How "Bird" helped me find my wings

I was watching the movie "Bird" yesterday, supposedly for my son...but he never came into the living room to watch with me. I'm not mad...he played the melody to blue monk yesterday and put a hurting on it. So, he practiced and he secretly loves the music. How can he help himself? I was pondering my current situation and how smothered I was feeling as a science educator. I am exactly where I need to be, and I would love to take a crack at the other two schools, especially the detention enter. But I am so constrained in what I can do. I am forcing myself how to learn to COEXIST. I have to try to touch the spirits of the other teachers and aids. I have to let them in to my mind and spirit if we are going to truly be of any good use to these young people. And it is amazingly difficult. So many boundaries have to be crossed, so many egos have to be put aside, but I am so much more prepared than ever before for this work, and it shows. The problem is that the detention-center style of running our school is hard for me to swallow, and since this is a blog, I can't say anything else about that. I am not crazy, I am not getting too close to my students, I am historically, culturally, and socially aware. I think I am going to have to find a way to be outside and inside at the same time to be useful. Enter Charlie "Yardbird" Parker. Thankfully, I will not have to take any legal or illegal depressants to survive this phase of my life. But he said something that got me thinking. Something about figuring out how to extend the harmony and play outside and inside of it simultaneously. Something about it happening before Christmas and changing his life. There was this scene where he was experimenting with it and the drummer threw a cymbal at him and gonged him off the stage. I can see clearly what needs to be done. Our system of education was designed to function like a machine, where youth proceed from one place to the next in an orderly fashion. In the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing. But what happens when the world outside of that institution does not function that way at all? What foolishness propels us to believe that we can undo a lifetime of disorder by simply setting up an orderly structure. And even if we condition our youth to function within this system while they are with us, without addressing any of the chaos outside of the school building, what has been accomplished? Why do we replicate detention centers and prison structure instead of creating something else. Why can we signify on everything else and not this? Take the harmony, take the form, and play something entirely different. This is what we do so well that others can only learn from us or try to emulate. The classroom is too small, but the university is too far removed. Got to create a different space. And expect somebody to throw a cymbal at me and laugh in my face. I've already been asked if I'm feeling ok...chuckle. No, sir, I am not feeling ok. Not at all.