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Some quotes about the future from my commonplace book

“People like us, who believe in physics,” Albert Einstein wrote in a letter of condolence on the death of a friend, “know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” 

“I know when a man talks of posterity in matters of this nature he is looked upon with an eye of ridicule by the cunning and selfish part of mankind. Most people are of the humour of an old fellow of a college, who when he was pressed by the society to come into something that might redound to the good of their successors, grew very peevish, We are always doing, says he, something for posterity, but I would fain see posterity do something for us.”  
Thomas Stafford as reported by Joseph Addison 

“We busy ourselves trying to change life so that our descendants might be happy, yet they will say, as is the custom: ‘Things were better before; life today is worse than it used to be.’” 
Anton Chekhov

• Мы хлопочем, чтобы изменить жизнь, чтобы потомки были счастливы, а потомки скажут по обыкновению: прежде лучше было, теперешняя жизнь хуже прежней 
   

“Past experience carries with its advantages the drawback that things never happen the same way again,” wrote Churchill in his memoirs. “Otherwise I suppose life would be too easy.”

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” 
George Orwell, 1984 

“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
Marshall McLuhan 

“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.” 
Milan Kundera 

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it”
Alan Kay 

 “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that is the way to bet.” 
Hugh Keough 

“To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.”  
–Oscar Wilde

Why do we write about 9/11? I’ll brook no denials of thqt phenomenon; ubiquitous remembrances prevail this week. We do it because we care and remember the caring of that time. Why add to the mass of recollections and reminiscence? Because we were part of something terrible that seems wrong to forget while also wishful of recapturing the unexpected graces arising from those horrors. The quotidian nature of our lives, the rushing from here to there to do this or that blocks out the reality that we are always part of something, and then a massive misfortune makes our painful connectedness unavoidable or a triumph (‘Knicks in Five!”) produces a giddy synesthesia. Recognizing that we are part of a larger body might be painful or pleasurable, but it is always revealing that the caring about something is widely shared.  25 years ago, September 11th 2001, summer not yet done, the connectedness was inescapable for me and the many.

In my early twenties, Thomas Pynchon yanked me momentarily but unforgettably above my self-centered complacency Into at least an awareness of my connectedness with this passage from his novel V: 

“Twenty days before the Dog Star moved into conjunction with the sun, the dog  days began. The world started to run more and more afoul of the inanimate.  Fifteen were killed in a train wreck near Oaxaca, Mexico, on 1 July. The  next day fifteen people died when an apartment house collapsed in Madrid.  July 4 a bus fell into a river near Karachi and thirty-one passengers  drowned. Thirty-nine more were drowned two days later in a tropical storm in  the central Philippines. 9 July the Aegean Islands were hit by an earthquake  and tidal waves, which killed forty-three. 14 July a MATS plane crashed  after takeoff from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, killing forty-five.  An earthquake at Anjar, India, 21 July, killed 117. From 22 to 24 July  floods rampaged in central and southern Iran, killing three hundred. 28 July  a bus ran off a ferryboat at Kuopio, Finland, and fifteen were killed. Four  petroleum tanks blew up near Dumas, Texas, 29 July, killing nineteen. 1  August, seventeen died in a train wreck near Rio de Janeiro. Fifteen more died the 4th and 5th, in floods in southwest Pennsylvania. 2161 people died  the same week in a typhoon which hit Chekiang, Honan and Hopeh Provinces. 7  August six dynamite trucks blew up in Cali, Colombia, killing about 1100.  The same day there was a train wreck at Prerov, Czechoslovakia, killing  nine. The next day 262 miners, trapped by fire, died in a coal mine under Marcinelle, in Belgium. Ice avalanches on Mont Blanc swept fifteen mountain  climbers into the kingdom of death in the week 12 to 18 August. The same  week a gas explosion in Monticello, Utah, killed fifteen and a typhoon  through Japan and Okinawa killed thirty. Twenty-nine more coal miners died  of gas poisoning in a mine in Upper Silesia on 27 August. Also on the 27th a  Navy bomber crashed among houses in Sanford, Florida, and killed four. Next  day a gas explosion in Montreal killed seven and flash floods in Turkey  killed 138. These were the mass deaths. There were also the attendant maimed,  malfunctioning, homeless, lorn. It happens every month in a succession of  encounters between groups of living and a congruent world – which simply  doesn’t care. Look in any yearly Almanac, under ‘Disasters’ – which is where  the figures above come from. The business is transacted month after month  after month.” 

All those souls every day lost to disasters and we had nary a word about them. Even though I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s with the advantage of men in suits and ties soberly telling us about the workings of the world every night on our black and white TV and two daily newspapers delivered, similarly black and white, spreading before us additional dispatches on the events and antics of humans, this paragraph shook me out of the littleness of my comprehension.  Most of us lived our lives and experienced our universe like the ink-black ants seen in the garden every year crawling on the white peonies, taking their journey on that flower and back to the anthill as encompassing their only and whole cosmos.  Suddenly Pynchon conveyed to me that my usual condition was one of not knowing squared, of nearsightedness in my soul.  

 On Tuesday, September 11th 2001, I was back in that usual tunnel-visioned condition because I had things to do, a situation that tends to sharpen the focus on what is dangerously, urgently, or just burdensomely in front of our nose. Still an organizational consultant then (the term covered a multitude of gigs, pitches, skills, and sins) just a few months before ETS would hire me as their first (and as far as I know only legitimate) Chief Learning Officer, this was an off day from the engagements that had me traveling to Dallas and Denver, Pittsburgh and Princeton. But there were still things for me to do. My father, John T. Elliott, had developed late onset Parkinsons that didn’t become evident or get diagnosed until four years earlier when he was almost eighty. My mother’s death just after the turn into this century resulted in our family moving him from Florida to New York City, first at my saintly brother Brendan’s house with his wife Barbara and then through the extraordinary assistance of my equally saintly sister Irene to an assisted living facility run by the Catholic archdiocese, exquisitely situated on upper 5th Avenue across from the gorgeous Conservancy Gardens of Central Park. 

The unsteadiness that is a feature of that disease and which in a way what cause six months in just time a fall, a broken hip, a tortured convalescence, and finally a lethal heart attack made us seek a companion for my father so that he could take walks in the park and around the neighborhood. At the time, my boss, Pam Cavanaugh, knew of a retired fireman, Pat , who had helped her with her own father in a similar situation. I had arranged with Pat to meet at my father’s room for a combination interview and introduction that morning of September 11th. Leaving our house in Tarrytown in what I thought was plenty of time to be there before Pat  so that I could discuss the situation with my father who was still pretending to a more independent and steady existence then his body would support, like so many others, the first news of the events downtown came over the radio. Those accounts had the expected noise of confusion and contradiction the unmistakable signal that something significant had happened. 

The traffic jam encountered southbound on the Major Deegan past rush hour reinforced this notion. So, using skills and knowledge gained by being a school bus driver again in my early 20s, I exited that roadway and wound through local streets that were already eerily deserted to get to the Cardinal Cooke residence. I wondered if Pat who lived in Yonkers would make it to the appointment, but when I reached my father’s apartment he was already there and the two of them chatting let me know that there was no need for introduction or interview. 

So we watched the television. Peter Jennings in a suit and a tie was our guide. My father had been a navigator during World WarII on the route known as ‘The Hump‘ an extraordinarily dangerous flight pattern from Karachi —yes, the same Karachi that Pynchon cited in his litany of woes  where ‘a bus fell into a river … and thirty-one passengers  drowned — and northern China. When he returned to the Bronx and my mother and brother John (who, of course, barely knew him having been born pretty much nine months after their wedding night and eight months after my father was posted to Asia), he worked as a short order cook and took advantage of the GI bill to attend Brooklyn Polytechnic for a BS degree in Electrical Engineering. He graduated second in his class and held all sorts of other honors while during those four years also added — along with my mother — three more brothers to the family. He was an impressive man still even with Parkinson’s wasting him. I miss my father, but cherish that day was spent in part with him

On this day, as we watched the the steady shot of the World Trade Towers, a place where my consulting jobs had taken me many times, a locale where when we lived in Tribeca our eldest daughter learned to walk in the vast spaces of its underground mall, suddenly smoke obscured the view and my father said, “The tower has collapsed.” I thought he was mistaken, that we were seeing an illusion. But he proceeded to explain to me the realities of super heated jet fuel and skyscraper architecture. Pat, the retired fireman, concurred. That September 11th was a brilliantly sunny day made my acceptance of this reality all the more difficult. But then an hour later as we looked out the window onto 5th Ave., we saw a man walking dazedly covered in dust and ash, an ambulatory portent of the destruction done. 

Among my large family, I alone was in New York City that day with a car. That status turned my time with my Dad into fielding panicked  phone calls from family: a sister stranded, a child to be retrieved from school, a dog needing rescue from a locked house, and simply the reassurance that a niece was safe even though she had been in the towers that morning. My father’s facility decided to lock down and Pat and I left. (He served My Dad nobly and caringly right to the end.) My path then involved collecting people while avoiding the crowds covering broad avenues like Park and Madison as folks tried to walk anywhere as long as it was away from lower Manhattan. I burrowed into my best Bronx accent to talk a harried cop into letting me get on to the West Side Highway at 125th Street despite the orders to close it, and then drove as the only car for miles and miles back to Westchester County. In all that solitude, there was the beginning of the synesthesia; this horror is happening to me, to us, even if I am not among the dead. A city and then a country rediscovered that like the mycorrhizal network of an ancient forest our roots connect all of us even if the threads are thin and often unacknowledged.

At the end of that passage above from V, Pynchon writes of catastrophes that  they happen “every month in a succession of  encounters between groups of living and a congruent world – which simply  doesn’t care.” Indisputable, But we care. We worry and mourn and comfort the victims even if they were strangers to us. And in the days afterward, the body of carers seemed to cover and stretch over the entire Republic and even beyond our shores. Since they knew we were from New York City, the staff at Hotel Aviatic in Paris where we had stayed that  August sent a postcard  hoping that our family was safe. When a shop owner in North Tarrytown gave me an American flag, our ensuing handshake brought tears to the eyes of both of us.  The acts of kindness were not random, but purposefully caring.

. I miss that caring that everyone had for one another at that time. I wish disaster was not prerequisite for sympathy. I pray for the souls of those who were lost but even more earnestly for the families who lost them. 25 years later, the learning seems lost as well. But perhaps today by remembering we can recollect and restore more of that sense of similarity, of sympathy. The world largely gave us love and for a time we returned that gift.  

AI will tell you if you ask that “No major unrelated natural or accidental disasters of catastrophic scale occurred in the United States on September 11, 2001, as the coordinated September 11 Attacks completely dominated national and global events.” Try to get Gemini to be less USA oriented and the answer doesn’t change much: “No major catastrophic international disasters or historical anomalies outside of routine, unrelated local incidents (emphasis in the reply) are widely recorded as occurring concurrently on September 11, 2001.” Is disaster ever routine as in ordinary, usual?  Pynchon’s “encounters between groups of living and a congruent world” that would be filed later “under ‘Disasters’ “ seem not to have been recorded at all for that day, which is unfortunate because the absence of such evidence deprives us from remembering that our fellow beings suffered too, diminishes chances to realize connections, to care. Everything I perceive about the world right now tells me the caring is what most people crave, not just the words but the deeds that show palpable concern for their lives. Politics and technology seem to row in the other direction with concerns not for people, but for profit and power. 9/11 and it’s aftermath proved that our nation indeed the world doesn’t have to be that way. Of course, as Thomas Pynchon—whoever he is — noted, The world will always run afoul of the inanimate, but we the animate, the spirited, the living can soften and even repair those collisions with caring for each other.  And this day, September 11th, reminds me to try harder to do just that.

A Couple of Chestertons

“Every great literature has always been allegorical–allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The ‘Iliad’ is only great because all life is a battle, the ‘Odyssey’ because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle. There is one attitude in which we think that all existence is summed up in the word ‘ghosts’; another, and somewhat better one, in which we think it is summed up in the words ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ Even the vulgarest melodrama or detective story can be good if it expresses something of the delight in sinister possibilities–the healthy lust for darkness and terror which may come on us any night in walking down a dark lane.”

Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it. 

GK Chesterton

It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.

G. K. Chesterton 

There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sports shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty drinks cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducts, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos. 

José Saramago, All the Names

https://wapo.st/3Sct3EL

Cautionary tales abound about the danger of persnickety obsessions with seeing the one thing wrong with an other wise splendid entity. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tale The Birth-Mark presented to the Sophomore English Honors class at St. Peter’s Prep in 1966 by Mr. John Casey told of the peril of obsession with trying to remove the one flaw of a beloved beauty. You just might kill it.

And then there’s the stern advice from Jesus about fault-finding:

Why do you take note of the splinter in your brother’s eye but do not notice the wooden plank in your own eye? ⁴ How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove that splinter from your eye,’ while all the time the wooden plank remains in your own? ⁵ You hypocrite! First remove the wooden plank from your own eye, and then you will be able to see clearly enough to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye.

Matthew 7:3-5, New Catholic Bible

Jesus makes a good point — as usual. BUT on reading this insightful and very interesting column by Monica Hesse that tells a very uncomfortable truth about SOME of the USA one defect did catch my eye, the one with the plank in it. And I feel a little bad now raising it because fittingly, the author who grew up in Normal Illinois, has a keen vision for spotting the deviations that now define part of our citizenry.

What was the flaw?

The phrase “teaching to standardized tests with shifting goalposts” repeats a common and unfortunate misunderstanding.. The belief allows for even more harmful judgments and should be confronted every time it appears. First, ‘teaching to the test doesn’t work so why would people still be talking about doing it? More perniciously, such myths, which are quintessentially 21st Century American in their vague anti-science cast, aid the overall rejection of educational measurement. If you want to say No Child Left Behind didn’t work or the Obama era follow-up initiatives were ineffective there’s an argument to be made for those sentiments although the reality of what happened is highly complicated. But the teaching to the test (Tx4) bugaboo was wrong from the start.

Did Tx4 happen in many places? Yes. Was it a stressor for teachers? Undoubtedly. Should administrators at each level of governance — federal, state, district, and building — have stoipeed the parctice because of its demonstarted ineffectiveness? YES. Did they? Mostly no.

How do we know that Tx4 didn’t work? That depends upon the circumstance.. In states that employed the cheapest version of tests, the scores might have risen but subsequent National Assessment of Educational Progress showed those results to be fraudulent. In some cases, the ‘teaching’ involved giving the questions ahead of time to students for practice and feedback, which is not so much teaching to the test as cheating to the test. In other cases, the technique simply didn’t work that should, able been np surprise because its already proven and well published inefficacy.

Teaching to the Test

In 1997, long before NCLB was instituted and Tx4 became a watchword for the perceived indignities of educational measurement, Lorrie Shepard gave the 3rd Angoff Lecture at ETS on ‘Measuring Achievement: What Does It Mean to Test for Robust Understanding?’ (Looking up the paper and seeing my friend and former colleague Shilpi Niyogi’s name in the acknowledgements as its editor was a bonus in this little excursion.) Lorrie demonstrated that there were similarities between what the textbooks contained and what the tests then included as questions. The significance of those findings was that the curriculum focused on a narrow set of information that didn’t necessarily advance more critical learning. Here is one of her examples:

“…pages from textbooks from the 1980s make the case that both first-time presentation of content as well as end-of-chapter tests closely resembled skills and formats from standardized tests. For example, because it appeared on standardized tests, second and third graders spent significant amounts of time learning to write out, from numerals to words, the narrative translation of 3,467 rather than doing problems to check on their understanding of what the numeral means (not what it “says”). Not surprisingly, some children who can write out three thousand, four hundred, sixty seven do not have the place understanding to be able to subtract 26 from 3,007.”

That kind of teaching to the test was NOT the teacher’s choice but developed at a remove in conversations between state boards of education and educational publishers. In fact, Lorrie’s paper documents the ‘scandalous’ finding that state reports overestimated progress by students.

This changed, and Lorrie’s call for more ‘performance tasks’ as opposed to multiple choice in these tests was answered by many educational researchers. Why performance tasks?

“(P)erformance tasks are intended to prevent the format effects of multiple-choice tests that have distorted instruction and in turn enabled students to
pretend to know. Open-ended tasks are more challenging and directly reflect desired understandings and applications. Therefore, it is less likely that students
could do these items correctly and still not understand the underlying concepts.”

My late friend and colleague, Bob Mislevy, stimulated significant changes in the shape of assessments with his conception (alongside Russell Almond, Linda Sternberg, Jan Lukas, Malcolm Bauer, David Williamson and others) of Evidence Centered Design of assessments. As Lorrie Shepard noted, tests and the preceding instruction need to be clear about what the intention of the learning is, the construct. That happened with ECD WHERE the unfortunately rare powers that be would approve and pay for it; happily . Bob was a pro-learning guy, not necessarily a pro-testing guy.

Do State Education Officials Read the Research of Their Field?

When NCLB starts in January 2002, the evidence already exists that teaching to the test only works if you are rigging the tests with the textbook ploy above or out and out cheating by distributing the tests beforehand as happened in Atlanta, Georgia. That same year, 24 years before the mention in the WaPo column that got me exercised over its Tx4 canard, Judith Langer on an NPR program — listen at around 22 minutes for the exact testimony — told of her experience in schools that teaching to the test only supplied very short term results.. 24 years ago! But you still hear about teaching to the test.

More damningly, this paper by Craig D. Jerald from twenty years ago pointed to research by Newmann, Bryk, and Nagaoka who “analyzed student test-score gains on the commercially developed, nationally norm-referenced Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) assessment and the state-developed Illinois Goal Assessment Program (IGAP) exams. The results were startling. In classrooms where teachers employed more authentic intellectual instruction, students logged test-score gains on the ITBS that exceeded the national average by 20 percent. However, students who were given few authentic assignments [i.e., taught to the test] gained much less than the national average. A similar pattern emerged when researchers examined results on the IGAP assessments.”

In other words, if you taught to the test in the way critics interpret that phrase, your kids did WORSE.

Given my role as Chief Learning Officer, accusations of bias regarding my views about educational measurement merit attention. I worked almost two decades for what was AT THE TIME the largest and most prestigious testing organization in the world. That must make me an apologist for the tests produced there, right? Where you stand depends upon where you sit is a worthwhile aphorism. But it does not describe me in this case because my own views of ‘No tests but for learning‘ were NOT shared by many of my colleagues especially those who were so-called ‘business facing’. After all, the current contracts for testing then produced important revenue and with a quarterly results focused leadership messing with revenue was anathema . Why? Another quote, this one from Upton Sinclair, explains their views — and many things that go on in corporations:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

It is true that even Sinclair’s wife found him to be “a man with every gift except humor and silence” but his quote above well describes in part the reality in which ETS never developed the systems that would have consigned the poor tests and the useless teaching to the test methods to the dumpster of educational practices. Maybe that’s why the teaching to the test misclaim irks me so much. While people were putting about such nonsense ETS and the nation were missing an opportunity to change the entire educational landscape through Cognitively Based Assessment of, by, and for Learning or CBAL Instead of futzing about the current tests, every stakeholder should have demanded the scrapping of the summative system, the one where certain grades devote a week to the old style of tests, to an adaptive formative system woven into actual instruction. I didn’t have anything to do with dreaming up this system, my friend and brilliant researcher Randy Elliot Bennett led that effort. But when Randy and others like Ida Lawrence first exposed the idea in a crowded hotel meeting room, I wanted to be part of getting this plan into the world. After all, that was part of my job, a ;part at which I mostly failed.

During my nineteen years at ETS, an effective strategy for taking the unique and consequential research on these matters effectively into the marketplace never materialized. In this 2017 paper here, I wrote about how the layers of conservative attitudes in an older ‘Operate and Maintain’ organization like ETS constituted a kind of gravity that made it difficult to put new products into orbit.

But my paper now reads as seriously flawed because a) it’s too optimistic about how ETS will escape gravity and b) my role in the failure to make that happen receives no notice. And that’s why a comment like the one Monica Hesse made about the supposed USA reality of ‘teaching to standardized tests with shifting goalposts‘ galled me so much that for the day I abandoned work on another project to compose this rant. I very much agree with Hesse on the other things she wrote of in her column about our country where “The American Dream comes down to OnlyFans, dodgeball and reality TV .” The mess she illustrates is connected to all of this:

“A teacher is paid $37,000, a scholarship is $125,000, a college tuition is a gazillion dollars, the cost of living is too much. Wherever you live, it’s too much, but this is America so you must find a way to monkey-bar your way to solvency and/or pull yourself up by your own boobstrap.“

The paragraph gets at the issues of inequality and opportunity that have gotten worse in the last fifty years. As Paul Krugman noted recently: “Between 1979 and 2000, the share of total income going to labor as opposed to capital was basically unchanged. But while the typical worker’s income, adjusted for inflation, barely increased over that period, the average real labor income of the highest earning 1 percent, such as top executives, nearly tripled..”.

At the end of her thought-provoking and soul-disturbing essay with stories of teachers turning to Only fans and dodgeball teams being decided by political affiliation, Hesse asks and answers a question that many of us have pondered this summer of the 250th anniversary of the Republic: “Where has life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness gotten us in 2026? Heaven only knows, but on television it’s gotten us to some very weird places.” It’s not just on television. The inequality Krugman documents above has gotten us to a place where it is more difficult than ever to get a man (and/or a woman but definitely more a man) to understand something like this impending societal disaster, when his/her salary plus bonus, stock options, network membership, fear of exclusion form the oligarchy, etc. depend on not understanding it. It’s gotten us to a place where the very health of our country is endangered.

What does​ educational testing have to do with all of this?​ Education could make a difference in reversing this decline. (Even staunch Republicans like former Senator Ben Sasse calls for a return to teaching coivics.) Not the kind of difference that will change everything. That’s a ridiculous and naive supposition, but testing for learning could make a difference in this situation.  How? The comprehending of the way in which the world really works makes us all more sensitive to the way in which we are being worked over.

I understand those that doubt any statement justifying assessments even on like CBAL. Testing is vilified and in some cases that judgment is deserved especially in States that have perverted the standards and gone cheap on methods and assessment. If you take a look at the states that have done that, you’ll also see a connection to either inaction or actions against their own interests among citizens of all generations there. Is that a harsh correlation? Yes. If you think that making ends meet by putting your wife on Only Fans is a good idea (read the Hesse column to understand what this means) then what I’m suggesting here won’t make any sense to you. 

There is​ another way. If testing is connected to learning as it should be, and the learning is focused on those constructs that most matter to having a productive life in a functioning Republic, then creating an overall methodology where the assessment is of, by, and for learning makes a difference. Learning will be more effective in that it will be more ​actionable​, Able to be acted upon or put into practice​. 

Is that kind of learning going to bring down ​Only ​Fans or stop what ​Hesse describes as even the politicization of dodge-ball? ​(Have you no shame, sir?) Certainly not. But it could make a difference in tilting more of the citizenry to askin​g questions as to what are they getting out of all of this? How is the current circumstance serving them? What will the continued decline of the Republic happening in concert with the increase of inequality affect their children or anyone else they care about in the Next Generation? Those goal posts are not shifting. And the test is still ongoing from all of us although I have​ the sense ​that time is running out.

Oh, and here’s what CBAL looks like for writing

Your Queen is in danger, Spock!

All Nine London Test Posts About RETROSPECTIVE’s UK Premiere 

Obsessed with tests? Yes, but this post offers advice for all performing and presenting artists 

The words test and toast qualify as etymological cousins. Language experts think that the former word meaning originally “a piece of burned brick, clay, or tile” derived from the Latin “tosta, from torreō (‘to burn, parch’).” That means our word ‘torrid’ is in this linguistic clan as well and London reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit as we departed yesterday after the conclusion of our run of RETROSPECTIVE. Torrid! 

The other connection between TEST and TOAST is that after a theatrical experience like the just concluded run of RETROSPECTIVE — as depicted in our nine post series London Test — all participants including this playwright and his goddess of an Executive Producer wife are ‘toast’ as in the colloquial sense of burnt out, frazzled, exhausted. (Bonus phrase reference; the use of ‘toast’ in this way purportedly originates with words mostly written by Harold Ramis and dan Akroyd but spoken by Bill Murray as Venkman in Ghostbusters “as he prepares to fire a laser-type weapon … ‘This chick is toast’.” ) 

Knowing that after such an adventure as RETROSPECTIVE , you’ll be the metaphorical equivalent of a word that originally denoted “A slice or piece of bread browned on both sides by exposure to an open fire, a grill, or other source of radiant heat (formerly often immersed in wine, water, or another beverage)” should prompt theatre makers and other artists to journal about their work while it’s unfolding. Creating performance or presentation involves activity (and often anxiety) on many different levels; the work is multi-faceted. It’s x-dimensional chess and you have to solve for chess just like in high school algebra.

This is not just about theatre; my good friend and sometime cast member, Patrick Smith, just published his first novel The Last Revision. The event extends beyond the writing to the revision, negotiation, promotion, and reflection of all of the material. Talking to him in London when he came to see RETROSPECTIVE provided a rich travelogue of that journey from the book being done to the author never being done. Well, it’s just that Patrick is  not there yet. Waiting to capture the impressions and insights of your creating means you’ll miss a few. (Emily St. John Mandel, one of my favorite contemporary authors, seemed to turn her jottings from the experience of her hit novel Station Eleven into a whole other highly imaginative novel, Sea of Tranquility. So, there’s that possibility too from journaling during the work.)  

Creation of ANY type is perplex. The wonderful Word Origins newsletter reminded me of one way of portraying the process: x-dimensional chess: 

Joe Queenan and I when writing Grudges in 2019-20 took advantage of the pretentiousness of the ‘playing x-dimensional chess’ term to skewer a certain political figure whose cult members claim he’s operating on that level, but as Dr. Spock knew (but NOT Dr. Einstein apparently) chess like creating art tests not just our cognitive intelligence, but also the emotional type along with resilience and adaptability. In writing the nine posts about our LONDON TEST, some elements likely escaped that documentation, but the journaling helped me to understand what this thing called theatre and myself within it is all about 

The nonet of London Tests 

London Test: 74 year-old Bronx Irish Catholic Guy Takes His Play to London contains the links to posts 1-4, which emerged as Substack notes 

London Test # 5: Collaboration, Inspiration, Admiration 

London Test # 6: Rothko knew what Rory knew 

London Test # 7: Claps and Clunks 

London Test # 8: “You’re going to love London audiences” 

London Test # 9: “Time’s up; Pencils down” 

As I start this final post of my London Test Series, it’s 6PM BST or British Summer Time; this year marked the 110th anniversary of what was termed “Another social revolution for conservative England … the adoption of ‘British Summer Time“ This day, May 23 2026, brought a strong sun and very hot temperatures, but the cooler night breezes will carry the voices of our actors completing RETROSPECTIVE’s eight show run at Barons Court Theatre, an event characterized by me as a test. Well, as previously noted, everything can be thought of as a test although the sense of that categorization here was circumscribed as some experience that “by which the existence, quality, or genuineness of anything is or may be determined.” What was RETROSPECTIVE’s quality? Yes, there is that ninety minutes of artistry unfolded by Noah Huntley, Sarah Pearcy, Jasmine Dorothy Haefner, and Benjamin Parsons, superbly directed by Liviu Monsted, brilliantly lit and otherwise designed by Mehran Mortezaei, and hosted by the estimable and generous Leo Bencisa of Barons Court. But the test ending, and a look at the results is best started BEFORE the cast celebration that will occur after the last bows.

What was the construct — the concept or characteristic — this test was measuring?

A few basics

Regular readers of TAPH know that if you want to make a claim about a performance or attribute then the first step is to define what you’re measuring. With RETROSPECTIVE as with any theatrical venture, there wasn’t just one measure. ; let’s start with some obvious measures.

• Could we get audiences to come?
  • We had about fifty percent attendance in the theater. That was below both our goal and our budget, but according to reports from other pub theatres about what they see this season.
• Would we break even?
  • See the above to realize that the answer is as usual, No. But our losses are among the lowest of our ten productions since 2018 and also represent a reversal of a trend of steadily higher per performance expenses since 2023, Our ticket sales were over $5000
• Did the marketing plan work?
  • Not to the degree planned by a wide margin; Facebook and Instagram ads failed to trigger ticket sales despite all the lovely assistance of everyone on the team. Our friends and theirs know that every one of the RETROSPECTIVE cast and crew posted like maniacs throughout this time with great help and marvelous content from the digital wizard, Gifford Elliott and our videographer Louis Catliff. Director Liviu Monsted and our Clint Belinsky, multi-talented Benjamin Parsons were particularly creative. But the ads didn’t register. Cards and flyers were more effective as was the work done by our PR wizard Matthew Parker
• Did everybody on the team get paid?
  • YES! This is a critical element of Knowledge Workings Theater’s mission so extra marks on that front.

Harder parts to measure

But those were not the most significant aspects of the test: this is theatre! Here are the main goals:

• What about the audience reaction?
  • This reel is a good indication that audiences engaged. Only two people left early over eight performances, which is very good for a so-called ‘existential comedy’. (I’ve picked up the calculations here AFTER the last show.) One guy sat next to me and fidgeted all night and I could see another person bored out of their gourd while their partner, rapt with attention, tried to get them to behave. Bet that was an interesting ride home on the Tube. And then there was the woman in a front row side seat on her phone last night… But these were exceptions. Audience members provided enthusiastic and unsolicited feedback for the play and the performers.
• How about critical reaction
  • Very positive especially for the acting and directing. Take a look here:

Check out this about our players…

this is part of the test — to get our team noticed to help their careers, which happened as shown above and here…

Yes, some critics thought the play could be shorter and one called it clunky, but that’s helpful in part because that gets to another critical dimension of the London Test…

Did we learn things to make this or subsequent plays better?

YES! In fact, we will make some cuts before RETROSPECTIVE goes to the printers

But the most important measure is how this all worked spiritually. In plainer terms, did we have fun in London?

ABSOLUTELY! We made theater live, met old friends, made new friends, and reaped the joys of being alive in our art. We put ourselves and our work to the test and thanks to Marjorie Phillips Elliott stayed sane and succeeded. This was not a pass-fail test, but rather a take-home exam, an opportunity to put all we have learned about theatre and life into these moments. If you throw yourself into that opportunity always alert to chances to develop and help others to do the same, there are no wrong answers.

In 1978, fresh off the dissolution of a relationship – Pippa in Retrospective likes the old English word, Eaubruche for the breaking of a marriage – a good friend of mine, Reverend Tom Davis, suggested that a return to acting would restore my spirits. Tom suggested a meeting with Alan Brody, then the Chair of the Skidmore College Theatre Department. The college’s works functioned as a sort of regional theatre offering and although at 26 and heading the Saratoga County Office of Addiction & Substance Intervention Services not a student Alan invited me to audition for the Fall plays.  

That Skidmore having only recently shifted from being an all-women’s college had a dearth of male students certainly helped my chances, and Alan gave me the role of Reverend Anthony Anderson in George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple. I got to say lines like “Essie, Essie, saddle my horse!” and my favorite “I’m Anthony Anderson, the man you want” while leaping onto the gallows to save my co-star Jeremiah Alexander. Not too shabby for my first role since Pozzo in Waiting for Godot in a touring production in 1972. 

But because of that production, Alan Brody encouraged me to dive back into theatre again allowing me to audit his classes and just generally soaking me in that world through conversation and example. That led me to New York in 1980 and years of studying with Terry Schreiber, acting, playwrighting, directing, and producing. Yes, then there was quite a break to raise with Marjorie the three exquisite children, but the lineage for this London Test of taking our play from its New York run to eight performances May 14-23 at Barons Court Theatre goes back to Alan Brody. 

Alan is now Emeritus at MIT after being Professor of Theater, Head of the Department, Associate Provost for the Arts, and probably a few other jobs. When he heard RETROSPERCTIVE was headed for its UK premiere, he wrote me the line in my title above: “You’re going to love London audiences.” Just as he has with myriad others, Alan opened up the possibilities for me when he brought me back into theater forty-eight years ago. It’s what he does.

He expressed this intention very well when he stepped down as Associate Provost at MIT in 2006 in describing why the arts were important at the most prestigious scientific university in the world:  

“…our students discover new ways of being in the world. They develop a tolerance for ambiguity and learn to honor their dreams. They come to exercise those parts of their bodies and minds they may never have experienced before. They understand the profound difference between solving a problem and illuminating a mystery.” 

The test for me and others who benefitted from Alan’s efforts is to pay it forward; help others to ‘honor their dreams’. That’s a critical part of this London Test: get our younger colleagues (and at 74 everyone on the team is really younger) a chance to show their talents. The reviews help: Jasmine Dorothy Haefner, Benjamin Parsons, and Sarah Pearcy all have rave notices that should not only buttress their confidence (who doesn’t need a little buttress there?) and get them some attention. (Noah Huntley is MUCH younger than he plays as our beleaguered painter, Rory McGrory, but he’s been getting swell reviews for a long time.)  

Why mention that one of our aims as Knowledge Workings Theater company is to promote our splendid colleagues? After all, didn’t Charles Dickens say, “Do all the good you can, and make as little fuss about it as possible“? He did, but the fuss we’re making serves to persuade anyone in London to see these coo kids by attending one of the last three performances, tonight, Friday, May 22^nd, and Saturday, May 23^rd all at 7:30 PM at Barons Court  Theatre just below Curtains Up pub near West Kensington Tube Station. As Alan noted, London audiences are fabulous; we do love them. And we’d like to spread the love around wildly these last three nights. It’s all part of our London Test.  

Louis Catliff, a superb videographer/director/writer filmed our May 15th performance of Retrospective. Take a few secs to watch this clip of something else Louis did for us — the solicitation and recording of comments about the performance from audience members, which everybody now calls Vox Pop, which we then use in promotional materials, etc. Because don’t forget, self promotion is not a bad thing.

It’s pretty good, isn’t it? Very satisfying. And the kind reactions continued through the first night of our second week. Around the same time that vox pop was being filmed, however, our excellent press representative Matthew Parker sent us the link to the first of our reviews; he’s snagged us five already, which is stupendous for a little USA transplant like RETROSPECTIVE. That review was also filled with some positive things, such as calling us “thoroughly lovable” and praising our very deserving wonderful actors, Jasmine Dorothy Haefner and Benjamin Parsons. But in the subtitle of the review itself our script caught an adjective that you can’t spin: clunky. (OED says the word is often associated with ungainly shoes; footwear plays no prominent part in RETROSPECTIVE.)

Why am I bothering to tell you about this undesired adjective? Because the purpose of this series, and indeed of the entire enterprise of TESTING A PERSONAL HISTORY, is not just to celebrate triumphs or offer interesting memories. The purpose is to continue a conversation that might lead to continuing education for all of us via reading about these experiences. The review provided an apt moment for such learning.

How do we survive the downsides of our imposed trials or, in the case of writing and co-producing a play like RETROSPECTIVE, self-initiated trials, weather the “testing or putting to the proof the fitness, truth, strength, or other quality of anything” when the results is not what was planned? Some other (and, I hope, much younger) enterprising Playwright/Producer might comfort and counsel themselves with the realization that things balance out with the right attitude, with realizing that mostly stuff balances out. 

Our balancing has on one side the wonderful reaction of audiences throughout the first 4 performances along with the thrill of watching our actors and team dazzle. And the other side holds this review, which as I noted has some nice things to say, such as calling our production “thoroughly lovable.” I don’t think I’ve been called thoroughly lovable since my mother’s been gone. In fact, now that I think of it, did my mother or anyone else ever call me thoroughly lovable? 

I’m using that phrase ‘balances out’ because as a devoted fan of Martin Short. I listened to his recent interview in which he addressed the aftermath of the tragedy of his daughter’s recent suicide. That event is the worst that can happen to a parent. It puts everything that’s happening to me in perspective.  Martin said that he can go back to 2010 when he lost his wife to cancer. Devastating again. And yet he had to go on. So, to do that he began think of life as a sort of balancing out; there are good things and very bad things. The ledger might not always come even, but we need to remember our blessings instead of just our woes, terrible in Martin’s case as they are.  

The harsh circumstances of Martin Short’s calamity remind us of what real setbacks are in life. But even on our diminished scale, we need to keep in mind how unlikely we are to have all of the good things in any venture. So, a review suggesting that the script for RETROSPECTIVE (tix available at this link) is overstuffed in perspective is not that big a deal. And since we invited (begged for) critics to attend a performance, then we needed to be prepared that some of what emerges might not be desired. That’s show business.

Monday night, with our play dark, we went to see the play Grace Pervades by David Hare and its powerful performances by Ralph Fiennes & Miranda Raison. Fiennes is playing the famous 19th century actor manager Sir Henry Irving who is credited with turning theater into a very potent force in both the UK and America. In one scene, Irving is reading a less than positive review and bemoans the fact that such publicity could interfere with his attempt to keep his theatre, The Lyceum alive. But he does not let the criticism stop or even daunt him; he keeps on keeping on. Irving pretty much died on stage doing what he loved, what be believed was critical for the world: creating art from the tragedies. Fiennes as Irving embodies that indomitable will to create what he believes needs to exist. One line in the play serves to defend his partiality to doing tragedy over and over: “Irving: Did you know that in Shakespeare there are seventeen ‘no’s to every one ‘yes’?… All his power is in the negative.“

We are not in Irving’s position; we don’t presume to put ourselves in parallel to such a genius and pioneer. We’re not even going to compare ourselves to Gary Oldman who is in a sold out production of Krapp’s Last Tape., but had to deal one morning with these reviews as selected by Fergus Morgan in his blog The Crush Bar: 

“Others, though, are left underwhelmed, with WhatsOnStage’s Sarah Crompton finding him neither “as moving or as desperate” as previous Krapps and The Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish also opining that he fails to “match the elegiac greatness” of Harold Pinter’s performance in 2006.” 

Are they kidding? This is GARY OLDMAN. And why is someone comparing him to Harold Pinter’s performance? This isn’t Mixed Martial Arts for Actors. Given Gary’s career, I’m betting that he is able to see how things balance out: sold-out houses applauding versus someone flushing out ‘previous Krapps’? (Yes, I did do that there.) 

This part of our London Test requires that balancing. There’s no time to curl up in a fetal position because someone called writing that matters a great deal to you clunky. I stick to what I have learned so far in theatre. And one of the most important lessons was the advice of David Mamet that the audience teaches the playwright. Note what stirs or stymies them. Could there be changes to the script going forward? The answer to that is always. But it would be foolish to rob myself, (And potentially through dark moods and looks, the rest of the team,) of the joy and satisfaction that we have felt because of the enthusiastic genuine reactions from the audience. Stick with what you know, but be open to new ideas. Paul Saffo’s timeless advice to “have strong opinions, weakly held.” Turn to advice for friends for how to go forward. Focus on what’s next. That’s how you pass this test. 

I wrote about the criticality of collaboration in the SubStack version of this stream of semi-consciousness. No need to repeat all that here, but this will keep the chain of posts about the London Test of bringing our play RETROSPECTIVE to the UK at Barons Court Theatre