Book Review--Retirement: A Memoir and Guide

The main point of Boyd Lemon's Retirement: A Memoir and Guide is that retirement is not primarily an outer process but an inner one. To have a successful, fulfilling retirement, one must understand this basic truth.

Lemon's insights and personal experiences related in his book center around his inner growth. As a reader, I found it personally interesting that Lemon in his 60's and 70's discovered meditation and writing, where I began practicing the Transcendental Meditation technique and discovered my passion for writing as a young man prior to my 21st birthday. We reached the mountain top from two different sides of the mountain, one might say.

My life has included the pursuit of inner development, excellence in writing, and a career in teaching. Lemon's admission is that he followed a life engaged in outer activity, recognizing the need for knowledge of self and discovering his passion for writing in the last ten years.

One of the great strengths of his book is that the author has asked himself many questions in the last ten years--and he includes those questions and reflections in the book. Whether or not a reader has already addressed those issues, asking those questions again from the new perspective of retirement is significant. Some of the memoir portions of the book that address the significant questions I found over-long with too much detail, yet others I found spot-on in both perspective, tone, and length.

A great deal of Lemon's insights remind me of American Transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The need to simplify one's life and the need to live life as an inward to outward process are significant to Lemon's guidance to experiencing a fulfilling retirement. I do not agree with all of Lemon's conclusions, but my disagreements do not lessen my appreciation that asking fundamental questions and recognizing that a restructuring of one's inner perspective are crucial to a satisfying retirement. Furthermore, the author says that each of us must consider our own situation as the primary basis of decision-making.

"Once we retire, there is nothing to achieve, except personal fulfillment." This does not mean doing nothing; rather, it means exactly what the word retire means--a new direction, an inner direction. In many cultures, one's last years are devoted to inner development and spirituality. Acknowledging this goal does not preclude travel, new passions, family, or an active life, as Lemon expressively demonstrates in the more autobiographical sections of his book.

The ultimate "retirement" is, of course, death, the ultimate simplification of one's life. It is the ultimate minimizing. Transcendence is a phase transition to one's inner potential and is also perhaps the most gracious transition to the ultimate "retirement."

Boyd Lemon in his book Retirement: A Memoir and Guide provides a powerful balance of what to watch out for and what to look forward to when retiring. Like Thoreau in Walden,  Lemon  has approached retirement as an "experiment in living," centered not in a place but in a time of life. The one splendid irony of life is that Lemon's wisdom in living the last years of our life may also contain wisdom of how to leave the last years of our living.

Copyright 2013 by Thomas L. Kepler, all rights reserved

Expand Your Vocabulary: an easy, effective approach

Choice is good.

Choosing the words you want to learn is more effective than having someone else choose them for you.

• Choice provides motivation.
• Choice increases meaningfulness.

Choice can even be provided with required, necessary vocabulary; for instance, twenty words can be provided, of which twelve are chosen.

Here are the procedures I use at school for my individualized reading program.

1. I give each student a book mark, a 3x5 index card cut in half by its length.
2. Students, as they read, write down words they don't know (or wish to know better) on the card, including the page number.
3. Later, they look the word up.
4. I have them provide the following information on a 3x5: word, appropriate definition, sentence from book (may be shortened), word used in their own sentence. This allows me to provide feedback.

What if the book is easy and the reader finds no words? 

For the classroom, a student just offered a great solution yesterday: go to one of our recently-read stories we shared in class. Yesterday it was an excerpt from Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom. The students felt this was a much better idea than using a vocabulary-builder textbook, where the words and exercises are all provided by the book.

Also, this is a great opportunity to suggest a more challenging book for the reader.

This method isn't new. I've used it for so long I've forgotten its source. Established, effective teaching practices should be shared, though, not hoarded.

Try it: you might find it efficacious.

Copyright 2011 by Thomas L. Kepler, all rights reserved

Maharishi School: Individualizing the Classroom

Teachers don't teach a curriculum or a lesson plan--they teach children.

This is something I heard a career teacher say a long time ago, and I remind myself of its wisdom and applicability regularly. Of course good teachers plan for teaching, and these plans consist of curricular strategies and lesson plan activities. Nonetheless, these teaching goals and objectives apply, ultimately, to individual children, not "classes."

This defines a dilemma in teaching. How do teachers instruct multiple classes during a day yet also reach individual students?

The answer lies in individualized instructional time that is included in classroom activities.

For some classes, one answer may lie in something as simple as student practice (or drill) time that allows the teacher to circulate through the classroom, attending to the needs of individual students.

For another classroom, a teacher may develop learning centers in which students choose and engage in activities of choice for part of the class, providing the teacher more time to circulate and interact individually with students.

Sustained, silent reading, writing workshop, and journaling are also activities that can open up time in the classroom for individual conferencing.

I remember that when I was a high school basketball player, the coach included the daily practice of shooting twenty-five free throws. As we practiced, the coach circulated and talked to individual players--and the discussion was usually not on free throws. The "evaluation" to keep us on task? A clipboard and running tally of the number of shots "sunk" each practice.

I have found the use of contracts for class assignments effective for structuring individual student contact time in the classroom. 

A simple contract for reading:

• 4 books read = A
• 3 books read = B
• 2 books read = C
• 1 book read  = D or NI

Something as simple as this contract, with good formative (or on-going) supportive evaluation provides an opportunity to individualize what level of book each student reads, provides a platform for individual and whole-classroom discussion of reading skills, and also provides time to quietly support and instruct to individual needs.

This is important for teachers who have students that change schools often, have English Language Learners, or have advanced (talented and gifted) students or students with remedial learning challenges--in other word, all teachers.

No two students are the same, and structuring activities in the classroom that provide individual time with students increases the opportunities to give students the right teaching at the right time. It's how we learn and teach. We just got away from that basic fact when budgets, demographics, and politics moved teaching and learning into more "efficient" factory models of mass instruction.

At the school where I teach, Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment, not only is the individual instruction of students significant to our school mission--the faculty and student body also practice the Transcendental Meditation program, the ultimate instruction of the individual, providing teacher and student daily time to contact their inner "knower," the foundation of all teaching and learning for all skill areas and disciplines. This approach to education is called "Consciousness-Based Education."

Ever heard the old joke about Henry Ford's Model T's? You can have any color you want--as long as it's black. Our children are rainbows. They deserve more than a black and white education.

Copyright 2011 by Thomas L. Kepler, all rights reserved

Learning English as a Second Language (ESL): YouTube Videos

If my opinion, the first thing to realize is that videos helping individuals learn English are not just for English Language Learners (ELL). 

When concepts are broken down to their basics, that fundamental knowledge can be of use to any language user, whether that individual is learning English as a second language, or whether that individual is native to the English language.

YouTube now boasts at having 1,530 videos to help in learning the English language.

I've checked them out. (No, not all of the videos!) And, for anyone who has interacted with YouTube, it will not be a surprise that content and technical quality varies. However, with over fifteen hundred videos, even if only ten percent of the videos were usable, that would be a large number (assuming one can find the diamonds among the gravel).

Examples:

Academic Writing - Parts of a Paragraph: In this video, a lecturer uses a white board to explain the parts and organization of a "North American paragraph." The presentation is boring, yet the information is clearly presented. Don't look for Gandalf and the Balrog discussing how to use transitions, but important ideas are conveyed fairly quickly.

How to Do Something: Here are varied step-by-step videos, such as how to answer a phone or how to make a potato salad. Not only can these be useful for English language learners, but videos such as this can be useful for teachers in demonstrating speaking skills for younger students. (Even negative or non-examples can be productive. "Okay, students, how could this have been done better?")

20 Irregular Verbs: This category is simply a quick review or drill of the major conjugations of verbs: draw, drew, drawn, for example. Music, a young woman providing some visual connection, and a quick once-through are the key elements of this video.

Other categories include travel, slang, stories, grammar, vocabulary, business English, and many more. From a teaching perspective, the key element in all these videos is modeling, seeing how to speak, hearing how to speak, many times within an appropriate context. Beware when reading that a New Zealand or British usage may be different than one used in the USA.

Copyright 2010 by Thomas L. Kepler, all rights reserved