A Reunion Conversation

from Michael Riera’s “Making the Most of Difficult Conversations”

At my 10^th reunion, I ended up talking to someone who I thought was the coolest and hippest kid in class. I had had a couple glasses of wine, so I just blurted out, “You know, in high school I thought you were the coolest kid in the whole school. You had parties that rocked and seemed to know how to handle yourself in any situation. And your clothes – they were the best! Your parents took care of you!”

He just looked at me, silent, for what felt like an hour, before he shook his head. “Funny. You’re the one I envied. Your parents were there for you and weren’t afraid to say, ‘No’ to you. You knew where they stood, while I didn’t even know if my parents really cared for me.”

I was shocked. At the end of the night, I had a new appreciation for my parents – they had neither indulged me nor crushed me. I always knew they loved me,  even when they were saying, ‘No.’”

Mental Health and the Name of the Game

The  psychologist, Alex Russell, kicked off our “Mental Health Awareness Week” on Monday, and he offered the Upper School boys this observation:

“We are seeing a significant increase in anxiety and depression. There are kids, some as young as 7, 8, 9 years old, having panic attacks over spelling tests . Think about that for a second. Having a panic attack in Grade 3 over a test.

And even as we see this increase in anxiety, it’s important to remember that today’s kids are among the SAFEST in the history of the planet. Yet, that doesn’t stop them from being the most anxious. We have to ask ourselves why this is.

Part of this is cultural. Let me give you just one small example. The Ontario Soccer Association has said that we can no longer use the expression “soccer tournaments.” Instead, we are to call them “soccer festivals.” This change in nomenclature is based on the same flawed reasoning that tells 9 year olds that we aren’t allowed to keep score during softball games. Of course the kids keep score!

And this notion, that you can’t call a tournament a tournament or keep a score  – it is downright disrespectful. It says to kids, ‘You can’t handle competition.’ The irony is that all these policies are aimed at well intentioned by crazy parents.”

The Things We Hoisted

 

Every school has its own unique culture, and one of the hallmarks of UCC is the relentless pursuit of and celebration of success. I first learned about the latter — what I like to think of as our flair for self-celebration — during the fall of my first year, when a boy came into my office early one Monday morning to tell me about an academic prize he had won the previous weekend. I, of course, congratulated him on his accomplishment, but I could tell right away that he was disappointed with my response.

Sensing that I didn’t quite understand his real purpose, the boy pointed to the plaque he was holding, a plaque, which had his name prominently displayed on it and said, “I’d like you to present this award to me.” I thought this was a strange request, but I was new to the country and thought that perhaps this was a Canadian thing.  So with what I hoped was an appropriately elevated degree of decorum, I took the plaque and was in the process or returning it to him when he said, “No, what I mean is, I’d like you to present this plaque to me during this morning’s assembly.”

I was dumbfounded, but again, I was a stranger in a strange land.  (By the way, I would soon learn that the celebration of self is not so much a Canadian as it is a UCC “thing.”)  An hour later, I called the boy up to the stage here in Laidlaw Hall and presented him with his prize. The students all applauded. Some even yelled, “Hoist!” and the boy in question seemed quite pleased by the whole thing.

Sometimes in a culture like ours, a culture where success is pursued and recognized at almost all costs, it is tough to cope with or learn from failure. But of course, we will all fail, and rather than fleeing from or denying this reality, we need to see that failure is actually a vitally important building block for any meaningful long term success.

As an example, let me tell you a story, taken almost directly from Psychology Today:

Philip Schutz wasn’t able to read until he was 11. By then he’d repeated a year, and he saw himself as a member of the “dummy section.” Today we would understand that Schultz had dyslexia, but nobody knew that at the time. All they knew was that this kid couldn’t read.

(An aside: research suggests that dyslexics are four times more likely to become millionaires than are members of the general population. Remind me to tell you why this is sometime. In the meantime, though, you might want to double clutch before making fun of someone because you think he’s not quite smart enough.)

Back to our friend, Phil. When a teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, Phil said he wanted to be a writer. The teacher laughed out loud. “I wasn’t insulted, “ Schultz recalls. “I understood it was a funny thing to hear from someone who hated to read and couldn’t write a simple English sentence.”

The consequence of Schultz’ being a perceived as a “dummy” was “exile to shameful outsider-dom.” That sense of being an outsider, of not fitting in, is often just the kind of experience from which writers and leaders are made. With “the loneliness of having so little expected of him, and the pain of being overlooked and forgotten,” Schultz had time for careful attention to his interior life. As a result, Schultz spent a great deal of his time in isolation, working towards the one career for which his teachers thought he was most ill-suited, poetry.

Cut to 2007.  “A working poet at this point, Schultz had realized that almost everything he wrote about was failure. Failure was his clay. He was especially interested in writing about his dad – a drunkard who’d been a lousy parent and a worse provider. He eventually managed to write a number of very personal poems about his father, and the power that shot through the plainspoken language in this poetry was unlike anything Schultz had produced before. He called the collection, simply ‘Failure.’ On its cover: a bent nail in a board. In 2008 it won the Pulitzer Prize.”

I offer two takeaways this morning:

First, failure is a necessary ingredient in the recipe for greatness.  Almost all successful leaders endured terrible setbacks. Failure seems particularly effective, by the way, if it occurs between your late teens and early 30’s, perhaps because if you are resilient (more on that in a second), you have the ability to rebound. Remember that Churchill and Kennedy floundered in school, and Steve Jobs dropped out of college and was later fired by the company he had created.

Remember, too, that J.K. Rowling lived in poverty, raising her young daughter on her own, as she tried to recover from a failed marriage. Despite all of this, she continued to scribble away at her fiction every day at a coffee shop, as she tried to create a character she would one day call Harry Potter. Rowling admits, “Failure stripped away everything inessential. It taught me things about myself I could have learned no other way.”

Second, resiliency is the key to dealing with and learning from failure, but schools, and especially private ones, sometimes undermine your resiliency. We have a tendency to bubble wrap kids from failure, and as a result, we can sometimes appear to be the land of the precious and the  brittle. But as one particularly insightful Year 2 boy said recently, to move forward in life, sometimes you have to be able to “drink the pain.”

Today marks the beginning of Mental Health Awareness Week, and one small part of good mental health seems to be the ability to cope with and learn from setbacks. While I am happy for the boy who won that plaque many years ago, I wonder if he — and all of us for that matter – might be better off getting a board with a bent nail. That would surely be something worthy of a “hoist!”

Pancaked

The fact that I am writing about this undermines the little good I tried to do this morning, when a bearded man in a straw hat asked, “Hey, can you give me $5 for pancakes?”

I confess I normally avert my eyes and breeze by these kinds of interactions, but for some reason – maybe it was the San Francisco air — I responded this morning.  I told the guy I’d buy him pancakes.

The first red flag I missed was his immediate response, “Can you just give me the money or a gift card?” Like a wily pitcher, (or so I thought) I shook him off and pointed to the diner across the street. “We’ll get some pancakes over there.”

The second red flag I missed was his insisting that he sit at the counter by himself.  He pointed to a booth in the rear corner and said, “You can sit back there and read the paper.”  The waitress behind the counter looked none too pleased when I asked her if she would send my newfound friend’s bill to me, after he finished his breakfast.

When I looked up from my newspaper fifteen minutes later, my bearded buddy was long gone, but the waitress now had a smile on her face, and she informed me that he’d run up a bill, nearly 4 times the cost of those pancakes.  She shook her head, and I could almost hear her silent “tsk tsk’ as I handed her my credit card.

Moments like this make me realize that, while I may have a fistful of letters after my name, there are days when I feel like I still just fell off the peanut truck.

November Cuts

As the snow came down this past Saturday during the track meet at Centennial Park, someone mentioned T.S. Elliott’s line, “April is the cruelest month.” Elliott was right, of course, but the cruelest week of the year, at least in my book, is the second week of November.

Let me explain why. In the fall there are lots of sports teams with lots of players. Think of all the boys you can accommodate on cross-country, football, and soccer teams.  When you play outside, you have room for big rosters.

When you move indoors, though, you moved to a confined space with a limited number of spots. Those of you who have tried out for hockey, squash, and basketball know exactly what this means.  I’ll come back to that second week of November in a moment but first, I want to tell you something about the stage of life you are going through.

If you take a psychology class when you are at university, you will learn two things: First, that there is a psychological task associated with each and every stage of human development. And second, a social scientists named Eric Ericson determined that the task of adolescence revolves around the question of identity. It is the “Who am I question?” that you ask yourself, your teachers, your parents, and your friends all the time and in all kinds of ways – and almost always without words.

Think for just a second about how you see yourself.  Do you see yourself as a fencer, a singer, a mathematician, a trombone player, a left wing, a chess wizard, a power forward, a scientist, or a poet? How you see yourself is important because it’s something that you are testing out all the time. It’s why prizes (and in the US t-shirts and bumper stickers) matter so much, and it is also why failure and disappointment hurt so much at your age.

When I was entering high school, I thought I was a basketball player.  Those of you who have seen me scuffle on the hardwood can guess how this sad story ends.

Here’s the embarrassing part: Not only was I cut from the freshman basketball team, but I was a “first cut.” And back when leisure suits first roamed the earth, nobody pulled you aside to console you or talk about what went wrong, or what you should work on, or what you could do to prepare yourself for the following year. I learned of my failure by reading a handwritten note, posted on the gym door, a note that simply said, “The following are NOT to return to the gym this afternoon…”

What made this particularly painful was the realization that my best friend not only survived the cut but actually made the team, a point that comes up in conversation not infrequently. Four decades after the fact, he still manages to ever so deftly work this into our conversations. He’ll say clever things like, “Hey, Jim, pass me the pickles, and while you’re at it, do you remember when I made the St. Joe’s Prep basketball team and you didn’t?” He’ll also ask insightful questions such as, “Hey, Jim, were you in the first or second cut? I think it was the first because you were so horrible, but if you had played your best, you might have made it all the way to the second cut. Maybe.”

I can laugh about this now, (well, maybe “laugh” isn’t exactly the right word!), but in that 2^nd week of November in the year 1972, I was not such a happy camper.

The day I got cut, I went home, got in shower, and cried.  (Like a man, of course!)  No, I confess that I howled like a banshee at the overwhelming embarrassment of it all.

My dad,  God love him, could sense my disappointment (I come from a long line of very perceptive men) and told me to “get off the pity pot and go make a team.” It’s worth noting that he didn’t call the principal or the coach or the advisor or the counselor. In his old fashioned, thoroughly un-enlightened way — I doubt that he’d read much about the wonders of “self-advocacy” — he just told me to stop feeling sorry for myself.

That night, I checked the student handbook and discovered that swimming had a no cut policy. Since I could float, I “made” the swim team. If truth be told, I never became a great swimmer, and I still shudder every time I walk by a cold swimming pool, but I did make some good friends and along the way, I got to know a great swimming coach and a great man in Fr. Tom Roach.

Twenty years later, I went down to Washington, DC to interview for the headmaster’s job Georgetown Prep. Like UCC, Georgetown Prep is a great boys school. It was founded in 1789, and for most of its history, it was a part of Georgetown University.

I was 34 and a bit nervous going for that first interview, but I also felt extraordinarily fortunate because on that hiring committee happened to be – as luck would have it — my old swimming coach, Fr. Roach, who had moved to DC a decade earlier. (I don’t know if we do a good job of stressing the importance of this, but it’s important to be lucky. I got the job the old fashioned way: I knew somebody!)

I was fortunate enough to serve in that role for 10 years, and that’s actually how I ended up coming to UCC, almost a decade ago. Georgetown Prep is a part of the boys’ school network, and when UCC’s former principal, Doug Blakey (a swimming coach, by the way) decided to retire, a consultant called me up and encouraged me to come to Toronto.

Which brings me back to that 2^nd week of November. I sometimes meet with boys who are frustrated or upset, boys who see themselves as actors, musicians, or hockey or basketball players. Frequently a boy will point out the injustice of his not getting a part in the play or the unfairness of his not making a team. I try to listen closely because often these boys are in anguish. (Hey, I still remember howling in the shower that long ago afternoon!)

But I also think a lot about how lucky I was that I got cut from that grade 9 basketball team. And about how lucky I was to have a dad who told me to not give in to my own sorrow, to explore new options, to make the best of a setback.

Yes, when I was a kid, I saw myself as a basketball player, but through the foggy rearview mirror of life, I can see now that there was another road for me to travel.

I hope that someday when disappointment dope slaps you – as it inevitably will–  someone will be there to encourage you. I hope you won’t give in to that disappointment, that you will get off the pity pot, get out of the shower, and get into the pool.  Especially if it’s the 2nd week of November.

Letter from the Boston Marathon

After yesterday’s bombing in Boston, I received a number of emails from Old Boys who were close to the explosion. Sean Hacker Teper, a second year Boston University student, captures a sense of what it was like on Beacon Street.

 

Dear Dr. Power,

Thanks for checking in. What a horrific day it was here. Thankfully I can say that all friends and family are accounted for.

I’m sure you’ve been a part of Marathon Monday in the past. The happiest day in the year was lost to absolute chaos in what had to be the biggest mood swing I have ever felt/seen in my twenty ripe years.

I was about a kilometre and a half from the bombing, and none of us knew of it. My friend told us that there was a bombing, but we thought he was just reading about a broken transformer or a random industrial explosion.

Everyone continued to party until a couple policemen ripped away the barriers, and three police cars and one ambulance came screaming down Beacon Street. Almost immediately, you could see the mood just drop, and everybody bolted from the area.

What a sight it was to see every person around us reaching out to one another, to make sure that everybody had contacted their parents, as some cell services were down.

I’ve never been more afraid of the sound of sirens, nor have I ever seen so many helicopters at once. It was something out of a movie, and I never want to live it again.

Luckily, today is a new day, and unfortunately I have classes. I can’t complain though. My thoughts and prayers go out to all those affected by such a surreal event.

Best regards and Go Leafs Go,

Sean Hacker Teper

“You Can’t Handle the Truth!”

“Tough Love”

I received a lot of feedback on last week’s talk, and I thought I would share one letter with you:

Power,

I read with great interest your talk to those impressionable high school boys about “stepping up” into difficult situations.

What you forget is that some of us knew you, back when you were in high school, and “courage” would not have been a word ANY of us would have used to describe you, you weak-kneed, snivelling, moral mollusk of a man.

Your rant drips with hypocrisy! The only thing you might have “stepped up to” would have been a bowl of spaghetti!

Anyway, the garage needs painting. When will you be down?

Love,

Mom

Steubenville’s Bystanders

Last week an Old Boy told me about an incident that had been bothering him for some time. A few years ago he and a colleague were walking down a very busy street, when they came upon a man and a woman, perhaps a husband and wife, engaged in a heated argument. While still in plain sight, the man reared back and punched the woman. Instinctively, the Old Boy stepped in to intervene, but just as quickly, his colleague grabbed him by the shoulder, directing him forward, and the two of them continued on their way, acting as if nothing had just happened.

After telling me this, the Old Boy paused for a moment and confessed that the image of the man’s punching the woman — and the memory of his doing nothing –continued to bother him. He asked, “What should I have done?” For just a moment, he looked almost haunted by the question.

Last week Elizabeth Renzetti raised a similar issue in her “Globe and Mail” column where she wrote, “Maybe everyone has a story like this. Once, when I was living in London, I was sitting on the top deck of a bus … (when I noticed) four young men in their late teens or early 20’s sitting in the very back row. They hurled insults at each other, which was entertaining enough – at first. Then they began tossing pieces of their fried-chicken dinners at other passengers.

I rolled my eyes and hunkered down in my seat, along with everyone else. A tourist – a German, judging by his accent – turned around and told them to stop. The boys rose as one, as if they’d been waiting for this moment. They stood over the man and screamed threats at him until he turned away from them, arms folded.

Still no one did anything. The boys then spotted a young woman sitting by herself near the front of the bus. They began taunting her, a stream of really vile sexual abuse. She sat there, hands clasped between her knees, her face getting redder and redder. No one did a thing to help her – me included.

I was very pregnant at the time, so I had the heft – moral and physical – to intervene. But I remember thinking, ‘Oh for God’s sake, why can’t someone else do something? One of these Londoners should step in.’ This is ape-level reasoning, because, of course, they were all thinking the same thing.

After a few moments of torment, the young woman bolted downstairs and off the bus. The idiots crowed in triumph. The rest of us – if I can extrapolate from my own experience – felt shame for a long time afterward.

I often think of that girl and how she must have been furious at the boys, but also at us, her fellow passengers, who didn’t even offer her the most basic human kindness.”

There has been a lot of focus recently on the roles and responsibilities of bystanders, in part because of all the publicity surrounding the news from Steubenville, Ohio. If you aren’t familiar with the Steubenville rape case, you should know that last August a bunch of boozy high school boys, many of them celebrated football players, raped a 16 year-old girl at a party. Because she had been completely intoxicated at the time, it wasn’t until days later, after she discovered, via social media, pictures of herself being violated, that she decided to file charges. Two boys have already been sentenced to 1 and 2 year jail terms, and an investigation continues because bystanders may be brought to trial for their failure to intervene, and at least one adult may face charges related to a cover up.

The Steubenville Case is multi-layered, and I hope that in classes or in advisory groups, you’ll have the chance think about this partial list of issues:

- the adulation of high school athletes

- the dehumanization of a powerless young woman

- the misuse of alcohol

- the apathy of bystanders

- the use of social media

- and the issue of profoundly misdirected sympathies (Some Steubenville’s citizens were apparently more concerned about how all of this will affect two schoolboys’ sports careers than they are about the impact of rape on a young woman’s life.)

Were I to try to address all of these issues, I’m afraid I’d resort to saying a number of insultingly obvious truths. So I will spare you a tiresome rant, and ask you to instead think about just one item on the list: the role of bystanders.

What do we owe one another? It’s a question that goes back to the earliest stirrings of human history. The first story of male adolescence, the story of Cain and Abel, ends with Cain’s asking the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

While we all know the answer to Cain’s question, we also know that we don’t always act in accordance with this fundamental truth. Somehow or other, knowing that we should defend the vulnerable, the stranger, or the weak does not always spur us to action.

I use the first person deliberately, by the way, in admitting that our failure to act is somehow rooted in fear, fear of challenging the status quo, of making a scene, of getting sidetracked from the task at hand, of embarrassing ourselves or of offending someone else. We are afraid to break that silence, afraid to make a stand. In our sad and sometimes even desperate attempts to fit in, to go along with the crowd, to be one of the “bros” – we inadvertently compromise our values. Our silence quietly affirms the wrong we fail to confront.

I wish there were a magic word I could give you, a word that would miraculously provide you with the wisdom and courage you will need. What I can give you, though, is a thought, an insight perhaps, on the nature of courage itself. Perhaps seeing courage in a different light will help you master it.

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle points out that we learn courage by doing courageous things. That may sound like a tautology, a non-answer to the question, “How do we learn courage?” But what Aristotle suggests is that courage is more like a muscle than it is a mental activity. It’s not enough to intellectually understand how a bike works. You actually have to hop on the bike. The cognitive can take you just so far. You really have to put your feet to the pedal.

In the same way, you need to exercise your courage muscle. How do you do that while you still are in high school? It may mean speaking up, when you see something going wrong, or it may be confronting a classmate or harder still, a friend, when you think something needs to be said. These are hard, hard things to do, of course, but that’s precisely the point. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be work.  It wouldn’t be exercise. And it is working that courage muscle that will give you what you need, the chutzpa, for lack of a better word, to meet the moments you will need to meet.  After all, you don’t want to wait until you are 40 to become courageous. You need to work that muscle now.

A word of caution: You also need to be wise. I don’t want anyone here misinterpreting my message. I am not calling for vigilantes. I don’t want you going Rambo or doing your own Jason Bourne impersonation by walking into a dangerous situation where, for example, there may be weapons. You need to use common sense as well as courage.

I hope, though, that whether you find yourself on a busy city street, or on a bus, or in a locker room, instead of asking, “Why isn’t someone else doing something?” I hope your instinctive reaction will be, “What can I do? How can I make this better?”  I hope you will have the courage to do something to make a difference. Uta Hagan encourages us all to, “Overcome the notion that you must be regular. It robs you of the chance to be extraordinary.” We need you to become the extraordinary and courageous men you were meant to be.

Staggering Social Change

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Juan Williams offers the following:

“Almost 50 years ago, when the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, the national out-of-wedlock birthrate was 7%. Today it is over 40%. According to the CDC, the out-of-wedlock birthrate for white children was just 2% in the 1960s. Today it is 30%. Among black children, the out-of-wedlock birthrate has skyrocketed from 20% in the 1960s to a heartbreaking 72% today.”

It goes without saying that the implications of all of this are staggering. Today’s schools have already taken on more “socialization” tasks than they ever have before. (That’s one of the reasons so many schools have advisory programs.) But the statistics Williams points to will mean that schools and other institutions will have to do more, much more to meet the growing needs of our future students.

I wonder, given the gravity of all of this — why there isn’t a greater sense of  urgency on this issue?

A Jesuit Pope

I consider myself lucky for number of reasons, and not just because I inherited the uncanny ability to whistle TV theme songs from the 60’s. (My “Mayberry” is not to be believed!). But beyond the good fortune of being blessed with 2 great parents, I consider myself incredibly fortunate because I was educated by the Jesuits.

At the risk of committing what a good Jesuit might call the sin of hubris, I am compelled to admit that I attended a Jesuit high school, college, and graduate school before working for the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, and later at a Jesuit high school for 10 years.

I don’t know if there is such a thing as “Jesuit cred,” but I can say that I was delighted to learn that Pope Francis is himself a member of the Society of Jesus. Because UCC is a non-sectarian school, some of you may not know all that much about the Jesuits, so I offer 5 fun facts, courtesy of James Martin, SJ.

1. The Jesuits invented the trap door. Drama, and not Big East basketball, was the co-curricular priority for Jesuit schools throughout most of their history.
2. St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, is the only saint with a police record. (He was found guilty of intent to cause bodily harm – before his conversion!)
3. There are 35 craters on the moon named after Jesuit scientists.
4. The Jesuits inspired the making of my favourite film, “On the Waterfront.” (The Karl Malden character was based on Jesuit priest John Corridan, who worked in labor-relations.)
5. The Jesuits educated Descartes, Voltaire, Moliere, James Joyce, Peter Paul Rubens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Fidel Castro, Pierre Trudeau, Alfred Hitchcock, Bill Clinton, Bing Crosby, Vince Lombardi, Robert Altman, Chris Farley, Amy Pohler,Salma Hayek, Michael Wilbon, Tom Babits, and Denzel Washington.