It's a funny thing - to find yourself writing in oblivion and then being acknowledged as part of a larger...oblivion. In The Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedges asserts that, because there is no real voice for dissent in this country, intellectuals have receded into their own veritable caves, with their own Platonic ideals as comfort. For a long time, I have wondered if the world would eventually transform into a place in which people stayed inside and did nearly everything virtually. Apparently E.M. Forster had this vision in 1909, in a story called "The Machine Stops," which Hedges also cites.
(You can read it here: http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html)
Most teachers I have met are already in this stage of existence. They come home exhausted from the battle with their students, administrators and parents. Most of the discussion is about language - since you cannot own your own words anymore, students, administrators and teachers are free to re-define the terms for the courses you teach at any time. What is English? Is it spelling? Shouldn't my son spell? Shouldn't we stop all discussion of reading comprehension until every student can spell? What about penmanship? What about the names of literary devices?
I'd defy anyone to bring these kinds of questions into an academically respected classroom. Ask a professor at Harvard if he or she marks off for spelling? Do the students have to count off the literary devices in Shakespeare or is their interpretation what matters? The need to categorize is something I've encountered in friends who felt out of sync - who felt on the margins. I understand that. Why do we have to teach our students to present themselves as if they, too, are on the outer rim of culture? We are not only creating two classes of students - the kind who are allowed to think "independently" at Harvard and those who must "address the task" - but we are setting up a world in which most of the former will find themselves instructing the latter to their incredible dismay.
First, I wonder why everyone insists so much that students who are loathe to read in the first place have to dissect texts dryly. Why not invite them to comprehend what they read, discuss what it means and inspires, and stop asking them to prove their rights to do so by calling something an image, a metaphor or a symbol. What matters is their ability to understand when something can resonate in many ways, and not the training of their reflexes in the art of slapping down a pen and writing in a label. What it does is limit their response to what they read and make them constantly in search of approval. It is exactly what Hedges describes: they put literary works "in their place" in the hierarchy of things, which places the reader at an even lower rank than what he/she reads. It leaves the intellectual/teacher the task of further slamming down the students and he/she becomes a kind of grand inquisitor of mechanics.
Second, I recognize that I have become the "Underground Man" which Hedges points to and I am to frightened, sometimes, to leave my lair. Like the figure in Dostoevsky's story, I am bilious.
All of this keeps our country in a kind of stasis that we couldn't possibly want for our children. Or, more selfishly, for ourselves. We are a society of lonely people.
Our separateness makes empathy harder to come by. In our caves, we re-invent ideas which wisdom could teach us to re-consider.
How do we face 2012 and not be afraid of each other - of listening to each other and sharing our ideas? How do we refuse to be bullied by a society which has made most people feel powerless because they don't have the money that those in power possess.
The lesson of Chanukah was that the few conquered the many. It was a few rebelling against an oppressor. It is easy enough to spend time rebelling, though not to win. But what do we build after?
Showing posts with label anti-intellectualism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anti-intellectualism. Show all posts
28 December, 2011
24 June, 2011
Old, familiar faces
In 2008, Brooklyn Comprehensive Night High School closed.
It is 2011 and the same dignitaries from what is now called the Department of Education arrived at my current school's graduation. They said the same words at this graduation as they said at BCNHS' graduations. This graduating class has "heart." For, at least, twelve years, BCNHS' June ceremony was one dignitary's "favorite graduation," because of how hard our students had fought to get to that moment. I sat there, and for the first time in years, I felt completely out of place.
There stood an individual who had voted to close my school. I wasn't angry. I was stunned. For years, we had received similar support. The same words, the same...except now we were all a little older and thicker in the waist.
I was very honored by my colleagues' work, by the true emotions of the students and the principal. But the ghosts were there. I felt like a ghost, as well.I felt as if I should leave the building. My world had been torn asunder by the same people staring down at my former students now. Now an alternate universe existed in which it was all happening again, but if it does exist, how can I also be part of it. One dignitary looked at me and then spoke to another person in hushed tones. I was, once more, an alien. In my heart it hit me that it would be nearly impossible for me to be accepted in my old district. I would have to look somewhere else, someplace where we were not all "old, familiar faces" to each other, and I did not know that the platitudes are spoken without true grace and in which I could be offered no grace to return, to try to become part of something new, to participate in the rituals of growth. Not here. Not in the old, familiar places. Not with the old, familiar faces.
What's ironic, of course, is Brooklyn Comprehensive was a small school before there was the first round of "New Small Schools" in the 1990's. So, what does this say about the current batch -- are these dignitaries going grant them the 19 years we had?
I suppose this is how people handle being involved in "Re-org's" in business, etc. But, like O'Brien in Orwell's 1984, the same person was the director of the new system as was the old. There isn't even the gesture of the glasses as a false comfort.
It is 2011 and the same dignitaries from what is now called the Department of Education arrived at my current school's graduation. They said the same words at this graduation as they said at BCNHS' graduations. This graduating class has "heart." For, at least, twelve years, BCNHS' June ceremony was one dignitary's "favorite graduation," because of how hard our students had fought to get to that moment. I sat there, and for the first time in years, I felt completely out of place.
There stood an individual who had voted to close my school. I wasn't angry. I was stunned. For years, we had received similar support. The same words, the same...except now we were all a little older and thicker in the waist.
I was very honored by my colleagues' work, by the true emotions of the students and the principal. But the ghosts were there. I felt like a ghost, as well.I felt as if I should leave the building. My world had been torn asunder by the same people staring down at my former students now. Now an alternate universe existed in which it was all happening again, but if it does exist, how can I also be part of it. One dignitary looked at me and then spoke to another person in hushed tones. I was, once more, an alien. In my heart it hit me that it would be nearly impossible for me to be accepted in my old district. I would have to look somewhere else, someplace where we were not all "old, familiar faces" to each other, and I did not know that the platitudes are spoken without true grace and in which I could be offered no grace to return, to try to become part of something new, to participate in the rituals of growth. Not here. Not in the old, familiar places. Not with the old, familiar faces.
What's ironic, of course, is Brooklyn Comprehensive was a small school before there was the first round of "New Small Schools" in the 1990's. So, what does this say about the current batch -- are these dignitaries going grant them the 19 years we had?
I suppose this is how people handle being involved in "Re-org's" in business, etc. But, like O'Brien in Orwell's 1984, the same person was the director of the new system as was the old. There isn't even the gesture of the glasses as a false comfort.
23 June, 2011
The Communists are Coming!
I got a text message on the bus on the way home. My eyes were on my phone because I left my e-reader at home. Consequently, I cradled my elephantine, non-smart phone in my lap,looking at it so as to dodge eye contact. The screen went white and I clicked the round "OK" button in order to read the new message from a colleague. "My doctor was shocked that teachers are allowed to grade Regents exams." I went livid. Of course, I have complained about differences with colleagues over how to interpret the rubric for the ELA Regents. That is the nature of language, however, and it wouldn't be fair if we didn't question each other and dialogue with the grading system foisted upon us. The Board of Regents itself concedes that there is more than one way to obtain the same grade -- there are "4" level essays which are more than thoughtful, but stray somewhat from their objectives, though they ultimately defend their original argument sufficiently. There are those which hit the mark, provide sufficient development -- all "no more, no less," than very good, but not excellent. We are given more than one "Anchor paper" (model papers) to judge our own by. The more you work with language, the more shades you can see to it. People will always have stylistic differences. Not every English teacher is interested in pretty prose -- some are in it for the bold themes or the heroic stories. However, we balance each other in the end as no one person determines a student's final score. Papers are always marked in teams. In the end, we always agree that the tasks themselves aren't rigorous enough, and the rubrics are equally shallow.
I go into this explanation because I was so affronted by my colleague's physician's response. She had related some of my feelings about the debates which ensue over work sometimes. Instead of seeing the complexity of the task, or perhaps, wondering why the State bothers to insist on "standardized" exams when its own rubrics are not stringent enough to satisfy the ideals of good teachers, he just questioned teachers' abilities to judge. Why not just let teachers create better, harder tests? The largest complaint in our grading room was about the fact that papers were going to pass State standards despite the fact that we would've failed those same papers if they were submitted to us in our courses. It would be unfair, however, not to give the student the State exam grade he/she deserves. In this case, the teacher is punished twice. First, we have to give an exam which doesn't live up to our own standards. Then, we have to pass kids on this exam whom we failed regularly during the year. But, all my colleague's physician could think of was the possible inadequacy of the teachers grading the exam, not that the whole exercise is flawed. It's natural for people to argue about language. What's sad is when the language isn't worth our breath. Or, in my case, my thumb movements.
After sending upwards of 15 texts back, many asking questions about whether doctors could be trusted to treat their patients properly given all the incentives from insurance companies to cut corners, I grabbed the handles of the backdoor with both hands and slowly pulled myself down onto the wet pavement. Without even waiting for me to turn around, one of the local car service drivers pulled up and I got in. First, he rebuffs my exhaustion with "well, just one more day." "No. There's Monday and I have Professional Development before summer school." "Well, at least you are working," says the upbeat driver. I let the "at least" comment go. I've never been fond of cherishing the "At least." It brings to mind my forebears in Nazi Germany thinking, "At least, they haven't..." Until they had. I make some passing remark about the heat and the lack of A/C in my classroom. He is seemingly, sincerely up-in-arms. "What about portable air conditioners?" "We would need three per room." I know this because the computer room has three air conditioners to insure that, even if the students fail, the equipment doesn't. Finally, he says to me, "Well, this is all because the communists are coming." I'm livid again. For one thing, education in the Soviet Union was, arguably, better than ours is here. For another, it's American cheapness that is keeping us from providing proper treatment to our students. If we were any cheaper, we'd be anarchists. I say something like, "but we're not spending any money on schools." "You will see. Little by little they will take over." What this has to do with anything I have said, I don't know, but this man is convinced of this. Like my colleague's doctor, he lives in the golden world of rumor which is fueled by anger and ignorance. Of course, this is part of the new/old list of Republican talking points against Obama, recycled from the start of the Cold War. Standardized tests were created out of distrust for teachers when, in fact, they undermine our efforts to be rigorous and rely on our best abilities to interpret their "standards" in order to be clear and fair with our students. I suppose that my driver was picking up on the buzz from our "fair and balanced" media, but does not understand that it is the rumor mongers who are denying my students decent learning conditions and giving weak students the impression they have achieved something by passing easy exams.
Of course, if education were a world priority, none of this would be happening. But, never fear. Companies are in no danger of losing their right to create and sell standardized exams, and drivers are in no danger of losing their opportunity to make cash they don't declare on their taxes. The classrooms are still boiling hot, the students are definitely "first" to be given an easy way out, and the teachers can't do anything to stop it. If we do, the media will say we aren't teaching because scores are too low. If scores are too high, they'll complain about why we are allowed to grade the exams. Has anyone bothered to look at the tests, the rubrics for grading, the anchor papers, etc.? Too busy looking for those Communists/Weapons of Mass Destruction/Communists/Evil Teachers.
I go into this explanation because I was so affronted by my colleague's physician's response. She had related some of my feelings about the debates which ensue over work sometimes. Instead of seeing the complexity of the task, or perhaps, wondering why the State bothers to insist on "standardized" exams when its own rubrics are not stringent enough to satisfy the ideals of good teachers, he just questioned teachers' abilities to judge. Why not just let teachers create better, harder tests? The largest complaint in our grading room was about the fact that papers were going to pass State standards despite the fact that we would've failed those same papers if they were submitted to us in our courses. It would be unfair, however, not to give the student the State exam grade he/she deserves. In this case, the teacher is punished twice. First, we have to give an exam which doesn't live up to our own standards. Then, we have to pass kids on this exam whom we failed regularly during the year. But, all my colleague's physician could think of was the possible inadequacy of the teachers grading the exam, not that the whole exercise is flawed. It's natural for people to argue about language. What's sad is when the language isn't worth our breath. Or, in my case, my thumb movements.
After sending upwards of 15 texts back, many asking questions about whether doctors could be trusted to treat their patients properly given all the incentives from insurance companies to cut corners, I grabbed the handles of the backdoor with both hands and slowly pulled myself down onto the wet pavement. Without even waiting for me to turn around, one of the local car service drivers pulled up and I got in. First, he rebuffs my exhaustion with "well, just one more day." "No. There's Monday and I have Professional Development before summer school." "Well, at least you are working," says the upbeat driver. I let the "at least" comment go. I've never been fond of cherishing the "At least." It brings to mind my forebears in Nazi Germany thinking, "At least, they haven't..." Until they had. I make some passing remark about the heat and the lack of A/C in my classroom. He is seemingly, sincerely up-in-arms. "What about portable air conditioners?" "We would need three per room." I know this because the computer room has three air conditioners to insure that, even if the students fail, the equipment doesn't. Finally, he says to me, "Well, this is all because the communists are coming." I'm livid again. For one thing, education in the Soviet Union was, arguably, better than ours is here. For another, it's American cheapness that is keeping us from providing proper treatment to our students. If we were any cheaper, we'd be anarchists. I say something like, "but we're not spending any money on schools." "You will see. Little by little they will take over." What this has to do with anything I have said, I don't know, but this man is convinced of this. Like my colleague's doctor, he lives in the golden world of rumor which is fueled by anger and ignorance. Of course, this is part of the new/old list of Republican talking points against Obama, recycled from the start of the Cold War. Standardized tests were created out of distrust for teachers when, in fact, they undermine our efforts to be rigorous and rely on our best abilities to interpret their "standards" in order to be clear and fair with our students. I suppose that my driver was picking up on the buzz from our "fair and balanced" media, but does not understand that it is the rumor mongers who are denying my students decent learning conditions and giving weak students the impression they have achieved something by passing easy exams.
Of course, if education were a world priority, none of this would be happening. But, never fear. Companies are in no danger of losing their right to create and sell standardized exams, and drivers are in no danger of losing their opportunity to make cash they don't declare on their taxes. The classrooms are still boiling hot, the students are definitely "first" to be given an easy way out, and the teachers can't do anything to stop it. If we do, the media will say we aren't teaching because scores are too low. If scores are too high, they'll complain about why we are allowed to grade the exams. Has anyone bothered to look at the tests, the rubrics for grading, the anchor papers, etc.? Too busy looking for those Communists/Weapons of Mass Destruction/Communists/Evil Teachers.
13 February, 2009
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.
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.
08 February, 2009
Let Teachers Remain Blue Collar
I must confess Sharon Pearce mentioned this idea years ago and I didn't understand its significance. She said she wanted to be blue collar and I didn't get it. I do now.
The 100,000 dollar teacher is a bad idea.
It's not that teachers aren't worth that much, but the job is not, by its nature, one which provides monetary profit to anyone. We provide a free service. Traditionally, we have exchanged security for high wages, with both sides benefitting from the long-term commitment which resulted.
Teachers are artisans at least, artists at best. But, by the nature of my profession, I don't give concerts that sell for 150 dollars a ticket. I give my art in exchange for security, pension and benefits. I am part of a system which does not require those who receive my art to pay for it.
A doctor working in such a system would not make as much as one who decided to work in the free market. Nor would anyone who did.
Teachers shape their art to fit a particular system and place. If we were to travel around like salespeople and try to sell our art, some of us would make millions, others of us would die. Like with any group of artists, among those who could not be appreciated in their own time would be geniuses. Only they would have no students to leave behind to appreciate in value and pay royalties to their children.
In the spirit of a nation which wants an active citizenry, the teaching profession has shaped itself to serve and not to sell.
We should not, however, demand huge raises and definitely not exchange our benefits for them. We are artists who cannot exist without the system in which we work. In pulling ourselves out of "the market" we are allowed to present our lessons objectively and fairly. We are meant to be outside of the "professional" world. We are blue collar.
In tempting us with raises in exchange for giving up a part of our security, Mayor Bloomberg has threatened the very nature of the profession. What's to stop me from getting Apple or Pepsi to sponsor my work and to brand my lessons with their products? In proposing the idea of providing incentives to teachers whose students have the best scores, he encourages teachers to do what other professionals would do in the market place -- to limit their risk, to skew their work toward that which will provide them the most profit and to eliminate anything which might hinder them from succeeding. That kid in the back who just doesn't do well on tests, hmmmn..... Why don't I encourage his parents to put him in another school, to test him for special needs, and why don't I make him so miserable that he begs the program office to remove him from my class. Or, why don't I push harder on the special needs issue, get him more time, someone to read to him, etc. Anything that can get me the extra cash even if it's not right for the student.
Most teachers I know did not vote for this contract. People say that it was the younger teachers and the retiring teachers who pushed it through. I understand why both sides would want more money, but THAT is not in the best interest of kids. Frankly, I have colleagues who would NOT have retired had they been given positions through the seniority system. Instead, we are paying those people their pensions when they could be teaching our kids.
And anyone who enters the teaching profession expecting a lot of money should leave before they get tenured. I lived in shares in my first teaching years and another young colleague and I used to live on the 25 cent granola bars they sold at the local bodega. That's what you get for also having health insurance, a prescription plan, etc. If you wanted to make a lot of money in your twenties and early thirties you should've done something else.
Teachers should earn a fair and decent wage -- one which helps them to continue study and to survive in a way which does not leave them ragged. We should be solidly middle-class. And we should get overtime like members of other unions.
We are not professionals in the capitalist sense. I can't make any money for my school with the work I do. (Sure, I could write grant proposals, but that's not like earning a profit for selling Wi-Fi.) And I shouldn't. I should be allowed to stay out of the market so that I can teach my students honestly.
I shouldn't wear a suit. If I had wanted to wear a suit, I would've gone to law school.
I wanted to engage in the exchange of knowledge and to help my students develop as thinkers. That doesn't require that I wear Armani. I need to be clothed. As someone outside the market, I ought to be allowed to present a non-conformist image.
We did not form a union to make teachers able to compete with MBA's. We did so that teachers could earn a fair wage, have security and good benefits.
Let's return to the contract prior to this one. Let's give back the raises, get back seniority and everything else we gave up.
I would be giving up about 20,000 dollars. I am sure that if we all gave back the raises, the city would not need to lay people off.
I know. I don't have children, I don't own any property and I still dress like a college student. I eat like a high school student.
But, my classes run really well when I feel secure. The more worried I am about surviving, not buying new clothes, but paying the rent, the less I am able to function. This would be true of any sane person.
My last salary before this contract was a fair wage for me so long as I have seniority, tenure and all my health benefits.
Here you will argue that a lot of teachers were placed in positions through seniority which were not good fits. Bad fits happen even when you go through extensive hiring processes. In "the market" people work to make themselves fit. So do civil servants.
I was once bumped from a position which I thought was mine. A teacher from Brooklyn Tech took my position at Brooklyn Comprehensive. Therefore, I found myself working at The Choir Academy of Harlem -- a school in which students wore uniforms and which had a very conservative culture. My principal knew I wasn't exactly the right fit ideologically for the school, but he hired me because I was intelligent enough to, as he put it, "interview well". I spent four years at that school and learned a lot and the students were well served. I asked to leave so I could go to Brooklyn Comprehensive once the teacher who took my position retired, and had to strike a bargain in which I taught at Choir during the day and, per session, at Brooklyn Comprehensive at night in order to leave. That mean travelling from Harlem to the junction of Brooklyn every night for a term.
You see, however, that in striking that bargain I was able, even under the old system of seniority, to find the fit I wanted. Smart principals and teachers HAVE ALWAYS found ways to get the faculty whom they wanted. At one school, my principal excessed an art teacher she didn't like, then a few months later, "found the funds" to hire an art teacher she did like who has outlived her tenure. Even in the world of seniority, people have freedom and options. They also have the security to try to stay and grow into a position and to remain objective and true to the students throughout. Principals often traded teachers who were better fits for each others' school. We got a great teacher at Choir that way.
You think that doesn't happen "in the market". It happens in "Re-org's" all the time. Sure, some people are fired -- but this is not a for-profit profession. And incompetent teachers can be removed through the 3020a process. Meanwhile, teachers remain objective servants to their students. If the individuals who became principals really wanted to have the freedom of the marketplace they should've taken jobs which carried that risk. No company would accept 3 percent growth (which is what Bloomberg says has happened in our test results) over a two year period -- let alone this Mayor's term. Everyone is playing pretend financial genius in a world where that's the last thing that matters. The students matter, and therefore, so does making sure that we retain teachers who are experienced, highly skilled and who are not looking to make a profit off of the kids. Job security makes people objective and secure.
My mother was a dental assistant who workd for The Dept. of Health of New York City. She made very little money. Without my grandmother's and my uncle's assistance, I would never have had the life I did. However, my mother's benefits made it possible to get her hip surgery done at Lennox Hill Hospital. With a few exceptions, she can afford any medicine she needs. Had she worked in the private sector she would've made more money but not had these benefits. She also wouldn't have been able to complain when a dentist had treated a patient badly or done poor work. My mother is an annoying human being to know on many levels, but she was a very good patient advocate in her position. She got furious when shoddy work was done on the children she served and she raised hell about it. Once, a dentist held a kid's head still and was about to drill, which could've killed the child, who was pushing back as hard as a five year old could. First, my mother stopped the dentist. Then she reported that dentist. That dentist was fired. And yes, it was a new dentist at the clinic who had no experience with children who did this. Having an assistant with (at that time) over 15 years of experience was crucial in keeping that child from harm. But, that never should have happened. My mother still remembers how long it took to calm that child down, and that incident happened 25 years ago. My guess is the adult that child grew up to be also remembers it.
I don't want to make the low wages my mother did, and to be fair, I have more responsibilities and much more education.
My point is, though, that we are both civil servants, both blue collar.
We don't need to drive BMW's. We need security so that we can serve the city without prejudice. We not only need to be paid overtime, but we need to be reimbursed FULLY for the items we buy in order to do our jobs. If you look at my salary and divide it by the number of hours I really work, it comes down to something like 12 dollars an hour. I'm including time I grade, research, shop for my class, in addition to my classes and the times in which I have given up lunches and preps to work with students.
I don't want to be paid entirely per hour because that would cost the city much more money.
What I want is a decent, honorable wage. I do not want to make an extravagant living -- I just want security in exchange for not earning one.
I'll go back to my previous salary. It's a lot better than what I'll get if I lose my job and have to work for a private non-profit. I suggest my colleagues push our UFT president to return the mistake in funding allocation made in the last contract and return to us the seniority and security which we truly need.
Really, if this is about a funding crisis, the sensible thing to do is take a pay cut and get back the intangibles -- the seniority -- things that don't cost the city anything extra, but provide me with good faith from my employer. Cut my salary back to the last contract. You can still reform the schools -- there are systems in place for firing incompetent teachers and most of the new schools which have opened were around during the last contract. And, it stands to reason, if I give back salary you can open MORE new programs, not fewer. All I want is my seniority back. It's fair reward for the 16 years of service I have put in below market value, at the very least.
The city's roster of teachers is also bloated with new, untenured faculty who were mistakenly hired for positions which do not exist. We now have Teaching Fellows whose masters degrees were paid for by the city, but for whom there is no work. They were hired in the hopes that the new contract would push experienced teachers out. They were hired with the idea that they would take all of the new positions opening and the experienced teachers would hang in ATR limbo. They had no idea of this, I'm sure, although they were trained in a culture that was anti-teacher. Why anyone would take a job where you are taught that the older and more experienced you get, the less you are to be trusted is beyond me. In fairness, since they have not yet earned the right to security, if more cuts need to be made, untenured faculty ought to be cut. The Yankees couldn't keep Shelley Duncan on the roster once Giambi came back. And think about it, he didn't really make that consistent a contribution. Giambi often did and he had a huge salary to earn. Shelley Duncan was working much harder than his minor league contract paid for...and most of the time he was really only up to his contract. It was a surprise when he played well.
I am not Jason Giambi. I have to work WITH plantar fascitis. I also can't take sponsorships from companies and, if I could grow a moustache, absolutely no one would care.
So pay me blue collar rates and give me blue collar protection. It'll save us all a lot of misplaced energy.
OR, give me the same blue collar benefits Corrections Officers get. Let me retire at 20/40. A lot more people will retire at that deal than 25/55 because those of us in our 40's can find non-profit jobs to supplement our pensions and re-train a lot more easily than people 55 and over. Ironically, the more senior teachers are more likely to stay so that they can have the best pension they can added to social security. Offer a chance for those of us to leave with our pensions now who, under current conditions, see lack of job security and worse ahead of us, and we are bound to go. I'd rather not spend the next 15 years fighting for my life against market economics. My union ought to see the virtue of that, at the very least.
The 100,000 dollar teacher is a bad idea.
It's not that teachers aren't worth that much, but the job is not, by its nature, one which provides monetary profit to anyone. We provide a free service. Traditionally, we have exchanged security for high wages, with both sides benefitting from the long-term commitment which resulted.
Teachers are artisans at least, artists at best. But, by the nature of my profession, I don't give concerts that sell for 150 dollars a ticket. I give my art in exchange for security, pension and benefits. I am part of a system which does not require those who receive my art to pay for it.
A doctor working in such a system would not make as much as one who decided to work in the free market. Nor would anyone who did.
Teachers shape their art to fit a particular system and place. If we were to travel around like salespeople and try to sell our art, some of us would make millions, others of us would die. Like with any group of artists, among those who could not be appreciated in their own time would be geniuses. Only they would have no students to leave behind to appreciate in value and pay royalties to their children.
In the spirit of a nation which wants an active citizenry, the teaching profession has shaped itself to serve and not to sell.
We should not, however, demand huge raises and definitely not exchange our benefits for them. We are artists who cannot exist without the system in which we work. In pulling ourselves out of "the market" we are allowed to present our lessons objectively and fairly. We are meant to be outside of the "professional" world. We are blue collar.
In tempting us with raises in exchange for giving up a part of our security, Mayor Bloomberg has threatened the very nature of the profession. What's to stop me from getting Apple or Pepsi to sponsor my work and to brand my lessons with their products? In proposing the idea of providing incentives to teachers whose students have the best scores, he encourages teachers to do what other professionals would do in the market place -- to limit their risk, to skew their work toward that which will provide them the most profit and to eliminate anything which might hinder them from succeeding. That kid in the back who just doesn't do well on tests, hmmmn..... Why don't I encourage his parents to put him in another school, to test him for special needs, and why don't I make him so miserable that he begs the program office to remove him from my class. Or, why don't I push harder on the special needs issue, get him more time, someone to read to him, etc. Anything that can get me the extra cash even if it's not right for the student.
Most teachers I know did not vote for this contract. People say that it was the younger teachers and the retiring teachers who pushed it through. I understand why both sides would want more money, but THAT is not in the best interest of kids. Frankly, I have colleagues who would NOT have retired had they been given positions through the seniority system. Instead, we are paying those people their pensions when they could be teaching our kids.
And anyone who enters the teaching profession expecting a lot of money should leave before they get tenured. I lived in shares in my first teaching years and another young colleague and I used to live on the 25 cent granola bars they sold at the local bodega. That's what you get for also having health insurance, a prescription plan, etc. If you wanted to make a lot of money in your twenties and early thirties you should've done something else.
Teachers should earn a fair and decent wage -- one which helps them to continue study and to survive in a way which does not leave them ragged. We should be solidly middle-class. And we should get overtime like members of other unions.
We are not professionals in the capitalist sense. I can't make any money for my school with the work I do. (Sure, I could write grant proposals, but that's not like earning a profit for selling Wi-Fi.) And I shouldn't. I should be allowed to stay out of the market so that I can teach my students honestly.
I shouldn't wear a suit. If I had wanted to wear a suit, I would've gone to law school.
I wanted to engage in the exchange of knowledge and to help my students develop as thinkers. That doesn't require that I wear Armani. I need to be clothed. As someone outside the market, I ought to be allowed to present a non-conformist image.
We did not form a union to make teachers able to compete with MBA's. We did so that teachers could earn a fair wage, have security and good benefits.
Let's return to the contract prior to this one. Let's give back the raises, get back seniority and everything else we gave up.
I would be giving up about 20,000 dollars. I am sure that if we all gave back the raises, the city would not need to lay people off.
I know. I don't have children, I don't own any property and I still dress like a college student. I eat like a high school student.
But, my classes run really well when I feel secure. The more worried I am about surviving, not buying new clothes, but paying the rent, the less I am able to function. This would be true of any sane person.
My last salary before this contract was a fair wage for me so long as I have seniority, tenure and all my health benefits.
Here you will argue that a lot of teachers were placed in positions through seniority which were not good fits. Bad fits happen even when you go through extensive hiring processes. In "the market" people work to make themselves fit. So do civil servants.
I was once bumped from a position which I thought was mine. A teacher from Brooklyn Tech took my position at Brooklyn Comprehensive. Therefore, I found myself working at The Choir Academy of Harlem -- a school in which students wore uniforms and which had a very conservative culture. My principal knew I wasn't exactly the right fit ideologically for the school, but he hired me because I was intelligent enough to, as he put it, "interview well". I spent four years at that school and learned a lot and the students were well served. I asked to leave so I could go to Brooklyn Comprehensive once the teacher who took my position retired, and had to strike a bargain in which I taught at Choir during the day and, per session, at Brooklyn Comprehensive at night in order to leave. That mean travelling from Harlem to the junction of Brooklyn every night for a term.
You see, however, that in striking that bargain I was able, even under the old system of seniority, to find the fit I wanted. Smart principals and teachers HAVE ALWAYS found ways to get the faculty whom they wanted. At one school, my principal excessed an art teacher she didn't like, then a few months later, "found the funds" to hire an art teacher she did like who has outlived her tenure. Even in the world of seniority, people have freedom and options. They also have the security to try to stay and grow into a position and to remain objective and true to the students throughout. Principals often traded teachers who were better fits for each others' school. We got a great teacher at Choir that way.
You think that doesn't happen "in the market". It happens in "Re-org's" all the time. Sure, some people are fired -- but this is not a for-profit profession. And incompetent teachers can be removed through the 3020a process. Meanwhile, teachers remain objective servants to their students. If the individuals who became principals really wanted to have the freedom of the marketplace they should've taken jobs which carried that risk. No company would accept 3 percent growth (which is what Bloomberg says has happened in our test results) over a two year period -- let alone this Mayor's term. Everyone is playing pretend financial genius in a world where that's the last thing that matters. The students matter, and therefore, so does making sure that we retain teachers who are experienced, highly skilled and who are not looking to make a profit off of the kids. Job security makes people objective and secure.
My mother was a dental assistant who workd for The Dept. of Health of New York City. She made very little money. Without my grandmother's and my uncle's assistance, I would never have had the life I did. However, my mother's benefits made it possible to get her hip surgery done at Lennox Hill Hospital. With a few exceptions, she can afford any medicine she needs. Had she worked in the private sector she would've made more money but not had these benefits. She also wouldn't have been able to complain when a dentist had treated a patient badly or done poor work. My mother is an annoying human being to know on many levels, but she was a very good patient advocate in her position. She got furious when shoddy work was done on the children she served and she raised hell about it. Once, a dentist held a kid's head still and was about to drill, which could've killed the child, who was pushing back as hard as a five year old could. First, my mother stopped the dentist. Then she reported that dentist. That dentist was fired. And yes, it was a new dentist at the clinic who had no experience with children who did this. Having an assistant with (at that time) over 15 years of experience was crucial in keeping that child from harm. But, that never should have happened. My mother still remembers how long it took to calm that child down, and that incident happened 25 years ago. My guess is the adult that child grew up to be also remembers it.
I don't want to make the low wages my mother did, and to be fair, I have more responsibilities and much more education.
My point is, though, that we are both civil servants, both blue collar.
We don't need to drive BMW's. We need security so that we can serve the city without prejudice. We not only need to be paid overtime, but we need to be reimbursed FULLY for the items we buy in order to do our jobs. If you look at my salary and divide it by the number of hours I really work, it comes down to something like 12 dollars an hour. I'm including time I grade, research, shop for my class, in addition to my classes and the times in which I have given up lunches and preps to work with students.
I don't want to be paid entirely per hour because that would cost the city much more money.
What I want is a decent, honorable wage. I do not want to make an extravagant living -- I just want security in exchange for not earning one.
I'll go back to my previous salary. It's a lot better than what I'll get if I lose my job and have to work for a private non-profit. I suggest my colleagues push our UFT president to return the mistake in funding allocation made in the last contract and return to us the seniority and security which we truly need.
Really, if this is about a funding crisis, the sensible thing to do is take a pay cut and get back the intangibles -- the seniority -- things that don't cost the city anything extra, but provide me with good faith from my employer. Cut my salary back to the last contract. You can still reform the schools -- there are systems in place for firing incompetent teachers and most of the new schools which have opened were around during the last contract. And, it stands to reason, if I give back salary you can open MORE new programs, not fewer. All I want is my seniority back. It's fair reward for the 16 years of service I have put in below market value, at the very least.
The city's roster of teachers is also bloated with new, untenured faculty who were mistakenly hired for positions which do not exist. We now have Teaching Fellows whose masters degrees were paid for by the city, but for whom there is no work. They were hired in the hopes that the new contract would push experienced teachers out. They were hired with the idea that they would take all of the new positions opening and the experienced teachers would hang in ATR limbo. They had no idea of this, I'm sure, although they were trained in a culture that was anti-teacher. Why anyone would take a job where you are taught that the older and more experienced you get, the less you are to be trusted is beyond me. In fairness, since they have not yet earned the right to security, if more cuts need to be made, untenured faculty ought to be cut. The Yankees couldn't keep Shelley Duncan on the roster once Giambi came back. And think about it, he didn't really make that consistent a contribution. Giambi often did and he had a huge salary to earn. Shelley Duncan was working much harder than his minor league contract paid for...and most of the time he was really only up to his contract. It was a surprise when he played well.
I am not Jason Giambi. I have to work WITH plantar fascitis. I also can't take sponsorships from companies and, if I could grow a moustache, absolutely no one would care.
So pay me blue collar rates and give me blue collar protection. It'll save us all a lot of misplaced energy.
OR, give me the same blue collar benefits Corrections Officers get. Let me retire at 20/40. A lot more people will retire at that deal than 25/55 because those of us in our 40's can find non-profit jobs to supplement our pensions and re-train a lot more easily than people 55 and over. Ironically, the more senior teachers are more likely to stay so that they can have the best pension they can added to social security. Offer a chance for those of us to leave with our pensions now who, under current conditions, see lack of job security and worse ahead of us, and we are bound to go. I'd rather not spend the next 15 years fighting for my life against market economics. My union ought to see the virtue of that, at the very least.
26 January, 2009
The Loss of Teachers' Voices
When was the last time you heard an interview with a teacher about education on a major radio or television station -- I mean an active teacher, not someone who used to be one.
Whenever discussions of education are held, it's the voice of politicians or businessmen. You rarely hear any statement with that heartening introduction, "I've been teaching on the same street to the children of ... for 36 years."
Those people do exist and I work with some one them. And they are fantastic teachers. But, these days they spend their days leaning against windows in quiet moments, afraid of what is going to happen next. Administrators come and go, and with them changes in policy, but in the process they wear on the nervous systems of dedicated professionals who really care about your kids. I say, your kids, because I don't have any children in the school system, but some of you reading this, do.
There is nothing fair about seeing people who have worked arduously with kids for almost as long as I've been alive finding themselves in fear of what they KNOW will be disaster.
A new program gets introduced to the school -- well -- new to this administrations. The faculty has tried it before and it didn't work. And they're demanding that teachers do it again. The kind of insanity -- of doing what fails over and over, is not unique to schools. But teachers find themselves alone when they are forced to do it. When a company does this and fails, they are publicly scorned. When a teacher does this, no one takes the time to ask how the failure happened. They just blame the teacher, who knew it wouldn't work all along.
Why didn't the teacher protest? There is no forum for protest in the Dept. of Education. None. You don't like it -- you're insubordinate.
And you can be fired for being insubordinate.
So, colleagues I deeply respect, bite their nails after over 20 or 30 years of knowing how to teach, facing the reality that they will not be able to do what they most want to and are best at doing. They will work within an insanity for which only they will be blamed.
Whenever discussions of education are held, it's the voice of politicians or businessmen. You rarely hear any statement with that heartening introduction, "I've been teaching on the same street to the children of ... for 36 years."
Those people do exist and I work with some one them. And they are fantastic teachers. But, these days they spend their days leaning against windows in quiet moments, afraid of what is going to happen next. Administrators come and go, and with them changes in policy, but in the process they wear on the nervous systems of dedicated professionals who really care about your kids. I say, your kids, because I don't have any children in the school system, but some of you reading this, do.
There is nothing fair about seeing people who have worked arduously with kids for almost as long as I've been alive finding themselves in fear of what they KNOW will be disaster.
A new program gets introduced to the school -- well -- new to this administrations. The faculty has tried it before and it didn't work. And they're demanding that teachers do it again. The kind of insanity -- of doing what fails over and over, is not unique to schools. But teachers find themselves alone when they are forced to do it. When a company does this and fails, they are publicly scorned. When a teacher does this, no one takes the time to ask how the failure happened. They just blame the teacher, who knew it wouldn't work all along.
Why didn't the teacher protest? There is no forum for protest in the Dept. of Education. None. You don't like it -- you're insubordinate.
And you can be fired for being insubordinate.
So, colleagues I deeply respect, bite their nails after over 20 or 30 years of knowing how to teach, facing the reality that they will not be able to do what they most want to and are best at doing. They will work within an insanity for which only they will be blamed.
25 January, 2009
The Alternate Universe of Borough Park
Just as Larry arches into a half' G-cleff, tail up, head curved down a bit to get an angular view of the B-I-R-D-S, Benie instinctively wolfs down water in an enormous slurp, turning Larry quickly around. "It isn't as much fun without me," is the message and Larry, acknowledging the intense wings the two of them share, follows Bernie with his eyes. Right now, though, he'd rather look on the window, so "fast game of tag up and down the bookcases" begone! There's time for that in the puffier part of the day, when the birds plump quietly and unseen.
Just watched Werner Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the Universe." Began a week ago, finished this morning, and it brought with it a great peace. The South Pole is sparsely peopled by types Karen wanted to be, though I don't know if in the forever-sense. A woman travels across a border hiding inside a clean sewage pipe being carried on the back of a truck for five days. The small round shape -- the imposed lens would've been fascinating, infuriating and inspiring...but also nauseating. This same woman (whose name was "Karen," of course) traveled across Africa in a garbage truck crossing arteries of territorial hatred, and finally escaping captivity with the help of drunk Russian Scientists. I think Karen Hunter's instinct to fly was a good one, especially if crossing violent, gorgeous earth.
Almost slept, but couldn't quite -- Friday I collapsed after taking a long stroll, completely in vain, across 18th Avenue, in the Center-North of the Alternate Universe of Borough Park. Though I don't have a bag ready to go to Ethiopia, Nigeria or Alaska (and I want one), one thing I have is a map of streets which are other-wordly, or, at least, discordant. Walking past manicured tiny lawns makes me feel just a bit more interested in what placing a knife to the back of my knee and lopping it off would do to me. The confinement of my body is whale-like and with the up and down changes of air quality -- half-radiator/half cold wind, all cold-wind, all moistish cool, my asthma is running for president of the United Federation of Thrashed Lungs. It sends mailings out while I sleep and has built a coalition among the residents of bronchial tubes inside teachers experiencing this punishing, quixotic air. My asthma promises no nasal drip tapping, or hanging chads of handkerchiefs. Paper ballots, with some healthy lungs doing the monitoring from Eustachians for Justice.
Almost made it to the stores I had wanted to see but it was too close to sundown -- the 30 or 40 shoestores which fill the Universe of Borough Park, home to a dozen or more Hasidic Jewish Communities were all closed, every last one. Running from about 40th street and 13th Avenue to 60th Street and 18th Avenue, are bakeries, stores which sell fine silver, pocket-sized booth selling specialty skullcaps (like a knitted on with the Yankees symbol on it), slightly bigger bagelry's, kosher pizza and falafel warehouses, and intermixed among these, clothing for the well-dressed European woman and man of 1941. Setting aside the special fur-laced hats and high socks which some Hasidic Jews wear, the vast majority of the Hasidic community is simply walking around high quality Film-Noir wear. Well-tailored suits with broad shoulders for both genders. Shapely and sensibly sexy black dresses or jumpers--everything with a soft curve to it, as if it were an upward breath that could lift a bit in a Swing dance. There's plenty of silk, lace and wigs designed to look like real hair worn over what are undoubtedly well-done hair styles, by women honoring the rule that no one but her husband should see her mane. This is a particular shame and a source of irony as ALL of these women choose wigs which must be close to what their actual hair looks like and which are damned good. It's like the rule that says we can't have a full figure statue of a person which is completely anatomically correct -- it must have a blemish to show that it is not real, it is not an idol. The seam which you can sometimes see in the wigs these women wear is that same flag "You are not getting the real beauty."
Almost an odd 40's movie, but not one because you cannot escape the long beards and curly locks on the men who also carry cell phones, work on laptops and drive Land Rovers. It's another planet, as Karen would say, and it's one I like to walk through sometimes, when the alien in me needs company.
People come to these specific blocks like those immigrants to Antartica. They are wrestless and looking for others like them -- who need to experience a rigor, a set of strange rules which put them at odds with nature and allow them to play chess with mortality. On Saturdays, when according to Orthodox Judaism, you cannot make anything or engage a force of power (like electricity) to cause a machine to make something, the Jews of Borough park storm up the avenues leading out of their continent and into Bensonhurst, Sunset Park and Bay Ridge. These are rarely spirals of contemplation, but usually power-walks. Why so fast? To see what you never have time to see on other days? Or, to move with the speed of a plane above interesting, but potentially dangerous territory.
I stop on my walks and go into a few caterers and sweet shops. By now, I am a regular at one of the local supermarkets, as well, and the owner doesn't know what to make of me. I can usually identify the music being played -- prayer music sung by famous cantors like Yossel Rosenbaum. I buy products which only have Hebrew written on them. Of course, I am that word which Chaim Potok made famous in The Chosen: Apikoros -- Hebrew for hypocrite.
Herzog wonders about the motivations of current explorers of the South Pole, noting that Shakleton's attempt 100 years ago, was on behalf of the British Empire. Wishing it could have been left unseen, unnoticed, or, at least, "unconquered," he seems to relish the stories of those who find themselves there to find community. The saddest story of the film involves a young man who came to preserve a local language -- I won't tell you what happened because you should rent or buy the film. But, the inevitability of Ph.D's taking to the highways for study and because they are not natural parts of whatever is left of the market economy, hit me in the stomach. You know when you study something that has several possible applications, but is not a single skill, that you will have to adapt and find your way to use it. That we may as well still be waring wigs and carrying our work in scrolls as far as the rest of the world is concerned, hadn't quite reached me until that moment. Karen had been told that because of her artistic and intellectual interests she would be better off in Europe as Americans tend to marginalize people not enlivened by consumerism. I told her that was bullshit and still believe it.
The Alternate Universes of Borough Park, the East Village and Inwood stood for me as proof that you can sustain your ideas and your art if you insist upon doing so. But, I was never as aware as I am now of how the market could pack an idea in mothballs and package it, buying real estate around it for people to consume and re-consume it. Much worse, how a bad economy could make the individual feel that anything not of immediate use is frivolous. Very few of my friends go to hear live music downtown, even if they live there. Yes, the bands have changed. But, that used to be the point.
What a comic, thin, man in a traditional dark suit and ice floe beneath his chin called, "The Great City of Borough Park," is a truly profound entity. It's a loosely planned community in the religious sense -- there are multiple kinds of Hasidim, and within them different groupings. As if someone had run around the blocks gluing down pieces of Shtetl, there are tiny shuls (synagogues) that fill tiny houses with hand-painted signs identifying them. Then there are the virtual classical parodies which serve glorious school buildings, community centers, houses and synagogues and, alongside them enormous chandeliers nearly breaking through the bay windows of garden apartments. The unwritten economic agreement to keep the neighborhood affordable for the community who lives there is unparalleled in NY. ( Hasidism do occasionally rent to non-Jews when the few apartments which become vacant aren't immediately gobbled up by the "cousin-of my youngest niece and her husband who are expecting quintuplets," etc.) That you can still find not just outfits right out of The Third Man, but Challah made with honey and eggs with no concern for cholesterol, is itself worth the walk.
For me, though, it's an opportunity to be an alien among my own aliens -- I can balance two worlds at once. Neither is home, and I envy both the people in Antartica and the Jews of Borough Park that willingness to make allegiance with a lifestyle.
Someday, I'll pack Larry and Bernie up in a Volvo (once I learn to drive) and we'll go to whatever that place is which will feel right. For now, I am a very slow traveler. I was and am willing to go faster and could have made that plainer when Karen was here. In the stillness is same desire which the bird's offending Larry have to "plump" and be "home" for a while. I found that home was created by the love of the bird I was flying with which is probably what they feel too.
Just watched Werner Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the Universe." Began a week ago, finished this morning, and it brought with it a great peace. The South Pole is sparsely peopled by types Karen wanted to be, though I don't know if in the forever-sense. A woman travels across a border hiding inside a clean sewage pipe being carried on the back of a truck for five days. The small round shape -- the imposed lens would've been fascinating, infuriating and inspiring...but also nauseating. This same woman (whose name was "Karen," of course) traveled across Africa in a garbage truck crossing arteries of territorial hatred, and finally escaping captivity with the help of drunk Russian Scientists. I think Karen Hunter's instinct to fly was a good one, especially if crossing violent, gorgeous earth.
Almost slept, but couldn't quite -- Friday I collapsed after taking a long stroll, completely in vain, across 18th Avenue, in the Center-North of the Alternate Universe of Borough Park. Though I don't have a bag ready to go to Ethiopia, Nigeria or Alaska (and I want one), one thing I have is a map of streets which are other-wordly, or, at least, discordant. Walking past manicured tiny lawns makes me feel just a bit more interested in what placing a knife to the back of my knee and lopping it off would do to me. The confinement of my body is whale-like and with the up and down changes of air quality -- half-radiator/half cold wind, all cold-wind, all moistish cool, my asthma is running for president of the United Federation of Thrashed Lungs. It sends mailings out while I sleep and has built a coalition among the residents of bronchial tubes inside teachers experiencing this punishing, quixotic air. My asthma promises no nasal drip tapping, or hanging chads of handkerchiefs. Paper ballots, with some healthy lungs doing the monitoring from Eustachians for Justice.
Almost made it to the stores I had wanted to see but it was too close to sundown -- the 30 or 40 shoestores which fill the Universe of Borough Park, home to a dozen or more Hasidic Jewish Communities were all closed, every last one. Running from about 40th street and 13th Avenue to 60th Street and 18th Avenue, are bakeries, stores which sell fine silver, pocket-sized booth selling specialty skullcaps (like a knitted on with the Yankees symbol on it), slightly bigger bagelry's, kosher pizza and falafel warehouses, and intermixed among these, clothing for the well-dressed European woman and man of 1941. Setting aside the special fur-laced hats and high socks which some Hasidic Jews wear, the vast majority of the Hasidic community is simply walking around high quality Film-Noir wear. Well-tailored suits with broad shoulders for both genders. Shapely and sensibly sexy black dresses or jumpers--everything with a soft curve to it, as if it were an upward breath that could lift a bit in a Swing dance. There's plenty of silk, lace and wigs designed to look like real hair worn over what are undoubtedly well-done hair styles, by women honoring the rule that no one but her husband should see her mane. This is a particular shame and a source of irony as ALL of these women choose wigs which must be close to what their actual hair looks like and which are damned good. It's like the rule that says we can't have a full figure statue of a person which is completely anatomically correct -- it must have a blemish to show that it is not real, it is not an idol. The seam which you can sometimes see in the wigs these women wear is that same flag "You are not getting the real beauty."
Almost an odd 40's movie, but not one because you cannot escape the long beards and curly locks on the men who also carry cell phones, work on laptops and drive Land Rovers. It's another planet, as Karen would say, and it's one I like to walk through sometimes, when the alien in me needs company.
People come to these specific blocks like those immigrants to Antartica. They are wrestless and looking for others like them -- who need to experience a rigor, a set of strange rules which put them at odds with nature and allow them to play chess with mortality. On Saturdays, when according to Orthodox Judaism, you cannot make anything or engage a force of power (like electricity) to cause a machine to make something, the Jews of Borough park storm up the avenues leading out of their continent and into Bensonhurst, Sunset Park and Bay Ridge. These are rarely spirals of contemplation, but usually power-walks. Why so fast? To see what you never have time to see on other days? Or, to move with the speed of a plane above interesting, but potentially dangerous territory.
I stop on my walks and go into a few caterers and sweet shops. By now, I am a regular at one of the local supermarkets, as well, and the owner doesn't know what to make of me. I can usually identify the music being played -- prayer music sung by famous cantors like Yossel Rosenbaum. I buy products which only have Hebrew written on them. Of course, I am that word which Chaim Potok made famous in The Chosen: Apikoros -- Hebrew for hypocrite.
Herzog wonders about the motivations of current explorers of the South Pole, noting that Shakleton's attempt 100 years ago, was on behalf of the British Empire. Wishing it could have been left unseen, unnoticed, or, at least, "unconquered," he seems to relish the stories of those who find themselves there to find community. The saddest story of the film involves a young man who came to preserve a local language -- I won't tell you what happened because you should rent or buy the film. But, the inevitability of Ph.D's taking to the highways for study and because they are not natural parts of whatever is left of the market economy, hit me in the stomach. You know when you study something that has several possible applications, but is not a single skill, that you will have to adapt and find your way to use it. That we may as well still be waring wigs and carrying our work in scrolls as far as the rest of the world is concerned, hadn't quite reached me until that moment. Karen had been told that because of her artistic and intellectual interests she would be better off in Europe as Americans tend to marginalize people not enlivened by consumerism. I told her that was bullshit and still believe it.
The Alternate Universes of Borough Park, the East Village and Inwood stood for me as proof that you can sustain your ideas and your art if you insist upon doing so. But, I was never as aware as I am now of how the market could pack an idea in mothballs and package it, buying real estate around it for people to consume and re-consume it. Much worse, how a bad economy could make the individual feel that anything not of immediate use is frivolous. Very few of my friends go to hear live music downtown, even if they live there. Yes, the bands have changed. But, that used to be the point.
What a comic, thin, man in a traditional dark suit and ice floe beneath his chin called, "The Great City of Borough Park," is a truly profound entity. It's a loosely planned community in the religious sense -- there are multiple kinds of Hasidim, and within them different groupings. As if someone had run around the blocks gluing down pieces of Shtetl, there are tiny shuls (synagogues) that fill tiny houses with hand-painted signs identifying them. Then there are the virtual classical parodies which serve glorious school buildings, community centers, houses and synagogues and, alongside them enormous chandeliers nearly breaking through the bay windows of garden apartments. The unwritten economic agreement to keep the neighborhood affordable for the community who lives there is unparalleled in NY. ( Hasidism do occasionally rent to non-Jews when the few apartments which become vacant aren't immediately gobbled up by the "cousin-of my youngest niece and her husband who are expecting quintuplets," etc.) That you can still find not just outfits right out of The Third Man, but Challah made with honey and eggs with no concern for cholesterol, is itself worth the walk.
For me, though, it's an opportunity to be an alien among my own aliens -- I can balance two worlds at once. Neither is home, and I envy both the people in Antartica and the Jews of Borough Park that willingness to make allegiance with a lifestyle.
Someday, I'll pack Larry and Bernie up in a Volvo (once I learn to drive) and we'll go to whatever that place is which will feel right. For now, I am a very slow traveler. I was and am willing to go faster and could have made that plainer when Karen was here. In the stillness is same desire which the bird's offending Larry have to "plump" and be "home" for a while. I found that home was created by the love of the bird I was flying with which is probably what they feel too.
23 January, 2008
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.
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.
15 January, 2008
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
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Attn: Endowment Office
30 Lafayette Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11217
Please note on the check "In memory of Malaika Bermiss."
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
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
19 March, 2007
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
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
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