An absolutely irrelevant note about foreign policy

Last night, a cab driver assaulted me.

No, it wasn't the usual, "You nice lady. You married, Miss?"

It was about healthcare. I spent about 15 minutes (the entire ride) trying to explain to a man to whom I just explained the word "breathing," why our country didn't have national healthcare already.

"Germany, England, France, you pay nothing. Obama say in 2014 we pay a little bit. This good plan, Miss?"

He was a leaden pipe full of hot water, and if his long beard weren't black, I'd've thought it was steam. Here we were, Jew and Muslim driving toward the neighborhood we both live in (Bensonhurst/Dyker Heights), and we weren't talking about "loneliness" or Israel.

In the past, drivers, and in fact, people in cafes, my left-wing psychiatrist -- a fair number of people have engaged me on foreign policy early in conversations. I learned about Israel's latest controversy while sitting in the waiting room of my psychiatrist's office --reading TIME magazine. Yet, we didn't get into it at all in session. We were both more concerned about our pets and about the obvious necessity to increase my anti-anxiety medication. The latter has become a staple of how I "deal with" the state of our economy and my job. In fact, economics has ruled most of my social and medical life since Bloomberg took office.

Yesterday afternoon, at a cafe, no one even bothered to put the closed captioning on when our Secretary of State Hlilary Clinton was on CNN. Perhaps she is aware of her own place as a kind of throwback to another time. I was shocked to find she has now grown her hair long and set it in the "Upsweet" popular in the 1960's. Will the Jackie-O make-up follow?

I still have no idea what announcement the former-First Lady/Presidential Candidate and powerfully staunch hawk was making. At a time when world economies continue to be in need of serious vision, hardly anyone cares about what we hope to be our foreign policy. Excepting of course those unfortunate people whom we might be bombing, boycotting or bungling attempts to provide humanitarian aid. Sadly, most of those people are really facing the results of our economic policy which has remained stagnant since we voted in resounding force for change back in 2008. Take those receiving the humanitarian aid known as unemployment. --I know they're not the same, but de facto, they are. In a WORLD which lives on credit and in which money is no longer measured by the gold standard, the question of what we pay and what we afford has to do with psychology and not finance. If that weren't true, everyone would've pulled their money out of the stock market years ago as very few sectors of any economy are truly flourishing. Unregulated capitalism leads to a lot of cheap goods, bankruptcies and reorganizations as well as monopolies. None of this provides much entry-way for the average citizen to benefit. No Milton Friedman fan can defend/explain or fix what happened in Russia if you want proof on a smaller scale than our worldwide dilemmas.--

What I did know this week was that President Obama said it was important for Congress to "do the right thing" and extend unemployment. That's about as strong and open-hearted a phrase he has used in some time on a liberal cause and it made me hopeful. Our President doesn't want to see people suffering. That's important.

It did not give me an answer for what to tell my driver. In the end, we haggled about his tip, which I had mistakenly not added using the new touchscreens mandated by our lovely Mayor. This is perhaps because I pushed the button to turn the screen OFF very hard possibly damaging it., so that I would not have to watch the especially bad and tourist-driven television it will proffer it I did not. In the end, I reviewed the receipt multiple times and handed the driver much less than the percentage I would've tapped in had the machine been working properly. I resented the argument, though I knew it was his right to make it. I wasn't about to NOT tip him, but there were more polite ways to raise the issue that the tip did not seem to be calculated. For someone who had been fervent, but open to my opinions in an overall discussion of economics, the push and shove on dollars was a little unsettling. If I hadn't been so tired and were generally a more confident person, I might've used it as what we is called a "teachable moment." The same tension with which he fought over three versus five dollars is what drives the argument against healthcare. It is also what some people call, "bad business" as it's not the kind of behavior that makes someone want to step into your cab again. Since it is truly random whether or not a driver sees a passenger again, I guess it doesn't matter. It is an industry, then, which can be used as a microcosm for examining our economy. Essentially, it is driven by an exchange between two people and the value of the service fluctuates depending on individual moods and the weather. Like a magnate, a cab company survives by having so many cabs that they can cover their losses. There is very little ability to control quality beyond a minimum. (I get out of cars that don't have air conditioning or heat and I suspect that's where most people draw a line if they have made the decision that they need to pay the fare.) It is a mobile marketplace complete with haggling salespeople.

If he was asked, I am sure the driver would prefer not to have to raise the issue of a tip. I'd certainly prefer that the agreed upon price somehow provided him with adequate sustenance. But, that would require a decision by producer and consumer on what the set value of the entire service IS. What does the driver deserve to make? What does a human being require for healthcare?

Of course, most of the time, I take the subway or bus, but I was trying to avoid the death-claw of the humidity on the platform last night. I was able to do so, in no small part, owing to the long history of labor bargaining for a fair wage and benefits. But, someone who isn't so lucky, who might take the train and find breathing suddenly difficult might then be rushed to the ER. There, he or she would receive services which, if he/she is uninsured, for which he/she won't be able to pay. Because we are not as cold-hearted a people in New York as people think, our hospitals don't push people toward their deaths and refuse them treatment. Yet, we don't just agree to provide all members of our city with insurance because we would rather engage in daily bargaining than commit our wallets. (What is a healthcare plan which will be implemented in 2014 but conjecture -- at most, a gauntlet on a bargaining table.) I wonder at how much this would really cost us if we sat down and considered:
1) What REALLY is a fair amount of profit? Yes, there is unfair profit. Maybe we should call it unreasonable profit -- a profit margin which will ultimately make it impossible for any consumer to afford the product. That requires a certain honesty on everyone's part. For example: No one needs a 150 dollars sneaker which is not orthopedic and no one should be making 140 times what it cost to make the sneaker, assuming that it took some Indonesian woman at Nike one whole day to make that pair for her wage of one dollar.
2) What is the REAL COST of our treatment? The price of the 15 minute glance-over and routine blood tests most people get, at best? Is that the treatment which our doctors really think is enough if they were being paid adequately? Not being as liquid as my mother was, I go see doctors who take my insurance. Even when they are good, they are still overworked and behind schedule.
3) Do you find it unpleasant to step over homeless and sick people on your way to work, or do you just consider this some reaffirmation of Calvinism, Fascism -- or do you just enjoy the feeling of being inside a painting by Francis Bacon?

If we thought about all of this, we might then turn up the volume on Mrs. Clinton, as, I am sure something she was talking about had to do with paying for bombs or humanitarian aid. For the value of the former, see question 3 again

Cheer

Making lists of lists

I still haven't gotten to the place where I find writing down a list acceptable.

However, I am constantly revising ones in my memory. Today there wre the many forms to print. 2010 and some offices actually still want you to print and mail forms. Why is that?

Time is absolutely no balm to wounds. What it is, is a tyrant to the memory. All sorts of things from the remote past become clear and where you left your cell phone a minute ago is a mystery.

Two years ago, I remember being chided for seeming to have a good time while working. What's the point in having an awful time? But this is the result of being in a world in which we are being evaluated for perceived productivity. I suppose I couldn't be effective and be laughing? One of the many things I've liked about working with high school students is that they are interesting. They are especially so as I never was the kind of teenager they are. I wore my backpack on both shoulders, sat outside classrooms and gave up my lunch period to add another class to my schedule. So, the world of the teenager amuses me. It seems much more like the world of Shakespeare than anything I've ever known.

Writing this blogpost was not on my list. Defiance never is, but I am always trying to practice it. Since, like laughter, it is nearly gone from my professional life, it must live on in my personal one.

How do you set priorities in the middle of an avalance?

I made several decisions in the past few months: what career I want to pursue next, what I would do about my health, what I would do about the state of my apartment.

Here's the problem: I don't believe I can do any of them.

When I was in graduate school, I always knew I could teach. So, I never worried about having an income. It's impossible to believe you can do anything if you feel that your day-to-day life is endangered. I try to act calm about being an ATR again. I try to take things day-to-day.

I'm a lousy poker player.

Oh Hennybee....

We know you are with us always. Bernie acts more and more like you every day... PLEASE STOP ENCOURAGING HIM TO HIDE UNDER THINGS....

We lost our Hennybee (fellow in white) four years ago. He was the definition of love itself. One time, I was losing consciousness so I called 911. He hid under the refrigerator and he stayed there until I came home. He just couldn't handle my not being there. As soon as I got home, I picked him up right away and, as usual, he purred like a tractor.

When does something constitute torture?

A man makes a promise to another man. You work for me, you work consistently, and you will always have a job. Twenty years later, the man says, "Sorry. I can't afford your salary. You have to go out and compete against people younger and cheaper. If not, you'll still have a job, but you will have no control over the circumstances. You will be unable to be consistent." If this were an agreement between one small employer and employee, it might be easy enough to see that there would be a case for "breach of contract." The day-to-day changes in the employees job description might constitute some kind of torture. But, when you're working for a large system like the DOE, it's harder to make the argument. First of all, you have an unsympathetic taxpayer base which does not imagine what your or your school day are like on a day-to-day basis. Since most of these taxpayers traded competition and bonuses for job security, they can't possibly see why other people who didn't sign on for that career path can't hack it. Finally, we are living in "the age of the bully." Supervisors are being praised for finding as much fault with workers as possible. Much of the steps the UFT has set to protect people from getting "U" ratings without due process are being ignored. Not because the UFT isn't trying. Ultimately, it's up to your principal and a DOE evaluator to decide if you deserved that "U." There's not a lot of incentive to defend people who are experienced and highly paid but who are having trouble making the transition backwards in their careers. What I mean by this is, some teachers have worked 20 years or more in one school and one population and have become finely attuned to their needs. Throw them into a whole new ballgame and they are not likely to be as immediately effective. Imagine you were a doctor working with people with chronic depression. You are then moved to work with a group of people who engage in emotional and physical violence, have ADHD, and you have no MSW or Psychologist to help you navigate the waters. The difference in the kind of aggression is impossible to explain. Plus, you are constantly being expected to instantly transform into someone new. You spent your career as a combination Corrections Officer/Counselor/Troubleshooter and now you are being asked to be Mr. Rogers for a group of students who don't respond to him. Your principal wants to create a "warm and friendly" environment, but he hasn't done anything to teach the students what this means in practical terms. They haven't practiced kindness, patience, respect. It reminds me of Ismael Beah's A Long Way Gone. When he and other child soldiers in Sierra Leone were brought to rehabilitation centers, they started fights and killed a few other new residents. The staff just kept saying, "It's not your fault," that this is happening to you. They took many months to try to settle into some normalcy. Meanwhile, a student body accustomed to punishment is being given the same room to rebel. Except that the speed with which they recover is YOUR FAULT. And you can't go back to methods which you've used before because they are considered too cruel or to blunt.

It's double-think, squared. That has to be a violation of human rights.

The Innocent Bystanders

This year, I lost more students and colleagues to violence and illness than I have in all the years I have been teaching. I've lost close family, too, particularly my godmother Mary Pearce, and I've written about her elsewhere on this blog. This is the first time I've been so inundated by unexpected and accidental deaths of people younger than I am. The most recent student, Michael Gonzales of Tilden HS, was a sweet kid -- a true teenager in the best of senses. He liked to skateboard, dance and he mostly had his head on his shoulders. He was not an academically aggressive student, but when pushed, he tried. He was navigating the academic world better than his skills might've allowed.

Tomorrow there is a candlelight service for Michael. I don't know if I will go because I sometimes feel as if I join in grief almost to prove my own life was important. I was at Tilden for one year. In that time, I must've talked to Michael almost every day. But, I never had him for a class -- I subbed for his advisory teacher a few times. I spent a lot of time convincing him to GO to class, and he mostly did. Like a lot of kids, he rode the limits of how far he could stay out of class without pushing it to the point of not graduating. He graduated last week. He died July 4, 2010. A bullet meant for somebody else hit him in the chest.

So many of the students' postings on Facebook ask the familiar question -- Why Mike? And some speak of wisdom far beyond their years and experience. Some students talked about how this taught them not to hold onto anger -- whatever fights they might've had with Mike paled now in perspective. Some wrote the equivalent of W.H. Auden's haunting warning, "We must all love one another or die."

If I were to try to explain to those students (and to myself) why so many "good die young" it might be an extension of Auden's warning adapted to 2010. We must all remember, whenever we bring violence into the environment, whether it be gun violence, whether it be the violence that propels us not to get people appropriate health insurance or just anger, we ENDANGER everyone in our environment. (I lost a student to Ketoacidosis. I have a friend who has survived that many times: the difference is education about Diabetes and insurance.) Our "beefs" are minimal -- the world, and life are not just about us. Whether we foolishly build a post office near a runway because it seems convenient, or, as I did a few years ago, we let off steam out of hubris, we inevitably endanger someone who will come into contact with our work who does not see our mistake coming. As a colleague once said to me when I faced punishment for my mistake, "You weren't thinking about the students who would need you the next day." Whoever brought that gun on July 4th, wasn't counting on missing. That's hubris, too. Not to be callous, but if you think you're going to be perfect at taking revenge, and then you hurt someone completely innocent, not only did you not get your desired goal, but you are now going to be punished for something you didn't want to do. So, even if you "made peace with the consequences" of hurting your intended victim, you royally miscalculated and now two people will have their lives cut short -- you and the innocent bystander. Even if you got your revenge, you weren't thinking about the people around you who need you -- maybe people you haven't even met yet but whom you could have/were intended to meet. If you say to yourself that you don't care, that G-D lets the violence happen in other places and doesn't stop it, you are just fulfilling a cycle of violence which inevitably hurts people whom you or someone you had no intention of hurting loved and helps no one. Do something positive and watch -- people you care about and people you didn't even know will benefit. And the energy will come back to you.

So, why does G-D let this happen to innocent bystanders: to remind us that we are responsible for everyone we come into contact with. That every decision we make, especially one involving violence, includes everyone in our immediate world. As people often say these days, "It's not about YOU." It's about everyone around you.

If I could give Michael's friends advice tomorrow, I would say to remember a time in which they had pure fun, whether it was with Michael or someone else. Hold that moment. The next time you feel angry in any way, reach for that moment. And remember that you don't want to deprive more people like Michael, like Terrance Wright, like Nakemia Riley...like Karen Hunter, of that moment. Give more when the instinct is to pull away. Be extra careful when you feel like you can "let something go." Have no hubris. And recognize that the people you care about do need you. The world needs more of the good people I have lost.

Hold tight to those memories of fun. Be generous -- let the world have the care it needs. No one should die because of something which can be prevented. We should never let our prejudices get in the way of medical research as we have with so many diseases. When in doubt, give. If you're a doctor, take on the extra patient. My uncle is very lucky. His friends gathered around him when he was diagnosed with cancer and his network got him to the best of care quickly. People put him at top priority. A veteran, a father and a good man, he deserved that treatment. But so does everyone.

This country could feed the world if everyone donated 15 dollars a day. There are limits to how much profit anyone needs to make. Anyone who has been in an emergency room knows that good, smart doctors know how to find a way to get people the priority of care they need. It can be done. It is done. And I can list tons of airports with grass alongside their runways -- room for error. Because none of us are perfect, and its hubris to think we can be.

I am lucky for the good memories I have of those I have lost. I will try to hold onto them when I feel angry, stingy, lazy or "above it all." I will try.

Mike's friends have put together a really thoughtful site on Facebook.: RIP White Mike http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=137750112917814

Bill Clinton Explains Robert Byrd's Membership In KKK

Writing in relative oblivion

The internet hasn't necessarily increased communication. Perhaps it's shed light on how many people are willing to write without ever being read, or just on the chance that they might be. For some of us, the blogosphere is the equivalent of Emily Dickinson's dresser drawers. Who has space for all that paper, these days. Even if you do, who wants to go to the Container Store and organize it.

I'm always surprised when someone knows of my blog, or just knows of it as part of a sector of 'x' kinds of blogs. Used to be, this was an angry anti-establishment blog. Now this is meant to be just a chronicle.

This past year was, perhaps the first time, that I had to actively speak with colleagues about what was "official" or "unofficial" and about actively playing the polarizations in action throughout the DOE. For many years, I've been aware of the politics. This year was the first time I actually had to try to "play" it. Usually, I go about my business in earnest and that makes me too risky for either side to try to use. This year, the winds shifted so many times, that just to phrase a sentence, required sliding my words through the unseen lights of multiple alarm systems.

The kind of political shapeshifting required by the DOE, I think demands several years of training. It's a combination of diplomacy and intelligence work. You never insult anyone, but you try desperately to understand his/her agenda and its roots. While you do this, your administrators switch agenda. Finally, I found myself doing what people have told me to do for years -- DOCUMENT EVERYTHING. By the end of the year, I found myself with, at least, ten written reports on student behavior a day. This doesn't count the numerous emails on various topics, some meant to clarify the ones just before them. Pressure just to prove what was going on where forced all the teachers I knew to write down practically everything they saw. And then at PD, the discussion was about moving away from this kind of practice. Since I'm not part of the school's future, for me it was just interesting how the thought processes in one part of the school were so different from the practice in another. I myself don't like writing down everything I see in this way, although the sheer volume of reporting began to have an effect, if only that the people enforcing consequences had bodies of information to support them. If you were to place your heart in any one method, you'd've earned yourself a metaphorical heart attack this year, anyway. Policies do need to evolve, though you hope to stay in the same philosophical place in which you began. I don't know, truthfully, what I can say about the latter as I found it bet just to roll with things. I think we all learned to distance ourselves from decisions, processes, anything but the students' work on paper and how the students could improve. We only began possibly to distance ourselves from the latter in those last minutes when it was clear that some studens weren't going to submit work no matter how much they didn't want to go to summer school. Worse, that many students hadn't really changed their patterns over the year. We had, in our many shifts of shape, adjusted to them.

The pressure to shift comes from the pressure to produce -- which comes from our Mayor and his Dept. of Education. If you were training a team of competitive athletes, you could never do what the DOE asked. You can't do "muscle and skill recovery" in the last two weeks before the playoffs. That's why you just put kids on the disabled list or take them off the team when they aren't able to meet the standards of competition.

But, I'm not a person concerned so much with the "competitiveness" of our students as I am their interest and investment in their own learning. It's possible to be competitive, but narrowly trained. I don't think we can produce schools and schools of "Closers." What I'm concerned about is that students see school as a kind of meeting place. Some of the people they meet are caring, adult and students alike. They don't see it as a place of learning -- not the learning they recognize. They learn more by doing at home and even watching tv -- at least, according to them. Nor do they often take pride in what they do. I have seen students who recognize their work as part of the development of their minds, ideas and creativity. That still doesn't mean they take care when they do all of it.

If there is one pressure perhaps we can "push back" at the DOE, it should be the pressure to differentiate instruction and outcomes. Since we know we are going to have to make adjustments based on the needs of our students, why don't we argue for multiple ways of testing and more curricular choices. We always know we are going to find students whose written work may excel even their ability to answer canny reading comprehension questions. The kind of literary/critical thinking which goes into exams is not necessarily that of most writers' processes. Couldn't students submit creative work which presented skills in craftsmanship and in using language?

Many private schools provide independent reports on students and some provide only these as their evaluations. I think we force ourselves into a continual shell game every year, the more we demand students excel in one way on a "shared set of standards and curriculum." We all know you can hand two teachers one set of guidelines and that they will be interpreted slightly differently. It's the ability to be different than someone else which does give us an advantage in a capitalist economy. Half the country pays twice as much for an MP3 player than it needs to, not completely acknowledging the monopoly that company has on music sales, because that company claims it is "different" than the company which usually has the monopoly on other areas of the market. It's true that there are certain "uniforms" and dress codes for business. Isn't the person we admire most the one who makes the best of the restrictions? We put a tremendous premium on conformity in a way which I think only serves to sell the items we label as "standard." How many people have spent more time thinking about "the right interview suit" vs. the right "fit" for the job and later, the right, "life plan."

Perhaps one benefit of the internet is that it is a testimony to how much people want to express their individual ideas. If we thought of our students as people who probably have and read blogs, who communicate via social networks, and take the time to, at least, organize their music so that it will support their days, we might view them more as differentiated pre-adults than clans of age groups to train. Whole markets are geared to them, and they know it -- and they use them. But, we offer them perhaps a small percentage of what they could be learning and an even smaller one of ways to show this. Then, we wonder why they find school boring.

They wonder, too, why we look so tired. The gap between what we are asked and how we work and the way they live the rest of their lives is too wide to begin to explain it.