Tightening those salaries

According to this Sunday, March 6, 2011, NY Times

The average salary for New York’s full-time state employees in 2009 (even before the last round of raises) was $63,382, well above the state’s average personal income that year of $46,957. Mr. Cuomo’s proposed salary freeze for many of the state’s 236,000 employees is an important step to rein in New York’s out-of-control payroll. It could save between $200 million and $400 million.

According to Executive Paywatch, the average CEO makes 263 times the salary of the average worker. Furthermore, Executive Paywatch charts the following

2009 Average CEO Pay at S&P 500 Companies
Salary $1,041,012
Bonus $203,714
Stock Awards $2,630,574
Option Awards $2,284,595
Non-Equity Incentive Plan Compensation $1,790,703
Pension and Deferred Compensation Earnings $1,060,867
All Other Compensation $235,232
Total $9,246,697

(Both stats can be found at http://www.aflcio.org/corporatewatch/paywatch/pay/index.cfm).

So, whose salaries need to be hemmed in?

Grynberg has a note

Dear Teacher, Friend, Relative, Larry and Bernie,
Wednesday, 18 August 2010 at 08:13

After I came home from last night's Yankees game (they won), I found I couldn't sleep a wink. This happened the night before, too, but I was sure the game would wear me out. It didn't. I got a headache listening to a bunch of wise-guys behind me trying to predict the Yankees team for next year and a bunch of reckless 30 somethings drinking beer and making inside jokes loudly and nearly pissing themselves. On the two hour ride home (the "N" is local after 10pm.) I was able to "blitz out" a little. God bless Mr. Bloomberg. Now I have so many more chances to be mugged and assaulted by homeless people who get on at stations like "City Hall." Why we are stopping in non-residential neighborhoods and going under the fetid tunnel to do it, I don't know. I thought you saved energy when you went directly from point to point, not stopped and started. Fortunately, there were lots of people on my train discussing sales loudly and keeping their children under the age of one up late on the ride home from grandma. The kinds of noises babies can make never cease to amaze me. This one sounded like an electric toothbrush running backwards. My poor mother kept me off the subways until I was 7 so that I might have normal hearing. Alas, it was all for nought.

There doesn't seem to be a week in my life in which there is not some major catastrophe about to befall me or my friends. This summer brought eviction notices (to friends), the threat of jail for missing jury duty too many times (friends), and the tenderhooks which come from caring for a cat who is sensitive to all kinds of stress and who resists by not eating. (Friend's cat. Larry and Bernie eat.) So, even when you jump away to the Church of Overpaid Athletes and surround yourself in the photos and memories of successes which make your parents, uncles -- all of your forebears -- dreamy-eyed, you can't really escape the tension. Then, of course, I forgot that I moved my medication schedule way up, so that it starts at 10pm. Completely impractical, but some of this tension contributed to this foolish decision. So, just as the game ended, the withdrawal started to kick in. The buzzing in the ears. The inability to complete a thought. The rage at my own stupidity. And for some reason, I get very thirsty.

I got a real deal on a huge bottle of water for one dollar.

But, then my friend wanted to explore for a while and my mind was turning into rabbit food, my feet beginning to swell and my back bend toward the ground. For some reason, I think people can see these symptoms, but since I'm already so short, have huge feet and bad posture, I guess it's only a matter of degrees. I had to insist we go home. Then I had to remember which train to take -- which stairs to go up or down on. There were a lot of MTA people in the station telling us what we already knew. I thought I heard the MTA person tell my friend to just go upstairs and take the four. I got confused and angry and my friend, rightly told me to back off. When we finally reached the train, our place in Yankees mythology now torn away from us, the grimness set back in. Medicine had to be got at the pharmacy. Inadequacies of the Vet bothered my friend and this brought back memories of the loss of my first godson-cat. An afternoon in which he was screaming for attention and it was hard to get it. I wasn't there because I was somewhere with Karen. If I'd've been there I could've kicked up a scene. I'm good at that. That was my job. Instead, my friend was trying to bridge the line between Mary Tyler Moore and Taxi Driver that is the Animal Medical Center and my godson cat collapsed in the process. We lost him the next morning.

I went home angry at myself, my friend, at the doctors and ugly with the feeling that I had let down my dearest friend -- and he was. My own cat Fred, I fear I over-reacted to so many times that it had much the same effect. I am much calmer with Larry and Bernie but they are brimming with health and stamina and curiosity. Where and who I will be when they are frail and desperate I don't know. I promise them the world, but I mean the Disney one. The real one is the color of breath on a late night in the subway. A faint grey, tinged with sweat and impropriety. After all, who cares what happens to the 40 or so people on the "N" after 10pm? If you run a train, slowly, through the ghost stops of the workday, clicking into the routines of the homeless, the desperate and the lonely, what kind of protection can you offer the few people coming home from a sale or a baseball game? If that baby were screaming for attention and the parents got out at Court Street, there would be hardly anyone on the street until they reached the small newsstand down Montague. If they called 911, they'd be taken to over-crowded and under-funded Brooklyn Hospital or to the smaller, but no less crowded Long Island College Hospital. Would the baby have collapsed by then?

All of this does not deflect from my role in the death of my godson-cat. No one can handle anyone's failing health alone. I should never have let his mother go alone without me. But I was on my way somewhere with Karen or was I on my way to work? Work at a school closed in directly inverse proportion to the amount of care that the staff put into it -- it was done quickly and silently with barely a trace. The school that replaced it is a land-mine, out of control and dangerous. The first day they opened a girl brought a knife. But the principal is married to someone involved in the creation of Transfer High Schools. So, despite the fact that there is shouting in the halls and souls are collapsing, it will keep going. I'm told a lot of the new schools are in this kind of disrepair. So everyday, some parent goes home on the subways, clammy with the knowledge that he/she was powerless to save his own child.

So, please forgive me. I didn't sleep last night. I would like to have done things today, but I have to try to sleep. On a night in 2007, after four nights of not sleeping too well, I made a very poor judgement call which nearly put my cats and me in jeopardy. I yelled at someone. I tried to cross through that chaotic barrier of unwillingness and resignation to certain death and say something. But, I was rude, and I was tired and I was crying. So I spent a year and three months in the DOE's Rubber Rooms deciding whether or not I was civilized enough to ever work with people again. I did this, knowing full-well that it was illegal to put a person with Aspeger's Syndrome in the Rubber Room on his/her first offense. As a disabled person, I was entitled to the least restrictive environment. But, I was hoping that the many people who were speaking up for me would make the case. At least, in the end, it got me out sooner and helped me negotiate a settlement. Because no successful person in this country has ever lost his/her temper in public. Not George Steinbrenner, not Billy Martin, not Thurmon Munson, not Lou Piniella, not Michael Bloomberg, not Bill or Hillary Clinton, not Ronald Reagan ("tear down that wall" is a polite request), not MacArthur and not Barack Obama. Never. Curt statements about human rights don't count -- they were done in the proper form. You can't have everyone over for beers. So long as you don't shout, don't cry or show emotions, you’re fine. There are no mediators in most places. And what we need most are mediators, especially if we are going to bridge political, social, emotional gaps and reach across the table between the neurotypical and non. They say Einstein probably had Asperger's Syndrome. He was given a lot of room for eccentricity and assisted in bringing his ideas to the world. If that hadn't happened, well, he'd of been the janitor in "Good Will Hunting," if he were so lucky. Probably not with that hair.

What about the founding fathers, the “Give me liberty or give me death," people, the notion of resisting oppression especially when it’s life threatening. “You gotta do what you gotta do.” You can’t run a country with everyone resisting every five minutes. Well, you could, actually, if people would just be open about what their agenda were from the start. Then you’d know either not to take your cats to that Vet or you could stage a more formal protest against decisions made for reasons. Arbitrariness invites secrets and the theories of luck and favor. Someone once told me it was a particular politician’s “time.” Jesse Jackson used to preach sermons about it being “Morning Time” – time for the country to wake up.
The reality is that time is on a 24 hour clock and it’s either time to go to work or it isn’t. There is no particular “time for a change.” There is a necessity for a change. If you tell someone at a job, “it’s time for a change” and walk away, they might just change the music or ignore you and wait for more specific instruction. If you say, “it’s necessary to make a change,” they can immediately ask of what and why? If you believe it’s “necessary,” you’ll be more convincing and more likely to succeed. No one is going to take care of that cat or baby because it’s time to do so – Mussolini ran the trains on schedule and it helped no one, plus, his example has caused most people to go the other way. Time is now, later or yesterday. And it’s in the moment. No need to call attention to it. People make “To do” lists not “To Time” lists. I’m belaboring the point. We create fake measurements of efficiency in this country by doing so in terms of time, which we then say equals money. In that case, we have no control over either. Time is just a way we refer to something out of our hands. The question is: “How well is this country taking care of its people?” That answer comes in how many are living, how they are living and how many are not living. It is reflected in the number of prescriptions for sleeping pills, tranquilizers and sales of alcohol. A generation Martini’d, tranquilized and otherwise drugged itself through the day. My generation has advanced to variations on our parent’s methods, including more intricate and varied drugs as well as Yoga, etc. It’s all not a very efficient way of trying to do one thing: get attention for a sick child, a sick cat or a loved one. We attenuate our feelings so that we can, as politely and non-offensively as possible, ask for what we think is very necessary and some people are gifted at mediating through this, some people are lucky enough to be provided with mediation. For the rest of, there are the hours of lurking in the slow moving train home, blocking out the noise and the knowledge that should anything happen to us, there’d be nothing we could do about it. And you wonder why Ipods sell so well?

Meanwhile cats and babies pass out everywhere.

I will find sleep eventually. I hope there is time later in the week for the things I have promised today. I am genuinely sorry.

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

An old essay topic

For years, I used to give my students the question, "Does punishment work?" as an essay topic. Usually, I got about a 50/50 response, with it coming down to, "it depends on the kid." Most often, they gave examples of how punishments worked on their younger siblings. Whether they were being honest or not, my students usually felt that punishments had stopped working on them -- not because they didn't feel the pain they caused, but because their actions were decisions based on what they thought were rational ideas. Since I've spent the majority of my career working with the overage and under-credited, I'm biased in favor of the latter set of arguments. I've met students who didn't succeed in school because they were busy trying to survive on a much more fundamental level. Yes, I know, there have been homeless kids who get perfect SAT scores. I'd argue that those kids are very talented to begin with. Having gone to Stuyvesant High School, I can also tell you that a lot of very talented kids have trouble succeeding academically when their basic needs are not being met. Exceptions never prove rules.

I think the same formula can be used for adults.

Call me a child of the 70's, but I believe the only way people learn is through forgiveness. Yes, I think wrong behavior should be addressed. But, no teacher or student wants to do harm or to fail. People make mistakes out of frustration, whether they are very young or not so young.

I put this note out there for everyone to consider. You don't need to write five paragraphs in response. Just let me know what you think.

Teacher Isolation

At the end of the day, for about five minutes, I sat with a colleague while he played Pink Floyd's The Wall on his personal laptop. We talked about it -- the themes, where we were when it came out -- I was graduating from 8th grade, he saw the movie with a group of friends. The movie had gotten to me later, in high school, along with Tommy. I always want to go right home after school, which is a new feeling for me. I used to sit with kids for hours or just work with a colleague. But now I wondered why I wasn't right out the door. I needed those five minutes. And then I pushed myself out the door.

Last week someone stole my cell phone and I lost all of my contacts -- it's easy to erase your identity when a person has your handset. There are so many people whom I will never see again, whose phone numbers kept me connected to them. It gave me the semblance of a community. Now, I'm a pushy person. There are colleagues I know who have probably never asked for the phone numbers of colleagues with whom they have worked for years. While people worked closely together, they were much more conscious of their privacy in the generations before me. There was no Facebook to casually sign up on, and they probably wouldn't have, anyway. Perhaps they might have shared their "Linked-In" pages. I doubt it. A recent study of new teachers found that many of them are leaving the profession because they feel isolated, too -- although mentoring programs have helped to reduce some attrition. (How Mentoring Programs Can Reduce Teacher Isolation http://cie.asu.edu/volume8/number14/) There's been a lot of writing on the plight of new teachers, on the need for teachers to collaborate, to communicate with the outside world -- but little on what is happening to the school community itself which makes these, and just connecting with long-time colleagues, near impossible.

With all the closings of schools and the shiftings of personnel, there must be scores of teachers who have lost their communities, and some of their only long-term friends. Working together means you talk to each other every day. But without that ritual, you don't have a way to continue the intimacy. Some people will call each other for a while, perhaps. Juxtaposing the feelings you have for the colleagues with whom you were close and trusting and that of terror which has come with this new era of instability makes it harder to talk to anyone, though. You don't know if your friends have changed. Are they still for real? Are you for real?

In the coming weeks I want to look at studies on teacher loneliness and see if anyone is looking at what is happening to the population of teachers in NYC who are being continually displaced. Are they socializing anywhere? Are they eating alone? Sure a lot of teachers have joined the blogosphere. What about those who haven't. What does it mean to all of us that we have lost direct human contact with so many, so instantly.

Anyone who wants to write in, please do.

Take the AX out of the ATR's Back: A personal story

A year ago, I was an ATR eager to find permanent placement. At the same time, I was in a relatively unstressful position which would have allowed me the room to consider any offers made to me. The volume and intensity of the Bloomberg press campaign was the first to shatter my sense of space for reflection. I walked in to my weekly therapy appointment and the first words out of my normally Pollyanish psychologist were, "You're right. You are going to lose your job. I thought you were just catastrophising." She had just read a series of articles in The Times and they had bowled her over. My anxieties came less from the mainstream press which I knew to be largely biased in the Mayor's favor, but from the words of the bloggers I have come to trust on many things and who had been very helpful to me in my first encounters with the 3020a machine. Still, some of the points they predict about ATR's have yet to come to fruition and worse, the cloud they have placed over the heads over ATR's have caused some of us, like me, to make career decisions out of desperation.

There have always been those on the blogosphere who take some of the choices in the UFT's negotiation process to their darkest logical conclusions. The pictures representing ATR's being loaded off on trucks and the tales of "secret deals" made re the ATR positions proliferate on websites of organizations and people who are often right on larger political points. But, they have been wrong about the UFT's dedication to ATR's from the beginning. If they had thought about it, aside from the fact that our UFT stands for job security, if for nothing else, there is the "Thorn in the side" which the ATR plays in the bargaining process. Since the ATR's cannot be easily done away with and they represent an embarassing managerial and financial situation at the DOE (what CEO of his company can't get his directors to hire a constituency to which the company has legal obligations) finding suitable and efficient placements for the ATR should be something of priority to the DOE. The DOE doesn't look any better than the UFT if it can't GET principals to hire teachers and they therefore languish in the lounge.
During my time as an ATR, I did have few days of such dullness, but most of the time there were multiple things to do, particularly during the term in which I served as a Dean.

But, in refusing to see that
1)the UFT has not yet abandoned ATR's or made statements to that effect and;
2) while few ATR's are in comfortable situations, they are, at least, still eligible to be hired and, for now, to be chosen by a school which might be a good fit;
those who spread the rumors of the doom of the ATR place the brunt of the ax they have to grind (legitimately or not) with the UFT squarely on the backs of the ATR's. Many of us, myself included, jumped at job offers which, given a lesser feeling of desperation, we might have much more rationally turned down. I'm teaching 6th grade two hours from my house at a brand new school. Fortunately, I have a supportive administration and I'm eager to learn. However, I am currently as effective as a first year teacher with no training with this age group. At 41, I have to completely reinvent my methodology and personality and while it is an interesting challenge, it is not easy. I've been playing tug-o-war with the flu and sinusytis and their winning. That plus the stress which comes from feeling like a novice at a game you used to dominate can make it hard not to grab a Hairshirt and take penance.

Like in much of my career, I've been lucky. I worked with some visionary and patient educators like Malaika Holman-Bermiss at Brooklyn Comprehensive. At my current school, my administration shares her respect for the process of learning necessary to developing good teachers. Moreover, I've been helped by the UFT in so many ways and by so many people. I will have a mentor at this position due to the intervention of Amy Arundell, who has been as understanding as a human can be. A few years back, Charlie Turner represented me with such clarity of strategy that he created the foundation for my getting out of a difficult situation. And I will never be able to thank Arthur Solomon enough, for serving as my surrogate father during my year of hell in the land of the reassigned. And Randi Weingarten read so many of my emails, regardless of my point of view, that the dialogue was a continued source of much needed comfort and intellectual challenge. Plus, she directed people like Amy to me who have made an enormous difference to me.

I cannot forget either the enormous support which the blogger community gave to Brooklyn Comprehensive, especially Norm Scott and the entire ICE community.

All I am saying, however, is that the aggression with which the image of the ATR on a tightrope has been pushed forward has had terrible consequences for UFT members. I am not alone in my awkwardly fitting position, two hours from my house, and at this moment fighting off infections which are also the results of being so run down by the intense challenge of the situation. I've taught mostly older adolescents a range of subjects from college prep to AP English and a lot of skills courses along the way. The transition to ten year olds who need very many of the same skills courses but in different packages is fathomable, but just. Barring my dying of a never-ending battle with infections and flus, I should be able to see my way clear to this in a few months. I have a supportive administration and faculty. But, had I not felt an ax in my back, I might've waited until I found a similarly exciting school in Bushwick or East New York.

The dangers of meaningless success

It's hard to tell a parent NOT to be encouraging to a child. They want to convince their kids they can be superheroes so that, I think, when the time comes for them to make their choices in life, they will not feel that they did not have the opportunity to follow their dreams. I'm not here to make the conventional lecture about this attitude, that, yes, little Zeno may have the opportunity to play basketball, but if he has poor balance, the NBA may not be in his future. Many little Zenos have worked so hard as to build serviceable careers either as athletes, broadcasters, writers or coaches at all levels of the sport. What I'm concerned about, besides the fact that there are so few opportunities even for the hardworking in an economy which out-speeds itself in speculation as opposed to observation, is that behind the parents' insistence that Zeno can do it, is an acceptance that, if he can't, it's okay, he can live at home.

Now, I have nothing against parents or their adult children who live with them. My question is, though: Did they really give Zeno the green light to go after his dream or to fail at it? And I believe our public schools are complicit in this regard.

In NYC, parents of public school children are given plenty of reasons to feel content with their children's development. Every year, their children are "tested" to see if they can advance to the next grade. The fact that the NY State exams have been proven invalid as markers for appropriate academic achievement by the results of the NEAP exams is not at the forefront of our media. For 18 million dollars, Mike Bloomberg has launched a campaign that makes "I Like Ike" look like it was the slogan for a student-body president. He isn't lying in the sense that these children did pass an exam. That the exam was beneath the students to whom it was given doesn't matter. After all, he could argue, do you ask the average third grade ballet student to be held to the rigor of the American Ballet Theater school? But, if we don't, then how will this young person really know if he/she is on the path to his/her dream? How will young Marie know her math skills are where they need to be if she is to develop into a scientist? How will her parents know?

You're probably thinking Marie and Zeno's parents are happy enough that they enjoy something in life and have some proficiency in it. They know, right, that the odds are good their kids are going to work a job they hate because they're going to have to "do what they gotta do" to survive?

While it may be true that most people don't go on to make a living at what they want to do, that's no reason to destroy their true opportunities from the onset. Worse, it's leaving most of our students with a proficiency which wouldn't even let them follow the field in popular literature or as amateur enthusiasts. Zeno will get all he needs to know about basketball from watching TV, you think? What if he can't understand the best commentators on the sport. I heard a cashier at a local supermarket talk about how she can't stand listening to legendary broadcaster Tim McCarver because "he knows nothing." When I pressed her for an example, she said that he "just goes on and on and nobody understands him." That's like saying that Keith Olbermann has no sense of irony. So, if Zeno's language skills are low, he may miss a lot of information and perspective which would help him to understand the game, how it's reported and how it advances.

When I was a kid, I was given the sense that the world was open to me. When I went on to high school, I was given even more of a sense that I might be a leader within it. In college, I floundered --not academically-- but somewhat artistically. My critical skills were always strong, but I didn't know nearly as much about how plays are actually put on as I thought. And I didn't integrate well into a performing ensemble because I was extremely defensive. Nevertheless, I got excellent grades in my major of Theater and no one ever sat me down to talk about the pragmatics of my entering the field. I went to an esteemed school and my degree was not an artistic one, but one in liberal arts. In other words, for a non-artist, I had done well. But, no one explained this to me, then. I learned this when I went on to get an MFA--a degree designed to test my abilities as a theatrical artist. I learned about what BA programs were and weren't designed to do, and I faced the fact that I could teach, write about or work in a quasi-academic role assisting a director, but that my temperament in itself was going to make it hard for me to direct or act, whether or not I had real talent. Had I been assessed this way in college, I'd probably have changed the strategies I used to plan my studies and my future. I'd've known that I needed to head to a Ph.D. program and I'd've thought of myself as a historian/scholar. Thankfully, my schooling did give me advantages I could have and could still use to pursue that aspect of the field.

My mother and I had a few exchanges in which I assured her I could become a teacher if theater didn't work out. When she asked me, about two years ago, why I felt unsatisfied with my achievements, I pointed out among other things, that I had never "made it" -- never written a play which went to Broadway, etc. She responded in complete shock, "Is that what you wanted? Very few people can do that." It's not the sweet assurance that I wasn't alone in my lack of achievement, but the disbelief that so disheartened me. I had been writing, acting and going to see plays and operas my whole life. Yet, I wasn't expected to have wanted to attain conventional success in the field I spent most of my time working in, at all. What did she think I was doing in those summer acting classes? What was I dreaming about? Was I expected to languish in precocity my entire life? My uncle, I learned about a year earlier, hadn't really given any thought to what I would become -- this despite his being the cheering section at several debates I lead in elementary school and the catalyst for my attending Stuyvesant High School. He said to me, "I had no idea...You were a girl...I thought you would get married." I went to college in the 80's and my uncle is a dentist, my mother a semester away from college graduaton and my father (though absent from my life) was a CPA. My mother insisted in a way I came to see more as pragmatic and faithless, that I could always live at home and she could support me. I'd gone to top schools which had made me a shrewd student, but for all my decent grades, no one really thought they had proof I was going to "be anything." What I had thought was a track record of success was meaningless to those around me. Fortunately, I had been competitive academically my whole life so I had developed useful skills and ideas and even strategies for survival. I had assumed, too, that I probably wouldn't live as an artist and took a teaching job fairly soon after graduation. Until this June, I still worked in the theater as a dramaturg, but it's harder to bifurcate my energies between two worlds and I need to harness them for the job that pays the bills. Acting and directing did help me as a teacher, and I haven't stopped looking at things as an artist. I encourage my students to do the same, but I hold them to real standards. I've found there are a lot of good, young artists out there and not enough good training or work. At least, however, an artist should know if he/she is really as effective as he/she can be. So they know that they had the chance to make use of what luck, hard work and time did offer.

In giving public school students weak assessments, we are denying them their dreams and their parents know this. Parents, I think, have become complicit in extending their children's agonies/adolescence because they don't want to seem like they are limiting their exploration. Inherently, however, their dooming them to floundering, rather than finding their niche. The testing movement is a defensive reaction, not a proactive step toward giving students real skills and choices. It's like saying, "Well, for non-students, they're pretty good." The only ones not in on the game are the kids. And they're not reading the commentary in the local tabloids because it's not there -- our major newspapers don't use higher than 8th grade vocabulary, so it might be possible that some of them would understand it. My students who do see postings about the ease of the NY State exams get infuriated. We ought to ask them what they think should be done. They wouldn't mince words.

Honesty

I was given the AP class in my school to teach while the teacher who normally teaches it is ill.

I feel guilty. Yes, I asked to cover the class -- the teacher's entire schedule about a week ago. I didn't do it with the idea in my head of whether I deserved it or not. I just did it because I wanted to do it. I didn't get the rest of the schedule, but I got the AP Class. I sort of get why -- I never got the Ramp-Up training so maybe I don't know enough to lead a class in it. I've taught AP English before, though not with a class as good as this one. I was mediocre at it. I'd've been better had my students done homework.

However, I feel like the senior teachers should be teaching AP English and I shouldn't be. I don't know why I care, or why it bothers me when I have a shopping cart full of books waiting to "Proceed to Checkout" which I want to buy to help me with the class and I'm up now to work on my lessons. It's not that I don't like teaching it. I do. Clearly, I do. I'm spouting off as much as I can remember ever learning and I'm thinking about reading Oedipus Rex aloud in my passable Greek.

It's wrong, though. Much as my outburst last week was wrong. I don't have the right to outrage or preferences. These people have been here for twenty years. I'm just part of the Occupation.

It's not just politically correct politics. It feels god-awful.

So, I'm going to send an email to my chair and the principal expressing the wish that a senior faculty member take the class and I'm going to talk to my union rep as well. My colleagues are all teaching this hideous Ramp-Up curriculum and it's killing them. Plus, they've earned this in this place and I haven't. I believe that.

I don't even mind if my colleagues feel schadenfreud if one of them takes the class away from me. They deserve to feel it. I am feeling self-conscious and miserable in too many ways. Plus, I know I can teach this class some other time in some other place. This isn't my school. It never will be. Even though I also have a Tilden baseball cap in one of my many "Wish Lists" on-line. For me that's fashion, whereas for the other folks at this school it's history.

The trouble is, I don't know if my saying anything will do anything positive, but I'll try. No one at my school reads this blog so they'll never know what I felt. That's okay, too. I write this as one of many ATR's and teachers-who-also-write-and-do-art-in-their-other-lives.

When the war is over, someone buy me new toys

There is no doubt Bloomberg and Klein are fighting a war against teachers. You need look no further than the insanity of my weekly experience. Perhaps the most hilarious moment yet was our professional development on Monday. We were introduced to "Mimio" technology, which is all well in good if we weren't working in a school with a shrinking budget about to be closed. And, the curriculum we are mandated to use in English and Social Studies specfically forbids the use of streaming video and the internet which makes the use of Mimio no more than a blackboard trick, certainly not one worth over 500 dollars to start.

Why keep teachers in a professional development in which you teach them about a technology they can't use and you can't afford to buy anyway? To frustrate them and make them feel obsolete, that's why.

How much did it cost for the demonstration? One of the teachers who attended a workshop for this product was given a t-shirt by the saleslady. Couldn't we, at least, have all had t-shirts? How about backpacks for the students with the logo? No?

Can you hear me? No, I mean, really.

A few days ago I called a parent about her son's lack of focus. I knew her son was deaf, but since he gets to work with a hearing teacher twice a week, I thought his services were in order. Plus, as I am continually reminded, I am the NON-SPECIAL-ED LICENCE-HOLDING person in the room. In the early part of my conversation with the parent, which spanned all three main floors of the building, the mother asks, "Is he wearing his earpiece?" "What earpiece?" "His teachers are supposed to wear this halo which is connected directly to his earpiece." This would've sounded very odd except that as a college counselor I went to conferences were I learned about all the fantastic devices out there to make college possible despite disability, one of these being a device which the teacher wears which does look kind of like a halo around your head and connects back to an earpiece and microphone on the student. I walk my phone over to special ed deptand ask the question about this. "I've got to find it," remarks the woman temporarily in charge of the dept while our chair nurses her newborn. My suspicion is it was lost long before her temporary tenure began. She tells me go down to the principal and ask. I take my cell phone, parent on the other end down to the principal's office. No, he won't just come on the cell phone. She has to call and see if her call is worthy with the principal's secretary first. I tell him what it's about and that the parent is more than concerned. He says she should call the Guidance Counselor for Special Education who is not in that day and with whom I have not had a lot of excellent experience. I find it laughable that he called me on being "not in compliance" when I took a few special ed students out of our classroom to work with separately because they were faster and more rambunctious than the other half of the class. Did he know that WE WERE ALL not in compliances as far as this young man's hearing headgear? I mean, basically, he's deaf as a post. And he sits through the same class he has with us in the period before he works with us -- so he is inundated with aural blur of the same kind for 100 minutes. We wonder why he goes to sleep?
My colleague in the class with the Special-Ed license says that she hasn't ever worked with this device on this young man and she has taught him for most of this year. No one told her a thing about it. That it was once, then that it was lost, etc. As she is meticulous, I believe her. In fact, from the conversation in the special ed office it seems that it was assumed the student would just go without this earpiece and they saw no reason to mention it.
But, I wasn't in compliance working with this kid one - to - four at one table where he could definitely hear me. I am sure that he hears my colleague and much of what goes on in her class because she is clear, but he has other classes which are chaotic and large and not so artfully run. He has often brought up points from the book we are reading which he says he has heard in his other class -- the very same English class taught by another teacher with three times as many students. The points don't seem familiar and I suspect he has half-heard them.

Curriculum Guide

Since I've become an ATR, I've become even less politically astute than before. Didn't think it was possible.

We had a meeting regarding the new curriculum we are using this term. Well, technically it's not really knew as it was used on these same kids when they were in 9th grade. But, new curriculum guides were purchased and even new copies of the same banal book the kids read years ago. There ARE some books worth re-reading at different points in your educational life. Usually, books designed specifically to meet the needs of a particular grade level -- in this case, middle school -- are not one of them. The students don't read at HS level, by and large, but assigning them a book geared to JHS kids was not a good idea. The themes are beneath them and don't merit revisiting. What they needed was something geared to HS kids written at a lower reading level. Or, they needed a book worth reading twice, which is not this book.

During our meeting about this curriculum, I found myself talking. That alone was a mistake. I know that I should keep my mouth shut, but for whatever reason, I needed to pretend to be empowered. When you are an ATR, I think, you want to do as much as possible and to try to connect with the center of the school. What you don't realize is how rotten things are at core and what influences whom because you're new to an already tainted environment and you're not given enough stake in it to get into the kinds of political battles which help you to learn what's worth fighting for. The lessons which go with this book are very amorphous and I've held back from completely suggeting a new structure with accompanying handouts. I said enough, however, to get the administration to use me to create items to make themselves look good -- rubrics for grading. As if there was really material here from which to differentiate.... However, my skills in education b.s. exceed theirs because I am good at creating meaning in activities and evaluations in and of themselves. Part of this comes from watching a colleague design rubrics for grading English essays which were harder than the English Regents, but used the same basic formula. Part of this comes from living in a world in which what the students do in the lesson is the meat of the lesson. It's been years since I've ever seen teachers asked to actually SAY what they are working on without an accompanying action. The phrase, "speak it into existence" has never been so wrongly used. It's not the teachers' fault and its probably not the administrators' fault either. We are all forced to make use of a product.

Indeed, at one point, one person referred to the "decisions" of "America's Choice," the for-profit organization who designed our curriculum. I thought, "that's the name of a company. They're not Harvard, for god's sake. What gives them academic credibility? Next you'll be selling me a curriculum by Fisher Price and speaking of them as if they were run by descendants of Moses."

My biggest mistake, however, was offering to create the enabling materials to make this business look less half-baked than it is. I don't want to seem like I am betraying my colleagues in doing this and I won't do it again, I think. The problem is that we are going to have bigger and bigger problems trying to engage students with this material as it only gets more amorphous and unbound to form as it continues. There's no build of skills upon the other -- there's a reference to a collection of habits students are supposed to develop. I've found that good habits need to be taught thoroughly and sometimes in stages. You can't just say you're teaching them even if you model them. Students need to know, "How." I'll give you an example of the kind of absurdist practice my colleagues and I are forced to perform.

One element of this curriculum is the use of "Sticky Notes," to mark important passages in a book. As a fan of the pen, highlighter and bookmark, I've never actually employed a Post-It to this end. When the students were told to do just that next to an image which they could envision, they were baffled.
First, where to put it: above, below, adjacent? Next: Do I really see what the author says or do I just kind of? If the latter, well does it get a note? Third: Should I put the page number on the note in case it falls out? Wouldn't it just be easier to mark it in my notes?

Since most students don't get the same book again to work with, they might never see this Sticky Note again. Even if they do, they were so busy trying to figure out the logistics that they fell behind in the text which was being read aloud by the teacher. So, they became even more frustrated.

I suggested that the students put their notes on a separate sheet of paper with spaces for each note, page number and, is turns out as I draft it, circling whether it's a description of a place, character or feeling. I didn't get into whether the student can fully visualize the image or not. When I read, I don't necessarily see things immediately, but the overall feeling of the language reaches me. Then, in discussion or re-reading, I see it more fully. Let's not forget that a lot of writing lends itself to synasthaesia. Too bad we're not reading Rememberance of Things Past.

So I found myself defining a real skill and method to cover for an unfinished idea. Students should take note of extensive descriptions as usually they are in place for a reason. I'm not sure that they don't do this already, but they don't generally take notes. The problem is, that in order to distinguish between what's worth noting or not, you have to understand its connection to the plot and themes as a whole. Probably, I'll have to put that in the worksheet. Now, I don't want students not to see things outside of the larger themes -- or necessarily think these are the only themes. Ideally, people would underscore what moves them. However, you usually aren't moved by abstraction that is not connected to something you seek. Since the book isn't really the sort that touches upon universal yearnings, it's good to get them to define what ideas it does have....inasmuch as it does.

Now, the final rub is it will take a long time to do this exercise if I create it right --- and we have been criticized for going over the appointed time for the curriculum. This was explained in this meeting as not meant to limit how much time we take, but that we should make sure that "teaching and learning is taking place" if we do go over. There's concrete for you. Not.

Next time, best to bring and eat cookies.

The Jupiter Symphony

An astrologer friend told me that the past few days have been my "Jupiter Time" -- which is supposed to indicate good fortune, at the very least in friendships, I think. I was skeptical and things came late, but for the first time in years, I have finally got a collegial bond with members of the department in which I work. Some of it is shared perspectives on the new curriculum we teach, but a lot of it is very sweet, mutual respect. I'm especially lucky because I wouldn't have earned this by a long shot, but by accident of fate I ended up working with a small group of really good veteran teachers. BCNHS was a collective of such folks, but it's been a while since we were a unified group and, once it was announced that we were closing, people were sent to different schools on very short notice and our department dwindled to just one or two. Of course, my colleagues are experiencing THAT feeling -- the feeling of tremendous loss of a host of old friends. I'm in the unique position in which making a new friend makes some sense, although I still feel like a refugee from BCNHS. I don't feel like I work at Tilden, still, but I do work with these colleagues and I do understand a little more of the politics which they face. You see, we Aspies can be empathetic, we just are so through our brains and then our central nervous systems.

Anyway, it's just faintly glorious to have people whom I respect and am friendly with at work again.

Disappearing in Blue

This is a furious post. I needed to write it and some people need to know what it feels like to have things like, you know, schools, fly in the face of reason. But it's more than about schools. It's what it's like to be INCAPABLE of a mid-life crisis because I know too well what my mistakes have been, and how I have failed. It's my confession. Perhaps that's why the Catholics do that -- they tell someone, without an expectation of real solution, just absolution. I don't want forgiveness. I just want to see it in print, to know what I know and what I don't. So, being Jewish, it makes sense that this is half-Confession, half Kol Nidre -- the accounting we do on The Day of Atonement. I'm accounting, but I'm not letting go. I need to read it. To see it, to edit it, to re-visit it. It needs to be public so that it can explain what I cannot. If anything, I wrote this because I cannot explain what I keep trying to.

And before I forget, I know how completely and brazenly I steal from Jonathan Levy's rhythms when I speak and write. The only person I know who has ever explained why I so inhaled them is Michael Chabon in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh where the central character talks about stealing other people's characteristics so that you would never really lose them. Even before this onslaught of things that don't make sense, people had tended to disappear on me and me from them for a lot of different reasons. Unfortunately, this theft is not for me, like it is for Chabon's character, a substitute for being more around the person I've stolen from or being more in whatever my own voice is. It's a comfort and it has become what I call it to people who don't know who I'm really referring to -- my self-adopted step-father's voice. Getting to feel like you had a father when you didn't is an amazing gift and, in this case, it also came with a very late and necessary shot of morality. At around 26. Truthfully, what is "me" is mostly a punk-kid. I do try to let the punk out in an effort to not steal so much. And that's why this is probably not such a great piece of writing....but I am and have been carving my own voice somewhat more and more with a better model than I had before 26. I'm still a lucky kid, in many respects, and I know that, too. I just don't get it -- I have luck where I haven't earned it and disaster where I thought I had been more careful. So, here are "the books."

Sometimes, lately, I have absolutely no interest in having any will over things. I forget appointments, I sleep through things I have been looking forward to for weeks. I can't remember where I put anything. Worse than usual on the latter.

I have tried to do what you are supposed to do, say what you are supposed to say, be where you are supposed to be for most of my life after the age of 26. In graduate school, the reality that what I did was not being filmed for play on prime time or in independent movie houses was brought home to me. Students are who I was when I wanted to be all the things I wanted to be and expected that I could be. It's my job to make that closer to reality. And, people really have schedules, responsibilities and their own tragedies. It was time to say what I meant. To "be the thing" as another friend says.

So I mostly did. And there was a grand logic to things for once. I went to bed at 11, got up at 6, was at my office by 7am. I became what a friend called, "dutiful". Whenever I was needed to be there, that's when I was going to be there...mostly. I took on too much, got lost in a lot of dreaming and didn't often know how much work I really needed to do to accomplish what I had just said I would. But, there was going to be a will for most of the ways I felt I had to create. If I had to write and print out letters at 2am, then that's when it had to be done. I made it work.

But my "tin tooth" to steal from Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift was an innate need for there to be some sort of reciprocal feeling in exchange for this. I was good many, many times to try to win affections of many different kinds. I wanted to be good because I loved and wanted to be loved.
The kid my grandmother said "would have a dirty end" had been banished because I was devoted...I was there. I loved somebody and stood behind them, in front of them, next to them --was as near as I thought I could be, let someone amazing "get close" to me. I told the truth, but I tried very much not to hurt anyone. I got better at that. At first, I cared more about being truthful, about the sense something made in my head, than being careful about how and why and when I said things but by the time I was 36 or so I was better at it.

My grandmother cursed me because I fought for my freedom to leave home and not be the appendage of my mother's perversity. She thought I was born to sustain my mother the way she died to do that very thing. On my watch, the new "kid," the girl who found a way to work three jobs to loan people money, the girl who went back and forth and back and forth to help a friend go forward, the girl who said, "you're right, I'm an idea. The word needs to become flesh" and finally made a move...BAD THINGS JUST DIDN'T HAPPEN ON MY WATCH. I got the job, got the extension, got the cash, got whatever, somehow, someway, I always pulled out of trouble. If nothing else, the girl in me surfaced and just pleaded and I got the special paper, the copies in miraculous time, the award for a friend, that piece of research that was elusive, the phone call with the right person. I even found THE PERFECT SCHOOL for the over-aged, under-credited and sometimes zealously overwrought or just over-tired. God laughed at me, but she didn't hurt me. She seemed to be even deciding that, like for Frank O'Hara, the sun would finally talk to me -- I had a love, a soulmate. And then it all ... the mistakes of the toothfilled grinning kid hung like a chain around my neck. Bad mixed metaphor, but that's what it felt/feels like. Like the mark of Cain. It's not "why me?" It's "why now?" It's "why?" And it's still, "You can't be serious, I'm going to wake up, right." But, I can't sleep much to begin with. When I walk into Tilden, gloriously nice as most of the people are, I know it is 2009 and something terrible has happened. It's backwards. I had a soulmate I could talk to, friends I could talk to and a principal who knew me like a mother is supposed to. We didn't buy into bullshit -- collectively. We spoke freely and we acted freely. We. "We". I don't include the last two years of Brooklyn Comprehensive -- or the times I was more of a blithering idiot than usual, generally. Remarkably, for a set of human beings on task to help kids, and in Karen's and my case as two people trying to love, destruction of the individual was very minimal overall. Which is why it absolutely irks me that Karen and the school and my principal -- they all died ON MY WATCH. As an inspired friend said about our school, "Malaika gave us the gift of letting us be ourselves." And Karen gave me that gift at home. I thought being truthful and being loyal meant these things weren't supposed to happen. I'm not being foolish -- it's common sense.

Let me give that some perspective:
I have spent almost 17 years walking through dangerous neighborhoods at dangerous times on dangerous subway lines. Karen worried about this a lot, and sometimes she went to pick me up because of it. But, nevertheless, I sometimes walked through places I'd rather not admit to at 2am, got off at even worse places than where I started, while being short, fat, white, female and obviously carrying an expensive backpack with a laptop in it.

I also believed that, if you really could die just because your engine couldn't get gas at the moment from a clog or you mis-calculated by a gallon because you had a really good dinner and you didn't give this the normal second-thought you would have or you had what you thought you needed and it was wrong -- if a half gallon of gas can be the measure of a person's life-- I never would've believed that letting these confounded cessnas in the air would've been allowed. Period. Think about it. Karen had to wear, and did, a helmet while riding a street-worthy bike through NYC. No one in their right minds would ride a bike whose tires could give out on the drop of a dime for no apparent reason, or could give out for good reason and throw you into the nearest building. No one would buy that bike and ride it through a park. But,we let people go up thousands of feet without airbags and without the contraption that makes the plane into a veritable parachute -- breaking the plane, but saving your life. That makes no sense. Less sense than the fact that I have ridden trains home at 2am from Brooklyn's version of Gaza and lived.

Only in that awful movie, The Unbearable Lightness of Being do people die at a height -- in a moment of true happiness. I'm sorry, I hate that kind of mystical bullshit, too. When you're happy and you know it, you aren't supposed to let the f'ing car flip over. You're supposed to be a little bit more careful about the f'ing gas tank. And for god's sake, people are supposed to rally around a place that helped them when no one else would. They are supposed to say SOMETHING. And we weren't supposed to turn into vile animals -- all of us -- in those last two years, all out of fear and a need to prove points. Everything was still in our hands, all we had to do was say what we meant, tell the truth, "be the thing". And we slipped. I slipped, anyway. That makes me the most reprehensible person in Karen's life and I know it. I know it now because of how badly I have slipped also since she died into a bilious sloth. Not the most profound of the type, but nevertheless, not even remotely close to who I was before Sept 2, 2005. Two different people. And even the better one was, it turns out, awful.

I failed. I failed as a guardian of love, honor and respect. There is no way to deny that. I had a sense something bad was going to happen that night and I didn't say anything. I let the vinegar of a bit of anger and fear of being thought possessive settle onto what I had refined into a pretty good nervous system. I let myself nearly get my FRIENDS in trouble, people I knew since before I was 26, out of reckless despair. How can so much horror creep into something beautiful in a moment? I know, I know, they were having so much fun and so into the event that they missed the bump. That's idiotic. That's irresponsible. And I let it happen. All that night that Karen died Michael and Sharon kept asking me if I wasn't afraid of her crashing. They wouldn't stop. And I thought, "of course she won't crash. She told me the plane can glide for miles. People land planes in baseball fields if they need to...for god's sake she's KAREN. I have loved her too much for anything to possibly happen. " I know. I really DID THINK it could NEVER happen to us because we were too good, too nice and what was it? A little f'ing flight to nowhere.
F-- Kundera and his damned book and the movie. That's what I abhorred, I thought. I was supposed to be way too grounded and practical for that kind of B.S. and it walked right in and stole everything. "Unbearable" is definitely the right word. "Unfathomable." "Vicious."

Precocious, precious, stupid. That's what I was. With the most valuable things in the world. The only reason I am good at keeping my cats alive is that my mother was good at crisis healthcare. Not the everyday living -- she took overall terrible care of maintaining me, but it's little work to do that for Larry and Bernie and they are, in my mind, children to be watched over. My mother was excellent, however, when I was violently ill. She knew how to push through the crowd to get the right doctor then and so, so do I. It's maybe my one skill. How to plead for my cats and my life. Good one. Really useful. So long as my life hinges on a dime like it does nowadays, I guess that's important. I am incapable of being good, perhaps because I haven't got all the skills for it. I MISS THE BUMP. I have Asperger's Syndrome. I get lost in dreams. Maybe I can never love any human at all. My love turned out to be the most worthless thing and I dedicated most of my energies to living by that feeling and being loyal to it. And I was worthless, nonetheless. Worthless.

All of us -- Karen, me, the faculty and students at Brooklyn Comprehensive -- we were good. We had all made mistakes, but we were all making amends. Nothing made sense, nothing has made complete sense since Sept 2, 2005 and, doubly so, since Feb. 2006 when it was announced that Brooklyn Comprehensive would close. You decide to fund a school, you foster it, and when it's clear what needs to be done to take it to greatness, you close it and make a commitment to another school which opens with a violent incident, has a student and faculty strike and will take years to learn what we already knew. I'll take the bet -- in less than 17 years, the DOE will close the school which succeeded us. I give them ten years. By then, the argument will have been made that ALL overage and under-credited students should be doing GED programs virtually through the public libraries. And why not? Once you argue that you shouldn't be offering HS diplomas to the 18-21 year olds, it follows that soon the 16 year olds will also be asked to consider the virtues of just taking a test and saving the DOE the cost of actually re-teaching them.

The faculty at Tilden also have every right to feel outraged about their closing, the ridiculousness of it perhaps, epitomized by my being placed there out of nowhere, from my closing madness into theirs. They were another kind of good school -- they took the stand that the kids they sent to us needed more time. If they hadn't been so bold and stuck to their standards, they would've pushed those kids through without their ever having had the chance BCNHS was able to give them to shape up and really understand their work. It's a good school which DOESN'T graduate kids before they're ready. They ran a good shop. Too good. You're not supposed to be that honest. We could be that honest because we were the MASH unit and the conditions of our patients were already deemed critical. But, like malevolent insurance adjusters, they were supposed to sign off that the half-dead were actually "mostly alive."
You can't get the job of teaching most of the disaffected youth of this city -- of bringing them to TRUE 12th grade reading level -- in four years. Like I said in a previous post, I've worked at schools with 99 percent graduation rates (which were not Specialized High Schools) and they had the same cruddy Regents scores and deplorable SAT scores of the kids that Tilden refused to graduate. Should any student graduate high school with only the skills to achieve 300's in all sections of the SAT? With the minimal passing rates on the Regents? Why? Why push those kids through -- what's the rush to send them out virtually ignorant into "the global marketplace." Remember, you get 200 points on the SAT just for writing your name.... The GED is a 9th grade level test. And it will be hard for these kids to pass that too, en masse.

It will take a Supreme Court case to change this, but it's not my point here. I'm much too sad for a point. My guess is Manhattan Comprehensive will take a case to the Supreme Court if they threaten to close it. God bless Howard Friedman's luck and give him more of it. The sad thing is, the case will be for a 19 year old girl from Chechnya who is sponsored by some major foundation and has been so physically and psychologically wounded in such obvious fashions that not even Clarence Thomas would deny she deserves extra time to finish her high school diploma. The kids we see are equally battered, just not in the language of international warfare. Though I wonder if you can argue that it IS international warfare when our economy is ravaged, our unions are decimated and whoever profits from wherever gets a major upper hand over the futures of kids from East Flatbush. I'm too tired to try to really make this point.

...So, when the things that didn't happen to the nice, lucky kid I had become at 26 started to happen, I started to slowly, well...disappear. Since Tilden's color is blue, lately that's the color I fade into. Only it's colorless -- I have all the blue oxford button down shirts a human being can have in all the shades, but they don't look any different, one from the other. Karen had blue eyes that lit up like lightning and I can see them. And then I close my eyes in total rage against everything, especially me.

Of all prosaic things, I'm angry and I hate...you name it, given the day of the week, the latest news, etc. I take Mike Malloy's "Have I told you how much I hate these people" which he says with gusto about Republicans, to a universal level.

For a while I was listening over and over again to Sweeney Todd. Prosaic, formulaic, but honest -- "so what" creeped right back into my vocabulary the way my favorite English Teacher warned me it would. I am one of those "so what people," Mr. Wozniak. It happened. I had no idea what you meant, but I do now. I warn my students not to be and it's not all the time.

Oh, and by the way, nice, dedicated teachers with a love of beautiful language and music are not supposed to feel they have to kill themselves and then actually do it because they have a horrible disease that was then being ignored by a maniac Republican White House. Whether I was good or not, that was not supposed to happen. Mr. Wozniak was good enough on his own. Do you know what it means to let a fatherless kid follow you around desperately every day, to read the idiot kid's work no matter how stupid, and to call the idiot kid when she's in college and has this sixth sense feeling of being really worried about you and LIE successfully so she only sees later that IT WAS SO OBVIOUS you were saying goodbye in the last letter and postcard? He watched for every bump, except the wall that the plane was about to hit. Like Karen, he just turned the plane to try to get away or, at least, get the passenger away. And I flew out onto the ground, shaken to the brain, but salvageable. It took someone to tell me he committed suicide. I did a good job of fooling myself for about a month. Karen did not commit suicide, but she also missed the bump that affected HER. That one last bump. What is it, hubris? This vicious "lightness of being" crap. Mr. Wozniak needed more of it, we -- Karen and I -- needed a lot less.

I will never believe suicide is painless. How the heck can it be -- your brain is on. I don't blame him. I can't stand a kidney stone let alone what AIDS did before the wonderful world of cocktails to control it. But, what kind of nutty drive was I and the rest of the country on....? That is not a rhetorical question because we're doing it again. And we know it. We're not solving anything...

And what kind of an idiotic country, as it nears the twentieth century, had fools at the helm. Ronald Reagan was a professional fool. A court jester. Literally -- that's what a "B Movie" actor is.

We failed a generation of gay men, but that story has long been told...

What is it I feel...It's just there, like a literal grey film, a residue. The distrust and the destruction of what is hopeful. It lingers. My job this week is to exorcise it. To find a way to live in which it doesn't settle. To begin to, anyway. I can feel it piling up on my nerves like dust, making it harder to feel anything.

As my therapist says, "Who knows" really what anyone or anything will be in the future. And since it's likely to come, best to try to work on making it happy.

I look at my cats who must find me a puzzle -- they understand me completely, but must wonder why I have no fur, why I am so vulnerably built. And I wonder if that is my relationship to god -- I understand some of what she might be, but cannot fully grasp her. There is hope in that. There is hope in the limits of my logic. And I remember Karen yelling at me in the car for having no faith.

If I can just feel it more. Who knows? Is "Who knows?" better than "So what."? I hope so.

All through the night

For the past two years and a few months, this Cole Porter song has been all too useful for me. The song, which can be heard as referring to an imagined or lost love who is never there "when dawn comes to waken" the singer of the tune has been for me and, I'm sure a billion others like me, a refrain used when facing an actual loss of a romantic partner. For the past week, however, on and off, at differing times of day and night (because my sleep cycles have been completely disrupted) I've gone back to the memories of a different time, place and...job. I've been remembering as best I can what it was like to have worked at Brooklyn Comprehensive Night High School when Malaika Bermiss was principal and many of my colleagues and I were even younger than we are now. The more I go back, the more I want to, and in fact, a great deal of yesterday was spent just doing so in my own head while not doing anything else except tending to my cats all day. Whenever I tell people about Malaika, I always start with how she hired me which she actually did twice in almost the exact same circumstances. I'm only going to write about the first time here.

I had been working for a year and three months at an adolescent teaching facility on Rikers Island. Although the students were some of the most brilliant people I have ever met or taught (as a rule, the worse the crime, the better the brain), the job wore on me. The prison system added to the educational system is a lot of quagmire to be involved in at once, the program itself was kind of a factory and I was being asked by the principal, regardless of my skills as a teacher and the fact that my classrooms were comprised entirely of imprisoned 18-21 year old males to start putting on dresses and look prettier when I came to work. Needless to say, it wasn't the kind of place you imagine throwing the energy of your early 20's wholeheartedly into in order to change the world. Nothing more was going to be done for the students than what was being done, and no student took the GED who wasn't very likely to pass. It was a good statistics machine. All the principal was asking me to literally do was ease up and be "Vanna White". Moreover, she wasn't going to release me from my job because I was too good. I needed someone really, really smart, politically savvy, trustworthy and most of all, who actually cared about education to get me out of this. Someone at WBAI where I worked in the Arts Department told me they had just interviewed with this really interesting principal but that they couldn't take the job because of the hours -- they were at night. Night didn't bother me -- I was only a year away from college and endless all-nighters.

Malaika Bermiss was sitting at her desk in her very overcrowded office, still working in the late afternoon, on the day I met her. Calculating with my very rough math skills, since she turns out to have only been 17 years older than I am, she was probably about 40, the age I will be in a week and a few days. I told her when I called that if she wanted to interview me that day then I didn't have time to change into my interview suit and I'd be in jeans because that's what I had worn to work. She said that was fine. I think she was wearing either a denim shirt and skirt--her clothes were elegantly loose and comfortable as I learned they would always be whether they were cotton or silk, high fashion or a sweatsuit. So that I don't get overwhelmed and so that I can take small readings first, I glom onto a person's initial gestures only and maybe one or two facial characteristics. With students, I am much the opposite, but I want to confine adults to a few controlling variables. Malaika was a firm handshake, a commanding and intelligent mezzo-soprano voice, and big-brown-no-b.s. eyes. She turned around in her chair and looked straight at my face. There was no up-and-down of my clothing, my weight or my bearing. I think I smiled and I know we looked straight at each other during what was not a short conversation. That sounds like nothing, perhaps, but there's almost no one I will look directly at for more than three minutes at a time and usually not even that in an initial meeting. I can do so with students because I need to. Usually, I fidget, look at my shoes, the sky, my fingernails or just away. It's not that I mean to be rude to adults I've just met, but I need time to trust them and like to do so in bits and pieces. Malaika Bermiss could be trusted instantly because she meant what she said.
We agreed on a lot, at least in spirit and having taught at Rikers made it easier for me to articulate how I felt about giving people second chances and the fact that I didn't want to judge those students or the students I would meet at her school based on what they had done in their past. By then, I also knew how to bluster about "having control of my classroom" as well as anyone, which I'm sure she saw through, but I did have a fairly decent technique for teaching essays and I liked doing it. What was clearest from what she was saying and the way the school was already running was that this was going to be a school designed for this population and we were really going to work with that in mind. She's the only person I've ever met who has ever recognized in practice that growth means you have to be allowed to make some mistakes-- and who knows how to look at something other people call a mistake and find what is useful in it.
I can hear people chiming "those mistakes are happening with children" -- and I'm afraid I will have to tell you that more mistakes happen when you don't try to fix problems than when you do and you still have to work out the fine tuning. Ours was a school where test scores and graduation rates got better and better. We're being closed because it's cheaper to run a GED program for the population we serve than an intensive high school. And the program won't even be run by the DOE -- it will be run by a non-profit organization and the students' statistics won't be counted in NYC public school numbers.

The woman I met that day, was most importantly, accountable. She wasn't going to let the school remain a "program" -- it was going to be a regular "high school" and not an "alternative high school". These students were not going to be cut off from the mainstream more than they had been. They were going to get a solid high school education which could serve as preparation for college. And somehow we were going to figure out how to do it. The same somehow, sort of, that she used to get her superintendent to call the superintendent in charge of the program I was working in and tell my principal to let me go which she finally did on the last day she had to do so.

It's 5:23 am. Soon it will be daytime. Confound it.

In Memory of Malaika Holman-Bermiss

Ad astra per aspera -- To the stars despite the difficulties. January 14, 2008.

In lieu of flowers, the family has established an endowment fund at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, one of Malaika’s favorite institutions. The goal is to endow a chair in the Opera house on the mezzanine level that will have a plaque that bears her name. More importantly, the endowment helps BAM to continue bringing world class performance art to the people of Brooklyn. Please send any donations to:
Brooklyn Academy of Music

Attn: Endowment Office

30 Lafayette Avenue

Brooklyn, NY 11217
Please note on the check "In memory of Malaika Bermiss."

Some of Mrs. Bermiss' last published thoughts about Brooklyn Comprehensive Night High School are in the article below from CITY LIMITS, March 19, 2007.

GOOD NIGHT, NIGHT SCHOOL:BROOKLYN COMP TO CLOSE
When this nontraditional school closes next year, only one other similar school will be left for students who are busy from 8:00 to 3:00. > By Matt Sollars


Ladonna Powell, 19, lives on her own, works at a bakery in Manhattan to pay the rent, and attends high school classes at Brooklyn Comprehensive Night High School because they fit into her schedule. Powell says the school, one of only two night high schools citywide, is important for struggling students who can’t make it to a day school but want to earn a diploma.
“Each person has their own problems,” she said. “We need this school to stay open. It’s a second chance.”
The public school is slated to close, however. The city announced in December that Brooklyn Comprehensive, which opened in 1990 to help students who had trouble in a traditional high school setting, would close this June. Teachers and students said they felt stunned and betrayed. The teachers’ union mounted a lobbying campaign, and by late February the staff was told the school would remain open until June 2008.
The city says five new "transfer schools," designed for “overage, under-credited” students, will replace Brooklyn Comp’s services. But while they will have some nighttime classes, it looks like they may not have an after-hours curriculum as complete as Brooklyn Comprehensive, which has the full high school curriculum except art and P.E. The other similarly complete nighttime school in operation is the Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day High School, located on Second Avenue near Stuyvesant Town. The Department of Education cites “low demand” as the reason for closing the night school.
“Attendance has dropped significantly in recent years,” said Melody Meyer, a department spokesperson. She pointed specifically to an abysmal 33 percent attendance record at Brooklyn Comp last year.
The school’s former principal, Malaika Holman Bermiss, says “attendance was always horrendous.” But she and some current teachers counter that the attendance rate dropped precipitously after the school was moved from Midwood High School to South Shore High School in Sept. 2004, due to space constraints at Midwood.
Indeed, school attendance records seem to support Bermiss’s argument. Brooklyn Comp had a 66 percent attendance rate in 2003-04, its last at Midwood. That’s not too far from the 72 percent average for transfer schools in the city. But in the next school year – the first at South Shore – attendance fell to 49 percent. Then it dropped to 33 percent last year. Meanwhile, attendance at traditional high schools citywide is 90 percent.
South Shore, which itself suffers poor attendance and is slated to close, is a large white building at the intersection of Flatlands and Ralph Avenues in Canarsie. A 20-minute bus ride from the nearest subway stop, the school is remote to reach even by car. In addition to the long commute for a student population scattered throughout Brooklyn, teachers and students do not feel safe, particularly at 10 p.m. when the school day ends. The day begins at 4 p.m.
“Muggings have been bad,” according to English teacher Sharon Pearce, in an observation echoed by several others. “Some parents won’t allow their kids to come to school any more,” says the 14-year Brooklyn Comp veteran.
Current principal Catherine Bruno-Paparelli did not respond to requests for comment, and officials declined to show a reporter around the school.
Charles Turner, Brooklyn district representative at the United Federation of Teachers, called moving a night school to such a remote location “a thoughtless decision.” He believes Brooklyn Comp has become “collateral damage” of the decision to shutter South Shore, one of five schools that DOE announced in December would close.
Pearce finds it ironic that the city decided to close Brooklyn Comp and send students to transfer schools, which accommodate up to 250 students. “We were one of the new ‘small schools’ before there was the expression,” she said.
Bermiss fears that a new school, even one that looks like Brooklyn Comp but meets during the day, will miss out on helping a certain sliver of students. “It’s a time frame issue,” she said. “Some of our students had neither children or jobs, but what they needed is what we offered them at 7 p.m. in the evening.”
She believes Brooklyn Comp was hampered by not ever having its own facility. Before she retired in 2005 after 34 years in the city school system, Bermiss did propose an expansion of Brooklyn Comp that would have included a dedicated facility. Now she hopes that the extension through next school year will allow the teachers and staff at Brooklyn Comp to keep the school going in a different format and location.
“My concern is that there be a full-time night school in Brooklyn to meet the needs of students,” Bermiss said.
Student Natalie White, 19, certainly agrees. White started at Brooklyn Comp in September after she “messed up” at Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush. Close personal attention from teachers quickly helped White gain confidence in herself.
“I never got an A in any class before,” she said. But after getting help from teachers in English and Spanish and A’s in both classes, she said, “I kind of knew I had some kind of potential.”
However, White knew she would not have enough credits to graduate by June 2007, so she stopped going to school. “I thought it was the end,” she said. “I was kind of thinking of giving up or going to another school.”
Now that another school year has been added, White says she will return and hopes to have enough credits for her diploma by January 2008.
- Matt Sollars

article on BCNHS in City Limits.org

www.citylimits.org


City Limits WEEKLYWeek of: March 19, 2007Number: 579

GOOD NIGHT, NIGHT SCHOOL:BROOKLYN COMP TO CLOSE
When this nontraditional school closes next year, only one other similar school will be left for students who are busy from 8:00 to 3:00. > By Matt Sollars
Ladonna Powell, 19, lives on her own, works at a bakery in Manhattan to pay the rent, and attends high school classes at Brooklyn Comprehensive Night High School because they fit into her schedule. Powell says the school, one of only two night high schools citywide, is important for struggling students who can’t make it to a day school but want to earn a diploma.
“Each person has their own problems,” she said. “We need this school to stay open. It’s a second chance.”
The public school is slated to close, however. The city announced in December that Brooklyn Comprehensive, which opened in 1990 to help students who had trouble in a traditional high school setting, would close this June. Teachers and students said they felt stunned and betrayed. The teachers’ union mounted a lobbying campaign, and by late February the staff was told the school would remain open until June 2008.
The city says five new "transfer schools," designed for “overage, under-credited” students, will replace Brooklyn Comp’s services. But while they will have some nighttime classes, it looks like they may not have an after-hours curriculum as complete as Brooklyn Comprehensive, which has the full high school curriculum except art and P.E. The other similarly complete nighttime school in operation is the Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day High School, located on Second Avenue near Stuyvesant Town. The Department of Education cites “low demand” as the reason for closing the night school.
“Attendance has dropped significantly in recent years,” said Melody Meyer, a department spokesperson. She pointed specifically to an abysmal 33 percent attendance record at Brooklyn Comp last year.
The school’s former principal, Malaika Holman Bermiss, says “attendance was always horrendous.” But she and some current teachers counter that the attendance rate dropped precipitously after the school was moved from Midwood High School to South Shore High School in Sept. 2004, due to space constraints at Midwood.
Indeed, school attendance records seem to support Bermiss’s argument. Brooklyn Comp had a 66 percent attendance rate in 2003-04, its last at Midwood. That’s not too far from the 72 percent average for transfer schools in the city. But in the next school year – the first at South Shore – attendance fell to 49 percent. Then it dropped to 33 percent last year. Meanwhile, attendance at traditional high schools citywide is 90 percent.
South Shore, which itself suffers poor attendance and is slated to close, is a large white building at the intersection of Flatlands and Ralph Avenues in Canarsie. A 20-minute bus ride from the nearest subway stop, the school is remote to reach even by car. In addition to the long commute for a student population scattered throughout Brooklyn, teachers and students do not feel safe, particularly at 10 p.m. when the school day ends. The day begins at 4 p.m.
“Muggings have been bad,” according to English teacher Sharon Pearce, in an observation echoed by several others. “Some parents won’t allow their kids to come to school any more,” says the 14-year Brooklyn Comp veteran.
Current principal Catherine Bruno-Paparelli did not respond to requests for comment, and officials declined to show a reporter around the school.
Charles Turner, Brooklyn district representative at the United Federation of Teachers, called moving a night school to such a remote location “a thoughtless decision.” He believes Brooklyn Comp has become “collateral damage” of the decision to shutter South Shore, one of five schools that DOE announced in December would close.
Pearce finds it ironic that the city decided to close Brooklyn Comp and send students to transfer schools, which accommodate up to 250 students. “We were one of the new ‘small schools’ before there was the expression,” she said.
Bermiss fears that a new school, even one that looks like Brooklyn Comp but meets during the day, will miss out on helping a certain sliver of students. “It’s a time frame issue,” she said. “Some of our students had neither children or jobs, but what they needed is what we offered them at 7 p.m. in the evening.”
She believes Brooklyn Comp was hampered by not ever having its own facility. Before she retired in 2005 after 34 years in the city school system, Bermiss did propose an expansion of Brooklyn Comp that would have include a dedicated facility. Now she hopes that the extension through next school year will allow the teachers and staff at Brooklyn Comp to keep the school going in a different format and location.
“My concern is that there be a full-time night school in Brooklyn to meet the needs of students,” Bermiss said.
Student Natalie White, 19, certainly agrees. White started at Brooklyn Comp in September after she “messed up” at Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush. Close personal attention from teachers quickly helped White gain confidence in herself.
“I never got an A in any class before,” she said. But after getting help from teachers in English and Spanish and A’s in both classes, she said, “I kind of knew I had some kind of potential.”
However, White knew she would not have enough credits to graduate by June 2007, so she stopped going to school. “I thought it was the end,” she said. “I was kind of thinking of giving up or going to another school.”
Now that another school year has been added, White says she will return and hopes to have enough credits for her diploma by January 2008.
- Matt Sollars