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betsynagler · 5 years

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Critical Thinking is Hard

I’m lucky: I grew up in a family where thinking was encouraged. My parents treated me and my brother like we were brilliant, which makes you want to be brilliant, and come up with your own ideas. They liked to talk about stuff, and, while they definitely treated us like kids, they also didn’t really shelter us too much. My mother was always ruining TV shows for me by pointing out the sexist moments in television, from reruns of The Brady Bunch and Star Trek, to Charlie’s Angels, Three’s Company and, well, it was the 70s and 80s, so pretty much all TV shows. But they still let us watch them, as well as R-rated movies which may not have been age-appropriate, and while they told us not to smoke pot, when we found out that they smoked pot, they gave us reasons for why it was okay for them and not us (since they “weren’t going to have any more children,” which seemed to make sense at the time). Another thing they did was encourage us to take responsibility for our own decisions from a fairly young age, which meant that you could stay up until 10 or 11 pm on a school night if you really wanted to, but it’d be your fault when you felt like shit all the next day. One can debate the pros and cons of this method of child-rearing (pro: de-mystifying drug use and other taboo behaviors to the degree that they actually start to seem uncool; encouraging kids to develop strong ethical compass and think through their actions; con: kids are even more weird compared to their peers, and precociously develop anxiety and guilt about their own actions). Nevertheless, it did start me on the road to learning the value of thinking for myself.

I didn’t really come into my own as a critical thinker until junior high, however, when I spent two years in a program for gifted students. First, isolation from my peers at a time when I was supposed to be learning the social skills of adulthood and the bullying that naturally flowed from that taught me to look for other people’s faults as a means of self-defense. That made me critical, if not necessarily thoughtful. But then I also had two years of Mr. Snyder teaching me social studies. Many of us in the gifted program had all of the same teachers for all of our academic subjects two years running. This meant that we got to know those teachers really well, and, in the case of Mr. Snyder, came to greatly admire and be shaped by his worldview. Mr. Snyder wasn’t an obvious candidate for intellectual guru to early adolescents. He wasn’t particularly handsome, and he’d had polio as a child and walked with a prominent limp. But he was funny and charismatic, gave terrific lectures that were like brilliant comedy monologues or TED talks, and knew how to make his students feel smart and special — in part because we had made it into his class, but still. We liked him so much that several of us would get to class early every day so that we could draw cartoons of him on the blackboard with clever word bubble-jokes, and he loved that. Too see him come into the room and look at our clever depictions of him and smile and make jokes right back at us, to feel appreciated for our intelligence and creativity, a sensation could be hard to come by as a suburban New Jersey youngster, was wonderful. The class was a mutual admiration society and a bit of a cult of personality that I think hugely affected all of us who took it.

I learned a lot there, as we studied political systems, geography and the history of the ancient world, among other things. We were assigned projects that were unlike anything you’d typically get in junior high or even high school, a combination of fun, self-driven exploration, and out-of-control amounts of work. We had to make a map of the world that included every single country, city, major mountain range and body of water, using color-coded overlays — something that I would have enjoyed, and sort of did, except that, since I was in 7th grade, I was terrible at judging how long it would take and left it until the last minute, and had to repeatedly re-letter the smudged plastic to make it readable in my 12-year-old handwriting. The following year, when we did separate units on Greece and Rome, we had to either fill in an entire outline that he provided with a paragraph or more on every subject, or do a handful of more creative projects designed to help us probe the topics in more interesting detail. After choosing to do the outline for Greece, thinking it would be easier, and ending up with several pounds of handwritten paper (I could not type) on everything from Sparta to Socrates to Doric columns that was probably 75+ pages long, Mr. Snyder had stared at the pile and admitted to me that he hadn’t really expected anyone to choose that option, that he’d made the outline so absurdly long to encourage people to do the creative projects. I probably got an A more because he didn’t want to read the whole damn thing than anything else, and on Rome, I did the projects, like going to a Roman-Catholic service and writing about it — which I did by interviewing my Catholic friend, Tara, instead of actually going to the service myself — or going to the Met to observe and then expound upon the differences one observed between the Greek and Roman statues — which I did after 15 minutes of taking furious notes on a Sunday when we arrived just as they were getting ready to close. Just because I loved Mr. Snyder didn’t mean that I, like any other kid, wasn’t always trying to get out of doing homework in any way I could.

The thing I learned and remember best, however, was not the facts, but the method. We had a class about political and economic systems — communism, socialism, capitalism, authoritarianism — and the first thing Mr. Snyder did was define these terms for us, explaining that they weren’t what we’d been told they were. Specifically, “communism,” the way it was looked at in the budding Reagan Era of the early 1980s, wasn’t actually communism at all. Real communism was an economic system that someone named Karl Marx had come up with, in which everyone owned everything, nobody was rich or poor or more powerful than anyone else, and that was, in fact, kind of the opposite of what the Soviet Union had become. This somewhat blew my mind. Here was the boogeyman that everyone talked about as the great evil threatening us with destruction — and remember, in the world of an American kid who had trouble sleeping at night because she obsessed with how we were one button push away from nuclear war, that meant genuine annihilation — and it wasn’t even what it really was. How was this possible? How was everything that we saw on TV and in the newspapers and at the movies just plain wrong? It turned out that, once you delved into it, the evolution of the term “communism” in the popular vernacular was an education in how concepts entered the public consciousness and then were propagated endlessly in the echo chamber of the media and society until they became something else entirely, usually in the service of some political or social end. Sound familiar? It wasn’t the same then as it is now that we have the Wild West known as the Internet, in some ways it was easier to get an entire culture to basically think one incorrect thing rather than many insane things, but the ability to miseducate a huge swath a people without their questioning it? Yes, that existed, and understanding that was a very big deal to me. It meant that you always had to look deeper than the surface of things to be sure you understood the reality, even when it came to what those things were called.

Why doesn’t everyone get taught to think this way? Well, like most things in life, it gets increasingly harder to learn as you get older. The more set in our ways we get, the tougher it becomes to look at ourselves critically (which is essential to critical thinking, because to truly get that you must dissect and assess the viability of ideas, you have to start with your own assumptions), much less change the way our brains function in terms of adopting new ways of doing anything that’s really embedded in there, much less ways of doing everything, which is kind what it means to change the way you think. Plus, it’s in the best interest of those in power to keep the bulk of the human race from doing it. It’s tough to build an army of people who don’t automatically follow orders, or have a religion made up of people who are always questioning the word of God, or build a movement if the followers are continually asking the leaders, “Is that really true?” And so we’ve arrived at this situation where we have so much information out there now to make sense out of, and the bulk of us without the tools to figure out how to do that — and many who reject those tools because they’re told education is just liberal elite brainwashing. Instead, you see a lot of people turn to a kind of twisted, easy version of “critical” “thinking” espoused on the fringes of the left and right, which disposes with the thinking part and instead just espouses wholesale rejection of anything dubbed “establishment” or “mainstream,” no matter how awful the alternative may be (and at this point we know: it’s pretty awful). Add to that the folks who skillfully exploit the overwhelm of information and lack of analytical skills to support their own greed, lust for power and desire to win at all cost, and you end up with an awesome new and different kind of embedded orthodoxy, that encourages us to silo ourselves within “our” (really their) belief systems, walled in with “alternative facts” and media that support them, and defending it all tooth and nail with false equivalencies that encourage us not to critique thoughtfully based on evidence, but to to pick apart every idea that doesn’t fit or even makes us uncomfortable (“Well, every politician lies” was one of the most egregious ones I heard used recently to defend the president).

And, when it comes right down to it, can you blame people? Thinking is exhausting, especially in this environment, and even human beings with the best intentions manage to ruin everything good anyway. Like, even though my parents didn’t make us believe their ideas, of course they still managed to inculcate in us their most mundane opinions. My father was particularly good at doing this, particularly when it came to eating (yup, Jews), like how fast food and chain restaurants should be avoided not based on nutrition but on lack of flavor (which I guess is why we still ate at White Castle), or how chocolate was really the only kind of acceptable dessert. It’s amazing that, no matter how far I’ve come as an adult, I still find it really hard to shake these ideas — like I saw a conversation on Facebook about how pie was superior to cake, and I just thought, Huh? But there aren’t any good chocolate pies. Another case in point: by the time I was a senior, Mr. Snyder had moved up to the high school, and was teaching an AP history class that I had the option to take. I decided to take economics instead, because I had never studied it, because one of my best friends was taking it, and, on some level I’m sure, to show that I didn’t need the wisdom of this idol of my 7th and 8th grade self, now that I was all of 16. I heard from people who took Snyder’s class that in his first opening monologue of the year he mocked those of his former students who had decided not to take his class — which I think might have just been me. That wasn’t really an appropriate thing for a teacher to do, especially since I was kind of doing what he’d taught us: to move on, do my own thinking and evaluate him critically. But as a human being, it’s hard to be a charismatic leader and just let that go — which is why the world has so many despots, and celebrities, and despotic celebrities. On other hand, my economics class was a terrible waste of time because it turned out that I didn’t like economics and the teacher was boring, so perhaps my premature rejection of Mr. Snyder and my 8th grade way of thinking, just to prove that I could do it, hadn’t been the best decision either. It’s hard not to wonder if I’d be just a slightly better, smarter person today if I’d accepted one more opportunity to take his class.

I’ll never know, but I guess the fact that I’m telling you this story means I haven’t given up on critical thinking. Maybe it’s because self-flagellating comes naturally to me, but these days, more than ever, I try to employ those skills as much as I can, even as it grows increasingly fucking hard. On top of all that media landscape stuff I mentioned a few paragraphs back, I also have this stupid menopause business I mentioned in my last blog post, which just amplifies all of the emotion that drives me as a human to err on the side of insanity, as if there weren’t already enough bad news, and bad “news,” out there driving a person in that direction. There are so many bad actors with so many tools that can be used to manipulate our fear and greed and lust into steamrolling our thinking these days, and all we have to fight back are these little broken piles of poop in our heads. And yet, we all do have them, aka brains, and so we have the ability to use them. And as one of those cynical-on-top-but-at-bottom-idealistic folks who believes we all also have the capacity to change, no matter how hard it might seem, until the day we die, I think we all have the ability to learn how to use them better. And yes, that means you, and your friends, and your kids, and even your cousins in Florida maybe, if we all just try a little harder.

I’m not sure what Mr. Snyder would say about me now, as I try to get people to think about stuff with this blog that almost nobody reads, but considering how many years he spent trying to teach adolescents about Platonic ideals, I’d imagine he’d approve. So in honor of him, and any teacher you’ve had who inspired you to think more, and more better, let’s advocate in 2019 not just for “our values,” but for the value of intelligent thought, even if we have to do it one mind at a time.

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stretchjournalemerson · 3 years

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What a Teacher Can Do

By Daniella Lopez White

I don’t recall much from the night. There was a tiny rolling table with a white table cloth neatly laid over the surface which held oatmeal cookies, a silver pot, and a card from the nurses on the floor that read Our Condolences. From the silver pot, the scent of coffee brewed much too long wafted its way into my nose; and despite the burnt taste I knew it would have, I poured myself a serving into the hospital styrofoam cups anyways. My mother’s sobs could be heard from the tiny room, with my older brother gently placing his arm around her back. My half-sister stood by the side of our father’s bed, and I imagined all the things she could be thinking about with her nursing degree— did he finally drink himself to death? Is that it? Was his liver working too hard to flush out all the alcohol? Or was it another drunken fall? One that would cause yet another laceration in his skull that had bled too much by the time someone had found him?

Family members, ones I did not even remember, were crowded in the compact room. Though wretched in my eyes, he seemed to have quite a lot of people crying for him the night that he died. His ex-wife’s brothers and sisters, his first grandson, the wife to which he was currently separated from. It took most of my strength not to ask them what they were crying about. My father had held an addiction to alcohol and drug use for the last 18 years—my entire life—and I could not recall one good memory about him. But that was not an acceptable thing to say at the foot of his death bed. So instead, I used what was left of my strength to serve my coffee, and to dial a number on my phone and listen to it ring.

“Hello?”

I sucked in a hasty breath at the voice.

“Dani?”

“Hey, Mrs. M,” I choked out.

I don’t recall much from the night, but I do remember standing in the hallways of the hospital five minutes away from my house where my father died, which was full of people I have known all my life, and choosing to call my yearbook teacher instead of talking to anyone else.

“My dad’s dead,” I blurted out into the speaker of my phone. “Do you think I have to change the information on my FAFSA? Because I put that he was alive, but now he’s not, and I can’t lie to the government.”

I imagined that Mrs. M’s face lost all playfulness that it usually had. I could picture her soft brown eyes pooling with sympathy. Her voice seemed so gentle when she said, “I’m so sorry,” as though the breeze had carried it all the way from her house to the walls I stood between, breaking down the words with each gust of wind until it was nothing more than a whisper. I shrugged, even though I knew she couldn’t see me.

“It’s fine,” I replied. “I’m just really worried about my FAFSA because I need the aid and if they think I lied on it then I won’t get any. And I don’t know how to call them up and say, ‘hey, my dad’s dead!’ y’know?”

When I look back on this moment, I wonder if she had contemplated what to reply. I wonder if she had the ache to sympathize with me or ask if she could do anything about it. But she simply told me that we’d have to ask the college center tomorrow, to which I gave her a simple “thanks” and a “see you later,” and hung up. A year later, I know now that it was the best thing she could have said to me. She knew I was not one to publicly wallow on something like my father, and she knew that, despite the circumstances, I’d still be in her class tomorrow, just as I said. She was a woman who had seen me grow in the past four years of high school exponentially faster than expected, and she knew me better than anyone in that little hospital room ever could.

In all honesty, the majority of my teachers did. While I locked myself in my room at home and only ever communicated with yells bouncing off the stained walls, at school, I flew. It is amazing what a good teacher—a good adult—can do for a child who knows only the barren trees of a failing marriage. To go to school at a young age and be surrounded by people who knew how to show me that adults were more than arguments and objects being thrown across the room was to see a landscape of fruitful green for the first time. And, even as I changed from that naive young child, every year I received a teacher who showed me how to fly just a little bit higher.

When I walked into her classroom the next day, breathing in the comfortable scent of the old AC, feeling the dust blowing off of the yerd posters, Mrs. M tilted her head at me. I pressed my lips together in reply.

“How ya doing?” she asked with a quizzical eyebrow raise.

I flashed her a grin. “I’m in the dead dads club now.”

Mrs. M shook her head and gave me a hug. For the entire hour and a half of class, she let me make jokes about my father being dead that probably would have alarmed any other person who did not know me. But she did. And she knew that was what I needed and that, when I was ready to confront it, if I ever was ready, she’d be there if I needed her to. But, until that moment came, she would continue to let me crack inappropriate tales about child support and dead dads, and assigned me the work I needed to distract myself. And that was that.

Growing up in a problematic family made me appreciate my teachers in ways that are unexplainable. My mother— who had come from an entirely different country— married the man she loved and watched her “American dream” crumble in front of her as our family went bankrupt from my father’s addiction. She was often too busy for my brother and I while trying to make ends meet. I cannot blame her. As a Latina single mother with no child support and a very low pay, raising our family on an expensive island thousands of miles away from her motherland was a struggle. One that would eventually pay off. But my mother’s endless devotion to working and my father’s far-too-common alcohol induced comatose state made me cling to the support of my teachers.

At home, no matter how many times I lifted the couch cushions or the living room rugs, desperately searching for an ounce of recognition, I could never find what I needed. However, I didn’t need to search as hard at school. I quickly learned that teachers took pride in the students who participated in class, and although they were not supposed to, always showed a hint of favoritism to those specific kids. It was at the young age of five in my kindergarten class that I swore to myself to be an amazing learner, one that would make my teachers proud. The idea of an adult taking all this time to simply help me learn and grow flabbergasted me, and I clung to this as if my life depended on it. My brother often poked fun at me for crying about an A-, but I never understood how he couldn’t be miserably terrified of disappointing the only adults in our life that seemed to pay us any mind.

As a young adult myself now, I often feel pangs of guilt for the reliance I had on my teachers. Teachers are essential parts of society that give so much and gain so little. Especially in my home state of Hawai’i, teachers are paid far too small of an amount to keep a stable life. I can recall days of sitting in classrooms during lunch and hearing my teachers discuss enrichment activities for their classes that sounded like the most fun those kids would have all year, only to realize that they would have to pay for it out of pocket. My summers were often spent away from home, and while I benefited from the distance, I know that my teachers benefited from my presence at school in the middle of a vacation, as well. Making bulletin boards and decorating classrooms so that students are comfortable in their learning environment isn’t quite reflected in a Hawai’i teacher’s paycheck. Hand-me-down novels and interactive lesson plans that still include Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet don’t show up at school on their own, but teachers do a good job at bringing them there. On an island in Hawai’i where kids are already subjected to isolation from mainstream education, teachers are packed with responsibility and hardship that they certainly are not paid well enough for.

But still, I have never had a teacher turn me away in a time of need. To be in a position of teaching means to be in a position where you change hundreds of kids’ lives each year, sometimes without knowing. I can’t count on my own fingers how many times a teacher has saved my life with a simple “you did a really good job today,” or a raise of an eyebrow my way because they know I know what they’re thinking. My teachers have passed me off to one another each year, every single one of them raising me until I held what I needed in order to grow.

I don’t recall much from the night that my father died. Burnt coffee. A crowded room. Eyes asking me why I was not crying with them. But I remember, clear as day, the need to hear my favorite teacher’s voice. A reminder that, just like thousands of days before, once I showed up at school, everything would be fine. At least for six hours. I needed a reminder that tomorrow, I would have whatever support I needed to this reaction I did not know how to handle. But however I reacted, a support system would be there. First in history class. Then in english. Then in math. Then, of course, in yearbook. Each one with a teacher who has built up my body with reinforcement in the form of encouragement, like watering a seed with positivity until it is ready to stand alone.

Acknowledgments: This is a short memoir I was assigned to write in my WR-121 class. When told to write about something that was important to me, my mind immediately raced back to my home, Hawai’i, and the people that have had the greatest impact on me. As this essay expresses, my teachers have always held such an important imprint on who I am, and this specific memory that I have of my yearbook teacher stays present in my mind consistently. Even while I’m thousands of miles away, I use what she taught me about life every day, and I can never thank her enough.

#stretch2021 #memoir

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weeeeenger · 3 years

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*Isocrates’ Rhetoric*

In this entry, I will be going over the critical questions: How does or doesn't this artifact fit Isocrates' criteria of good rhetoric? Is this example of rhetoric ethical/productive for democracy and/or limiting to society?

The artifact I chose to cover is Address to Nation on the Challenger, by President Ronald Reagan. The Challenger shuttle was the second spacecraft of the space shuttle program, flying 85% of all Space Shuttle missions. Before its final launch, the Challenger had flown to space nine times with no malfunctions. The main purpose of the Challenger shuttle was to help deploy space labs and satellites, so information could be gathered about space. The tenth and final flight of the Challenger was unique because it was going to put the first private citizen in space. Reagan’s speech exhibits Kairos, appropriateness, and originality by quickly speaking about the event, both mourning and honoring the crew, and incorporating different narratives throughout the speech. This is productive in unifying the audience through their emotions and helping them move on from this tragedy by memorializing the seven lives lost.

My artifact is covering the tragedy of the Challenger shuttle. As president, Reagan could see the national impact the explosion had on the nation, causing him to postpone the State of the Union address (for the first time in national history) and make a speech commemorating the lives lost. The Challenger Disaster happened on January 26, 1986, after launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the shuttle exploded just seconds after being launched into the sky. The goal of the shuttle was to send out a tracking shuttle and to release the Spartan satellite to observe Haley’s comet. Along with 6 other astronauts, was Christa McAuliffe, a teacher who won NASA’s Teacher in Space program. Her goal was to teach a couple of classes from space as a payload specialist then tour around the country teaching children about space. There were many problems with the launch from the start. The launch was postponed for many days and the night before the launch, the launch site was covered with ice because of a severe cold front that overcame Florida. This ice caused two rubber O-rings to shrink, making them not completely sealed and allowed hot exhaust emissions to escape the chamber. As the leak increased, it caused a framing rod of the shuttle to erode and break off, penetrating the external fuel tank and causing it to explode. The Challenger broke apart in the air, being completely destroyed less than three minutes after its launch. The Challenger explosion was considered a national tragedy, especially impacting President Ronald Reagan who proposed the Teacher in Space program. This caused him to make a speech to honor the lives and the families of those who were lost during the explosion.

As rhetorician Isocrates states in, “Against the Sophists,” all good rhetoric must follow three main rules. These are Kairos, speaking in a timely fashion on a matter; appropriateness, making sure the speech fits within the context of the event or following certain traditions or values; and originality, bringing new ideas or perspective up within the speech. This theory is reliant on context, as the speaker must know the entire situation around the speech they want to make. Isocrates says that a speech must link the situation to a certain democratic ideal or make the audience see the situation in a different light, the speaker and the audience do not have to agree on the value being presented. The final aspect of Isocrates’ rhetoric is for the person analyzing the speech to make a judgement on the ethicality of the speech. The speech can be considered good rhetoric and not be ethical, it can also be considered bad rhetoric and be ethical - it depends on what the analyst chooses to argue.

The first staple of having good rhetoric is appealing to Kairos. This speech is appropriate for the event, because Reagan presented it right after the disaster, and he also took an opportunity to honor and mourn the fallen Challenger crew. Reagan first appeals to Kairos by making his speech on the night of the accident, just hours after the explosion. At the beginning of the speech Reagan says, “Today is a day for mourning and remembering.” He knew the importance of quickly addressing the events of that day, trying to put the nation at ease and apologizing to the families of the people who were lost. This also helped the families and coworkers of the crew understand how personally impacted Reagan was by the disaster. He especially felt responsible for Christa McAuliffe’s death, as it was his idea to put a teacher in space. Reagan also appealed to Kairos through addressing past historical events that were similar to the Challenger Disaster. He first referenced the Apollo 1 accident which had happened almost 19 years earlier, “Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground. But, we’ve never lost an astronaut in flight; we’ve never had a tragedy like this.” There are always risks when trying to explore space, this was seen in the Apollo accident. The difference between Apollo and the Challenger is the Apollo accident happened during a test trial of the launch. For the Challenger, everything was checked over and over - everything had gone right before the launch, and a day that was supposed to be celebratory turned into a tragedy. By noting that no one has ever died in space flight, Reagan immortalizes the crew of the Challenger. This could be why Reagan ends the speech by comparing the lost crew to an English explorer who died on the sea. “On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard a ship off the coast of Panama.” By doing this, he made sure the crew would be remembered as pioneers of science and space exploration, just as Drake is remembered for his early explorations. Drake was so dedicated to his mission in science that he died during his explorations and the Challenger crew also exhibited the same dedication to their space mission.

Another key staple of Isocrates’ rhetoric is ensuring that the speech is appropriate for the occasion and appealing to any traditions or norms the community may have. The values and wording of the speech are appropriate for the context in which the speech was given. Reagan does this by addressing the nation as a whole, uniting everyone around the families of those who were lost. By using words such as, “we and all of us,” he makes the audience a collective and personalizes the speech. This is important, because the whole nation was in mourning, and he did not want the audience to lose hope in the space program or the field of space exploration. The first part of the speech is about mourning those who were lost. “Today is a day for mourning and remembering. Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with all the people of our country. This is truly a national loss.” The setup of this speech can be compared to that of a eulogy, as the audience can tell Reagan has a profound sadness from the disaster. At the time, most people were hurt and shocked by the events of the Challenger and Reagan wanted to validate and share that sadness with the audience. This allowed him to specifically address the crew’s families and the unimaginable pain they were going through. Reagan did not just glaze over the families, he reached out to them and properly gave them his condolences. He also did this for the children who saw the explosion live, explaining that this sometimes happens in science. By validating the pain and grief of the nation, the families, and the children watching the Challenger, Reagan fulfilled his objective of mourning the crew. From this, the speech could take a “lighter” turn by honoring and memorializing the seven people who lost their lives for science. This is specifically seen through the quotes, “They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers… The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them… We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’” The language and wording used to commemorate the astronauts is similar to the language used while describing people of great accomplishments. This is entirely appropriate to characterize the Challenger crew, as they were some of the first people to be in space. Not to mention, Christa McAuliffe was the first private citizen to be in space ever. These people were going to be some of the first American scientists to be in space, but they sadly made history in a different way. Reagan commends them for their bravery and forward thinking, helping to push the idea they will be honored and remembered forever.

The last concept of Isocrates’ rhetoric is presenting ideas originally or creatively. There are two ways originality is presented in Reagan’s speech, by postponing the State of the Union Address and by personalizing it through different quotes. Before this speech, the State of the Union had never been postponed before. This constitutionally mandated presidential message is expected to be delivered at the beginning of every year, outlining their goals and plans for the rest of the year. Reagan took a risk by choosing to postpone the message to a later date, as it would be hard to reschedule and the entire country was expecting it to happen on the night of January 28. Some president’s may have chosen to deliver the State of the Union address that night then address the Challenger explosion at a later date, but Reagan knew how shocking and impactful the event was. By delivering the speech immediately, Reagan was able to connect with the audience through the similar feelings they were all having. He says, “Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger.” This was especially true for Reagan, as he felt personally responsible for the death of Christa McAuliffe because it was his idea to do the Teacher-in-Space program. Sometimes it is hard for people to effectively show emotion in formal public speaking, but Reagan took a chance with this speech and let the audience know that he was pained by the day’s events. He also intertwines the story of the crew within the larger narrative of the space program without losing the significance of the individuals. This is not always seen in such specific speeches, because it is hard to balance the two equally but it both showed the importance of the Challenger to the space program and mourned the individuals lost by the nation. Bringing in the story of Sir Francis Drake helped develop the concept of dying for something one is passionate about and being honored for it. While many politicians may reference historical figures or events to further their point, it was creative of Reagan to make a full analogy between him and the Challenger.

This speech, while unconventional through some facets, was productive in validating the nation’s grief and shock while still being able to give tribute and commemorate the individuals lost during the Challenger Disaster. The explosion of the Challenger was upsetting for the whole country. After nine successful launches, the American public wanted answers as to how this could happen. American’s were very fond of the space program, it was one of the best symbols for American exceptionalism. One of the main issues with Reagan’s speech was the lack of responsibility put on NASA for the whole incident. During his speech, he praises NASA for their “great achievements,” pushing the value of American exceptionalism and avoiding complete transparency with the public. Not to mention, he was doing this while trying to mourn the seven lives that were lost because of the mistakes in the space administration. Because Christa McAuliffe was on the flight, there was much more press than many other shuttle launches and Reagan knew he had to protect NASA from public scrutiny. The space program was in the business of building up the American Dream, giving people hope in science and American technology. NASA knew the multiple risks and ignored different red flags given by engineers, because they wanted to prove to Congress that the money being spent was worth it. Reagan failed to put any blame on NASA, specifically saying, “I’ve always had great faith in and respect for our space program, and what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don’t hide our space program. We don’t keep secrets and cover things up.” While this statement agrees with the values of transparency and directness, the lack of answers or responsibility directly contradicts what he is saying. One could argue that Reagan held American exceptionalism and promoted national unity over complete transparency with the public. The speech is considered good rhetoric by Isocrates’ standards, but the lack of NASA’s culpability within the speech made it ethically questionable.

In short, Ronald Reagan gave a very touching tribute to the Challenger crew. He showed good rhetoric by postponing the State of the Union speech, comparing the astronauts to a great explorer, and bringing the nation together to grieve with the families of the crew. While Isocrates would be satisfied with this speech, Reagan was not completely transparent with the public which calls for questionable ethics. The Challenger shuttle disaster was a shocking tragedy that impacted the American public uniquely, and Reagan was able to give them a proper goodbye.

Works Cited

“Hope Then Despair: 30 Years Since the Challenger Disaster.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 27 Jan. 2016, www.nbcnews.com/slideshow/space-shuttle-challenger-disaster-devastated-nation-30-years-ago-n505606.

Howell, Elizabeth. “Challenger: The Shuttle Disaster That Changed NASA.” Space.com, Space, 1 May 2019, www.space.com/18084-space-shuttle-challenger.html.

Isocrates, et al. “Isocrates Against the Sophists.” University of Texas, 2000.

Kunde, Meg, director. Day 10 Isocrates. YouTube, 12 Mar. 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9OvqgBZ4Dc&feature=youtu.be.

“‘Address to Nation on the Challenger’ by Ronald Reagan.” The Art of Manliness, 13 Jan. 2017, www.artofmanliness.com/address-to-nation-on-the-challenger-by-ronald-regan/.

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mytherapistthinksiamfunny · 4 years

Text

Remember The Titans and Black Lives Matter

I learned American History from Hollywood films and pop culture during the Bush Administration.

My 6th grade teacher was horrified to see my potential wasting away on the frivolity of Based on True Event sport blockbusters and Remakes of Dystopian Nightmares, Sarcastic Teeny Bop Melodramas.

Or, worse, the Hippy Dippy Nonsense genres that encouraged the youth to remain ignorant Sheeple With A Death Wish like Jackass or Gossip Girl

Despite how that sounds, he wasn’t a condescending prick. He was a good man with very high standards for media that he came off as a snob. Because he was. A snob. With so much nerd rage. That’s what made us bond.

You see, I’m a snob too. I had to be. I am the daughter of immigrants. And I grew up during the Bush Administration.

I grew up during a time of Prop 187, El Nino, El Morro, Thalia Y Tomy Motola y el secuestro, Pasale Paisano, anti-Cuba sentiment, Fake News, Columbine, Hanging Chads, 9/11/01, Pseudo-Fascism, WMDs, Jingoism, Patriot Acts, They’re Gonna Follow Us Home, Shakira, Katrina, George W Bush Hates White People Kanye Scandal, Militia, NRA Guantanamo, Dixie Chicks, A Day Without A Mexican, Selena the Movie, El CHupacabra, End of the American Dream, Once In A Lifetime Breaking News TRL Britney Once In A Lifetime Civil Unrest Breaking News Breaking News Narco Corridos Breaking News Miramax Breaking News Anthrax Breaking News Marylin Manson, Las Hijas De Juarez, Eugenio Derbez, La Escuelita, Los Tigeres Del Norte, Los Tucanes De Tijuana, Napster, Metallica Some Kind of Monster, Bono, Apple, Pixar, MySpace, AIM, new tech every 6 months, cell phones, Reggeaton, Walter Mercado Primer Impacto, American Idol,

To boot, I am the daughter of immigrants. Who were hyper-Catholic. And narcissists. And abusive. And alcoholics. Who were allergic to stability, progress, open-mindedness, or anything conducive to raising children in a global crisis.

So I had to be selective about the media that I consumed. Because my mother was a Batman Villain, my paternal-figure was a reluctant father unwilling to abandon his fuckboi ways for his family, and my brother and I were left to our own devices to figure out how to raise ourselves and our parents. We sucked at it. And years later we are paying for trying.

So, while navigating the highs and lows of our own puberty-induced hormonal roller coaster, we had to think quick and raise our 2nd-adolescence shit show of a parental unit.

We were parentalized. I didn’t know it at the time, but that is what happened to us.

What I did know at the time is that I needed to figure out how to live. Come up with a division of labor within the family unit and ensure that everyone played their role. You know, like the mother typically does.

And in order to play my role, I had to be studious of this different culture. Not just American culture. Not just teen culture. Not just Mexican culture. But all of them. Somehow, I had to find a way to navigate life. Since the age of 9 years old.

It’s exhausting having to be the adult of the house. I did not have a chance to be a child. Or matter to anyone. So I learned to matter to myself.

I learned not to trust anyone to be part of my support system because the people who were supposed to show me what that looked like were emotionally unavailable. And they stubbornly refused to divorce because that would mean they had failed their culture and religion and would be ostracized from the communities made of individuals they hated but stubbornly worked to impress and fit into.

And that meant that I befriended a strange array of really awesome people who made me feel seen and heard and understood. Like this Santa Clause-looking white dude with a motorcycle fetish and a kind touch with prepubescent girls with culture shock and daddy issues. Best of all, he was genuine. And sweet. And not at all inappropriate with children. That’s not sarcasm. He was not inappropriate with me or anyone else that I knew of. He truly was a great teacher.

Which is why I tried to keep in touch with him long after 6th grade. He was a computer nerd and introduced me to the wonder of the internet. And internet humor. And being opinionated. He was my Big Guy Bow Tie.

His opinion meant so much to me and I wanted to please him so badly.

And not once did he cross a line that would make it harder for me to thrive and move past the other trauma I was being exposed to.

How sad that I feel compelled to reiterated that he never diddled me. Sad for his reputation and sad that I have come to terms with how vulnerable I was to predators.

He was a real one.

I knew that my feelings were not normal in the broader sense of the word. But I understood that it was all I had to work with and make magic with it. So I figured out that I would have to be very guarded and selective with my time, effort, and social circle. Which often meant I was the smart young adult in a group of what I thought were sophisticated adults but were really ghost of my future if I did not get past my daddy issues in a healthy way.

By the time I got to high school, I was the weird kid

I had no idea how I got there. But I had to figure out how to follow my passion without wasting my potential.

My passion is art. Specifically, music. But in general? Art. Books, Poetry. Knowledge.

And because that wasn’t complicated enough: I was discovering my own sexuality.

And the first born first generation Mexican American with hyper Catholic parents.

I may as well have come out as a supporter of the Axis of Evil

They would never understand that I was ACTUALLY part of the Axis of Awesome

They would not understand. It would be lost in translation

So I had to learn to be silent with my truth. Forever hiding in the shadows and wondering when my life might begin

It began when I learned that the library was my escape. That I could learn about anything I wanted with very basic tools and that my ingenuity would get me far

But what does any of this have to do with Remember The Titans? Or Black Lives Matter?

Well... everything.

Because in addition to my parents being old fashioned and abusive, they were also closet racists. I had to teach myself not to ingrain their prejudices as I trusted them to keep me alive. I had to walk a very fine line between Daddy’s Girl and Daddy Issues. A fine line between Mommy’s Little Princess and Mother Knows Best and No The Fuck You Don’t.

And I managed to do that with the renaissance of black content creators in the early 2000s. Remember the Titans was a favorite of mine.

Little did I know

I was teaching myself to experience different cultures without appropriating them. I found what I was into and I immersed myself in it.

But I hid it. I silenced my opinions and tried to keep the peace. For the sake of my family.

That did not work. Shocking.

But I was left with the realization that even though my effort was wasted with my nuclear war of a family, I learned valuable lessons that I taught myself. Including that Black Lives Matter, anyone who has trouble acknowledging that needs to grow the fuck up and learn something cause we’re running out of time and ain’t nobody got time for ignorance an fear with a mad man in the white house.

And I don’t want to miss out on my life simply because I come from dysfunction and am constantly playing catch-up to understand what normal is and how to achieve it

I am not alone in this. I come from a generation of American children who learned to cope with complex issues of race, politics, satire, drugs, over-medication. self-medication, financial irresponsibility, weaponized faith and ignorance. It was the dawn of the age of the Basket of Deplorables. And Millenials were caught in the crossfire. I was caught. And I learned. Black. Lives. Matter. Women have voices and opinions that matter and a feminine point of view is crucial to the success of any business endeavor. I taught myself feminism and committed to its intersectionality before I knew it may be a word the dictionary I owned was missing. I learned that words matter because language has power. I tasted the crispness of that juicy apple from the tree of knowledge. And I wanted to marinate in its juices until i was good and goddamn ready to be tasted and known myself.

Oh yeah, I learned my Daddy Issues manifest themselves in a need to sexually please emotionally unavailable men.

So I chose as wisely as I could. You know, what with the inmates running the asylum

But my god am I into drummers! And linebackers! And Cheating Ass Marine Motherfuckers With Secret Families in Portland who Ghost a Bitch Just When She’s About to Fall!!!

My picker is off. I learned that phrase from Loveline. Another resource in my quest to exist in my natural state

Having to twist myself into a pretzel to please the un-pleasable was unsuccessful.

So I stopped and focused on my real family. My chosen family. Those who care if I live, die, have food and rent money, and ask me to text them when I get home so they know I am safe. Those people. My people. I go hard for them. And they are various heights, weight-classes, political affiliations, complexions. because I learned that black lives matter. As well as Asian American Lives. And Migrant Lives. And Femme Lives. And LGBTQIA+ Lives. In essence, ALL LIVES MATTER INCLUDING BLACK LIVES. Because life is too hard in it’s natural state to be excluding people from We The People. Because the America I Still Believe in does not allow for any of this maga shit to stand

Because we need to be allies for each other against the real danger to this country.

Internalized Systemic Racism and how it has been exploited to separate the working classes in a strict divide down socio-economic boundaries that are not easily crossable. This phenomenon is often called a glass ceiling. Minorities are particularly affected. But that doesn’t mean that all white people are to blame or responsible or immune. You see, I’ve read the Handmaid’s Tale.

And while everyone is looking at the Scarlet Robe of the Handmaids and the Serene Teal of the Wives, no one looks at the EconoWives. Wife Trash, I suppose.

Much like the Titans’ football season. High school seniors in a recently-desegregated town. Sounds like the plot of a Disney movie or a Based On True Events TV movie

Gee... I can’t imagine why I related to this...

But I did and I learned from it. I learned that it takes effort to make a champion. And it is not accomplished alone. And while the odds may be ever against you

You have to decide what matters to you. And if that is football, you listen to your brothers on the team and keep your circle small.

And if that is closet-cases that fear for their safety when outed

And if that is a mother at 9 years old because that is how old you were when you realized you were more emotionally intelligent than your own pathetic excuse for a mother who is really a batman villain who you will later turn into if you don’t watch out for the stalker tendencies now and your fuckboi father who still cheats on your mother because this is a pity marriage that neither of them are ready to end even though everyone would be better off, especially your brother who is a precious little squish but being psychologically handicapped by the Stephen King Novel raising him and who is so much like you but you won’t know that for several years because you’re just a child and what do you know what normal is or is not supposed to feel like...

Then that’s just what the fuck it means.

My therapist asked me how I’m doing in 2020 with my depression and the isolation and what I think about the protests.

Like if the logic behind the protests was up for debate. Or if it was a political statement rather than a statement of human compassion and empathy to say that

Black

Lives

Matter.

I guess she hasn’t seen Remember the Titans

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epacer · 5 years

Text

Story You May Have Missed

Crawford High more balanced racially now

SAT scores on verbal and math tests at Crawford in 1969 was 1015. In 1982 it was 871

After fourteen years I had only one uncomfortable moment, one feeling of small panic. It came halfway through the advanced English class I was monitoring as an observer. Maybe it was because the class was period two, home room — and since graduating from Crawford High School in East San Diego in the spring of 1969 I had forgotten all about the fact that we used to have home rooms. Or maybe it was that the day’s lesson on Greek drama was just the sort of thing that used to put a glaze over my eyes. Whatever it was, the teacher’s voice faded, and I became acutely aware of the clock on the wall, with its minute hand creeping upward one loud “click!” at a time. I heard the boy next to me ask his friend, “Did you find your homework yet?” and heard his friend answer, “I didn’t do it, so how could I find it?” And suddenly I felt lightheaded, as if I hadn't graduated at all, as if the teacher were going to call on me and I didn’t know the answer to the question.

I had come back to Crawford looking for a lot more than a feeling of deja vu. I wanted to find out what the students’ concerns and perceptions are, and how they differ from what ours were back in the days when the Rolling Stones were still young and the newspapers daily reported the latest total of American soldiers who had died in Vietnam. In a way, I suppose, I wanted to stash the school under my shirt, run off with it, pull it out once I got home, and leaf through it page by pungent page. Because you hear a lot of things about high school these days. You hear that students graduate without knowing the difference between words like “their” and “there.” You hear that sex is as common and meaningful as exchanging business cards, and that kids show up for class so saturated with drugs they can barely put pen to paper.

I had heard a few disturbing things specifically about Crawford, too. There were rumors of students threatening teachers for giving them bad grades, and of fights stemming from racial hostilities and gang rivalries. Some of the incidents were said to involve knives or guns. “I guess you’d need a gun to get by at Crawford now,” some of my old high-school chums would say, half jokingly, whenever the subject of Crawford came up. It sounded a bit different from the prim, strict high school I remembered, run like a cross between boot camp and a coed summer camp, where the most defiant act imaginable was to smoke (tobacco) in the bathrooms.

So I decided to go back and find out if all they can’t wear today “is a bathing suit or something,” joked Kelvin Ross, currently a senior at Crawford and a standout linebacker on its football team. Handsome and almost lanky, Ross carries 220 pounds on his huge frame and on the football field is the embodiment of the old saw, “For a man of his size, he has amazing quickness.” He was one of several students I talked to at length during a recent visit to the campus, and I found his mental quickness above average, too. But when I tried to explain to him how administrators used to measure girls’ skirts to see if they were inappropriately short, Ross simply shook his head incredulously and said, “Oh, wow.” (“We resisted liberalizing the dress code, but once you get away from the emotion of the issue, you have to analyze whether something like dress really has any impact on a student’s academic performance,” one district official told me not long ago. Apparently no relation between the two was found.)

Another striking change is the relationship between teachers and students. I saw a lot of students stop to banter with teachers in the halls between classes. At lunchtime the students are free to wander off the campus — and no one quizzes them when they return to see if they’ve been playing pool, guzzling beer, or smoking pot.

Near the lunch quad is a spacious drop-in counseling center and students are in it all hours of the day, talking with counselors or researching some career opportunity on their own. In the classrooms, many of the teachers wear casual shirts and jeans; they are no longer simply distant authority figures, and most of them seem to be having a genuinely good time with their students. “They treat you not as a student, but as a student and a friend,” explained Ross. “Plus, they seem to really care about what happens to you.”

It is a relationship we did not even hope for in 1969. We were a half dozen studious but restless individuals; we shared a grotesque sense of humor and a profound disdain for the educators who ran our school. In our view, they were unimaginative and hypocritical, and they gave us no measure of respect. They insulted us by saying we should attend proms and join the student government; what could have been more “irrelevant” (irrelevant was a key word that soon became a cliche) to the social and political turmoil engulfing the country? We thought the role of school should be to prepare us for life in the real world — and it was a world where people were getting drafted and sent to Vietnam to die for no clear reason at all. It was a world where college students were protesting the government’s policies in increasingly harsh terms; within eighteen months some of those students would be tear-gassed, beaten, and even shot while they were protesting. Blacks had rioted in the ghettos of Detroit and Los Angeles after 200 years of unequal opportunity. Elected officials were plotting coups and undermining foreign governments while publicly maintaining they were doing nothing at all — lying through their teeth, some of them. And in the midst of all this we were told that what was truly important was to keep our hair short and wear red, white, and blue to school each week on Spirit Day.

Our convictions were uncluttered by any real understanding of human nature. And they were definitely not shared by the vast majority of students at Crawford, who were caught up in the usual high-school concerns of dates, cars, and money. Those students accepted the role conceived for them by administrators, but we rebelled. We listened to the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane instead of our teachers. We started a group called the Student Action Corps, modeled on the radical college group Students for a Democratic Society, and circulated a petition with a list of demands that would give us a lot more influence in school matters. Along with such things as an open campus, no dress code, and better food in the cafeteria, we slipped in a few bombshells: true decision-making power for the students, politically significant movies in the auditorium. Two thousand students signed the petition in three days, although surely most of them were more concerned about the food than the movies. Teachers and administrators instantly grew apprehensive. “They want to take over the school!” one friend of mine heard a teacher say.

But abruptly, we gave up the whole fight. We were cynical enough to believe that the school “Establishment” would never give in to us, and a true revolution was doomed (even if we had advocated the use of weapons, we didn’t have any). The demands in the petition crumbled. I had written many of them myself, and I’ve always regretted giving up the fight for them so quickly, because we had the right people on the defensive, and for all the right reasons.

Most of the changes we asked for became realities within a few years after we graduated. We happened to be the beginning of a huge wave of student unrest and rebellion that swept through the area’s high schools in the early 1970s. But changes take time, and tensions at Crawford continued throughout the Vietnam War, according to Marion McAnear. McAnear was a German teacher at Crawford when I was there; I was a student of his for three successive years. He is still at Crawford, still teaches German, and has become the school’s soccer coach, too. A burly man whose hair is now going gray, he was and is an excellent teacher and a thoughtful man. “When I first came here in the Sixties we were a lot more straight-laced than we are today,” McAnear told me when I looked him up on the Crawford campus. “Teachers wore ties and jackets; classrooms were a lot more formal. There was a gap between the students and the teachers, and that was the way it was supposed to be.

“But during the Vietnam War, the whole atmosphere here was one of tension. There were so many kids . . . and they were rebelling. Cherry bombs were being blown up in trash cans almost every day at lunch. The battle lines were drawn,” McAnear said.

“When I was going through high school, it was sort of us versus the teachers,” agreed Chris Miller. At thirty-three. Miller is one year older than I am, and he encountered many of the same rules and frustrations at his high school in Phoenix, Arizona. He currently teaches U.S. history at Crawford and is the head football coach, and his rapid-fire style of talking is full of a coach’s enthusiasm. “We had a strict dress code, and our student government was a body that had no power at all,” Miller continued. “The teachers were sort of detached. They didn't try to get to know students.

“Today, we’re still authoritarian figures, but we listen to the student government. We treat the students with respect.” Or, as another teacher at Crawford, Don Mayfield, puts it, “The students don’t see the administration as the ‘Establishment’ anymore. They see the individuals.” It isn't utopia, but from what I saw, the relationship between students and teachers beats the hell out of the one that existed fourteen years ago, and that’s a fundamental change.

But it is a curious kind of change. It has been accompanied at Crawford by a resurgence of the old bromide, “school spirit.” In the last few years, such things as taking fierce pride in the school’s football team, currently ranked sixth in the county, have become increasingly popular. As I talked with Miller he told me I should wear red, white, and blue to school the following day, Spirit Day — a lot of the students and teachers would be wearing those colors, he said. The Crawford team would be playing arch-rival Lincoln High School that Friday afternoon in a game that could decide the Central League championship, and Miller and a lot of other teachers and administrators at Crawford encouraged me to go. “The football games are a big part of the overall scene here,” explained Bill Fox, Crawford’s current principal.

I wound up driving out to the game at Lincoln the next day with Fox, a boyish-looking man of forty-five. He has been principal at the school since 1981, and he told me that the re-involvement with school activities such as dances and football games comes after a long period when such activities received little student support at all. “I think you’ll find that [in that sense] students today are more like the majority of students were when you were in high school,” Fox commented. The resurgence of interest is due in part to the encouragement of top school district officials, who are hoping that an increase in “school spirit” will lead to a decrease in vandalism, drug use, and other problems that have plagued high schools throughout the county in recent years. Fox himself vigorously supports the idea, partly, he told me, because he thinks it is important for students to be exposed to various high-school social activities. He also believes successful events raise funds that can be used to lower the cost of student activities, enabling less wealthy students to attend.

Increasingly, the students seem to be buying the idea. Margie McDonald, Crawford’s current Associated Student Body president, told me that the number of people who attend A.S.B. activities has increased noticeably in the last three years. Many more students are doing things such as wearing school colors on Spirit Day and showing more enthusiasm at pep rallies, she said. (Mayfield told me that a few years ago it wasn’t uncommon for some of his brighter students to show their disdain for “school spirit” by coming to class on Spirit Day dressed in black.) “It sounds trivial, but attendance at the football games is up, too,” said McDonald, an attractive young woman who has the precocious, oddly disconcerting poise that high school A.S.B. officers traditionally seem to possess. She admitted with a laugh that the renewed support of student activities may be due to the fact that “we have a good football team. But I think [such support) is important, I definitely do, because getting into supporting the school creates positive feelings, positive activities. If you’re hating school, not getting involved in anything, it creates negative activities — like hanging out more, maybe getting into drugs.”

Fox and I parked in Lincoln’s parking lot and walked down to the athletic field, where the two football teams were warming up. The Crawford players looked awfully big in their white helmets, white jerseys, and blue pants, and the faces had changed from exclusively white when I was a senior to a more balanced mixture of black and white. (Crawford now has a black student population of 17.5 percent, nearly double the 9.9 percent average for city junior high and high schools, and far more than the 2.9 percent it had in 1969. White students currently constitute just under half the total student population, and the balance is made up principally of blacks, Asians, and Hispanics.) The Colts were favored to win the game, but Lincoln, a high school located on South Forty-ninth Street in Southeast San Diego, has a long history of upsetting favored Crawford teams. I got the feeling that as far as the Lincoln players were concerned, the Colts were just upstarts from uptown. After the opening kickoff Crawford’s team moved methodically down the Field to score. Then a Lincoln player ran back the ensuing kickoff for a touchdown, and from then on it was a dogfight.

It was a hot day, but the stands on the eastern side of the field were jammed with Crawford supporters: teachers and parents as well as students. The students were wearing “Classy Colts’’ sweatshirts, “Go Colts’’ ribbons, and buttons that said, “Face it, Colts are Great,” exactly as their predecessors did fourteen years ago. The cheerleaders all had great legs, and they still had names like Andi and Buffy and Melinda. But you could occasionally smell marijuana smoke in the stands, and the cheers were a lot more soulful than the plaintive “Hey, hey, whad-dya say” stuff I remembered. They included things like “Boogie ’cross that line” and “Crawford don’t take no jive,” and more than once the crowd exhorted the team to “get down.” There was, in fact, a lot more cheering than game watching. The score at half time was 13-7 Lincoln, but in the second half, as the smog drifted in and the sun turned brown, the Crawford players finally put together another long drive. On a critical third-down play a tall Crawford receiver went up for a pass and managed to catch it despite the Lincoln player who tackled him instantly (he juggled the ball momentarily, but crashed to the ground clutching it firmly to his chest), and a few minutes later a muscular young player made a nice over-the-shoulder catch to give Crawford a 14-13 lead. The crowd screamed even louder, if that was technically possible, and I remembered that when I was in high school, I thought all this “school spirit” business was kind of dumb. I’m not certain I’ve changed my mind. If successful school activities somehow enable economically disadvantaged students to attend proms they might not otherwise be able to afford, I guess that’s great. What I object to is the small view that things like “school spirit” can engender. Shouldn’t we teach high-school students that compassion for your rivals is of far greater consequence than glee at having rubbed their noses in the dirt? And more than that, should we really be encouraging students to think that things like homecoming and pep rallies are important? It seems to me our time and money would be far better spent encouraging students to explore ways of bringing about nuclear disarmament, or easing world hunger, or putting an end to acid rain. Attitudes are important, and they’re certainly forming at the high-school level; why bother with “school spirit” when you can bring about changes that might save the human race from complete annihilation?

I suppose it’s part of our neurotic modem consciousness to be required by circumstances to face such questions, and to be simply unable to do it most of the time. I know I can’t. Hell, when Crawford scored that go-ahead touchdown, I felt a shiver of emotion, and I realized something: I wanted the Colts to win. It looked as if they were going to, too, right down to the point where only two minutes were left in the game. Then the Colts’ quarterback threw a low, flat pass that was intercepted by a Lincoln defender. Two plays later Lincoln’s quarterback scampered around left end, made a couple of neat zigzags, and was tackled at the two-yard line. The Crawford fans grew morose, and with thirteen seconds left, Lincoln scored to put the game away, 19-14. I felt kind of let down as I made my way out of the stands, but I noticed the girl next to me was crying. Down on the field some of the Crawford players were, too.

The changes in the ethnic makeup of Crawford’s students would be immediately obvious to anyone who attended the school in my era. We were a school that consisted of ninety percent white kids, nearly all of us middle class, and racial concerns and tensions were things that happened elsewhere. Today Crawford has achieved what school district planners like to refer to as racial parity; the remarkable thing is that the school has gone through this transition without having to resort to busing. Only about fifty students are bused to Crawford from other parts of the city, and they come to take advantage of special courses the school offers as a regional “magnet” school for business and accounting. “It’s very unusual to be balanced ethnically without a lot of busing,” noted principal Bill Fox. “Most schools are out of balance one way or the other” — that is, top-heavy with either minorities or whites. The reason Crawford is not seems to be coincidental; the school’s district, located smack dab between Southeast San Diego and the burgeoning suburbs north and east of San Diego State University, is a sort of melting pot of various ethnic groups. Housing in the district varies from run-down apartments to sprawling tract homes, and this is probably what has brought about the racial mix.

As Fox pointed out, one advantage of the district’s racial balance is that students of various ethnic groups tend to encounter each other as they are growing up, mingling in activities such as Little League. Their parents tend to see each other year after year at PTA meetings. By the time most of the students reach high school they are accustomed to mixing with people from other ethnic groups who are, after all, simply people from the same community. One teacher at Crawford, who formerly taught at Lincoln High School, told me that if I were to go to Lincoln I’d “probably find a lot of bused-in white kids sitting around in groups and hoping the black kids won’t beat up on them.’’ At Crawford most of the blacks and whites seem to get along fine. I saw them sitting together on the quad at lunch and joking together in classrooms when teachers were temporarily absent. Nevertheless, there is racial uneasiness at Crawford. “No, it’s not a cloud hanging over the campus, but yes, there are racial tensions,’’ as football coach Chris Miller sums it up. Nearly all of those tensions involve a new ethnic group in the area — the Indochinese.

The Indochinese, or Asians, as they are called in the school district’s official lingo, arrived in large numbers almost overnight at Crawford in the fall of 1981. Culturally and socially it was a shock wave the school is still struggling to absorb. The new students were Indochinese refugees, many of them “boat people’’ recently departed from refugee camps in Southeast Asia and resettled in the sea of stucco apartments and aging houses along University and Orange Avenues between La Mesa and North Park. “Within a matter of three months our population of Asian students skyrocketed from less than five percent to fifteen or eighteen percent,’’ said Fox (it is now about twenty percent, some 300 students in all). “It kind of rocked us.’’ With the influx of Indochinese refugees, Crawford became eligible for additional funds from the school district and the state, and administrators were given a week to prepare special classes and hire teachers and aides who can speak the native languages of the incoming students.

Many of the new students did not speak English, of course; some were illiterate even in their own language. It was not uncommon for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds from Cambodia or Laos to show up for their first day of school at Crawford having never before attended a school of any kind. In the ensuing confusion, some of the new students were simply issued biology and history textbooks and told to start studying.

Things have become quite a bit more organized since then. The Asian students are now interviewed when they first enroll at Crawford to determine their educational level and knowledge of English. Some have performed extremely well academically from the start, and the list of students on the principal's honor roll now includes names like Pheuak Phanthao, Son Do, and Dao Hong Thi Tran. Most of the Asian students, however, are assigned to special classes designed to teach subjects such as biology, math, and U.S. history to students who are not fluent in English. The classes make use of simplified vocabularies, and material is covered more slowly. At the same time, the Asian students take special English courses to learn the language, moving up into increasingly advanced levels until they are fluent enough to transfer into the regular curriculum. But by that time, most of the Asians are already on the verge of graduating. There does not appear to be any immediate alternative to this method of educating the Asian students, but it is clear that most of them are graduating from high school far less proficient in almost every subject than their American classmates. The special classes (which many of the Asian students attend four out of six class periods a day) also tend to isolate the Asians from the rest of the student population — that is, even more than they already are.

Before school, the Asian students tend to hang out in clusters, often near the back of the cafeteria. During lunch hour they seem to disappear; there are small numbers of them on the quad, but almost none anywhere else on campus. There are no Asian students on the varsity football team (there is one, a halfback, on the junior varsity), and they are conspicuously absent from pep rallies and dances. Many Crawford students resent the Asian’s habit of hanging out in groups, but Ken Watson, a senior who works as an aide in one of the many English classes for Asians, explains that “they’ve just come over from Asia, so they want to stick together. There’s power in numbers. They can be intimidating if you let them, if you think of them as a dominant group. But I can see they might think of us that way.”

Watson said it is simply the language barrier that prevents many of the Asian students from mingling with others and taking part in school activities, a view shared by Katy Chang. Chang, a Laotian with coal-dark eyes and an eager, pretty smile, is currently a senior at Crawford. She has been in the United States for more than five years and speaks fluent English. “I try to go to things like, let’s see, homecoming?” Chang told me. “I should know about it. 1 like to have American friends so I can learn what they do and what they have. I’m going to graduate from high school and I don't know much about it.

“But it’s a problem. I think it might be an English problem. You have to study really hard [so you don’t have as much free time in the first place). And Asian custom is so different from American custom. [Americans’] personality is so different. They put on make-up, smoke ... I don't do those things, or go out with a boyfriend.” Nearly everyone agrees the friction between the Asians and other students reached its peak last year, and most of the incidents that took place involved black students and Asian students. Several teachers told me that the outgoing, high-energy personalities of many black students contrast mightily with the reserved, cautious personalities of most Asian students. But the differences go deeper than that; some of the black students also seem to resent the attention and money being spent on the Asians — an understandable if not exactly admirable reaction, considering the years of discrimination blacks have suffered. “From my viewpoint, [the Asians] are getting special classes and special teachers, and they’re taking away a lot of good teachers that could be teaching us,” one female black student pointed out recently. “Why don’t we have something like that? We need help, too. I’m not prejudiced or anything. But there is a lot of money involved ...” Whatever the differences between the two groups, fights between them broke out last year. One black student badly beat up an Asian whose locker was next to his, and not long afterward, five Asian students jumped a tall black student in one of the school’s bathrooms. Several other incidents were narrowly avoided. “More than one time I had to break up something because of what people thought was being said,” Fox noted. “Students would hear the Indochinese talking in their own language, and for some reason they’d assume [the Indochinese] were talking about them.”

Most teachers and students at Crawford say the tensions appear to have eased so far this year. But the school security officer, Don Donati, said he has been called to the scene of four near fights between black and Asian students in the last few weeks. One Asian student also told me that “just one week ago I was talking to a girlfriend, and this black guy came up and touched my head. I don’t like people touching my head. I tell him, and he started yelling. Not joking. I can tell he doesn’t like Asians or something.

“Some dark people are my friends. But many dark people, I don’t like their personality. They tease you, even though you didn’t say anything. They call you Nips. I try to get along with everybody, but sometimes I get depressed, and really mad.”

Some of the black and Asian students claim allegiance to bona fide street gangs, the blacks to the Crips and Playboy International, and the Asians to the Stray Cats. But Crawford is not considered a problem school in terms of gang activity by either the school district or the San Diego Police Department’s street-gang detail, and there has not been an incident involving known gangs reported from the school for more than six years.

Fox and other administrators insist the racial tensions at the school have not been that serious, and that they will fade in the coming years as the Indochinese refugees become more integrated into the cultural life of San Diego. Some teachers predict that the need for special classes will disappear in two or three years, too, partly because the Asian students come from a “success-oriented” culture and work hard to achieve what is expected of them. “It will take time,’’ said McAnear, the German teacher and soccer coach, “but I really believe that the Indochinese are going to put a shot in the arm of America. They’re polite, disciplined, relatively easy to teach . . .’’ He paused, and grinned. “And besides, some of them are damn good soccer players.”

One April night five years ago, an adult-school teacher was showing slides to a Spanish class on the Crawford campus when two sixteen-year-old boys sped up on a motorbike. One of the youths entered the classroom with a gun and got everyone’s attention by firing a shot into the blackboard in the front of the room. After that he robbed the students (mostly middle-age men and women) as well as the teacher, netting a grand total of about seventy dollars. He and his partner then fled on the motorbike, but were arrested two days later when an anonymous informant phoned police. Although McAnear was not present during the robbery, it took place in his classroom, and he told me with a shake of his head that his blackboard still bears a bullet hole from the incident.

The attempted robbery was a dramatic example of the trend toward violent behavior that occurred on many of the city’s junior high and high school campuses in the last decade. In that time, incidents of students threatening and assaulting teachers rose citywide, as did acts of vandalism such as breaking windows and looting lockers. Students sometimes walked out of classrooms en masse, and in at least one instance, a police car was burned at Lincoln High School. “For ten years violence was a big factor here,” McAnear said. At many schools, it still is. Although incidents such as burglaries and threats of injury declined throughout the district from the 1981-82 school year to the 1982-83 school year, incidents of battery and assault with a deadly weapon jumped sixteen and fifty percent, respectively, during that same time period. A spokesman for the board of education’s police services department also noted that throughout the district, violent incidents in October of this year have increased fourfold over the same month last year.

The police services department does not keep crime statistics for individual schools, but McAnear and other teachers and administrators insist that violence is currently decreasing on the Crawford campus. Still, the legacies of the past are everywhere. Crawford, like many high schools in San Diego, now has a security officer whose main function is to help prevent criminal acts from taking place on or near the campus. Most high school football games are played in the afternoons rather than at night, due to the number of fights that were breaking out after night games a few years ago. And a new law enacted by the state legislature last April has made a five-day suspension mandatory for any student caught fighting or possessing weapons or controlled substances on school grounds.

Fox thinks the increased violence stemmed from student frustrations with the slowness that characterized the response of school officials to the cultural changes of the ’70s. McAnear agrees; the violence was often a way of challenging authority, he points out, and challenging authority was a widespread phenomenon in all facets of society at the time. The school district finally adjusted to new concepts of behavior, appearance, and “relevant" curriculum, but McAnear isn't so sure those adjustments were always the right ones. “Discipline went out the window. We loosened up on too many things — homework requirements, for instance. Standards fell, and teachers got frustrated because a lot of kids wouldn’t do their homework. Eventually you were supposed to leave time to do the homework in class, but you can't do that, especially with thirty-five students” and the special attention that many of them require, McAnear complained. Attendance also became a problem as the school district placed less emphasis on being in class regularly. Fox explained that by attending summer school, some students at Crawford would complete twenty-four of the forty class credits needed to graduate by the end of their sophomore year. That meant they would have to attend an average of only four classes a semester (rather than the standard six) for the next four semesters, and many of these students would spend the two free periods a day wandering around the school or the nearby community. Simultaneously, the scores seniors were getting on standard tests such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test declined steadily. The average SAT score on combined verbal and math tests for a senior at Crawford in 1969 was 1015. In 1982 it was 871.

Today, echoing the swing back to more student involvement in school activities, there is increasing emphasis on the value of homework and attendance. Beginning this year, high-school students in San Diego are required to do two hours’ worth of homework each night, and attending six class periods a day is mandatory. At Crawford, teachers no longer greet students who are tardy to class with a shrug of the shoulders; they stand in the hallways between classes, exhorting the students to be on time and occasionally yelling at them when they are not. New districtwide guidelines for achieving minimum proficiency in English and math are being introduced, and next year, if seniors cannot demonstrate that they have attained these levels, they will not be allowed to graduate. Some of the students I talked to at Crawford are already grumbling about the homework and attendance requirements. “I’m a little offended by it,” A.S.B. president McDonald said. “It seems like they’re talking down to us.’’

But nothing ever comes full circle. Students have to attend six classes a day just as we did in 1969, but now they’re studying subjects such as computer programming and race relations. They still go to physical education classes, but now the girls’ and boys’ gyms are known as the male and female gyms. There has not been a single student cited for smoking marijuana on the Crawford campus so far this year, but drug use is still much more widespread than it was fourteen years ago. “It’s not the way it used to be,’’ McDonald told me emphatically. “There’s not a party without drinking. There are very few students who haven’t tried drinking or smoking pot]. There’s even a trend toward cocaine these days.’’

But administrators and teachers at Crawford insist that even though students are exposed to more information and experiences at a younger age, most of them still tend to make responsible decisions. They say students have, in effect, responded favorably to the increased independence they have gained since 1969. “The brighter kids don’t seem to get involved with drugs that much,” said Don Mayfield. “But they are, certainly, exposed to a lot more things [than high-school students used to be). They know a lot more. They know about homosexual bars, and the prostitutes along El Cajon Boulevard. But the kids are more open . . . and seem to be stronger.” Even Mayfield, however, conceded that high-school students “still have a lot of difficulty sorting it all out.”

“We’re taking a lot of steps [these days], but many of them are immature steps, like getting stoned or beating up other students,” senior Ken Watson agreed. “People are doing things like that just because they feel they can do them and no one will stop them. That’s kind of immature.

“Compared to Wally and Beaver, yeah, I guess I’m growing up pretty fast. I think it has gotten a little out of hand. Parents let their kids go out and get drunk. Some parents are even growing marijuana in their back yards. Maybe if they’d set some rules and regulations instead, [the current situation] wouldn’t have happened. But I don’t think we’ll ever return to the days when you come home from school and have cookies and milk. It’d be great if everyone could be like the Cleavers, but remember, this is the Eighties.”

And so it is. In the late 1960s Crawford administrators struggled to keep the controversy of the Vietnam War out of high school; today they struggle with the influx of Vietnamese students. We experimented almost daintily with drugs; today’s students seem either to worship them or consider them passe. We had to go to therapy groups to learn how to be “up front” and “get in touch with our feelings” (we even had to invent the terminology); students today are open and honest almost as a matter of course. They don’t talk about sex much — at least, not to reporters — but they do say it is a big part of the high school scene, another indication that things have loosened up considerably.

I did, however, discover one constant. During my recent visit to Crawford I made it a point to buy lunch at the outdoor window. We called it the cold lunch line back in 1969, and it was a place where you could exchange a few quarters for dry, stale sandwiches, grainy malts, and chocolate “cake squares” loaded with sugar and oil. On this visit I was surprised to discover for sale such “healthy” items as yogurt and pita-bread sandwiches. But my mission was comparison; I wasn’t interested in the contemporary stuff. I bought a piece of chocolate cake and a tuna sandwich. The cake was larger and fresher than the old “cake squares” we used to gobble up, and lighter in texture, too. But the tuna sandwich could have been left over from the last time I ate at Crawford: tuna-flavored paste compressed between two slices of doughy, alleged wheat bread, and decorated with a piece of aging lettuce. Some things never change. *Reposted article from the SD Reader by Gordon Smith of November 10, 1983

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discoveringthebible · 7 years

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The Connecting Church: Ministry

Many people know that I am in a program that trains ministers and clergy for the church. I enrolled in Northwest Nazarene University’s program for a few reasons, but I have been going through once class at a time since the Spring of 2014. Before this current semester, I decided that I wanted to try two classes at a time, even though I work full time and I lead a ministry at the church I attend every Sunday morning.

The two classes that I am taking right now are Telling the New Testament Story of God and Pastoral Care and Counseling. Even though I am only in week 4 (of 12 weeks), I have learned a lot and have grown a lot and am closer to God than I have felt in years, even though my life is pretty crazy right now.

I am the Lead Prayer Minister at my church. I oversee a group of people (between 12-15) to create a schedule and work together with the church to have two prayer ministers be available to pray with congregants during the communion part of our gathering. (Our church has communion every Sunday, and I think it’s a wonderful and powerful testimony and reminder when we take time to remember Christ’s sacrifice for us every week.)

When I was a Children’s Pastor, I didn’t have anyone assist “under” me. (I use “under” because I don’t do this alone. I’ve just accepted to take on the extra responsibilities of organizing others in the group to make sure we have at least 1 (preferably 2 prayer ministers during both Sunday morning gatherings.) I have been doing this since our church relocated to our own space in April.

One of the things that I have noticed, and not just with my church, but with many churches I have visited or volunteered at, is that it is hard to find people to volunteer, even if they are regular Sunday attendees of a particular service. It’s hard to get people to help make church work. (Church doesn’t just happen. A lot of work goes into making church exist every Sunday, whether there are a few people or thousands.) And there is a lot of work behind the scenes that gets overlooked.

Maybe now that I am working toward a vocational call into full-time ministry that I am noticing this more, but it seems that most people think they don’t have a job to do in the church (for whatever reason they come up with.)

I see many people who want to help and volunteer, but something is holding them back.

Well, today, as part of my reading for my New Testament Class, I had to read a sermon by David Busic called “The Connecting Church: Ministry.” He preached this sermon at Lenexa Central Church of the Nazarene in Lenexa, Kansas back in 2002. This sermon just hit the mark for some of the things that I have been noticing, and thinking about. His sermon is concise and to the point, much better than how I could have put it, so I’m sharing it with you in hopes of a few things.

1. That you will take a look at your church life (if you go to church) and to see how you are involved with it. Is there something else that you could be doing to be a bigger part of God’s kingdom?

2. Is there a gift or strength you have that you notice is lacking somewhere? If you do notice it, maybe you might think more about trying to find a way to use it and bless the church with it.

3. If you are already in ministry, how have you been looking for volunteers? (I have not been doing a great job of stepping out of my comfort zone to ask people to volunteer. When people are asked specifically to volunteer, they are more likely to think more about it and are more likely (but not always) willing to help.

-Peace and Blessings

Cody Marie

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THE CONNECTING CHURCH: MINISTRY*

1 PETER 2:4-10

by David Busic

There is a barrier in many churches today. It’s a wall that’s hard to climb over. More than a few have tried to scale it, only to fall flat on their face. It’s not exclusively a Kansas City problem. There seems to be a wall whether you live in New York, San Francisco, or Omaha.

That wall is called the ministry barrier. Here’s how it works: Every single Christian is called by God to be a minister. And yet in most congregations 20% of the people are doing 80% of the ministry. The question is: Why the barrier? Why have so many churches failed to motivate 80% of their people to engage in any kind of significant ministry?

Well, there are a couple of possible reasons: Either in the average church 80% of the people just don’t care about God’s call to ministry in their lives or the majority of people believe that God’s call to ministry is reserved only for a special few.

I don’t think the first reason is true. I believe the vast majority of Christians truly do want to make a difference for God. And yet I also believe that a ministry barrier exists today because of a predominant myth that has permeated the way we do church for well over 1,500 years. When that myth is really examined there is no scriptural validity, and yet its subtle and pervasive grip on the church has caused many people to believe it’s true.

THIS IS THE MYTH: Ministry is for “ministers.” And “ministers,” of course, means only ordained clergy type folks. Clergy are the professionals and laity are the amateurs. How we ever came to that conclusion is a mystery to me.

The ministry of the laity is nothing new. It is as old as the gospel itself. In fact, for the first 300 years of church history, the church had no clergy. It was made up of believers who understood they were to be apostles sent on a mission by the living Christ. And while different believers had different ministries, every Christian was expected to use his or her spiritual gifts for ministry. And as they did, the Church exploded, spreading like wildfire throughout the Roman Empire, literally turning their world upside down.

In time, though, ministry became professionalized. The nonprofessionals, or laity, were relegated to some kind of a second-class status that all but locked them out of recognized ministry. It was a heresy that essentially divided all believers into two classes—the clergy, or the “ministers,” and the laity, or the “nonministers.”

Bruce Larson addressed that issue when he wrote: With the phenomenal growth of that early church, both numerically and in influence, two classes of Christians emerged, leaders and spectators. The spectators were supposed to learn sound doctrine, to pray, sing, listen to sermons, and pay the bills. But when the question is asked, as it often is, “Why doesn’t the church do something about that?” THE CHURCH is synonymous with “the clergy.”

That was exactly the heresy that Martin Luther, a German monk, and the other Reformers of the 16th century fought against. That line of thinking began to lead the church of his day into practicing a theological sacerdotalism.

Now that’s a big word, but it has a simple definition. It basically meant that the clergy of the church, the priests, officially belonged to a special class that was poised between God and the laity, and that God would speak through Scripture to the people as interpreted by the priests, and then the people would speak back to God by confessing to the priests.

Martin Luther came along and said: “Wait a minute! That’s not biblical. The Bible teaches the priesthood of ALL believers.” And therefore a fundamental cry of the Reformation was a return to the biblical plan of the “priesthood of all believers,” which essentially taught that all Christians are potentially equal in both communion with God and ministry FOR God.

That means that the call of God upon a person’s life is not the prerogative of a special class. God does not lay claim to the life work of a few special people and leave the rest of us free to chase the American dream! Protestant churches all agree that every Christian is a minister. We believe that: “It was he [Christ] who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God’s people for works of service” (Eph 4:12).

And yet what we believe theoretically in our heads and live practically in our lives are miles apart. In our head we believe what the New Testament says is true. But in our gut, many Christians still feel like the reverend/pastor/preacher is probably closer to God than the average layperson.

If you don’t believe that’s true, think about our conversations. We say the pastor is THE minister, and what he or she does is THE ministry. We say things like: “Have you met THE minister of my church? Hey, have you heard the news? David’s going to seminary to study for . . . THE ministry.”

In fact, if a pastor leaves a church to pursue another vocation we say: “He or she left THE ministry.” That’s why so many church signs read: “First Church of the Nazarene/ Worship 10:45 a.m./MINISTER: John Smith.” Why do we do that? Because many people believe when we say “the minister,” we mean a paid clergy person, and when we say “the ministry,” we’re talking about what the clergy does.

But, my brother and sister, every time we refer to the vocational ordained clergy as THE minister and what they do as THE ministry, we drive one more nail into the coffin of the priesthood of all believers.

1 Peter 2 is devoted to the priesthood of all believers. These are words that tell us about the way a church indwelled by the Spirit of God is to function within the kingdom of God.

Peter says that our lives in Christ are like a house that is being built. But it’s not just any house. The homes that you and I live in are built with inanimate objects like wood and bricks and mortar. But the house God is building is a spiritual house that is alive and active. And Jesus himself is both the cornerstone and capstone of that house.

The cornerstone is the most important stone in a building’s foundation. The capstone is the central stone in an arch, which balances the arch so that it will stand. And so the cornerstone of God’s house is Jesus and the capstone of God’s house is Jesus. Jesus is both the foundation and the pinnacle! He is the beginning and the end of God’s living spiritual house.

And so if Jesus Christ is the cornerstone and the capstone of this living spiritual house, who are the rest of the stones that make up the structure? Where are they coming from? Peter says that we are! We are the stones in God’s house!

When we come to Christ we become living stones placed in the spiritual house that God is building. And the word here for “stones” doesn’t just mean a rock that you might dig up out of a field. It’s talking about a dressed and fitted stone ready to be used in construction. And all of us who are Christians make up the edifice of God’s spiritual house.

You see, in the Old Testament the dwelling place of God’s presence was in the Temple. But in the New Testament everything changes and the dwelling place of God is now within every believer!

The apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthian church: “Don’t you realize that all of you together are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God lives in you? God will bring ruin upon anyone who ruins this temple. For God’s temple is holy, and you Christians are that temple” (1 Cor 3:16-17).

Paul was saying that God’s new temple, God’s new dwelling place, is within us! And so when we say things like: “It’s good to be in your house today, Lord,” we’re not being totally biblical because that means we’re still one Testament behind.

We are the temple of God! We are the people of God! You and I are Almighty God’s chosen people. We are His folks!

What a privilege! But what a responsibility! Because the very reason we are being built into a spiritual house is so that we might become a holy priesthood set apart for God’s holy purposes. We are a HOLY priesthood! But we are also a ROYAL priesthood. Which means that we are a priesthood belonging to a King who gives us authority to be His ambassadors in the world.

Now it’s important to stop right here and ask ourselves a question: If we are living stones being built into a spiritual house, for the purpose of becoming God’s holy and royal priesthood, what does it mean to be a priest? I think that’s a pretty important question. If God is calling all of us to be priests, then what does it mean to be one?

In the Old Testament, priests were the mediators between God and people. They were the channels of communication from God and to God for the rest of the community.

They had the designated privilege of serving in the very presence of a holy God, and of “coming near” when no one else would dare. They were the select few who could enter the temple and offer sacrifices on behalf of the people, and only the high priest could go beyond the curtain to enter into the holy of holies, and that just once a year, to make atonement for the sins of the people.

But when Jesus died on the Cross and atoned for our sins, once and for all, access into the presence of God was opened for all people. The veil that once separated the holy from the unholy, the sacred from the secular, has been ripped in half—torn from top to bottom! Because of his sacrifice, Jesus has become our great High Priest, and access to God is no longer for a privileged few, but has now been extended to all who believe.

We are the new priesthood! And what that means is that you and I have been set apart as God’s people to announce the mighty works of God, to declare His glory, and to proclaim the miracle of our redemption through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And that’s the reason the people of God exist!

You have a priestly calling in your daily interaction with people.

You are conduits between God and His world.

You are called to be ambassadors of God’s reconciling love!

You are called to bring their needs and concerns to God in intercessory ways!

And you are called to offer spiritual sacrifices of the gifts and calling that God has give specifically to you!

Why? Because you are a holy, royal priesthood!

But do you know what I am discovering? I am finding that the “priesthood of all believers” and the invitation to ministry is not all that appealing to some folks today. Because it sounds like more work, and most of us already have all the work we can do. It sounds like more responsibility, and most of us are already staggering under loads that are already too heavy.

I remember what Barbara Brown Taylor wrote about the woman who listened to her speech on the ministry of the laity as God’s best hope for the world and said: “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be that important.”

Barbara said: “I understood what she was saying. Like many of those who sit beside her at church, she hears the invitation to ministry as an invitation to do more—to lead the New Members Class or cook supper for someone who’s just come home from the hospital or teach Vacation Bible School.

Or she hears the invitation of ministry as an invitation to be more—to be more generous, more loving, more religious. No one ever introduced her to the idea that her ministry might involve being just who she already is and doing just what she already does, with one difference: namely, that she understand herself to be God’s person in who she already is and in what she already does.”

I mentioned Martin Luther earlier. When talking about ministry, Luther made a careful distinction between a Christian’s vocation and a Christian’s office.

Offices are what we do for a living—teacher, accountant, homemaker. None of them are particularly more endearing to the heart of God than another. In our offices we exercise the diversity of our gifts, playing our parts in the ongoing life of the world.

Our Christian vocation is different from that. While our offices may be different, as Christians our vocation is the same. We are called to share Christ’s ministry in the world as His holy priesthood. And whether you deliver babies or deliver mail that is a common calling for every believer! Another way to say that is: Whatever our individual offices (plural) are in the world, our mutual vocation(singular) is to serve God through those offices.

That is a vision that takes a lot of strength to see clearly, because what we’re talking about is learning to see in a different way. To believe in your divinely ordained priesthood is to see the extraordinarydimensions of your very ordinary life. It is to see the hand of God at work in the world and to see your very own hands as necessary to that work.

And it doesn’t matter if those hands are putting diapers on babies or washing dishes or changing the oil in a car or balancing a corporate account . . . they are God’s hands claimed by God at the moment He saved you, to accomplish His will on earth.

What a holy calling that is! And many of you take that very seriously. Many of you have said: “Lord, take my life and use it for Your glory. I want to pour myself out for others! We’ll go where Youwant us to go and do what You want us to do, even if it costs us everything . . . even our very lives, if that’s what we’re called to do.”

And when you said those things, you meant every word of it! But maybe what you thought giving your all to God was, as Fred Craddock has said, is like taking a $1,000 bill and laying it on the table: “Here’s my life, Lord. I’m giving it all.”

But the reality for most of us is that He sends us to the bank and has us cash in the $1,000 for quarters. We go through life putting out 25 cents here and 50 cents there.

Listening to the neighbor kid’s troubles instead of saying, “Get lost.”

Teaching a Sunday School class full of energetic third graders.

Going to a committee meeting.

Giving a Dixie-cup of water to a shaky old man in a nursing home.

And we begin to discover that very often our life to Christ isn’t as glorious as we thought. It’s done in all those little acts of love, 25 cents at a time. In some ways it would be easier to go out in a flash of glory—because it’s harder to live the Christian life little by little over the long haul.

That means a serious commitment to your holy priesthood. But what a blessing . . . and what an honor!

There are plenty who decline the honor, finding it either too frightening or too intrusive to be taken seriously, but those willing to accept the challenge find themselves living an extraordinary adventure!

You have a purpose in the world! We are a holy and royal priesthood! But it is not the priesthood of the believer. It is the priesthood of all believers. The house is no individual. We are living stones placed together. Our offices may be different—but our vocation is the same. And we do it together.

*Sermon by David Busic given at Lenexa Central Church of the Nazarene, Lenexa, Kansas, 2002.

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qtakesams · 5 years

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What 9/11 Is Like on the Other Side of the World

As an elementary schooler in the early and mid 2000s, September 11th was like a weird national holiday we remembered by coming to school and halting whatever topics we’d been learning about. Thusly, we would devote our eight-hour school day (or at least half of it) to talking about what led to the attacks and what had happened since. This happened every single year of elementary school. In sixth grade in 2011, the ten-year anniversary, all of the students were gathered in the auditorium where the teachers recalled the basics of where they were that day and how it affected their lives.

I remember how strange it felt to do that every year, for my teachers to lecture on events that had happened when I was alive but not old enough to recall my own experiences. The only reason I know where I was and what I was doing (sitting in the living room, watching Blue’s Clues) is because my mom was home with me that day. A co-worker called her shortly after the first plane hit and told her she should stay home that day. A little later, my mom turned on the news and watched the second plane crash.

By the time I hit high school, I was beginning to realize it was probably pretty weird and extremely difficult for my teachers to educate on us on 9/11 every year. My teachers, who had been somewhere in their twenties or early thirties on that day, found themselves having to carefully explain a terrorist attack to kids who were toddlers back then but suddenly teenagers. I would imagine it is even weirder for them now, teaching teenagers who weren’t alive back then about an event from college drilled into their 40-year-old brains.

I always considered it rough to watch the documentaries, to look at the photos of people under distress during an event that, at the time of which, I wasn’t really aware. I can’t imagine how it feels now, being a high school junior or senior who literally wasn’t alive yet.

This is my first year not being in America on this day. It doesn’t really feel weird, especially since the last two Septembers, I’ve been in college and other than a quick morning memorial, it’s just another day at Susquehanna. The years of spending this day dwelling on the attacks are becoming slimmer in educational institutions, and I suppose this is primarily because the kids who were aware and alive in 2001 are now completely grown up. The attacks are becoming less of a distant memory to reflect on, and more so of a historical event as foreign as the collapse of the Berlin Wall or Pearl Harbor.

I’m also, in the Netherlands, six hours ahead of New York City. While I’m adjusted to the time change at this juncture, I still forget I’m ahead six hours. This caused a strange occurrence in me this morning, when I awakened and realized that on that day in 2001, Europe was viewing the attacks as a sudden afternoon outbreak of horror, while Americans awakened to the news that the nation was under attack.

Other than a few NPR notifications, the attacks hadn’t really crossed my mind today until I realized that this very detail was strange to me. I suppose students studying abroad in America may feel the same way when they are abroad during main dates in their country’s history.

It’s weird to be in a place where nobody is really acknowledging something that used to take over a specific day of your life every year. I’m not really even sure that Dutch children are educated about 9/11. It makes me think of what this day will be like in 20 or 30 years, when I potentially have children of my own attending school in early September. Are they going to watch the same documentaries as I did, or have a moment of silence at the same time the first plane crash hit? Part of me hopes they have a less intense viewpoint when they’re young. Part of me doesn’t want them to know anything about it.

I finally know what it feels like to be on the diminishing end of a national crisis that is in some ways still ongoing. And all I really can say is: it feels strange.

#studyAbroad #Amsterdam #exchange #9/11 attacks #neverforget #Thoughts #2019

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madeyemoodyproductions · 7 years

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I was a pretty obnoxious kid growing up.

Okay, fine. I’m still pretty obnoxious. But as a kid, and more specifically, as a student, I was obnoxious. I wouldn’t have wanted to have me in a classroom (Hey, what do they say? Teachers make the worst students? Even as a secondary student I knew I wanted to be a teacher.). I talked all the time; I was a total smart-ass (not to the teachers…usually…or directly…). I am telling you the absolute truth when I say that my freshman year of high school, my World History teacher (who, by the way, was also the Dean of Students) took hold of my desk – with me in it – and flung it about 20 feet across the room because he was so exasperated with me one day. In his defense, I purposely provoked him, asking all sorts of inane, yet, just believable enough to be answered questions, with the sole goal of postponing the day’s test.

Yeah. That was me.

But I’ll tell you one thing I wasn’t. I wasn’t a cheater. It wasn’t that I had a strict sense of morality. Other stuff I did growing up would disabuse you of that notion pretty quickly. No, I was an intellectual snob. Well, I suppose a better way to say it was that I didn’t trust anyone’s brain but my own. If I didn’t know it, or didn’t remember it, there was no possible way anyone sitting around me would, either. Of course, given who my circles of friends were at certain points in my secondary education career, I may have been spot on about that. But those less-than-stellar-albeit-necessary-for-making-me-who-I-am-today choices are neither here nor there. The point is, when my senior government teacher accused me of cheating on one of my last high school tests ever, I was justifiably affronted. I would NEVER cheat off of someone.

And so, with that sense of justice (and because I was really worried about what would happen to me if I got caught doing it), I approached my Physics teacher before final exams that year and asked her if it would be considered cheating to program (okay, I’m using that term loosely…I really just wanted to save it in a file/page) the formulas into my TI-whatever-number-was-out-in-1998 graphing calculator and use it on the exam. She paused, seeming impressed – whether at my honesty or comfort level with the technology, I’m not sure – and said that if I could figure out how to do that, she’d be fine with me using the calculator. So I did, and I don’t think I really used it more than once or twice because I was well-prepared.

I tell you this background and anecdote to give you context for my decision as an English teacher to openly guide my students toward – and even encourage them to use – the resources on SparkNotes.

If you’re not familiar with SparkNotes, you should be. And I’d wager that you are familiar with Cliff’s Notes. It’s even a colloquialism these days – “Give me the Cliff’s Notes version!” Meant to only include the information of utmost necessity. Enough to pass the test. Because who really has time to read every assigned novel in British Lit? Or American Lit? Or all of high school?

Cliff’s Notes has a pretty negative reputation as being a cheater’s way through the material. Good teachers would know right away if you’d only read the Cliff’s Notes version, because your answers would only skim the surface. And likely be phrased far too sophisticatedly for an average high school student.

SparkNotes is the modern-day version of Cliff’s Notes. On Steroids.

So, why would I encourage my students to go there, when no self-respecting English teacher would hand out Cliff’s Notes copies of a novel to students and say, “You know what? Go ahead. Skip the real thing. Hell. Watch the movie. It’s close enough.” Now, you might think you know the answer to this, because if you follow my blog, you know I often write posts that seem, perhaps to some, like I just lower the standards for my low-performing students. Like, I know they’re not going to read the novel. Why fight the battle? Why not give them something they actually might, if all the stars and planets align, find it in them to do? Would it really be that terrible?

But that is not what my rationale is. No, I don’t direct my students to SparkNotes because I just like to lower the bar. (And I prefer to think of my philosophies more as “realistic expectations,” thank-you-very-much.) No, it’s because of what SparkNotes offers.

Go to a Sparknotes unit for a novel and you will find a veritable cornucopia of resources for that work. You’ll get the context of the work, the plot overview, character list and analyses, and even discussion about themes, motifs, and symbols. And then, if that weren’t enough, you’ll get chapter summaries. They even have quizzes and review questions. They explain important quotations. And it’s all free. Free for students, free for teachers.

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Now, I am an avid reader. I love to read. And I hate, hate, hate previewing the story. It’s like nails on a chalkboard having to find out what happens at the end before I even start. That was my least favorite part of being an English teacher. We had these story previews in our curriculum workbooks that gave a synopsis of the entire story before the students even began. It drove me crazy! Where was the suspense? The situational irony? Everything was ruined!

Until I had to teach Julius Caesar. I’m not a humongous Shakespeare fan to begin with, but Julius Caesar isn’t my favorite play of his on the best of days. What made it worse was that I remembered studying it in high school but didn’t actually remember anything other than that I did actually study it. I retained nothing. I’m not sure if that was because I just didn’t understand it or I didn’t read it and spent the discussion time being obnoxious. Probably the latter. But I was not excited to have to teach it. I didn’t even want to read it. I felt like a whiny student.

So I found SparkNotes. I read all the Act summaries. I read the synopses of character analysis, themes, important facts, etc. I even – praise the literary powers that be – used their “No Fear Shakespeare” modern text version to get me through the PITA that is early Modern English in iambic pentameter. And then I picked up my copy and read it through. And it made sense. And I flew through it. And it wasn’t hard. And it wasn’t boring. And it didn’t make me want to carve my eyes out with a spoon. I was amazed. I wished I’d had SparkNotes in high school. It would likely have helped me get through other classic literature without falling asleep (*cough cough* Great Gatsby, I’m looking at you).

Yes, I already knew the ending, so I’m not sure how I’d feel about some other story being “spoiled” by reading SparkNotes first, but I’ve found – to my surprise – that my students didn’t seem to mind that aspect.

So, when we would get ready to read a novel, I would encourage my students to go to SparkNotes. I would tell them to spend time reading everything SparkNotes had on that work of literature so they would understand and notice the subtleties of motifs, symbolism, and sub-plots. Sparknotes does such a great job explaining all this that we were able to spend our time in class talking about other meaningful aspects of the novel. SparkNotes is the modern-day Cliff’s Notes version. But it does it better. It includes so much more that makes it easier (dare I say, enticing?) to read the entire work. But it leaves a little mystery. As a teacher, I just made sure to look at the review, quiz, and essay questions that were on the site and steer clear of them. There were plenty of other things to discuss and put on my assessments.

SparkNotes is the modern-day Cliff’s Notes version. But it does it better. It includes so much more that makes it easier (dare I say, enticing?) to read the entire work. But it leaves a little mystery. As a teacher, I just made sure to look at the review, quiz, and essay questions that were on the site and steer clear of them. There were plenty of other things to discuss and put on my assessments. SparkNotes didn’t rob me of a unit. It didn’t give me a way to fail kids easily because they’d obviously only “read the Cliff’s Notes.” No, by using SparkNotes as a scaffolding tool, I made novel study more engaging and meaningful during class. And heck, it made me a better teacher, too. I like to think of myself as a version of my old Physics teacher who, rather than forbid what could potentially be an extremely valuable tool simply because it seemed like it would lead to slacking – or cheating, embraced it and all it had to offer, and that resulted in student success.

Why I Recommend SparkNotes to My Students (and how I encourage its use) I was a pretty obnoxious kid growing up. Okay, fine. I’m still pretty obnoxious. But as a kid, and more specifically, as a student, I was obnoxious.

#education #english #English Language Arts #literacy #Literature #novels #online resources #reading #school #sparknotes #students #teacher resources #teachers #teaching #teaching tips #teaching tools

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whistlekick · 7 years

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Kyoshi Brent Crisci is a karate practitioner and teacher from Maine. He is the founder of United Martial Art Academies.

To me, that’s what sport karate does. It builds that type of integrity and it build that kind of pride.

Kyoshi Brent Crisci – Episode 226

In this episode, we talk with Kyoshi Brent Crisci who is also known as “Kicks” in the martial arts world. A very seasoned martial arts practitioner and instructor, he worked with some of the greats in the martial arts during his younger years. It was during those experiences he learned not only the material, but the importance of passing on to the younger generation. Kyoshi Crisci is a fighter and a survivor of one of life’s most challenging battles, which is why we’re so honored to have him today. Listen to Kyoshi Brent Crisci as he tells his very inspiring story.

[app_audio src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/whistlekick/226-brent-crisci.mp3″%5D

Show Notes

Link to past episodes:

Robb Buckland, Master Ken and Matt Page, Bill Wallace, Dave Kovar, Bruce Juchnik

Website – uniteddojos.com

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Show Transcript

You can read the transcript below or download here.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Hey what’s going on everybody it’s episode 226 of whistlekickMartialArtsRadio. My name is Jeremy Lesniak I’m your host, and the founder of whistlekick sparring gear and apparel and I’m the guy who’s lucky enough to talk to all of our guests, including today’s guest who pretty sure is the guest we’ve had on that I have known the longest, that’s fun. Stick around for that. In the meantime, have you checked out martialartscalendar.com? It’s a website we’ve put together because there’s really no great spot to pull these events together. I mean there are you know if you go to event, events that have a circuit you know like a tour, you can go to that site to see all of those competition and you know maybe you can see the events that are going locally via Facebook or something but what if you’re traveling or what if you want to follow something specific like a particular presenter around we’ve heard some of our guests talk about how they would basically follow Bill Wallace or Joe Lewis around the country and train with them quite a few weekends out of the year. How do you know about that? Or unfortunately there wasn’t a great site to do all that so you know what like everything else in my life I said alright let’s make one. So, we put together martial arts calendar, martialartscalendar.com which you know it’s free, it’s free to post to. It’s free all over the place, we ate all the money in development, we eat the monthly fees on it, we don’t advertise on it you know just check it out, contribute to it you know if you know events that aren’t there or people that put together events just help us grow it because look I believe that the more people we have attending these events and building these bonds, the more retention we’ll have in the martial arts, the more enjoyable martial arts will be and that’s really the goal. We put together this stuff, I put together this stuff, for you all because I believe that a good number of you are like me. If you want to check out the other stuff that we do, other than martialartscalendar.com you can go to whistlekick.com you can find the show notes for all of the podcast episodes at whistlekickmartialartsradio.com yeah that’s it. So, let’s talk about today’s guest. You know just when you thought you’re living easy and you’ve got life bent to your will, something can change, something big and this is what happened to Kyoshi Brent Crisci who survived a condition that technically took his life. Kyoshi Crisci is a decorated practitioner and instructor who’s worked with some of the absolute greats, throughout the martial arts history. He has a very very interesting life, he’s an incredibly entertaining man and he’s got a story that we can all take inspiration from even those of us who might not me in the martial arts. Without further ado let’s welcome him to the show. Kyoshi Crisci welcome to whistlekickMartialArtsRadio.

Brent Crisci:

Hey thank you for having me Jeremy it’s been a long-time overdue in coming.

Jeremy Lesniak:

It is, it is and you know as I do episodes to this show I start to think back about how long I’ve known certain people and I maybe wrong but I may have known you the longest of anyone that’s yet been on the show.

Brent Crisci:

That is possible and I, that’s why I thought this is a great idea and I remember when you called and when you were launching whistlekick and had the idea and yeah but yeah that goes way back I mean my days in the Vermont New Hampshire early in sport karate go back to you know the 80s.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Right, well I remember you from my early days and you may have forgotten I grow up in Maine you know not terribly far from you and yeah just all the names

Brent Crisci:

Oh, I have been in Maine a long time, I don’t the only guy that I’ve tracked, that I found again was Master Ken. Master Ken used to come to my tournament in the 90s when he was a Rich Pelletier student

Jeremy Lesniak:

Yup

Brent Crisci:

Before he was Master Ken and it took me a few episodes to figure out some of his inspiration and where he, who he was mocking from the seminars in the 90s

Jeremy Lesniak:

Are you claiming to be some of the inspiration for the character of Master Ken?

Brent Crisci:

Oh, I absolutely am and I know it because one of the interviews. Some of the first 3 things that he focused on bashing arts and one was ninjutsu which is the first art I did in the 80s and early 90s in Maine and I thought well that’s a fairly obscure art to bash. But okay a lot of people do ninjutsu. And then he bashed kempo and I thought that’s a little more specific and dangerous but kind of hey that’ my art too. That’s been my claim to fame and then I knew when he bashed yoshi sono jujitsu cause there’s a very small specific line under the DePasquale family that does yoshi sono jujitsu and I’m one of them and I thought well that’s a trifecta I’m taking this personal now and then when he came out with his black belt magazine he mentioned attending seminars in his home state and tournaments and I thought hmm cheesy mustache, loud aggressive guy, hey that could be. So, I’m very happy for him and obviously it’s one of the few people that’s taken off that can make fun all of us and get away with it without causing a stir so it’s kind of cool.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Because of course he has deep roots and anybody that’s listening out maybe didn’t listen back at I’m going to say this is somewhere in the 40s and we’ll link to it in the show notes at whistlekickmartialartsradio.com if you’re new but the episode with Master Ken and the man behind Master Ken, Mr. Matt Paige was an absolutely wonderful episode. Hopefully it’s not going to come through the town has decided to grayed the road outside the office at this very moment.

Brent Crisci:

Okay well that’s timing is everything, I was doing the documentary, they decided to air out the main rooms of the dojo with large fans on Tuesday which apparently kicked up the sound who knew. Well we’ll just blame my gruff voice.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Sure, sure so you know the beauty of that brief conversation we just had. I think anyone that doesn’t know you and I’m not going to say to any one that, we could even say anyone that hasn’t met you, because anyone that has met you has likely left with an impression a strong impression because you, that is what you do.

Brent Crisci:

That is very, very well put.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Yeah

Brent Crisci:

And very, very tactfully put as well, they do, they always leave us an impression not always a good impression but to make an impression, I like that

Jeremy Lesniak:

People don’t forget about you, that is for sure, but of course there is a time maybe before people are getting to know you as a martial artist and I kind of want to roll back because I don’t know this story, I don’t you know you just mentioned you know you started with some ninjutsu and I know a lot of the lines of influence that lead to where you’re at now but how did you become a martial artist?

Brent Crisci:

Okay, I guess my first, I grew up in New Haven Connecticut. I was an originally what they call a flatlander up here and one of my best friends in kindergarten and elementary school’s brother had a judo black belt and so it intrigued me because he would throw us around and he did the same things that Captain Kirk had been doing on Star Trek which was really cool. It wasn’t the traditional battalion fighting you know it’s just grabbing and throwing stuff and that fascinated me right there and we became 08:14 dummies and I really fell in love and then the ninja craze launched in the media and Shoku Sagi and that’s just the weapons just fascinated me. I’ve always been weapon’s 08:25 and so that’s really probably I’d love to say I got in for all the right reasons and the reasons that I profess to teach but that would be untrue. I get in for probably all the wrong reasons, I was a punk and a fighter and I thought this will be a cool way to win more and to be able to use weapons. So, the, it might not be the most noble intention, it did lead to some awesome stuff down the road. But that’s what happened, my mother was vehemently opposed to martial arts training, violence. I was already getting in fights, I was supposed to be a good catholic boy, I was never to become a priest if that kept happening so she was against it and I actually, I got her this birthday present 1 year. Stephen Hayes was kind of the first American Ninja, well known. He was doing a New England seminar and he had a student that taught out of USM in Portland Maine. He actually ran security for USM down in Portland. Jim 09:29 was his name and so that occurred and they bought me the thing to attend and I went and I loved it and I started training in the bunjinkan dojo in Portland with Jim *** and 09:41 Stephen Hayes in ninjitsu and to condense the story cause you know it’s a long one we’re going back that was in the early 80s, 82, 83. A man names Robert Howe had come to visit me and one of my friends whose father was in the military and he’s in he was stationed with Robert Howe when he was in the military. So, he came to visit that gentleman and this friend of mine had told Robert Howe that well I was a ninja and Robert Howe was a kempo master born and raised in Hawaii. He would be interested in ninjutsu so she told them oh my friend’s a ninja so he can teach you that stuff and me having the giant ego I did as a teenager went yeah sure. So that’s how I met Grandmaster Howe originally was we were going to exchange kempo for ninjutsu and within a couple of sessions I immediately realized that I was in way over my head that my knowledge level is not in the same realm. So I actually bought Grandmaster Howe, Sensei Howe at the time Master Howe to meet Stephen Hayes and introduce him to him to learn some ninjutsu and Master Howe stayed, it was supposed to be 2-week vacation he ended up staying for 3 months and we worked out together for 3 months, had a great time and I studied more and more about Kempo and found out more about the 11:01 line from Hawaii and he said well you know what I’ve decided on not leaving, I’m going to move hear and I want to teach, he actually has a masters in American History and a physical education major so he started teaching at 11:16 and we continued training and that’s when I had to make the choice at the time the bunjinkan ninjutsu dojo was by invitation only and you could not be ranking in any other styles so it was a closed system which is not uncommon in the 80s that most styles and masters. If you got caught training somewhere else, you 11:36 or you’re expelled at worst. So, I continue studying ninjutsu for a little while longer and then Master Howe made me the karate kid offer before the karate kid movie came out. He said look you I will teach you become my number one student and you will in exchange your kempo with as many people as you can that’s your mission. And I’ve taken that mission seriously for the last 3+ decades and I eventually left ninjutsu and went just with him we started doing 12:08 programs in kempo and ninjutsu and at that time I also traveled to some seminars and that’s when I met Soaki and Michael DePasquale was I went to New Jersey do seminar with Moses Powell and I met DePasquale family and I just really fell in love. He’s an Italian guy doing really traditional jujitsu and also street lethal stuff. And he invited me down to Virginia to the karate college, that’s when I, the same year I met Joe Lewis. The first time I think superfoot Wallace ever came to me, a guy named Dave Howard hosted him in ’83 or ’84 the Taekwondo dojo and I showed up in my black gi the only guy in the building in a black gi by the way. So, it’s a sea of white gis and superfoot Wallace who obviously I knew who he was, he’s been on television and magazine covers and I also knew that back then he would do a round with anybody who wanted to a round with him. After the seminar if you want to do a round with superfoot and I thought well what, that’d be so great if I get to do that. So, I waited till the end of the seminar 2 and a half hours and then he said look does anybody want to do a little you know do a sparring round and I thought it would be a fight Jeremy to the front. I thought this was going to be you know the kind of a tough man contest to get a round with superfoot so I just both hands up leaped forward because I was I don’t know 18 or 19 years old at that time and then I looked around and every else took a step back. It was like a volunteering in the military. No one else wanted to do a round with him, I didn’t get why till I put the gloves on and I got a couple of seconds into the and someone came and hit me in the back of the head. So, I whipped around to look who it was and there was nobody near me. I thought well that’s odd, I thought somebody is being funny so I turn around and I’m throwing all my good stuff that’s not landing on Bill and then somebody hit me in hit me in the back of the head again and I turned around again to see who’s doing it and I turned back around I know you seem to smile by it now. That evil boyish grin, the sheepest, I’ve done a naughty thing and I’ve never been kicked by the superfoot, foot kick that just comes around behind you and can’t possibly hit you from that angle but does. So, it’s him hitting me in the back of the head from the front and I’ve fell in love from then I’ve chased him around the country trying to learn kicking better and so that was kind of the launch of everything. Cause in those few years I was lucky enough and this is what I just count my blessings. I didn’t have to go through any less than awesome people or any bad ill intended instructors. Every instructor I found happen to be the head of the system or one of the best in the world at what they did and I hooked up with them. So that for me just saved me a lot of time and I was willing to take a beating. I actually preferred it, I didn’t learn as well from listening or watching and I was a real skeptic. So, I would always offer to do punching or do to spar to find out, that’s how I found out Joe Lewis’s hook punch. The drop hook that threw god rest his should. I just was amazed by the power he had but I thought maybe these guys aren’t rolling with it. So, when I went to Virginia to Karate College I asked him about it and his response was; do you have some gloves, and I went yeah why, out them on and then he knocked me out with a drop hook punch. I’m assuming did. I remember starting to fight and then I remember a lot of drool in my mouth and looking at lights while I was laying on the floor and the people around me like Robb Buckland and Michael D. 15:58 that I had been immediately dropped and again I fell in love with that and I chased him around for when I was doing the kick boxing stuff. So yeah, I mean I know, there’s so many great people that I immediately connected with that I just count my blessings everyday because I was able to train with them at their peak and then follow them around and they were very open and Grandmaster Howe at the time was also very open minded so when I went back to him and said hey I’m going to be doing jujitsu with this guy or I’m going to be doing kickboxing with that guy, he’s like great bring back what you learn and share it. It was a little different than a lot of the other instructors of that ear that kind of got you know protected. They didn’t want to have their system betrayed and they also some of them just didn’t want their students seeing that other people knew more in certain areas and my gosh you know there’s a lot more people that know a lot more in areas than I do and if my students can hook up with them and learn from them, that’s awesome because I can’t do it all, I can’t teach it all, I’ve tried. It will kill you literally I found out last year, was that too soon to joke about that?

Jeremy Lesniak:

It’s okay, it’s your joke to tell.

Brent Crisci:

Okay, that’s quite a year yet so I know some of my friends and family don’t like it when I do it but I like I said so those were you know in the early days I started with ninjutsu I then when to kosho ryu kempo with Bob Howe and within a year I met Bill Wallace and Michael D and they were doing a lot of seminar circuits back then well bill still does but they were on the road every weekend. So, I started chasing them around, North America training and just been loving it ever since. I really didn’t get into sport karate early, like I said ninjutsu. Master Howe was vehemently opposed, his instructor 17:58 in Hawaii sports karate will kill martial arts and you’re not allowed to do it. So, I had to argue with him for about 2 years, and then after 2 years he gave me the permission to go to a tournament but I’ll tell him about it. Then after 4 years he said okay I want to see what’s going on and take me to a tournament and then I won them over to it and then in 1999 he actually competed for the first time in his life. He’d been studying the martial arts for 40 years at that point but he’d been coaching my 18:28 formed in ’92. Team United 18:32 and he was of course a coach for the teams and he said I can’t he came into my office one day, I’ll never forget it. He said I can’t coach the team anymore with you, why not sir you know you don’t like it and our businesses will know. It’s not right I mean I’m a hypocrite. I’m young 18:52 what they need to do in a tournament and I’ve never been in a tournament a karate tournament. I mean he was a college wrestler you know national buddies and I can’t do that nice and well. Seems to be the solution isn’t not to coach then it’s to compete and he said okay I’ll compete but under one condition you’d be my coach you’d be my teacher and I said I can’t be your teacher you’re my teacher it’s not going to work and he argued with me 19:16 as he often did and so I actually said why don’t we start with a local tournament, we’ve got some great tournaments in Maine. He went no I want to be on the US team with you, I want to go to the world cup, the next one next year and that’s what we did I called Dr. Mill may God rest his soul the head of the world congress 19:34 my instructor we’d like to be involved in the tournament he said well I’ll appoint him. I gave him his resume and he came and he went to Mexico and he competed in the Grand Master’s Division and he won a bronze medal in the weapons in his first tournament in the national level and I’ll never forget it because I had won, there were a lot of divisions back then so I had won 4 or 5 gold medals that week and we had that was on ESPN2 actually they filmed that. They had the stage, they played the national anthem when you got your medal and I was excited, I was in the front row because I got a coaching slot by then. But then it was the term for the Grandmaster’s division awards because no one knew who won till the awards ceremonies you got to list if you medaled but you didn’t know in what. So, I got down front with my camera cause my teacher was up and I was very excited and I was at the front row anyways as with my coaching warm ups. So, I’d leave my seat in the front row and I go right to the edge of the stage and they call his name, they called the bronze first and they played the US national anthem and I like a teenage girl jumped on to the stage now because I want to get a better picture with my cheap camera. So, I’m in the middle of the stage in front of 2000 audience members in front getting in the way to get ESPN cameras, while Dr. Mill he is yelling at me from the sidelines to get off to the stage. Taking pictures of my instructor because I was just kidding, it was one of the, people ask me what was one of the highlights in sport karate you know winning this or winning that and honestly it was when Master Howe won that first bronze medal. I was so proud and so moved that he had the integrity that he had to get up and do it himself well into, he was in his 50s by then already. So that to me, that’s what sport karate does. It builds that type of integrity and it builds that kind of pride in my teacher. So yeah, I was very proud to represent the United States around the world and win all sorts of wonderful things. But to me that was one of my highlights because that was my teacher who didn’t have to do it by then. He didn’t have to step up, he didn’t have to prove anything and he did and that’s what a real master is all about. They don’t do the minimum, they don’t do what they have to they do what they should, they do what needs to be done and that’s something that I unfortunately see fading in the martial arts world so I guess that’s one of my missions, is to do whatever I can to be that type of instructor to live up to the people I’ve mentioned. Those are huge shoes to fill and I’m never going to be any of those people but if I keep what they did alive and if I could represent them well then, I’ll feel it’s a life well spent. Does that answer your question?

Jeremy Lesniak:

That answers a few questions, but it invites quite a few more and the first one that I want to glom onto is why do you think that’s fading. What is changing about, is it the world or the way martial arts is presented or whatever?

Brent Crisci:

Okay, I’m on a positive mission now so I’ll try to spin this as best I can.

Jeremy Lesniak:

I appreciate that.

Brent Crisci:

I think there’s already enough people critiquing and putting down what’s wrong and you got to identify the problem and that should be 10% of your energy and then 90% should be on the solution and what we can do about it. I think one of the things that is a double edge sword is martial arts for profit. Martial arts as a livelihood wasn’t something that existed 30 years ago very much and then the Fred Villari’s chain came a long turned it into a franchise business and it gave us the ability to not have to work at the factory for 50 hrs. a week and then try to teach at night. It gave me the ability to do what I love full time to devote all my energy and time to it and that’s awesome. The other edge of the sword is that what it became something people could make a profit from greed became involved and I know you’ve seen the cookie cutter dojos or the mcdojos as they call them that really it’s about getting money and keeping students and the integrity of the art to the knowledge of the student falls second third or fourth place and that unfortunately has led to a lot of paper tigers and a lot of an and that’s why master Ken’s funny because you know he’s making fun of people that really exist out there unfortunately these 11th degree black belts that just have kind of self-strived to whatever and so that I think that’s one of the factors is that you have people that are in it for greed and that have watered down everything so that people in this society can succeed in it versus let them earn it, let them be worthy of being part of it not water it down for them and I think the other thing is wait I got to come up with a new word cause I know you’re going to have to bleep me if I say this one. The kiddiefication, can I substitute kiddie for the word I was going to say.

Jeremy Lesniak:

I know where you were going.

Brent Crisci:

And I think the people who know me will know where I was going. The kiddiefication of use of America that we bubble wrap them and I mean I’m all about modernization and better safety and that’s great you know I existed without sparring equipment. I never wear a helmet in a fight until secondary black belt and I was at internationals at Massachusetts and they said you have to wear a helmet and I said I don’t wear a helmet no you have to it’s the insurance, it’s the rules and I put on the full helmet they gave me and I put on backwards cause I never worn one and I was a secondary black belt already which explain why I am the way I am now maybe. But I think that we’ve gone so far in the other direction with bubble wrapping these kids and being so sensitive that we’re losing the drive, we’re losing what made the martial arts great that desire to overcome, that desire to push back that gets the instructor and to may sometimes blindly out of respect just do what they say. Not have to have a 10-minute argument or explanation to convince you to do it. You do it because you became my student and that’s the relationship, I say you do, you trust that I know best and you learn and you grow and you get stronger and you become a leader and unfortunately that’s, I like I said I think that’s lost I think the litigious state of our society. I know I actually taught public school for 4 or 5 years, my in college my, mine was a special ed minor in physical education major. So when I first left my shaolin kempo system and I wanted to make a living and I formed the academies, I had to have insurance and money so I took a job at 26:43 academy and I taught there as a regular teacher and worked with the students and I got fired a lot and I got called in the principal’s office a lot and I didn’t care cause it wasn’t my career but I realized those people who are lifetime teachers and who need to have their job and their pension they can’t afford to discipline these kids, they can’t afford to risk being sued or being fired because the society’s become so litigious that they also water everything down and they, it’s unfortunate you know I because it’s not creating a better group of generations that may well hear about these millennials and I don’t hear anything good. Every time I hear the term millennial used it’s followed by some, some horrific falsification of what’s coming or some lack of what we have now and so it doesn’t give me a warm fussy feeling. I can’t change that, all I can do is change my corner of the world or take that Mother Teresa approach. Don’t look at the world and be depressed and be sad that you can’t feed all these people. Look at the person in front of you and feed them and then do it again, and then do it again and that’s kind of the approach I’ve taken is you know I’m going to change a lot of people’s life for the better through martial arts training and some of them are going to do the same thing and it becomes that commercial that no one will get from 28:13. You tell 2 friends and so on and so on and the power of amplification. So that’s kind of, that’s like I said I don’t want to be negative about it I do think it’s a negative thing, I do think we’re definitely losing those dedicated Grandmaster’s aren’t being replaced by as many because they’re not allowed to be because they can’t make a living and do that anymore because the next generation just won’t tolerate that instruction. The other thing is the average age of the student. When I started teaching was an adult and then a teenager and then 10 years old and now the average age of my students is 8 years old. Meaning that half of my students are less than 8 years old. They can’t do the systems I learned, no matter how I teach them because they are not physically or mentally or spiritually capable of completing those martial arts requirements. It doesn’t mean they shouldn’t do martial arts. Thank God for people like Melodie Schuman who is has just helped me so much and since I joined 29:20 in ’88, ’89. Started a little ninja’s program because she so knows they can’t do that but they can do parts of martial arts and they can benefit from martial arts training and if we keep them and teach them with that stuff then when they get older, they will be able to be there and learn your more traditional arts. So, I’ve kind of done a little bit of a U-turn on that where a lot of my older friends they just said well we can’t do it cause the kids can’t learn it. Well that is true, maybe they can’t do what you were doing when you were learning martial arts but if they don’t do anything then they’re going to be in gymnastics, dance, baseball, basketball whatever and they’re not going to do martial arts ever. Whereas if we can them when they’re 2 or 3 and get them into an active program that benefits them with life skills and basic martial arts training then as the age they’ll be more ready to digest maybe some of the awesome traditions that were handed down to me and you by people like Michael DePasquale senior and junior and Superfoot Wallace and Grandmaster Lewis and so many others that you know so anybody I left out that’s why I told you at the beginning we did a pre-interview. I’m going to piss off a few Grandmaster’s either with what I say or what I don’t say so anybody I didn’t list, I’m going to blame the head injuries and the lack of element, my apologies.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Now you hinted at something and once you put it on the table I figured it’s a fair game. You referenced something that happened to you not quite a year ago, something that was traumatic might be a good word and I know that that’s had an impact on you and I’m hoping you might talk about it.

Brent Crisci:

It has, I well you know I’m still in the process of being audited by the IRS and it’s a horrible experience Jeremy and I don’t wish on anybody. It’s really scary and that’s what, is that not? Oh no, I know I’m sorry that isn’t what you were talking about.

Jeremy Lesniak:

It’s not.

Brent Crisci:

The other thing, yeah

Jeremy Lesniak:

But we can talk about that too.

Brent Crisci:

Yeah, it’s been, yeah, it’s self-employment. No, I just kind of died for a very short period of time last September. I wasn’t planning on it I had a, I keep calling it a little heart attack and everybody keeps correcting me cause they’re like no 100% blockage 31:35 opposite of little. So, without going into the gory details I was doing what I love I was teaching privates and I actually came out of retirement to a little girl kung Fu because I occasionally teach kung Fu former to kemps and she did so well and she’s a competitive figure skater and I said you know I retired in 2000 from doing 7-star mantis while in kung Fu. I did it for close to 25 years but I loved it and so I was teaching her and she was late for a private. So, I decided to run through some of my other patterns from Sifu Yao li was my Sifu he used to run the Boston Kung Fu Tai Chi institute for many many years. He taught great people like Professor Nick Cerio, Christine Bannon-Rodrigues, taught them all, Cynthia Rothrock. Yao was the man. So, I was lucky enough I used to drive to Boston on Friday’s and train with him, but I decided that I and I was when I was asleep so I was on my second energy drink and I ran through I put my CDC, CDN and I went about half an hour and then I start the private and I couldn’t catch my breath and then I finished the private I still couldn’t catch my breath and I wasn’t feeling good. So, I thought another private cause that’s what you do when you’re dizzy and you can’t catch your breath and I noticed, I was having trouble when I sat down I tried to stand up, I started to pass out. So, I had a beginner’s class come in, I have 2 black belts to teach with me so I kept giving them instructions. Tell them that I had to make a phone call and I snuck back into my back office and I sit down for 5 minutes then I get up and passed out and then I wake up get out and I tell them a few more things to go. So, I did that for another class and by the way none of these things are smart so this is a cautionary tale for anybody listening. When you have those symptoms, you immediately go to the hospital or you call an ambulance. You don’t drink water and sit down for 5 minutes but I did and thank God one of my black belts wife came in, she’s a nurse and I was sitting out in the front at that point when they started the next class and she being not tactful at all comes up and says Sensei you look like ish and I said yeah, I feel really bad, I don’t feel good something’s wrong. She says I’m going to go get my kit and she took me in my front office and my vitals said bottomed out. My blood pressure had dropped to half that what it normally is, my pulse was half less than half than what it normally was. So, she got her eyes got really big and she said, were going to the hospital and I said alright I’ll get my keys and she said no no you’re having a heart attack and you need to go to the hospital and I’m only about 4 minutes from the new hospital they built in the capital. So, she said I’m just going to drive you, I think if we call an ambulance wait for it to bring you it’s going to be worse. So, she actually drove me to the emergency room which was kind of nice as a nurse and I got in there and they did some preliminary work and they give me a bunch of nitro and it didn’t do anything and they have to do a blood test and I forget the name of the hormone but there’s a special hormone that’s only released when your heart is been damaged or from a heart attack. So, it’s a very easy test, know if you’re, so they did that and when the results came back, I’ll never forget it cause the ER doc was on the phone with the cardiologist in the hospital on the speaker phone and the cardiologist literally said get him the hell out of here. They called the life light which is the emergency helicopter to fly me to Portland, central Maine medical center which has one of the best cardiac units at New England. So, they rushed me down to CICU in Portland which is about probably at midnight then and when I got there they had to call the emergency team and to do surgery because they had discovered that I have, I was an EMT in my younger days to make money and you have a major artery on the right and 2 major ones on the left and my right artery was 100% blocked which I later questioned because I’m like well that’s the major artery and 35:39 blocked. How do you get any blood? and the doctor said well you don’t that’s the problem. So, I had 100% blockage so they did emergency surgery and they were able to do 35:51 with a sent a balloon up in through my arteries and blow up that vessel to break up the blockage and then they put in stents, through a coded stents which were like little tubes or pipes to keep it open and they worry for about 3 days. I was in the CICU critical care because more than 50% people with 100% blockage have another episode or another heart attach within 3 days so luckily, I just listened to them and they lied to me about everything which was great. They told me everything’s fine and you’re going to be able to do everything and they were awesome in there in CICU and I didn’t have another heart attack and then they did an Echo Cardiogram and after 5 days I go to the Critical Care Unit and I went to the Cardiac Unit and at the end of the week they let me go. And I started rehab and I everybody I talked to said you know how lucky you are, several students were nurses and a couple of doctors and they said well when I told them what had happened they said well usually with 100% blockage to the right artery unless that occurs in a nursing home or in the hospital the patient dies and I’m like well I didn’t know that so I didn’t die. Well I did that’s the other thing that I joke about when they were reading the surgical notes back to me to release me from the CICU they have to read everything to you and have you sign it and she got to the point in the surgery where they don’t put you out so I don’t recommend it. You don’t get but you can’t be put unconscious. They just give you a little Valium and strap you down, when they do this stuff so that’s kind of awesome and she got to the word coded and like I said I’ve been in EMT for a few years when I was young and I was working for the shares department because you need to make a living and the word coded usually meant your heart stopped so I stopped there and I said excuse me, that term coded does that mean my 37:43 yeah did not somebody not tell you this? I’m like no they don’t anything in here they want you to stay calm so she explained that yeah you did code for a while and it’s not uncommon because we put a balloon into the major artery going into your heart and then we blew it up for a while and that stops all the blood flow so it’s not uncommon for the heart to arrest at that point she said and then if the it doesn’t rupture they balloon, doesn’t rupture the artery when we pull it back out we restart the heart and that’s what happened with you and so but you’re fine now and you got a good rhythm and I’m like well that’s good I just was curious that no one mentioned that I had died there for a second or 2 or a minute or 2 whatever. So that’s why I’ve been telling people, people asking my age as they always do and I tell them I’m one because if you die for more than a minute that’s your birthday then so now September 21st I’ll turn 2. I’m pretty excited I’m going to have a party so that yeah, so that definitely that like any near-death experience or whatever you want to call it, it causes you to do a little evaluation and I’ve always lived life to the fullest. I’ve always you know I don’t have bucket list, I have list of things to do and I do them. But it did cause me to seriously reflect on and what I’d done so far what I wanted to get done before I am not that lucky the next time so I the other thing that I want to share with you because I have to that was the negative part obviously that you know I had a 100% blockage and I had a major heart attack and I had emergency surgery and ended up you know in the CICU. The outpouring of love and support from not just family and immediate friends but from the martial arts community was amazing. It was one of the reasons I do what I do and one of the reasons I believe that in better living through martial arts in martial arts sport and community. Literally in the CICU the next day I was allowed to have calls or phone or anything I was triple IVd and wired and drugged and the head charge nurse comes in with a portable phone and she told me my sister was on the phone. I have a sister that lives in Boston and I thought well okay my dad snuck a cellphone in so I could talk my other sister and my kid. But I take the phone and it’s not my sister, it’s a very concerned and 40:13 Denise Rouleau, Grandmaster Rouleau had called until she got through to the CICU and got a phone bought into my room in critical care because she wanted to hear my voice and make sure that if I needed anything she said look do you need me to come up and run your dojo? I can leave today, I’ll be up there this afternoon and I thought this woman isn’t even a part of my organization or my style and she’s ready to drop her own organization and her own dojo to come up and run my business for me. That’s the type of friendships we build in the martial arts. I mean we’ve known each other since we were teenagers, we competed in the PKL together but that’s the type of love and then I actually do something I’ve never done I don’t you know I like Facebook for sharing photos or whatever or promoting my business but I was told by my dad and my immediate family that I need to let every know what happened. That they were already questioning because I called my head black belts, I had my father call my head black belts when I got sent down to Portland and so I had my father helped me and he did a Facebook post the next day on just kind of the recap. Here’s what happened I did heart attack, I did end up in the Critical Care Unit I had emergency surgery and I’m alive and I’m going to be well and it just went nuts. I mean the amount of calls and messages and text and emails went on day after day after day. It didn’t stop in a day and that moved I mean I know I love a lot of people and I know I’ve got a lot of people that love me I’m very fortunate but to see it all numerically recorded and to just continue to get that love and support for weeks and months later I just I you know I can’t thank everybody enough. So, the only thing I thought I could do is try to not die again, I figured that’s the only way to pay everybody back. I also in making the list lying in the CICU bit of things that I still want to do and want to see. I had to make some changes in my lifestyle and I can’t work out the way I did when I was in my 20s or 30s and I can’t eat the way I did and I can’t run my organization the way I did working 80 hours and running you know 40 kids classes a week. So, I immediately hired an office manager and I hired someone to run the lower aged kids’ groups and I delegated, I cut down on my travel and I made some definite changes. I ate everything the way I was supposed to, I did my 3 months rehab and in 3 months my numbers were perfect, my blood pressure, my blood sugars, everything was great and I’ve continue to follow that, it will be a year next month because I get a lot to do and a lot of people count on me to do it, it’s not just me. So yeah it was you know like I said initially a negative experience, I wouldn’t wish that on anybody but everything happens for a reason and even if it wasn’t good, there’s always good to be had from it. There’s always something to be learned from it and that’s my take away for it is it’s smarting me up in certain areas and it made me, it reminded me. We all need reminders, everyday is a good day, that you’re above 43:44 and every day is an opportunity no matter what’s happening this bad you know we all have bad things happen and it’s okay to be upset with them but we’ve only got so much time. So I guess the take away was Tom Callos said this to me years ago, I think he stole it from Jhun Rhee actually but he said champions don’t need to be taught what to do but they need to be reminded often and that’s what that did for me is I knew how to live and I knew what was important but I forgot a little bit and that episode reminded me and it’s helped me to remind other people and I’ve seen people in my own organization that have made steps preemptively now to go I don’t want to let things go that far, I don’t want to end up there so I’m going to make some changes and so yeah it’s, it definitely was a major life event and I’m like I said I’m doing awesome now and I feel great and I’m just trying to continue to remember that I don’t want forget what happened cause those people who forget the past are doomed or 44:48 to somebody wants that. SO I keep it in my mind, I keep on my mirror cause I worked with 44:55 in my whole life that opportunity to meet him when I was 17 and I followed him until he passed and just a great motivational, just an incredible giving man and he believes in reminders stick ems on your mirror affirmations on your bed room mirror so what I did was I took the recipe and I had from the emergency room and the CICU and I take them up to my mirror so every day when I get ready to leave my home I have to see them and I’m reminded of what happened, what could’ve happened that day, very easily it could’ve been the end of the story and if I’m lucky enough to get it on a chapter then I’m going to make sure it’s awesome. I’m going to make sure I write it and that I make it full and exciting so I put that up and that’ll stay up because I do need that reminder and from all my friends out there whom I call them generational teachers where we’re teaching generation after generation now or up there in years. We’re not 21 anymore, we feel like we are in the inside but we all have to adapt and adjust. Dave Kovar who I’ve been fortunate enough to work with for a lot of years. He actually was one of my instructors my Grandmaster of cultural kempo. Hanshi Bruce Juchnik who I know you met and interviewed.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Yes

Brent Crisci:

Dave Kovar was with Hanshi as a teenager and I have some really cool black belt pictures of Dave with his 46:22 hairdo and he ran the Hanshi school and when he’s about 17. So, he understands where I’m coming from traditionally with the traditional demands on my martial arts systems but he also has modernized and he is the one who tells me, you can’t focus on what you can’t do anymore you know I used I was called kicks for a reason that’s what I did in kickboxing in sport karate in the dojo I love kicking, I love flying around, I had my feet in everybody’s face all the time. It’s a wonder I had any friends. But he said you know you got to focus on what you could still do and the amazing abilities that you required because you can’t kick this one anymore you also can do magical things that nobody else can do and some of those are physical and you know little ninja style movements and some of them either you can walk into a room and you can turn a child’s life around. You can get a person to listen to you that would not listen to somebody else, because of your reputation because of the knowledge of the past, your accomplishments, you have a credibility and that’s power and that came with the age you’ve acquired so no you lose in some categories yes. You focus on the categories, you gained and so I’m very appreciative to Dave because I continue to work with them because he sets me straight he has a great way of looking at things, his dad is still training, my dad still trains he’s 75, he’s still in the dojo training. Dave’s age I think he’s 93 now.

Jeremy Lesniak:

I believe you’re right.

Brent Crisci:

And he did rounds for his birthday, ah what an inspiration. So, if I think I got a few problems because of the heart attack and the things I can’t eat or the things I can’t do, I just put on a video of Dave’s dad and go shut up dude you got a great, you got nothing to worry about. You got awesome, you got and awesome so yeah, those people if you can surround yourself with people like that and you can continue to look forward then you don’t have a bad day. You have challenges, you have opportunities but there’s never a bad day. There’s no bad days above ground.

Jeremy Lesniak:

I would agree.

Brent Crisci:

So that’s what happened last fall.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Man okay, so we’re going to dig into that in a second. I just want to let folks know that you may now have the record for mentioning the most past guests. So, which maybe

Brent Crisci:

Well I felt I need like you’ve been giving me a hard time since day one we have this idea and I said yeah, I’ll do it and then literally I kept being busy and anyhow we can use the heart attack as part of these but before that I was just really busy and I’ve watched you literally interview every one of my teacher and some of students that trained with me and I thought yeah, I got to get this done so, but I do like I said in the beginning. I’m lucky

Jeremy Lesniak:

It’s only been two and a half years. I mean we only, we started recording in March of 2015…

Brent Crisci:

And in my lifetime two and a half years is a blink of the eye Jeremy, it’s blink of the eye, but 49:24 there I don’t want to leave anybody out because each one of them has a profound impact on my journey and they’ve all been a piece of a pie that make me the impressionable individual as you out it that I am today.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Yeah, you know there’s a lot there and folks if you’re you know we get people coming in to the show all the time if you’re new I’m going to link to all these other folks you know Kyoshi Dave Kovar and Superfoot Wallace and just all these other people that we’ve talked about you know as well as other stuff you know we’ll get photos and I’m sure we can dig up some more wonderful old photos of you competing and everything so those will be at the show notes at whistlekickmartialartsradio.com

Brent Crisci:

Oh my god sure you could, I have some nice ones on my wall of gratitude that are flattering that I like. I have a wall of gratitude in my office something 50:16 taught me to do and I’m looking at it right now actually.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Cool.

Brent Crisci:

And you know the names I mentioned their all on that wall. Superfoot, Joe Lewis God rest his soul, Michael D Jr and Sr, Professor 50:31 was my first 50:33 weapons instructor, Grandmaster Remy Presas, my stick instructor who passed on, Hanshi Bruce Juchnik, 50:41 who we lost a couple of years ago now 50:43 but they’re all people that are all part of a story and they are amazing individuals that have influenced so many people that yeah, we should give props. But in all those pictures I’m young and skinny because they’re old old pictures so I really like those. I’ll see if I can get you some of those for the website.

Jeremy Lesniak:

That would be great, that’ll be great. You know this whole near death experience if I can call it that or death experience.

Brent Crisci:

I’m not sure what you actually call it when you actually died.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Yeah

Brent Crisci:

You know my, if you say death experience it sounds weird cause I’m still here but yeah visiting. I call, that when I tell it I died for a very short time. The rumors of my death were slightly exaggerated.

Jeremy Lesniak:

So, if we look at that I mean the number of people that have talked about what that’s like and how it changes their lives we don’t need to go there but where I want to go is a very small subset of that and that is how has it changed your view on martial arts and I don’t mean your view on martial arts as an instructor as someone who passes on wisdom as someone who shows up to the dojo to teach. But martial arts is a pretty all-encompassing thing you mentioned the physical and the mental and the spiritual aspects when you were talking about teaching children and anyone that’s been training more than you know I would expect just a few years sees those connections to those different pieces in their lives. How has your martial arts shift?

Brent Crisci:

Well, honestly Jeremy I don’t think I would be talking to you if I hadn’t been a martial arts master prior to that episode, I really don’t. When I get out of there and they did the evaluations and everything my blood sugars were out of control, well into diabetes range, type 2 diabetes. My blood pressure was 30 points higher than it was supposed to be. So, they gave me a list of both cardiac and diabetic restrictions with appropriate medications. I hate to take medicines any kind, just avoiding meds all my life. I told them, you tell me what I need to do I met with a dietician I met with a nutritionist. I did 3 months of Cardiac rehab. I said alright 3 months I’m in the physical rehab where I have to go to the hospital every other day and do the stuff and I said 3 months this is all going to be fixed and they’re like well no this is a lifetime to build up and you know we just want to get your numbers better I said no. I said you tell me what needs to happen, carbohydrates need to be gone, carbohydrates are gone, ok what do I need to, I need to do this exercise and not my martial arts stuff great I’ll do that and the discipline to do that and I did it in 3 months I finished my cardiac rehab, got my certification, my A1C was 6.1, my blood pressure was perfect, everything was exactly where it should be or better in 3 months and that was because of the years of martial arts training. The what the martial arts had taught me to do, the discipline it gave me, the focus, the lack of not to make excuses or the crying you know I got to deal with this oh I can’t eat that, oh no suck it up buttercup was our catch phrase on my team. So that came from martial arts, so really believe that the martial arts both like you said, physically, mentally, spiritually the skills and tools I learned that maybe weren’t intended to be used for that you know we always think of it in terms of physical self-defense and stuff but that’s not what kills most people is not not getting beat up by a mugger. Okay, most of us are going to succumb to you know another ailment, long before we get attacked by a guy in ski mask, fight all 5 guys in a Bruce Lee movie. So that’s real self-defense, like Tom Callos talks about another great mentor. Tom is constantly talking about the modernization of the use of martial arts we’re not at war and even in war it’s not physical anymore. So, we don’t do hand to hand is not as relevant as the compassion as the discipline as the community mindset so yeah, I think that it changed my view in the martial arts in that. Again, it reminded me of the real values of what I do and what I teach and what the benefits all my students get are a lot more than kicking and punching or a lot more than weight loss. There’s a lot of subtext, there’s a lot of stuff that we’re getting that we’re going to use in ways we never even thought of. So yeah, I think that changed it. The refocusing of what I have to teach, I have accumulated the leadership 55:45 the inheritorship of three traditional arts that’s on my shoulders and that’s a big responsibility. I’ve earned black belts in 13 arts, I say earned because I went from white to black through the ranks in 13 systems. I’ve gotten a lot of other ranks that were awarded to me or bestowed on and that’s great I’m honored but there were 13 where I wanted to learn them and earn my black belt in them and I can’t teach them all anymore. There’s just not enough time in the day to run my organization and coach and do all the things I want to do so that was the other thing that that episode, it forced me to do something ironically Zig Ziglar taught me to do when I was 18. You make a priority list everyday, you color it A, B and C or you know red, blue and yellow and you put stuff on the list of what needs to be done. What really needs to be done today, what you like to get done today and what you could put now or forever and if it doesn’t get done it doesn’t get done. So, I’ve done a much better job this last year because of that episode categorizing where I’m putting my focus and energy and where I’m putting I don’t let, I let people take my time and that’s on, I let them it’s my fault. You can’t let people do that as much anymore because I got too much to do so I’ve changed my prioritization I’ve changed some of my style focused because I also have an incredible amount of medical bills. If you’ve never experienced a major blow out like this even with some fair health insurance I had, I had the medical bills have just mounded and I’m very certain ones that are going to have forever, certain drugs I need to take for the rest of my life, certain things checkups and test I have to have done every 6 months now. So, I need to look at it from a businessman perspective as well and I say well I need to do whatever I need to do martially that’s financially, professionally productive and you know I’m not going to do anything that doesn’t allow me to sleep at night but I a lot of the stuff I do as my Dave Kovar’s good for guiding me with this. I love to teach my hobbies, they’re not good careers, they’re not good money makers but I love them, they’re fun arts you know and I like to teach them but there’s not, it’s the law of supply and demand. So, I’ve been forced to pass some of those on to some of my students and say look you’re going to run that once a week or whatever I’m not going to do it and I need to put my time in other areas and I’ll come and play with you when I can. So, it’s a, like I said it’s not the traditional, I wasn’t reborn or anything I’ve always done what I wanted to do and lived how I wanted to live but it did refocus and remind me of certain things and it did remind me that martial arts you may never know until you know what you’ve gotten from your training. Whether it saves your life physically, whether it saves your life emotionally, whether it saves your job or your marriage or makes you a better dad or mother or brother or sister, it’s doing all those things onto the surface. Even if you don’t know it, it’s doing it. Get martial arts training and I firmly would say my whole life everybody can benefit from being involved in the martial arts, you just got to find the right system for you but everybody could benefit from being in the martial arts and my pledge to my students and my organization is that better living through martial arts. My students have a better life because of their involvement. They have a good life and if they left the dojo they’d still have a good life but they have a better life because of their involvement and then I have to make sure that is true. I have to make sure that what I’m teaching and how I’m teaching it, it doesn’t just blow smoke. It’s not just an affirmation, Zig used to say that it’s not just attitude, you can tell people I’m great, I’m great, I’m awesome but attitude without aptitude has no value. So, you have to make sure that there’s something Tony Fournier another lifelong friend that you said you’ve known me since the beginning probably the longest, Tony’s one of the guy’s I met when I was just a kid in the AU fighting and he gave a 1:00:08 example about self-worth versus self-esteem in our society it’s a catch phrase a money phrase is we build self-esteem. He says I don’t build, I build self-worth, self-esteem is just telling somebody they’re awesome and making them believe it but there might not be a foundation, it’s like telling somebody oh you can fly and you pump them up and you chant I can fly and you have them flap their wings in the dojo and you get them really excited and we light a flight candle and we do our flight 1:00:34 and then we get up on the roof and we jump off and we die, cause we can’t fly no matter how much you believe it, you’re not jumping off that roof and fly. Now however if you want to fly maybe you can do take the tools, you know learn how to skydive or paraglide or learn how to fly a plane. There are it’ll give you the ability to fly, you can make that but you need the aptitude, you need the skill set to back up that attitude and that’s what Tony, he used a chocolate bunny and I like that because I don’t eat chocolate but I do crave it now even because I can’t have it. He said you know what, 1:01:13 he was in the generation where all bunnies were solid you got your easter1:01:19 with solid chocolate weighed a pound and a half and then when he was a kid they introduced something called the hollow bunny and I’m sure we’ve all gotten one or two in our lives now and you get that bunny and it’s empty so as soon as you pick it up you realize that’s really light and then you bite the ear off cause that’s where we all start unless we’re weird and bite the butt. You people know who you are, that was a reference for 1:01:42. You get that empty bunny so it’s disappointing it’s not what it professed to be, you saw a bunny that was 12 inches tall and should be a pound of chocolate and it turned out to be about 4 ounces of chocolate because it was hollow and that’s the difference between just self esteem believing something and self worth having the insides to back it up the solid bunny. So that’s been kind of one of the affirmations from that experience I want to make sure that everything I say and do and then everything that’s done and said in my name because I got a lot of people represent me now awesome great people, I want to make sure they all have self-worth not just self-esteem, that they have the abilities and the aptitudes to back up their awesome attitudes. What was the question?

Jeremy Lesniak:

I don’t even remember and that’s ok.

Brent Crisci:

Good, good then I’ve done my job.

Jeremy Lesniak:

You have, you know this has been a great episode. You just kind of took it and ran and all of the things that I try to do on my end as an interviewer with the structure with the questions you know the attempt here is really to lead people through in sort of an organic on their life through the martial arts and you did that without any prompting so I thank you for that because it allowed me to step back and just kind of let you go.

Brent Crisci:

I’m happy to do it, I felt like I needed to really make up for the delay and

Jeremy Lesniak:

Don’t worry about it

Brent Crisci:

for 2 and a half years a whole 1:03:09

Jeremy Lesniak:

Well you are not the only person so

Brent Crisci:

Oh, I’m sure, well you know what the reason you want to interview these people is because they’ve got something to say and they’ve done something which means they’re busy they’re doers. So, doers we keep you know it’s tough to find time but we make time for what is important and this was important especially after last year’s episode I if nothing else like you said to edify and to show gratitude for the mentors that I’ve been lucky enough to have. The instructors I’ve been lucky enough to call teacher and still do, they deserve props and then many of them are still here. So, when we have event like the martial arts symposium where the gathering in California or the Maine gathering we just have, I implore students stop making excuses and make it happen. Everybody is not going to be here forever, no one is going to be here forever and I’ve always taken advantage and I’ve flown and driven and because these things that exist a lot of them when I was training early on. I had to drive everywhere to go to these guys and now we bring them together so students have to go in their back yard essentially and spend the weekend with Superfoot Wallace or Hanshi Juchnik, or Michael DePasquale you know an endless list to these awesome Grandmaster’s that are part of history that they could see all in one place so you know I know martial arts university too, I got to mention that, that’s coming up Columbus Day weekend this year out in New Jersey so Soki DePasquale always running that. there are masters that go to these events that don’t go to anything else you know so that’s the opportunity so students don’t wait for the right time, that’s another thing that near death experiences will give you is I’ve always lived that way luckily, I’ve had good parent’s good teachers that told me carpe diem. So, I didn’t lay there and have regrets about all the things I didn’t do. I only had a few thoughts on what wasn’t I going to get to do now. What you know that I had plans so yeah, I hope that I like I said I’ve opened up or edified those people and again if I missed anybody I’ll punch in at the next event, you can beat me up.

Jeremy Lesniak:

This has been great, if anybody out there if they want to get a hold a view or you know just

Brent Crisci:

Why would they be want to do that, I’m really more, I’m a lot more obnoxious in real life here on the radio.

Jeremy Lesniak:

There’s probably one person so for that one person that might want to talk to you that hasn’t already.

Brent Crisci:

That one friend I have left Grandmaster Pete 1:05:44 that actually likes me they could no. We have a website that’s pretty informative UnitedDojos.com that’s our United martial arts academy’s website. I have an email, I have multiple emails, they all forward to my original AOL email. Yes, I said AOL for those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s called America On Line, it was the first internet email really that was used and it’s kicksusa, k i c k s u s a @AOL.com so all of the other current emails cause me and Michael d started their martial arts a worldwide network was the first internet based martial arts thing which kind of exciting that Soki started. They did it with AOL so I used to host the chat room for AOL back when the internet started, oh god I felt I sound ancient there don’t I? But anyways [email protected]. If you want to give me a call to the office I’ll never answer the phone but you can, it’s 207 621 0770 some nice people will talk to you and they’ll leave me a message. Of course, now I’m pretty good with my social media so Melody Schuman again props to her and Dave Kovar making me get on there and do stuff so I’m on Facebook and I have a kid’s account and then an adult one. So, the kids I have a kid friendly ones so you know that’s just kid orientated and any kids can be on there and they’re never going to see anything bad. I have an Instagram account kicksusa on Instagram and a bunch other stuff I don’t know the words for and Melody I’m doing my 1:07:21 like you told me once a week now on Facebook so I hope you’re proud.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Well she may hear this.

Brent Crisci:

They’re making other people laugh if it’s doing nothing else, there’s a lot of amusement on Facebook when I go live because I don’t know what I’m doing with my cheap phone but yeah there’s all sorts of way that you could hunt me down or if you go to any of those awesome events, martial arts symposium, gathering in California, the Maine gathering, Martial Arts University. I’m doing a pretty bad job in reducing my travel schedule so I’ll be in all of the tournaments I’ll be down in Vermont, you’re a way it’s the Vermont National’s in September and at tournaments you know I always love to help so if anybody has a question or a comment you know I got pretty thick skin come tell me what you think and I tell you what I think.

Jeremy Lesniak:

1:08:14 alright well Kyoshi I thank you for being here and one last thing we always go out in the highest of notes, what parting advice would you give to the folks listening?

Brent Crisci:

You know what I’m going to borrow from a teacher I didn’t talk about a lot because I knew I would get the clamp and I would get choked up is my Professor Nick Cerio he did more for me than I can ever repay he took me as his private student. He put me on his board of directors for Nick Cerio’s 1:08:45 martial arts and he said something when Hanshi interviewed him for like a magazine he said he wishes that the martial arts would unite that the leaders and the instructors would unite together as martial arts not as styles so that we would have more power than everybody else and that’s my advice is it stop worrying about who’s style is better and who’s system is legitimate and who’s got this rank. Start knowing where all martial arts, and if we all are together, we have massive power and we have massive ability to change the world. So, my advice is learn from anybody you can, put your ego down put it down, put it get it out in the way. It’s only getting in your way, put your, take your belt off if you need to and get on the mat and learn something. I don’t care what you know, I don’t care what you are I get on the mat everyday and I learn something I learn from white belts and I learn from masters, I don’t care what style it is. So that’s my advice is unite and get to work, get on the mat train there’s nothing more important than that, not you know unite and that’s what Professor said it was his wish he passed not long after that and so I’m grateful to him and I still teach for him and I still represent him and so that’s my parting, not my epitaph I guess cause I’m still here again rumors slightly exaggerated but yeah let’s get together. Let’s not worry about the styles we’re all martial arts that means we’re all in the martial arts we’re all the same so let’s train, let’s edify, let’s support.

Jeremy Lesniak:

Talk about a spirited martial artist and someone who’s weathered a pretty strong storm in their life. A storm which he wouldn’t have survived without his martial arts. It made him physically able to face life’s greatest challenge head on and he managed to survive. Through all he’s maintained his trademark sense of humor and I’m grateful that this episode took place and I’m really grateful we could share it with you. Thank you Kyoshi Crisci for coming on the show. If you want to find the show notes those are at whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. Don’t forget martial artscalendar.com and you can find all of our social media @whistlekick. If you want to email me directly that’s [email protected]. I want to thank you for tuning in thank you for spending time with us today and until next time train hard smile and have a great day.

Episode 226 – Kyoshi Brent Crisci Kyoshi Brent Crisci is a karate practitioner and teacher from Maine. He is the founder of United Martial Art Academies.

#Bill Wallace #Joe Lewis #Jujitsu #kempo #Maine #Ninjitsu

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