prelude to my life in bullet points, in bullet points

• April 26, 1990. I was born at 8:42 pm. This is completely irrelevant.
• July 2-30, 2006. This was Genesis. Sort of a summer camp, sort of a community building experiment, sort of an accelerated college program. My response: Whatever. Pluralism, tolerance, self-awareness, spirituality, diversity--my new code of living. Fuck the Bible. I have an identity. I have friends. I have confidence. Now, at age 16, I feel like a respectable person worth whatever amount of square inches I take up on this planet.
• November 8, 2006. I am in high school. We have just ventured to a miserable, isolated campsite where a particular Orthodox Jewish has congregated about two hundred yeshiva high school students for a leadership conference. In other words, I have just spent four days in a state of complete misery surrounded by people taking lots of digital photos of their new "bff 4 life!!!!" while also pretending to participate in some useless programming intended to strengthen our "leadership skills" in our schools and communities. I leave the conference having collected the following pieces of information:
• There is no such thing as "leadership skills."
• Charity begins at home and stops at your college application.
• Judaism is not a religion. Nor is it a code of law. (Consider the aforementioned remark "Fuck the Bible" actualized.) Nor is it a culture. It is a community, but more like the communities I've read about in books by George Orwell. I decide to opt out of the structured Jewish community that in retrospect seems to have been built upon a foundation of brainwashing-produced bullshit. I also decide to opt out of any further brainwashing my school offered to me in the form of a classroom, a college guidance office or the term "headmaster." I will challenge everyone.
• April 26, 2008. The first time I got drunk, my 18th birthday, the sixth day of Passover. My family is entirely responsible.
• April 28, 2008. The eighth and final day of Passover. I spend the entire day crying hysterically because I am terrified. I am terrified of knowing. I have always planned to know it all, but I have never fully known, and I have never tried. It seemed disrespectful. It seemed too blunt, too inconsiderate, too damn sensitive. Gotta respect everybody's sensitivities. Especially the old people. I will never know directly from them, my grandparents, where I came from, since they won't tell me, I must use alternative means toward self-discovery.
• April 30, 2008. I fly to Poland.
• May 1, 2008. I'm home.

Why I want to write a book

I can't remember the last time I wrote something of substance. I've taken a lot of time to write a lot of things--op-ed articles included, naturally--but rarely do I have the opportunity to tell a story. I'm not quite sure what the proper medium is for a story these days. Nor am I certain of who still takes the time to read stories, considering their infrequent appearance in the media. (Can you tell I am consumed by journalistic theory these days?)

There are untold stories. There are unshared ideas. There are things that have yet to be articulated, things that sit in people's heads accumulating dust... Sometimes I think I could devote my life to new ideas and the people behind them.

These ideas and people deserve the space of a book. They deserve the length, breadth and depth that pages of text (well, not exclusively) can offer. Most of all they deserve honor. They deserve character and context.

I teach with my whole self--I convey ideas from my entire mind to the entire mind of another person. New ideas deserve to be represented in no less of a fashion.

Experiments in Education

DISCLAIMER: This is a free-writing exercise (as are all posts on this sporadically used blog). To my students who may have stumbled upon this, WRITING YOUR MIND IS GOOD FOR YOU!

Nearly four weeks into my summer experiment in pedagogy, my students found my Twitter account as part of a classroom assignment and enthusiastically began to discuss--with a good sense of humor--some of the 140-character bits of my personal life. Terrified, I continued meandering about the classroom, hoping to retain some air of authority and even just a scrap of my dignity as a human being.

My fear subsided as my students, sensible journalists they are, shared the end product of the assignment--tweets from public figures they deemed newsworthy. Not one chose me as a public figure. Thank God. I'm not that important or interesting. Not that I ever thought I was.

But I've come to the conclusion that I cannot serve in this profession without blurring the lines between my public life and private life. Impressions, perceptions, reputations all at once seemed minimal compared with the full-scale relationship between a student and a teacher. Now that I know these people (not kids, not participants, but PEOPLE), I also know a bit more about me. I know enough to know that my entire identity comes through my teaching. And that's no accident. In my classroom, the structure builds upon individual personal relationships because people learn from people and not their reputations or caricatures.

To be continued after class.