Tea with McNair

• national “no perfectionism week”

{ A Red-Letter Day for You }

He looked at my homework and the grade -- in red -- and was livid. My father, a life-long professional educator, knew a thing or three about doling out grades. From grades 3 to 8 he was my principal and frequent substitute teacher, especially in history. He taught it like he had been there and with World War II he had.
    Thus it was that, on the days we brought home our report cards, it was a more important day than in many homes. (My mother was also a teacher, artist, wedding director, playwright, poet . . .) But on this bringing-home-grades-day, my senior year of high school, he was particularly concerned. I had never received an “F” on my report card. Nor did I bring one homer this day, but my grade in my Civic Problems (American government) my teacher, Frank Foehr, had angered my dad just as much as if I had gotten an “F.”
    These were my grades for all first semester courses. In Civics, half of the grade was class participation (Mr. Foehr loved energetic debate and role plays in his class) and the other half was a semester-long project. We each selected a local problem ignored by our community leaders. Our project was to suggest our own course of action. We submitted a list of three projects and “Mr. F” approved one. He told me mine was the most creative idea he had seen in ten years of teaching civics.
    “But you’re gonna have to work extra hard to pull this off, pal.”
    Apparently I had accomplished that goal. Mr F gave me an A+. My father gave me a disgusted look. (I call it the “I-just-sucked-on-too-many-kumquats” look.)
    “To receive an “A” you must be correct on 96 to 100% of your work.  An “A+” would be more than 100%. There is nothing beyond 100%. If 100% is perfect, how can anyone be better than perfect?”
    “Well,” I said, “This isn’t anyone getting an A+, it’s me.”
    My dad was proffering a rhetorical question, but I had an answer anyway.
    “And you are better than perfect?”
    “Yes. On this project, in Mr. F’s mind, I did a complete and thorough analysis of the problem and devised a good answer for fixing it. He really liked my project.”
    “But no one is better than perfect.”
    “What if you get the content right and then do a great job, better than expected, so it’s worth more than a plain old “A.” Look, they give D+ grades. What’s that, ‘Super Dumb’?”
    “It just doesn’t work for me. Go get you project and let me see it.” My dad was not backing down, but was willing to re-examine my work. I had stayed up late the night before my project was due, to finish it and turned it in the next day. My father had not seen the final presentation. Usually he does--and my mom. As a student I was never drawn to the traditional way of doing anything. Spelling was at the top of my tradition-breaking list.
    “That’s not how you spell ‘nessissary’?” A teacher said.
    “Then how do you know that that’s the word I’m going for?” I answered.
    I lost half a grade point on too many projects in my early years due to my untraditional spelling techniques, so I always ran everything past my spell-check-parents. (This was the pre-computer age, when our homework was done on papyrus with a quill pen and India ink.) On my senior project, however, there was no concern with spelling. I had written not one word, save the title card for my multi-paneled photo essay on public graffiti. In my senior year I took a still photography class with an emphasis on black and white photography.

    My essay included black and white photos of graffiti--big, spray painted, words on public structures in downtown San Jose, California. My solution focused on one particular bus stop--a commuter hub, a large parking lot near my high school (Oak Grove) in the south part of town. Business workers parked there and rode public transit buses to various points in the city center. More than just a few benches with backrests that were mini-billboards for the local mortuary, this was a large Spanish, mission style, stucco structure, complete with adobe roof tiles and natural wooden benches.
    It was covered with graffiti, spray painted words in black, red, and the occasional silver or gold. Nothing creative, some of it lewd and vile, and much of it unreadable. All of it ugly and making this well designed, thematic bus stop look old and forgotten. In fact, it was about a year old when I photographed it and used daily by hundreds of people. My solution was to allow the best graffiti artists to do community-endorsed, colorful art on the walls of forgotten places in rundown commercial and residential areas. I photographed examples of murals by local artists for the second half of my project. It would take work to coordinated, but be well worth the experiment.
    Upon reflection my dad loved my project: the photos were rich and told a detailed story. The “solution” photos were rich, saturated colors demonstrating how “forgotten places” could be enlivened using the talents of forgotten artists.
    Looking at one remarkable piece of colorful art, done on the side of a liquor store, by a “tagger” (graffiti artist) my dad said, “Now this guy should get an A+, too!”
    “Why.“ I asked
    “It’s perfect.” He said.
    And it was.
    Find something in your life this week that you’ve finish, accomplished, completed, created, and give your self an A+. Write it in red, on a Post-It and stick it on you work. If you personally are worth an A+ this week, stick it on you. Don’t fuss over how it ain’t perfect. It works and you feel good about having completed it.
    This is National NO Perfectionism Week. Put you critical spirit aside. We’ve  just spent our weekend of giving thanks and eating turkey sandwiches for three days. Carry those positive feelings over for at least one more week and be excited about what you have accomplished. There’ll be plenty of time to be a critical, dissatisfied, never-finish-anything-cause-it’s-not-100% perfectionist next week. And the weeks after.
    And find an opportunity to give everyone in your family an A+ for something--especially your kids. Don’t just say it, let ‘em have!
    I am giving you an A+ just for reading this flawless blog.

    ~ McNair

Were you plagued by anxiety over grades or spelling?

Leave a comment below --  share you battle with perfectionism.

 

P.S. If this is your first visit to Tea with McNair, have a look at my new series of creative exercises ~ Between Reason & Recess ~ It began last week with my post titled: i know a place.

You may want to join in and I hope you will. My next blog will be Reason & Recess Exercise No. 2  ~ later this week. 

{ 1,117 }   

> i know a place <

{ Preface to an exciting new series! }

Lucy walked all the way through the wardrobe, past the big furry coats, and discovered the magical, life-changing place called, Narnia.

There is another place--accessible to anyone who wants to go there--that can bring wonder and adventure to any life. Getting there does not require passage through the elusive Platform No. 9½  at the railway station. Nor does it require that we “think happy thoughts.” In fact, for some, it is often thoughts of frustration that hold the key.
    It is a world I discovered as a kid in grade school and I have been making regular trips to ever since. I have not shared this with anyone, until now--fearing I would be labeled crazy. Alas, I was called “crazy” none the less and have embraced it boldly.
    Now it is time to reveal the location of this amazing, restorative place and invite you in for tea and more. When I tell you, it will not surprise me to learn that many of you have already visited there, many, many times and, like me, you too, have kept it a secret.
    Our journey there commences with a story.
  As a kid I never hated school and, I did not love it--not for any normal reasons at any rate. I loved history and geography--especially maps and globes (which I collect.) I thought we spent to much time on European minutia and almost no time on the ever-intriguing East. Our look at Asia was, at best, a fly-over of China, a harbor tour of Hong Kong, and a post Pearl Harbor peek at Japan. It seemed as though Asia was created to start World War II and ancient Asian art was actually mass produced in the back rooms of small shops in the “China Town” districts of New York and San Francisco. For all I knew from school, “Ming Dynasty” was a noodle shop on Grant Street.
    I did actually hate reading. Mostly because we all read the same books. Why couldn’t we each read something different and learn from each other? Evangeline, the epic headache, ah, poem, being read aloud by twelve year olds I found to be a mind numbing ritual--after all, there was hemlock in “the forest primeval.” Coleridge’s The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner was literary water boarding.
    In fourth grade, at age nine, a miracle happened: I met Mr. Samuel Clemens, and his literary alter ego, Mark Twain. Eureka! I sailed through Huckleberry Finn, the assigned text, and jumped on to Tom Sawyer’s adventures, and then off to King Arthur’s Court with "Hank Morgan," an ingenious Yankee from Connecticut. I read it all, traveling with Twain to Calaveras County, the Garden of Eden, and all points on the compass. I could not get enough of his genius for story telling (and human observation.) Mostly it was Twain’s indefatigable wit that captivated me. He is my favorite human to quote (followed immediatly by G.K. Chesterton and Thomas Edison.)
    Before I had devoured all of Mr. Twin’s four-egg oeuvre I ran smack dab into a hot and steaming flagon of Charles Dickens. Eschewing the assigned tome, I had greater expectations for myself and ran head long away from David “the wuss” Copperfield and signed up with Dombey and Son. Next, I perused Mr. Pickwick’s prodigious Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, and A Christmas Carol--which every family should read aloud.
    I almost talked our school into staging A Christmas Carol one year in the place of one more tired re-dredging of Jesus and the Indians Go to Bethlehem. “But,” they said, “Scrooge doesn’t really become a Christian in the end, just a good person.”
    Bollox!
  Meanwhile, back in class, every class, I searched for what does this have to do with me? Especially with math, if everyone knows how to determine the square root of the sum of an isosceles triangle, or whatever, why do I need to learn it. Ask some one who knows--and cares.
  A more surprising discovery in school, I didn’t  like recess either--accept as it was a relief from triangle and sentence dissecting. Recess accomplished naught. Oh, sure, we worked off nervous energy to be less fidgety during the next round of “French monarchs for 200, Alex.”
    Then, one day, on my way to recess, I found it. The magical place--my own private Narnia. It was an accident. I had been drawing in my sketch pad--having completed the filling in of the ten blanks in my Think and Do workbook calculated to drum into my brain the role of the adverb in modern culture. I was never allowed to go to recess early--no one was. Hence I drew. On this day, not having completed a particular drawing, and the story that went with it, I took my sketch pad with me as we headed for recess. No tether ball for me that day. I sketched and wrote all through recess.

    “Are you alright?” Asked the officer of the day in the noisy, frenetic playground. It was uncharacteristic of me not to join in any reindeer games.
  “I’m fine. I just need to finish this.” And then it hit me. That I said “need” instead of want. That there was something started in the classroom, a place of reason and learning, and continued to completion during our recess from reason--the mindless pursuit of play, for no real reason.
    This was my new favorite place, but could it, I wondered, be a better place than either the classroom for reason and the clash-ground for recess. Is there a place I can go, anyone can go, to do what they love and that what they love has purpose? Is there a place like that? I’d like that.
    Welcome to the place Between Reason and Recess!

So, today, I am launching a new series of exercise, playful projects, designed to push your personal creativity ever-closer to the surface, out into the light of day. It is also intended to develop tools and skills usually thought to be only for artistic expression and integrate these skills into all areas of your life. When I speak at writers’ conferences, I push writers to start drawing to improve their observation skills. My Uncle Paul (Beckman), while a professor at Sacramento State College, had a student who showed great promise as a painter and encouraged “Wayne” to write about his art. His first effort was crap (Uncle Paul used a stronger noun.) He threw the essay at Wayne insisting he rewrite all of it. Years later Wayne told me that  my Uncle's insistence that an artist be able to put his ideas into words was a great gift to him as he went forward in life. That artist became one of our greatest American, contemporary masters, Wayne Thiebaud. ("Waterland" by Wayne Thiebaud, below)

 
These little “try this” events in my new Between Reason & Recess series are designed for discovery and exploration. You can do them and so you must try--please.  This is not a contest and no one need see anything you do. It is a playful exercise leading to discover. The only failure is not to try.  Also, I ain’t just makin’ them up. This is the stuff I’ve been doing for years--proven to inspire and stimulate the creative centers of your mind and spirit. When I invent a new exercise, I will try it myself before passing it along through the blogosphere. If you have an idea, speak up, share it with. I'll try it and pass it along to the rest of our "creative salon." This  series will occur in between my regular posts at blog central: TEA WITH McNAIR . Each exercise will be simple and fun enough that you CAN do it. The only failure is not to try. If you were to look through all my old sketch books ( 140 and counting), you would find lots of chicken scratchings. But it all adds up to the important work of just trying to draw while you are really learning to be more observant of life and all its remarkable details. 

•  •  •  What to bring to creativity camp •  basic supplies •  •  •  •  •   •   

• Sketchbook (blank, unlined).  Both a journal and sketchbook. I suggest, if you are not already a regular sketchbook user, get a basic, spiral bound, 9”x12”. Any smaller and you will create phone doodles. Larger may be too awkward to carry around. If you haven’t got an art supply or craft store nearby, Target and most drug stores carry decent sketchbooks. WARNING: If this is your very first sketchbook, do get an inexpensive one so you WILL feel free to use it a lot--the higher the price, the lower the usage. Trust me.
• Lead pencils, soft (get 3 and a small sharpener)
• Colored felt pens, a fist full. If you do not already have a favorite “felt-tip” brand, start with one of the packs of 24-50, small felt pens, assorted colors-- Target and other such stores.
• Camera ~ If you do not own a small, easy to use camera, a disposable one will work fine for our purposes. Even those with film can be used to create digital images on a disc during film processing.
• Office supplies: Small pair of scissors, clear tape, glue stick, etc. (Think portability)
• Favorite writing instrument ~ fountain pen, roller ball, your choice. This would be a great time to try out something new. (Cue the fountain pen salesperson.)

{ Between Reason & Recess  • Exercise No.1 }

1. Get the stuff (see above)

2. Write (scribble, draw, no labels) your name, address, contact phone on inside front cover of your new sketchbook and the phrase, If found, please contact:

3. Select a favorite quote that inspires you and write (draw, scribble, etc.) it on the first page of your new sketchbook.

That's it -- for now.
Onward & upward,

McNair

Sketching at the counter
Jamaica Inn coffee shop,
Los Angeles

[ 1,661 ]

Lucy walked all the way through the wardrobe, past the big furry coats, and discovered the magical, life-changing place called, Narnia.

There is another place--accessible to anyone who wants to go there--that can bring wonder and adventure to any life. Getting there does not require passage through the elusive Platform No. 9½  at the railway station. Nor does it require that we “think happy thoughts.” In fact, for some, it is often thoughts of frustration that hold the key.
    It is a world I discovered as a kid in grade school and I have been making regular trips to ever since. I have not shared this with anyone, until now--fearing I would be labeled crazy. Alas, I was called “crazy” none the less and have embraced it boldly.
    Now it is time to reveal the location of this amazing, restorative place and invite you in for tea and more. When I tell you, it will not surprise me to learn that many of you have already visited there, many, many times and, like me, you too, have kept it a secret.
    Our journey there commences with a story.
  As a kid I never hated school and, I did not love it--not for any normal reasons at any rate. I loved history and geography--especially maps and globes (which I collect.) I thought we spent to much time on European minutia and almost no time on the ever-intriguing East. Our look at Asia was, at best, a fly-over of China, a harbor tour of Hong Kong, and a post Pearl Harbor peek at Japan. It seemed as though Asia was created to start World War II and ancient Asian art was actually mass produced in the back rooms of small shops in the “China Town” districts of New York and San Francisco. For all I knew from school, “Ming Dynasty” was a noodle shop on Grant Street.
    I did actually hate reading. Mostly because we all read the same books. Why couldn’t we each read something different and learn from each other? Evangeline, the epic headache, ah, poem, being read aloud by twelve year olds I found to be a mind numbing ritual--after all, there was hemlock in “the forest primeval.” Coleridge’s The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner was literary water boarding.
    In fourth grade, at age nine, a miracle happened: I met Mr. Samuel Clemens, and his literary alter ego, Mark Twain. Eureka! I sailed through Huckleberry Finn, the assigned text, and jumped on to Tom Sawyer’s adventures, and then off to King Arthur’s Court with "Hank Morgan," an ingenious Yankee from Connecticut. I read it all, traveling with Twain to Calaveras County, the Garden of Eden, and all points on the compass. I could not get enough of his genius for story telling (and human observation.) Mostly it was Twain’s indefatigable wit that captivated me. He is my favorite human to quote (followed immediatly by G.K. Chesterton and Thomas Edison.)
    Before I had devoured all of Mr. Twin’s four-egg oeuvre I ran smack dab into a hot and steaming flagon of Charles Dickens. Eschewing the assigned tome, I had greater expectations for myself and ran head long away from David “the wuss” Copperfield and signed up with Dombey and Son. Next, I perused Mr. Pickwick’s prodigious Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, and A Christmas Carol--which every family should read aloud.
    I almost talked our school into staging A Christmas Carol one year in the place of one more tired re-dredging of Jesus and the Indians Go to Bethlehem. “But,” they said, “Scrooge doesn’t really become a Christian in the end, just a good person.”
    Bollox!
  Meanwhile, back in class, every class, I searched for what does this have to do with me? Especially with math, if everyone knows how to determine the square root of the sum of an isosceles triangle, or whatever, why do I need to learn it. Ask some one who knows--and cares.
  A more surprising discovery in school, I didn’t  like recess either--accept as it was a relief from triangle and sentence dissecting. Recess accomplished naught. Oh, sure, we worked off nervous energy to be less fidgety during the next round of “French monarchs for 200, Alex.”
    Then, one day, on my way to recess, I found it. The magical place--my own private Narnia. It was an accident. I had been drawing in my sketch pad--having completed the filling in of the ten blanks in my Think and Do workbook calculated to drum into my brain the role of the adverb in modern culture. I was never allowed to go to recess early--no one was. Hence I drew. On this day, not having completed a particular drawing, and the story that went with it, I took my sketch pad with me as we headed for recess. No tether ball for me that day. I sketched and wrote all through recess.

    “Are you alright?” Asked the officer of the day in the noisy, frenetic playground. It was uncharacteristic of me not to join in any reindeer games.
  “I’m fine. I just need to finish this.” And then it hit me. That I said “need” instead of want. That there was something started in the classroom, a place of reason and learning, and continued to completion during our recess from reason--the mindless pursuit of play, for no real reason.
    This was my new favorite place, but could it, I wondered, be a better place than either the classroom for reason and the clash-ground for recess. Is there a place I can go, anyone can go, to do what they love and that what they love has purpose? Is there a place like that? I’d like that.
    Welcome to the place Between Reason and Recess!

So, today, I am launching a new series of exercise, playful projects, designed to push your personal creativity ever-closer to the surface, out into the light of day. It is also intended to develop tools and skills usually thought to be only for artistic expression and integrate these skills into all areas of your life. When I speak at writers’ conferences, I push writers to start drawing to improve their observation skills. My Uncle Paul (Beckman), while a professor at Sacramento State College, had a student who showed great promise as a painter and encouraged “Wayne” to write about his art. His first effort was crap (Uncle Paul used a stronger noun.) He threw the essay at Wayne insisting he rewrite all of it. Years later Wayne told me that  my Uncle's insistence that an artist be able to put his ideas into words was a great gift to him as he went forward in life. That artist became one of our greatest American, contemporary masters, Wayne Thiebaud. ("Waterland" by Wayne Thiebaud, below)

 
These little “try this” events in my new Between Reason & Recess series are designed for discovery and exploration. You can do them and so you must try--please.  This is not a contest and no one need see anything you do. It is a playful exercise leading to discover. The only failure is not to try.  Also, I ain’t just makin’ them up. This is the stuff I’ve been doing for years--proven to inspire and stimulate the creative centers of your mind and spirit. When I invent a new exercise, I will try it myself before passing it along through the blogosphere. If you have an idea, speak up, share it with. I'll try it and pass it along to the rest of our "creative salon." This  series will occur in between my regular posts at blog central: TEA WITH McNAIR . Each exercise will be simple and fun enough that you CAN do it. The only failure is not to try. If you were to look through all my old sketch books ( 140 and counting), you would find lots of chicken scratchings. But it all adds up to the important work of just trying to draw while you are really learning to be more observant of life and all its remarkable details. 

•  •  •  What to bring to creativity camp •  basic supplies •  •  •  •  •   •   

• Sketchbook (blank, unlined).  Both a journal and sketchbook. I suggest, if you are not already a regular sketchbook user, get a basic, spiral bound, 9”x12”. Any smaller and you will create phone doodles. Larger may be too awkward to carry around. If you haven’t got an art supply or craft store nearby, Target and most drug stores carry decent sketchbooks. WARNING: If this is your very first sketchbook, do get an inexpensive one so you WILL feel free to use it a lot--the higher the price, the lower the usage. Trust me.
• Lead pencils, soft (get 3 and a small sharpener)
• Colored felt pens, a fist full. If you do not already have a favorite “felt-tip” brand, start with one of the packs of 24-50, small felt pens, assorted colors-- Target and other such stores.
• Camera ~ If you do not own a small, easy to use camera, a disposable one will work fine for our purposes. Even those with film can be used to create digital images on a disc during film processing.
• Office supplies: Small pair of scissors, clear tape, glue stick, etc. (Think portability)
• Favorite writing instrument ~ fountain pen, roller ball, your choice. This would be a great time to try out something new. (Cue the fountain pen salesperson.)

{ Between Reason & Recess  • Exercise No.1 }

1. Get the stuff (see above)

2. Write (scribble, draw, no labels) your name, address, contact phone on inside front cover of your new sketchbook and the phrase, If found, please contact:

3. Select a favorite quote that inspires you and write (draw, scribble, etc.) it on the first page of your new sketchbook.

That's it -- for now.
Onward & upward,

McNair

Sketching at the counter
Jamaica Inn coffee shop,
Los Angeles