18 July, 2012
In honor of Henry
In honor of the anniversary of losing Henry, Larry ran around like a maniac chasing a feather and then started lifting the toy on his own and Bernie went after it.....
16 July, 2012
Floodlights
In the compressed, florescent light of the ambulance, Manuel thought the green bottle looked just like a toy lighter he had tried to purchase for 25 cents in a vending machine. The green plastic enticed him, itself a reminder of the bottom of the kitchen glasses which broke easily when he knocked them off the table when he was 2 and 3 years old. He squished the bottle and almost cracked it. “Young man, we need that.” The paramedic pulled her voice back a bit and rubbed the boy's shoulders. “We need to know what your mommy took, so we can help her.” The boy handed it over silently.
Destiny Torres-Shapiro was not an unfamiliar face to the nurses in the Shalom Aleichem Memorial Hospital Emergency Room. A year ago, her mother Stacey had found Destiny listless in the doorway to her apartment building. Six months later, Dmitri Shapiro, her ex-husband, drove Destiny from the restaurant bathroom where he found her attempting to throw up the overdose she had just taken. He waited with her until they found a nurse named Devon who watched over her until she was admitted. “What if my patients see me,” he explained as he wiped Destiny's forehead. Still, he was angry when she didn't call him to pick her up when she was released a week later. He hadn't intended his practical concerns to overshadow his desire to be her hero and her one true love. In his mind, he was sure Destiny knew how much he cared for her and that she could rely on him, always. He had left her in capable hands – and he had stayed for hours until she was properly supervised.
The nurses felt sorry for Destiny, and didn't think she was an incapable mother to her children. She obviously had some personal turmoil, and while they liked Dmitri, they referred to him as "the guy she hangs with" even when they were married. When he was a resident in Internal Medicine, he spent his time with a crew of young Russian doctors known for smoking outside of the ER and keeping two cell phones, one for their wives and one for their girlfriends. If he wasn't unfaithful (and they weren't sure) he enjoyed the ersatz Sinatra bad boy image of the others, and made no attempt to separate himself even from their notorious drinking escapades. He even wore the "bling" -- a pinky ring of diamonds, an opal and diamonds on another finger, and a gold chain bracelet, sometimes with diamonds, as well. The wedding band (and they were all married) was super-ornate, Dmitri's and Destiny's in carved, block Jewish letters (she converted for the marriage, officially at any rate.) So, if anything, they saw Dmitri as more suspect than Destiny.
No one, in fact, saw Destiny's employment for Child Protective Services as ironic. Her kids were well-fed and well-spoken. They dreaded more what would happen to them if they left a world which was unstable, but basically safe and which they understood well. Although Dmitri was a nice enough stepfather and they believed the grandmother helped with raising the children, they saw the children's characters as gentle replicas of their mothers, especially their manners, their natural curiosity about medicine and their above average compassion. They were thoroughly, "nice kids" and the thought of placing them into foster care was never considered. All of the ER staff had seen their share of incompetent parents and of parents who were basically good, but had personal traumas and they saw Destiny among the latter. Finally, the drugs that Destiny took weren't really lethal, but were overdoses of medications for pain and anxiety. The psychiatric teams themselves saw Destiny as someone who wasn't trying to kill herself, but needed better help managing. They only wished they had the time to be able to fully help her. However, no one felt tht she or the children should be uprooted, unless Destiny herself felt otherwise, or things deteriorated.
Destiny was not completely unhappy, either, and she still felt affection for her ex-husband. When she had come out of the hospital, six months ago, it was Dmitri whom Destiny called as soon as her mother had left after bringing her home. She took him to dinner in Chinatown, where they always went whenever they wanted to escape their identities. Then she gave him a massage and slept alongside him. But, she couldn't sustain the calm. Her rhythms were spun around Manuel and Damaris, children of her high school sweetheart and first husband. She loved them and had built a silent world in which they never had to explain anything to one another. She felt unfaithful to them – and she was – whenever she lived in the adult world of explanations and distinctions. There was nothing more satisfying than holding on to both of them after a day of playing at the beach or at home. She didn't know how to explain to them that the purity was sometimes too much and also too fragile. When she was with them too long, she lost her ability to defend herself, and thereby care for them. If she was to work in the world of adults, she needed practice. Dr. Dmitri Shapiro had wanted nothing more than to protect her when she met him, two years ago. He was ready to adopt her kids, create a home. Much as she held one foot in what her grandmother had called the “normal world,” Destiny was afraid she couldn't manage it full-time. Why had she had children, then? An insatiable need to love and nurture. She knew she could do this, if she could do so unnoticed, far away from crowds, especially of those who were familiar. Like everything else in Destiny's life, however, this certainty was undermined by an opposing truth. There was nowhere else besides the thirty blocks in which she had grown up in which she could survive most effectively. She didn't know how to drive and, taken out of context of the Hispanic and European immigrant neighborhoods of Brooklyn in which she grew up, people couldn't parse her fast speech or inexplicable fears of space, the dark and of being stranded without buses or trains.
Manuel already knew, if nothing else, how in danger his mother felt. She had stopped sleeping weeks ago and was living on the tablets in green bottles. The hall closet was full of bottles, some of which she pulled out and used for his sister and for him when they were ill. The hoarded medication was a safeguard against needing to go to the doctor. His mother had a gift for diagnosing her family's ills, and whenever they did go to the doctor, she demanded prescriptions with refill after refill, which she filled, noting their uses should similar illnesses appear in their house again. It mortified her when she found out it was Manuel who had to call 911 this time. She hadn't meant to kill herself, but was in the habit of overdosing on pain and anti-anxiety medications when she was frightened. Sometimes she slept it off without notice. Manuel had a system for how to tell if this was a dangerous moment. Whenever he saw his mother asleep, he breathed with her for about a minute. If the process wasn't smooth in any way, he picked up the phone. Even when another adult was making the decision, Manuel checked his mother's breathing, to be sure.
When Dmitri arrived at the ER, Manuel was riding on the shoulders of Patrick, a gregarious African-American male nurse with a surprisingly thick, Yiddish accent. Having grown up in the Hasidic area surrounding the hospital, Patrick absorbed the accents of his neighbors. His mother was also a nurse, and her familiarity with the elderly parents of her neighbors (who perforce she often cared for in the cardiology wing of Shalom Aleichem), made most of their families at ease with her zealously curious son, and he had grown up with the unusual privilege of visiting their schools and synagogues, as well as eating frequent meals at their tables. Only the children of the most severe sects did not acknowledge him, and Patrick was an expert at distinguishing by their clothes and the style of their side locks of hair who was Satmar and who was from the more-welcoming Lubavitch fiefdoms. He'd learned, too, the derogatory Yiddish slang that one group used about another and more generally upon anyone with whom they felt enmity. What she didn't pick up herself, Patrick eagerly taught his mother. Consequently, everyone regardless of sect, knew not to curse around Patrick or his mother because they could turn around and double the offense. Plus, they could find nearly everyone's addresses, schools and favorite places to shop. Patrick's mother was prized among the highest customers at the local butchers and fish markets because she not only had discriminating tastes, but she was far nicer to the servers and delivery people than most of her neighbors. Cross Amanda Davis, her son, or her quiet, Englsh teacher husband Tom and you might never get a good white fish or shoulder steak again. Even though Tom kept his distance from practically everyone, claiming the noise of his classroom made it impossible for him to listen to human speech after 3:25pm, he could sense if what was being said about him was disparaging from the tone, and he knew that anything ending with the word, “Yaaam” - river in Hebrew in Yiddish, could not be good.
“Gantz be'Seder?” asked Dmitri in his broken Yiddish, of Patrick. “Gantz is Meshugah!” responded Patrick, gently placing Manuel on the counter top of the large nurse's station at the center of ER. Unlike most hospitals, the ER at Sholom Aleichem moved slowly and carefully. Most of the patients were elderly people who came in because they hadn't seen a doctor in a long while. Urinary tract infections, chronic headaches and stomach problems. Some terminal patients who needed more home care than their insurance paid for would call when their pain was too severe or they're symptoms took a dramatic turn which they did not understand. Then there were people like Destiny and the patient in the bed next to hers. No one knew exactly how Herman Diamond had arrived in ER. He was a resident in a nearby nursing home. Had they just wheeled him in and left him? Someone early in the evening had been able to establish that he had throat cancer in the later stages (hence the breathing tube in his neck.) Periodically, he coughed loudly, but what exactly were they to do? Destiny reminded each new crew of nurses who looked in on Herman and began to ask him for basic information, “They already asked him that, it's all in his chart. They're trying to get his records from the nursing home.” It had quieted down around Herman when Manuel had jumped on Patrick's shoulders.
Just as Dmitri and Patrick had begun to go over the details of Destiny's episode, however, Herman started to wheeze. Bending forward as if for speed, a nurse bolted from across ER, pulling the curtain around Herman as she looked for the suction bag and found that Herman was in the one bed at which no such machine existed. She screamed this out and an older nurse moved seamlessly behind his bed and set the equipment up. “Don't move,” said the younger nurse as she began to pull the fluid from Herman's chest. The sound of gagging under-water peeled from behind the curtain. “Please, sir, don't move!” A teenage voiced female nurse shouted as she shifted the curtain to enter, “He has a DNR.” But, the other nurse insisted, “I don't think we're there, yet,” removing the last bit of phlegm and replacing the breathing tube gently in the space in Herman's neck. “Patrick, he needs a new tube. We need to fit him for a new one. Call Respiratory and ask for Holman,” beckoned the nurse who had done the suction. To Dmitri, this nurse appeared to be in her very early 30's, thinner than the rail which held the curtain-rod, with a wide-boned, smooth burnt yellow skin and face of the Mongol conquerors he had seen in the copies of the silk paintings by the thirteenth century artist Qian Xuan which hung in the coffee-stained dispatcher's office in which his father worked. Patrick grabbed the phone, and for the first time all night, Herman was heard speaking into his own cell phone. His voice was thin,sounding more like static on a soft radio. Ten minutes later, his 18 year old son Mohammed, dressed in a baseball cap, a bright red polo shirt, sagging jeans and squeaky new dunks, ran into the ER, and sat down next to Dmitri while Manuel slept in Destiny's arms.
Destiny Torres-Shapiro was not an unfamiliar face to the nurses in the Shalom Aleichem Memorial Hospital Emergency Room. A year ago, her mother Stacey had found Destiny listless in the doorway to her apartment building. Six months later, Dmitri Shapiro, her ex-husband, drove Destiny from the restaurant bathroom where he found her attempting to throw up the overdose she had just taken. He waited with her until they found a nurse named Devon who watched over her until she was admitted. “What if my patients see me,” he explained as he wiped Destiny's forehead. Still, he was angry when she didn't call him to pick her up when she was released a week later. He hadn't intended his practical concerns to overshadow his desire to be her hero and her one true love. In his mind, he was sure Destiny knew how much he cared for her and that she could rely on him, always. He had left her in capable hands – and he had stayed for hours until she was properly supervised.
The nurses felt sorry for Destiny, and didn't think she was an incapable mother to her children. She obviously had some personal turmoil, and while they liked Dmitri, they referred to him as "the guy she hangs with" even when they were married. When he was a resident in Internal Medicine, he spent his time with a crew of young Russian doctors known for smoking outside of the ER and keeping two cell phones, one for their wives and one for their girlfriends. If he wasn't unfaithful (and they weren't sure) he enjoyed the ersatz Sinatra bad boy image of the others, and made no attempt to separate himself even from their notorious drinking escapades. He even wore the "bling" -- a pinky ring of diamonds, an opal and diamonds on another finger, and a gold chain bracelet, sometimes with diamonds, as well. The wedding band (and they were all married) was super-ornate, Dmitri's and Destiny's in carved, block Jewish letters (she converted for the marriage, officially at any rate.) So, if anything, they saw Dmitri as more suspect than Destiny.
No one, in fact, saw Destiny's employment for Child Protective Services as ironic. Her kids were well-fed and well-spoken. They dreaded more what would happen to them if they left a world which was unstable, but basically safe and which they understood well. Although Dmitri was a nice enough stepfather and they believed the grandmother helped with raising the children, they saw the children's characters as gentle replicas of their mothers, especially their manners, their natural curiosity about medicine and their above average compassion. They were thoroughly, "nice kids" and the thought of placing them into foster care was never considered. All of the ER staff had seen their share of incompetent parents and of parents who were basically good, but had personal traumas and they saw Destiny among the latter. Finally, the drugs that Destiny took weren't really lethal, but were overdoses of medications for pain and anxiety. The psychiatric teams themselves saw Destiny as someone who wasn't trying to kill herself, but needed better help managing. They only wished they had the time to be able to fully help her. However, no one felt tht she or the children should be uprooted, unless Destiny herself felt otherwise, or things deteriorated.
Destiny was not completely unhappy, either, and she still felt affection for her ex-husband. When she had come out of the hospital, six months ago, it was Dmitri whom Destiny called as soon as her mother had left after bringing her home. She took him to dinner in Chinatown, where they always went whenever they wanted to escape their identities. Then she gave him a massage and slept alongside him. But, she couldn't sustain the calm. Her rhythms were spun around Manuel and Damaris, children of her high school sweetheart and first husband. She loved them and had built a silent world in which they never had to explain anything to one another. She felt unfaithful to them – and she was – whenever she lived in the adult world of explanations and distinctions. There was nothing more satisfying than holding on to both of them after a day of playing at the beach or at home. She didn't know how to explain to them that the purity was sometimes too much and also too fragile. When she was with them too long, she lost her ability to defend herself, and thereby care for them. If she was to work in the world of adults, she needed practice. Dr. Dmitri Shapiro had wanted nothing more than to protect her when she met him, two years ago. He was ready to adopt her kids, create a home. Much as she held one foot in what her grandmother had called the “normal world,” Destiny was afraid she couldn't manage it full-time. Why had she had children, then? An insatiable need to love and nurture. She knew she could do this, if she could do so unnoticed, far away from crowds, especially of those who were familiar. Like everything else in Destiny's life, however, this certainty was undermined by an opposing truth. There was nowhere else besides the thirty blocks in which she had grown up in which she could survive most effectively. She didn't know how to drive and, taken out of context of the Hispanic and European immigrant neighborhoods of Brooklyn in which she grew up, people couldn't parse her fast speech or inexplicable fears of space, the dark and of being stranded without buses or trains.
Manuel already knew, if nothing else, how in danger his mother felt. She had stopped sleeping weeks ago and was living on the tablets in green bottles. The hall closet was full of bottles, some of which she pulled out and used for his sister and for him when they were ill. The hoarded medication was a safeguard against needing to go to the doctor. His mother had a gift for diagnosing her family's ills, and whenever they did go to the doctor, she demanded prescriptions with refill after refill, which she filled, noting their uses should similar illnesses appear in their house again. It mortified her when she found out it was Manuel who had to call 911 this time. She hadn't meant to kill herself, but was in the habit of overdosing on pain and anti-anxiety medications when she was frightened. Sometimes she slept it off without notice. Manuel had a system for how to tell if this was a dangerous moment. Whenever he saw his mother asleep, he breathed with her for about a minute. If the process wasn't smooth in any way, he picked up the phone. Even when another adult was making the decision, Manuel checked his mother's breathing, to be sure.
When Dmitri arrived at the ER, Manuel was riding on the shoulders of Patrick, a gregarious African-American male nurse with a surprisingly thick, Yiddish accent. Having grown up in the Hasidic area surrounding the hospital, Patrick absorbed the accents of his neighbors. His mother was also a nurse, and her familiarity with the elderly parents of her neighbors (who perforce she often cared for in the cardiology wing of Shalom Aleichem), made most of their families at ease with her zealously curious son, and he had grown up with the unusual privilege of visiting their schools and synagogues, as well as eating frequent meals at their tables. Only the children of the most severe sects did not acknowledge him, and Patrick was an expert at distinguishing by their clothes and the style of their side locks of hair who was Satmar and who was from the more-welcoming Lubavitch fiefdoms. He'd learned, too, the derogatory Yiddish slang that one group used about another and more generally upon anyone with whom they felt enmity. What she didn't pick up herself, Patrick eagerly taught his mother. Consequently, everyone regardless of sect, knew not to curse around Patrick or his mother because they could turn around and double the offense. Plus, they could find nearly everyone's addresses, schools and favorite places to shop. Patrick's mother was prized among the highest customers at the local butchers and fish markets because she not only had discriminating tastes, but she was far nicer to the servers and delivery people than most of her neighbors. Cross Amanda Davis, her son, or her quiet, Englsh teacher husband Tom and you might never get a good white fish or shoulder steak again. Even though Tom kept his distance from practically everyone, claiming the noise of his classroom made it impossible for him to listen to human speech after 3:25pm, he could sense if what was being said about him was disparaging from the tone, and he knew that anything ending with the word, “Yaaam” - river in Hebrew in Yiddish, could not be good.
“Gantz be'Seder?” asked Dmitri in his broken Yiddish, of Patrick. “Gantz is Meshugah!” responded Patrick, gently placing Manuel on the counter top of the large nurse's station at the center of ER. Unlike most hospitals, the ER at Sholom Aleichem moved slowly and carefully. Most of the patients were elderly people who came in because they hadn't seen a doctor in a long while. Urinary tract infections, chronic headaches and stomach problems. Some terminal patients who needed more home care than their insurance paid for would call when their pain was too severe or they're symptoms took a dramatic turn which they did not understand. Then there were people like Destiny and the patient in the bed next to hers. No one knew exactly how Herman Diamond had arrived in ER. He was a resident in a nearby nursing home. Had they just wheeled him in and left him? Someone early in the evening had been able to establish that he had throat cancer in the later stages (hence the breathing tube in his neck.) Periodically, he coughed loudly, but what exactly were they to do? Destiny reminded each new crew of nurses who looked in on Herman and began to ask him for basic information, “They already asked him that, it's all in his chart. They're trying to get his records from the nursing home.” It had quieted down around Herman when Manuel had jumped on Patrick's shoulders.
Just as Dmitri and Patrick had begun to go over the details of Destiny's episode, however, Herman started to wheeze. Bending forward as if for speed, a nurse bolted from across ER, pulling the curtain around Herman as she looked for the suction bag and found that Herman was in the one bed at which no such machine existed. She screamed this out and an older nurse moved seamlessly behind his bed and set the equipment up. “Don't move,” said the younger nurse as she began to pull the fluid from Herman's chest. The sound of gagging under-water peeled from behind the curtain. “Please, sir, don't move!” A teenage voiced female nurse shouted as she shifted the curtain to enter, “He has a DNR.” But, the other nurse insisted, “I don't think we're there, yet,” removing the last bit of phlegm and replacing the breathing tube gently in the space in Herman's neck. “Patrick, he needs a new tube. We need to fit him for a new one. Call Respiratory and ask for Holman,” beckoned the nurse who had done the suction. To Dmitri, this nurse appeared to be in her very early 30's, thinner than the rail which held the curtain-rod, with a wide-boned, smooth burnt yellow skin and face of the Mongol conquerors he had seen in the copies of the silk paintings by the thirteenth century artist Qian Xuan which hung in the coffee-stained dispatcher's office in which his father worked. Patrick grabbed the phone, and for the first time all night, Herman was heard speaking into his own cell phone. His voice was thin,sounding more like static on a soft radio. Ten minutes later, his 18 year old son Mohammed, dressed in a baseball cap, a bright red polo shirt, sagging jeans and squeaky new dunks, ran into the ER, and sat down next to Dmitri while Manuel slept in Destiny's arms.
05 July, 2012
Voluntary Redundancy
As I was reading The Guardian this morning, I noticed reference to a very curious phrase called, "Voluntary Redundancy." This roughly translates to a buyout by a company of select workers -- with a generous severance pay offer. After a little research, I found The Guardian, had done a longer piece on the fact that companies were likely to offer many workers this option, given job projections in Britain. When faced with such an offer, a woman in publishing noted:
"It was a lot of money and could have nearly paid off my mortgage. I decided against in the end because I wasn't certain I would find other work, but I'm still not sure I made the right decision." ("What to do if you are offered Voluntary Redundancy," Jill Insley, The Guardian February 26, 2010.)
Typically, as with incentive packages offered in the private sector in the US, Voluntary Redundancy packages are 10 - 12 months pay. That doesn't sound anything like the buyout which was discussed (and seems to have disappeared) by the DOE. If we are to be expected to follow a more corporate model in education, why isn't the DOE acting more like a business and offering a reasonable incentive to those whom it wishes to take a buyout?
Not that a buyout would really help me, even if it were this generous.
There's nothing else I am qualified to do but teach, and I can't face the next eleven years on one year's salary. Nor can I use it to train to become something else -- it won't cover any private education tuition, and should I even get into a public school for re-training, what will I use to live on? However, such a buyout might be viable for people who are or five years away from retirement, if they can also start to receive their pensions. The small incentive numbers (Walcott said something about looking at what was offered in Dallas - 2 to 10,000 dollars, in that case) wouldn't really help anyone. If you are renting an apartment for, say, 1,500 a month, why would you take an offer that didn't even cover a year's rent? It's bizarre that a DOE working under a mayor who is a businessman would offer packages that would have no place in a corporate model. Often these packages include maintaining some of the benefits that the job offered, so no one can argue that any benefits UFT workers might get to keep from a buyout outweigh the small cash package. Corporations in Britain, anyway, also offer job re-training programs. Do you know how impossibly difficult it is to try to get a different job if you have spent your life teaching? Such programs might be very valuable to someone who can't quite manage to live on whatever his/her pension might be, but could supplement his/her income if he/she had new skills. Again, this wouldn't help me, and frankly, what I want is to continue to work in education because I actually like teaching.
However, if I were three years away from retirement and could start to collect my pension, I could take an offer of a year's salary and re-training. A big, "IF," but there are people out there for whom this might be a reality. People who take Voluntary Redundancy also have the option of returning to their companies -- in the same way, I guess as people can work F-Status, or just come out of retirement. If someone were to do this, he/she might also bring new skills and experience to his/her position. This would enrich the school environment. Now, this is all not viable for me, and not something I would would want "at this point in my career." Unlike the many interviewers whom I have faced who look at my years of experience and have used the latter phrase to imply my experience and age would make me unwilling to work hard, I WANT TO TAKE MY EXPERIENCE and really put it to work on the job. I feel frustrated that I can't do this. That I can't, finally, use what I know to improve a situation. Then, after being allowed to come close to completing my life's work, if the economy were still in bad shape - in about 8 -10 years, I might be ready for a buyout.
There's nothing else I am qualified to do but teach, and I can't face the next eleven years on one year's salary. Nor can I use it to train to become something else -- it won't cover any private education tuition, and should I even get into a public school for re-training, what will I use to live on? However, such a buyout might be viable for people who are or five years away from retirement, if they can also start to receive their pensions. The small incentive numbers (Walcott said something about looking at what was offered in Dallas - 2 to 10,000 dollars, in that case) wouldn't really help anyone. If you are renting an apartment for, say, 1,500 a month, why would you take an offer that didn't even cover a year's rent? It's bizarre that a DOE working under a mayor who is a businessman would offer packages that would have no place in a corporate model. Often these packages include maintaining some of the benefits that the job offered, so no one can argue that any benefits UFT workers might get to keep from a buyout outweigh the small cash package. Corporations in Britain, anyway, also offer job re-training programs. Do you know how impossibly difficult it is to try to get a different job if you have spent your life teaching? Such programs might be very valuable to someone who can't quite manage to live on whatever his/her pension might be, but could supplement his/her income if he/she had new skills. Again, this wouldn't help me, and frankly, what I want is to continue to work in education because I actually like teaching.
However, if I were three years away from retirement and could start to collect my pension, I could take an offer of a year's salary and re-training. A big, "IF," but there are people out there for whom this might be a reality. People who take Voluntary Redundancy also have the option of returning to their companies -- in the same way, I guess as people can work F-Status, or just come out of retirement. If someone were to do this, he/she might also bring new skills and experience to his/her position. This would enrich the school environment. Now, this is all not viable for me, and not something I would would want "at this point in my career." Unlike the many interviewers whom I have faced who look at my years of experience and have used the latter phrase to imply my experience and age would make me unwilling to work hard, I WANT TO TAKE MY EXPERIENCE and really put it to work on the job. I feel frustrated that I can't do this. That I can't, finally, use what I know to improve a situation. Then, after being allowed to come close to completing my life's work, if the economy were still in bad shape - in about 8 -10 years, I might be ready for a buyout.
20 May, 2012
Larry will be writing more in the summer
Larry wanted to take this opportunity to apologize for not keeping up with his part of the blog. He's been busy, but is quite well and eager to write. He's been doing a lot of important caring for the Bernster, me and others. Plus, he got his teeth cleaned and he's been turning down toothpaste commercials, left and right.
Soon...
What we talk about when we talk about the UFT
Forgive me, it's been a long time since I have posted, and I have to be brief.
It's popular for blogs written by and for teachers to be anti-UFT. Recently, some blogs even picked up on the heinous story by the NY Post about UFT president Michael Mulgrew's alleged affair. In doing this, all we are doing is picking up the public's gauntlet and using it to beat ourselves. This is exactly what people want to read. The anti-teacher sentiment which has been engendered by political figures at every government level thrives on the rhetoric and techniques of witch hunts.
When I have had complaints about the UFT, I have been pretty direct in making them -- to the UFT members in question. If I went unheard, I found a way to get the individual in question to hear me.
As I have said on other occasions, I have been helped a great deal both by Unity members of the UFT and members of alternative factions. What I like about both groups -- people like ICE, GEM, etc. is that they are actually trying to do something, not just complain. When we complain publicly about any group of teachers (or teacher) we reinforce stereotypes which are being capitalized upon in the current climate. More than this, we waste time. Don't stop questioning what anyone does, but do stop getting involved in tangents. Keep asking -- keep the dialogue going, if not in the forum in which you started, then in another, BETWEEN YOU AND SOMEONE WHO ACTUALLY CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE.
WASTING TIME JABBING AT ANYONE doesn't help. I'm "putting this out there" because this IS a general point.
When my mother was working for the city, she got enormous help both from her own union, and from advice of other unions, all of them for Blue Collar jobs. No matter what complaints she or others in her job title had, they didn't waste time complaining about other workers. My mother had meetings directly with the head of the Dept. of Health of NYC, she had meetings with leaders of her union and even asked for advice from leaders of other unions. That's how she managed for the over 30 years she worked.
If you are going to say times have changed, I'll say this: Willie Loman didn't have a union. Had he worked as a construction worker, he would have had a union.
22 February, 2012
Unchained Memory
November 23 went by and I forgot it was your birthday. I probably had no idea it was November 23rd. On Dec 1, I took a month leave to deal with my health. All I could do was find out what was wrong and it was time to go back. I'm trying to address things now. Karen, I miss you and I am more shaped by your loss than I want to be. I want to be shaped by what I found in you, not to seem trite and obvious. I still don't believe it.
22 January, 2012
The End of the Aspie Teacher
When I originally published this, I altered facts to protect my identity. I don't want to change it and it doesn't make a difference in the end.
Will there ever be more Aspie Teachers?
November 5, 2011
Teaching: A vanishing safe haven for people with Asperger’s Syndrome.
When I was emerging into what has passed for my adulthood, at the age of 25, I took a job as a teacher. To my friends, I said it was because I had a passion for kids and for writing. The truth was, it was something that I could imagine doing. Period.
My favorite teachers had been, what a friend of mine called, “extremely ugly people.” They didn’t pay any attention to conventional ideas about appearance. If they thought about what they wore at all, they conspired to find a compromise between clothing which was comfortable and which conformed to the norms of an intellectual/artistic or political aesthetic, however marginal. It wouldn’t have occurred to them that they were aligning themselves with “subcultures” – that they were weirdos. It was your loss if you didn’t know how comfortable Bierkenstocks were, or that Levis fit a man’s legs better than designer jeans or pressed slacks. If you prized variety over finding the perfect cotton shirt which you then bought en masse, that was your choice. I had a history teacher who might have stared at you for several minutes had you asked him why he always wore the same kind of white shirt. First, there would be the simple irrelevancy of the question. Then, the stupidity of it – why would you make something like dressing more complicated than it had to be when there was HISTORY to be studied.
So, yes, at 25, it seemed a safe bet that I could stand in front of a group of teenagers in black jeans and a distressed polo shirt. I took the leap that I might be able to make them laugh and then maybe teach them. What made any of it possible was that I didn’t have to put on the costuming of any particular social class. If you thought I looked like the janitor, well, maybe I did. So what? The difference between the janitor and me was supposed to be what we did, not what we wore. I also took for granted what I had since I was four years old; that my command of the English language would provide its own credibility. People could tell I was smart. They always had.
Surprising as it might sound, the bluff actually worked. My classes weren’t instant successes, but I got better at teaching. And I was funny. I was also close enough to the age of my students to find a common bond, and that rapport saw me through a lot of rocky lessons. Being in the classroom engendered the passion I pretended before I got there. In time, I became pretty good at helping my students jump through the necessary hoops ahead and to like writing in the process. They also learned that I really did care about them. Everyone continues to learn, and I hope to, but the changes in the teaching profession which have occurred in the past 6 years have increased the odds against me.
The new requirements that stand in my way have little to do with student performance, but now seem to have everything to do with my personal survival. If I can’t adapt, well: The work force has no place in which my skill sets or strengths will naturally assimilate. In my 50′s, it might be best if I were to go on disability because I’ve accrued some legitimate illnesses and injuries over the course of my almost-adulthood. Or, I could just go mad. Would it ronically, have been better if I had given up at 25, 26 or 27 rather than invest my energies in mastering a profession which would then invalidate the successes of my late twenties through the end of my forties?
You would think that the years of experience in the DOE would’ve have made me secure, or almost. The joke, however, was on me when in 2008, the Department of Education closed the school in which I had been working and producing excellent Regents exam results, as had the rest of my department. Nothing about my department’s results had anything to do with why we were closed. I didn’t want my school to close, but, at least, you’d think that my track record would still be valuable and my years of success would help me to find a new position. Actually, it’s the opposite.
Funny, right? But, the real punch line had already been written two years earlier, in the last contract negotiation between my union and the Dept. of Education. Traditionally, you joined the Dept of Education and spent the early 15 years of your career or more with little choice over where you taught. Schools with strong academic performances or special programs hired teachers with lots of experience, and those teachers were also able to transfer into those institutions by virtue of their seniority. So, not to worry, right? I should be able now to have some choices over where I will go next. But, enough of my fellow members accepted a contract with a fairly steep pay raise, in exchange for letting go of the seniority transfer. I can’t blame anyone for the choices they felt worked best for them. All I know is how this contract has affected me and other teachers I know with A.S. (I voted “No.”)
Wait, however. It gets better. After the contract was signed, the Dept of Ed decided it would no longer provide schools with the extra funds they had relied upon to allow them to hire experienced teachers REGARDLESS OF THEIR SALARIES. Meaning, now schools were stuck paying their teachers out of their own, soon to be further slashed, budgets. And here were a whole crew of teachers with fat salaries thanks to the new contract. Who can blame anyone for wanting a raise – and normally, who would argue with a union for getting them one. But, the DOE’s move put all teachers, especially those whose experience earned put them at the top of the salary scale, in an awkward position. Some of these folks were now looking for positions, their schools having closed. A few of them have a developmental disability that makes it harder for them to handle competition in a conventional market.
The reaction of school administrators was predictable: get rid of the fat salaries we have on board, and avoid adding new ones, at all costs. “Why hire you, when I can get those two teachers for the same, price?” That’s not an easy question to answer if you don’t have AS. If you do, you find yourself dumbfounded. We’re not a population that knows how to shmooze or to do our own public relations. I have a very flat affect. That means that my face seems almost expressionless (except when I am having a really good time, like teaching a lesson and fielding all sorts of questions.) So, not only am I not good at debating my merits, I’m not interesting to look at. My clothes are plain and designed to allow me to move. What are my odds against people at my own salary range, let alone someone cheaper, sexier and less discouraged?
Like the millions of workers over 40 in every other field in this country, I now find myself ready to collar the administrators who look at my resume with disinterest and say, “A man is not a piece of fruit.” Unfortunately, almost none of the new schools have Assistant Principals in charge of individual disciplines like English, so it’s more likely that I’ll be spitting through my teeth at a twenty-nine year old in charge of everything from ordering pens to designing the Curriculum Map for the entire school, and finally, rating all the staff. Even if he or she was an English teacher, there is no space in that circuitry for retrieving common literary allusions. The kid needs to get a slice of pizza, two liters of coke and five goddamned minutes to pick what gets done first while he/she’s busy doing what has to be done right now.
That may be how you run a corporation, but it doesn’t really leave room for managing the education of future voters or the voters who manage them. And being a principal is not the same as being a whiz kid CEO. It’s not like creating Facebook or designing the next cool APP. You can’t do it running on all-nighters while listening to techno and drinking coffee or beers or even organic juice. Even if you could, when are you going to do it and do all the other things which used to be done by a lot of other people?
Remember that the school closings, the budget shifts — all of these changes were made because theold system with all those unnecessary people wasn’t perceived to be working too well for the children. (Talk to any public official about education and count how many times they refer to “the children” as if they were Moses talking to Ramses. Or Charleton Heston as Moses, anyway.)The big schools were cut into many small schools, with fewer administrators and teachers per school, though there are probably MORE administrators in the building overall. Add to this that these new small schools are run by "Education Management Corporations" who are given hundreds of thousands of dollars to MANAGE the schools, but are not in the schools on a day to day basis to help out. So, a lot of money is being spent on a smaller school, with fewer people doing more work. Same class size as before. Smaller budgets. Therefore, to keep costs down, most of the people in the building are young and without much experience or lengthy track records. If you’re a parent, when your children aren’t doing well, do you give them less support while you try to do many more things – on purpose? Would you take your child to a doctor who suddenly took on two new specialties while working the same hours with no additional support or supplies?
Forgetting the altruistic arguments against the new budgetary constraints on our schools, there’s the basic question of survival of the employees. What are all these people supposed to do for work should they not be able to manage? Teaching is not like any other career in one very painful way. The skill sets do not translate to anything else. Yes, I can make arguments otherwise, but try that in an interview. “No, I’ve never managed an office, but I’ve managed 32 kids an hour, taught over 150 kids a year.” It’s sweet, charming, but incomprehensible to someone who is trying to understand if you can order the supplies for all the computers, manage appointments, run the website, etc. The fact is you haven’t done any of those things. It’s possible you could. However, the person who interviewed an hour before you has already proven he/she can. Which is what potential employer after employer said to me when I tried my hand at leaving teaching out of frustration with the changing political climate, years ago. In my mid-thirties. Younger, thinner, less gray and more hopeful.
The average teacher leaves the system in the first three years of his/her career. Does he/she even have anything more to show for it, besides interesting fodder for his/her Law School application essay? Suppose he/she doesn’t have the funds, energy or liberty to go on for more education. Start at the bottom of the salary ladder at something else, kid. It’s like you spent three years traveling through Europe. Worse, because you didn’t even learn a new language.
Where does that leave me? Now, I have never been good at mastering some of the major social skills of adulthood. I pay my rent and utility bills and I respect others’ space– that’s not what I mean. I mean, I don’t press my shirts and I am often rude when I am trying to get something done. If my students need something, I’m going to be pushy. I will apologize profusely, afterward. Years of teaching have also inured me to the expectations of “normal people.” Did I miss a button on my shirt? Should I care? I can teach someone to pass the English Regents from scratch. I can teach Othello off the top of my head. I can revise my lesson plan mid – air. My jokes aren’t funny anymore, but the slapstick of my hands and eyebrows helps me break up confrontations. My students have done well. I know what I’m doing, mostly, whether I “look smart” or not.
But, all proof of this has disappeared. My school closed. Many of my colleagues, retired, including two principals whom I served. Sure, I have had excellent results in my career, but who can verify my role in an overall school’s achievement, now? Even if I convert all of my records to data on a computer, who will believe me? And there is that, nagging reality that I don’t look like a corporate success and as soon as I start to boast of my work I become self-conscious. I don’t fit the “dress for success” themes of many small schools. My work used to speak for me. Now I just look like the common stereotype of the enemy: a slovenly, hippy-type academic, inefficient and laden with old-fashioned sentiment toward the students. No matter what I say, the principals who interview me don’t hear me. It’s the same rationale that used to make superintendents severely punish schools if they saw students wearing hats inside the building. “If you can’t get them to obey the ‘hat rule,’ what can you get them to do?” Sounds reasonable but the impulse to wear a hat isn’t driven by just one or the same reason in every kid. There is nothing which says a kid who wears a hat won’t study, be respectful, or enjoy learning. He/she just really likes hats. “Why you stressin’ it?” And I really, really don’t like my clothing to be tight, so they are looser than some might consider fashionable. That doesn’t mean that I can’t teach English.
Those questions aside, the reality of the thousands of displaced teachers like me begs the simple question of where are these people – we – supposed to go? Education reformers talk about experienced teachers like we are pariahs. All right, suppose we were all in need of re-tooling? If we were selling cell phones, we would be given training every year about each new batch. Suppose we all need new training. Isn’t it cheaper to do that than just fire all of us and start again with new teachers? A colleague once told me that a superintendent once responded to that very question with “it’s cheaper to buy a new car than fix an old one.”
Since that very superintendent was replaced a month later, I wonder if how he sees himself as a “lemon.” Where did he go? Another school district and another. When does he start building a learning curve? Or, is he just going to be passed from one unwitting owner after another, until they discover he doesn’t drive. Why not fix him? He isn’t a car, after all, which can be harvested for parts. Neither am I.
Undoubtedly, some of my readers might ask, “Why can’t you just learn to dress in a corporate manner and to be polite? Look in the mirror before you leave the house, at least.” Here’s my frightening response. I did. I tried. Before I continue, I want to ask you to think back to some of your best teachers. Wasn’t at least, one of them, slightly awkward, a miserable dresser, and, a bit brusque sometimes? I can’t believe that not one of them had all or some of these characteristics. Here’s an even harder one. Think back to some of the great teachers you had that you thought were “mostly normal” ? Like the fantastic geometry teacher who wore so much Bloomingdale’s Tea Rose perfume that the air was yellow and you felt surrounded by honey that was a little too sweet? She was so terrific that you got used to the smell, even cherished it. And you could tell that she couldn’t live with the air being one touch less fragrant. But, all right, she was a bit, eccentric in this regard. Why am I so touchy about this – couldn’t they, too, have been polished up? No. Because I’m guessing that the person who you remember was already doing his or her level best and that, like me, he/she had Asperger’s Syndrome. Teaching was one of the rare professions which offered to people with A.S., who are developmentally disabled in key areas of socialization but are often highly intelligent in many areas of academic/theoretical difficulty, the rare opportunity to utilize their minds without the intrusion of social norms they could not fulfill. I’m not talking about people who could hurt your children. I’m talking about people who, like Albert Einstein, couldn’t comb their hair to anyone’s satisfaction. People who didn’t notice the stain on their shirt until someone pointed it out. People who yelled at an adult for not helping a student enough. In general, Aspies don’t yell at kids. It doesn’t make any logical sense – it won’t help. And, Aspie’s are logical creatures to a fault. Part of what is mystifying about socialization is it’s lack of logic. (Does it really matter if I part my hair to the right?)
Where, especially, are these Aspies, who have a fairly high unemployment rate, supposed to go now? I’ll tell you where because it’s on my list: disability. Having a condition which makes it impossible for you to fulfill the requirements of almost any job is one criteria for qualification. And what are reinforced to me in all of the results of our most recent contract, are my inadequacies. It really could be possible that people like me, who once contributed meaningfully to the economy and society, could be rendered incapable by a culture which is unwilling to respect or pay for our experience and which attends more carefully to the loose cuffs on my shirt than to what I am saying. (Based on a true story: I had an interview with a principal who could not get his eyes off of the fact that my shirtsleeves were loose and a little to long for my jacket. Meanwhile, I was trying to engage him in a discussion about how to help the children at his school.
Never mind the reality that some of my colleagues look like movie stars, but if they have over ten years of experience, fat chance of anyone picking their fat salary up. Take a pay cut, you say. Sure – if you give me back my Seniority rights.
Meanwhile, there are many of us Aspies among the Absent Teacher Reserve. Meaning, they are floating around between schools, waiting for someone to take them on. Each week, we go to different schools. That wouldn’t be easy for anyone, but for someone who has difficulty adapting socially, it’s a nightmare. Forget what it feels like once we get to the school. The ANXIETY that knowing you will have to face different people every week can produce in a person with Asperger’s Syndrome would probably be unfathomable to most people. Imagine you were crippled by the realization that you had been misunderstood at a meeting – that you unintentionally insulted a colleague or friend. Think of what it would do to you to know that you will have the opportunity to make that mistake again and again and again. That you will feel like everyone is speaking on a slightly different radio wavelength from yours. And when you finally think you’ve just about got it, you have a whole new one to learn. That’s just the adults – what about all these new children.
This morning I go off to my weekly assignment. Each week I am moved to a different school in which I substitute for absent teachers, help new ones (ironically), team teach or all three. In any subject. Why? I’ve been given several reasons. None of them even pretends to ignore the reality of how difficult this practice is for the teachers, administrators and, of course, the children. You know how you might have bonded with someone and worked with them – especially if they were lucky enough to be in a room with another teacher so that they could give you more attention? Forget that. I’m leaving Friday. No risk of co-dependency. Or trust. Or of long-term intervention. Or being taken seriously. As one student said to me, candidly, “You don’t carry much weight.” I can cajole. If I’m lucky, I’ll be put in a room where I might actually get to teach something I know, English or a familiar part of another discipline. In the best of circumstances someone has left a lesson plan which is actually relevant to what the kids are doing. In the worst, there is nothing and no one. Twice, I have covered classes in other disciplines which are without teachers and have been since the first day of school. I’ve interviewed for English jobs at schools which still don’t have anyone. (Ok, they can’t afford me, but they can’t afford anyone? It is frigtening to think they might be waiting to see if someone cheap comes on the market, like a baseball team looking for an extra reliever who won’t cost too much if he doesn’t work out.) Let me tell you, the children are, understandably, not amused. For those of us 99 percenters who happen to be experienced teachers in the New York City public schools, we are not just prisoners of Wall Street, but prisoners of the children of Wall Street and its prisoners. And they are, in turn, prisoners of an educational system which is supposed to be preparing them for their right, as Americans, to have the opportunity to join the ranks of the 1 percent, should that be their dream. I think they know that there’s a punch line coming.
Will there ever be more Aspie Teachers?
November 5, 2011
Teaching: A vanishing safe haven for people with Asperger’s Syndrome.
When I was emerging into what has passed for my adulthood, at the age of 25, I took a job as a teacher. To my friends, I said it was because I had a passion for kids and for writing. The truth was, it was something that I could imagine doing. Period.
My favorite teachers had been, what a friend of mine called, “extremely ugly people.” They didn’t pay any attention to conventional ideas about appearance. If they thought about what they wore at all, they conspired to find a compromise between clothing which was comfortable and which conformed to the norms of an intellectual/artistic or political aesthetic, however marginal. It wouldn’t have occurred to them that they were aligning themselves with “subcultures” – that they were weirdos. It was your loss if you didn’t know how comfortable Bierkenstocks were, or that Levis fit a man’s legs better than designer jeans or pressed slacks. If you prized variety over finding the perfect cotton shirt which you then bought en masse, that was your choice. I had a history teacher who might have stared at you for several minutes had you asked him why he always wore the same kind of white shirt. First, there would be the simple irrelevancy of the question. Then, the stupidity of it – why would you make something like dressing more complicated than it had to be when there was HISTORY to be studied.
So, yes, at 25, it seemed a safe bet that I could stand in front of a group of teenagers in black jeans and a distressed polo shirt. I took the leap that I might be able to make them laugh and then maybe teach them. What made any of it possible was that I didn’t have to put on the costuming of any particular social class. If you thought I looked like the janitor, well, maybe I did. So what? The difference between the janitor and me was supposed to be what we did, not what we wore. I also took for granted what I had since I was four years old; that my command of the English language would provide its own credibility. People could tell I was smart. They always had.
Surprising as it might sound, the bluff actually worked. My classes weren’t instant successes, but I got better at teaching. And I was funny. I was also close enough to the age of my students to find a common bond, and that rapport saw me through a lot of rocky lessons. Being in the classroom engendered the passion I pretended before I got there. In time, I became pretty good at helping my students jump through the necessary hoops ahead and to like writing in the process. They also learned that I really did care about them. Everyone continues to learn, and I hope to, but the changes in the teaching profession which have occurred in the past 6 years have increased the odds against me.
The new requirements that stand in my way have little to do with student performance, but now seem to have everything to do with my personal survival. If I can’t adapt, well: The work force has no place in which my skill sets or strengths will naturally assimilate. In my 50′s, it might be best if I were to go on disability because I’ve accrued some legitimate illnesses and injuries over the course of my almost-adulthood. Or, I could just go mad. Would it ronically, have been better if I had given up at 25, 26 or 27 rather than invest my energies in mastering a profession which would then invalidate the successes of my late twenties through the end of my forties?
You would think that the years of experience in the DOE would’ve have made me secure, or almost. The joke, however, was on me when in 2008, the Department of Education closed the school in which I had been working and producing excellent Regents exam results, as had the rest of my department. Nothing about my department’s results had anything to do with why we were closed. I didn’t want my school to close, but, at least, you’d think that my track record would still be valuable and my years of success would help me to find a new position. Actually, it’s the opposite.
Funny, right? But, the real punch line had already been written two years earlier, in the last contract negotiation between my union and the Dept. of Education. Traditionally, you joined the Dept of Education and spent the early 15 years of your career or more with little choice over where you taught. Schools with strong academic performances or special programs hired teachers with lots of experience, and those teachers were also able to transfer into those institutions by virtue of their seniority. So, not to worry, right? I should be able now to have some choices over where I will go next. But, enough of my fellow members accepted a contract with a fairly steep pay raise, in exchange for letting go of the seniority transfer. I can’t blame anyone for the choices they felt worked best for them. All I know is how this contract has affected me and other teachers I know with A.S. (I voted “No.”)
Wait, however. It gets better. After the contract was signed, the Dept of Ed decided it would no longer provide schools with the extra funds they had relied upon to allow them to hire experienced teachers REGARDLESS OF THEIR SALARIES. Meaning, now schools were stuck paying their teachers out of their own, soon to be further slashed, budgets. And here were a whole crew of teachers with fat salaries thanks to the new contract. Who can blame anyone for wanting a raise – and normally, who would argue with a union for getting them one. But, the DOE’s move put all teachers, especially those whose experience earned put them at the top of the salary scale, in an awkward position. Some of these folks were now looking for positions, their schools having closed. A few of them have a developmental disability that makes it harder for them to handle competition in a conventional market.
The reaction of school administrators was predictable: get rid of the fat salaries we have on board, and avoid adding new ones, at all costs. “Why hire you, when I can get those two teachers for the same, price?” That’s not an easy question to answer if you don’t have AS. If you do, you find yourself dumbfounded. We’re not a population that knows how to shmooze or to do our own public relations. I have a very flat affect. That means that my face seems almost expressionless (except when I am having a really good time, like teaching a lesson and fielding all sorts of questions.) So, not only am I not good at debating my merits, I’m not interesting to look at. My clothes are plain and designed to allow me to move. What are my odds against people at my own salary range, let alone someone cheaper, sexier and less discouraged?
Like the millions of workers over 40 in every other field in this country, I now find myself ready to collar the administrators who look at my resume with disinterest and say, “A man is not a piece of fruit.” Unfortunately, almost none of the new schools have Assistant Principals in charge of individual disciplines like English, so it’s more likely that I’ll be spitting through my teeth at a twenty-nine year old in charge of everything from ordering pens to designing the Curriculum Map for the entire school, and finally, rating all the staff. Even if he or she was an English teacher, there is no space in that circuitry for retrieving common literary allusions. The kid needs to get a slice of pizza, two liters of coke and five goddamned minutes to pick what gets done first while he/she’s busy doing what has to be done right now.
That may be how you run a corporation, but it doesn’t really leave room for managing the education of future voters or the voters who manage them. And being a principal is not the same as being a whiz kid CEO. It’s not like creating Facebook or designing the next cool APP. You can’t do it running on all-nighters while listening to techno and drinking coffee or beers or even organic juice. Even if you could, when are you going to do it and do all the other things which used to be done by a lot of other people?
Remember that the school closings, the budget shifts — all of these changes were made because theold system with all those unnecessary people wasn’t perceived to be working too well for the children. (Talk to any public official about education and count how many times they refer to “the children” as if they were Moses talking to Ramses. Or Charleton Heston as Moses, anyway.)The big schools were cut into many small schools, with fewer administrators and teachers per school, though there are probably MORE administrators in the building overall. Add to this that these new small schools are run by "Education Management Corporations" who are given hundreds of thousands of dollars to MANAGE the schools, but are not in the schools on a day to day basis to help out. So, a lot of money is being spent on a smaller school, with fewer people doing more work. Same class size as before. Smaller budgets. Therefore, to keep costs down, most of the people in the building are young and without much experience or lengthy track records. If you’re a parent, when your children aren’t doing well, do you give them less support while you try to do many more things – on purpose? Would you take your child to a doctor who suddenly took on two new specialties while working the same hours with no additional support or supplies?
Forgetting the altruistic arguments against the new budgetary constraints on our schools, there’s the basic question of survival of the employees. What are all these people supposed to do for work should they not be able to manage? Teaching is not like any other career in one very painful way. The skill sets do not translate to anything else. Yes, I can make arguments otherwise, but try that in an interview. “No, I’ve never managed an office, but I’ve managed 32 kids an hour, taught over 150 kids a year.” It’s sweet, charming, but incomprehensible to someone who is trying to understand if you can order the supplies for all the computers, manage appointments, run the website, etc. The fact is you haven’t done any of those things. It’s possible you could. However, the person who interviewed an hour before you has already proven he/she can. Which is what potential employer after employer said to me when I tried my hand at leaving teaching out of frustration with the changing political climate, years ago. In my mid-thirties. Younger, thinner, less gray and more hopeful.
The average teacher leaves the system in the first three years of his/her career. Does he/she even have anything more to show for it, besides interesting fodder for his/her Law School application essay? Suppose he/she doesn’t have the funds, energy or liberty to go on for more education. Start at the bottom of the salary ladder at something else, kid. It’s like you spent three years traveling through Europe. Worse, because you didn’t even learn a new language.
Where does that leave me? Now, I have never been good at mastering some of the major social skills of adulthood. I pay my rent and utility bills and I respect others’ space– that’s not what I mean. I mean, I don’t press my shirts and I am often rude when I am trying to get something done. If my students need something, I’m going to be pushy. I will apologize profusely, afterward. Years of teaching have also inured me to the expectations of “normal people.” Did I miss a button on my shirt? Should I care? I can teach someone to pass the English Regents from scratch. I can teach Othello off the top of my head. I can revise my lesson plan mid – air. My jokes aren’t funny anymore, but the slapstick of my hands and eyebrows helps me break up confrontations. My students have done well. I know what I’m doing, mostly, whether I “look smart” or not.
But, all proof of this has disappeared. My school closed. Many of my colleagues, retired, including two principals whom I served. Sure, I have had excellent results in my career, but who can verify my role in an overall school’s achievement, now? Even if I convert all of my records to data on a computer, who will believe me? And there is that, nagging reality that I don’t look like a corporate success and as soon as I start to boast of my work I become self-conscious. I don’t fit the “dress for success” themes of many small schools. My work used to speak for me. Now I just look like the common stereotype of the enemy: a slovenly, hippy-type academic, inefficient and laden with old-fashioned sentiment toward the students. No matter what I say, the principals who interview me don’t hear me. It’s the same rationale that used to make superintendents severely punish schools if they saw students wearing hats inside the building. “If you can’t get them to obey the ‘hat rule,’ what can you get them to do?” Sounds reasonable but the impulse to wear a hat isn’t driven by just one or the same reason in every kid. There is nothing which says a kid who wears a hat won’t study, be respectful, or enjoy learning. He/she just really likes hats. “Why you stressin’ it?” And I really, really don’t like my clothing to be tight, so they are looser than some might consider fashionable. That doesn’t mean that I can’t teach English.
Those questions aside, the reality of the thousands of displaced teachers like me begs the simple question of where are these people – we – supposed to go? Education reformers talk about experienced teachers like we are pariahs. All right, suppose we were all in need of re-tooling? If we were selling cell phones, we would be given training every year about each new batch. Suppose we all need new training. Isn’t it cheaper to do that than just fire all of us and start again with new teachers? A colleague once told me that a superintendent once responded to that very question with “it’s cheaper to buy a new car than fix an old one.”
Since that very superintendent was replaced a month later, I wonder if how he sees himself as a “lemon.” Where did he go? Another school district and another. When does he start building a learning curve? Or, is he just going to be passed from one unwitting owner after another, until they discover he doesn’t drive. Why not fix him? He isn’t a car, after all, which can be harvested for parts. Neither am I.
Undoubtedly, some of my readers might ask, “Why can’t you just learn to dress in a corporate manner and to be polite? Look in the mirror before you leave the house, at least.” Here’s my frightening response. I did. I tried. Before I continue, I want to ask you to think back to some of your best teachers. Wasn’t at least, one of them, slightly awkward, a miserable dresser, and, a bit brusque sometimes? I can’t believe that not one of them had all or some of these characteristics. Here’s an even harder one. Think back to some of the great teachers you had that you thought were “mostly normal” ? Like the fantastic geometry teacher who wore so much Bloomingdale’s Tea Rose perfume that the air was yellow and you felt surrounded by honey that was a little too sweet? She was so terrific that you got used to the smell, even cherished it. And you could tell that she couldn’t live with the air being one touch less fragrant. But, all right, she was a bit, eccentric in this regard. Why am I so touchy about this – couldn’t they, too, have been polished up? No. Because I’m guessing that the person who you remember was already doing his or her level best and that, like me, he/she had Asperger’s Syndrome. Teaching was one of the rare professions which offered to people with A.S., who are developmentally disabled in key areas of socialization but are often highly intelligent in many areas of academic/theoretical difficulty, the rare opportunity to utilize their minds without the intrusion of social norms they could not fulfill. I’m not talking about people who could hurt your children. I’m talking about people who, like Albert Einstein, couldn’t comb their hair to anyone’s satisfaction. People who didn’t notice the stain on their shirt until someone pointed it out. People who yelled at an adult for not helping a student enough. In general, Aspies don’t yell at kids. It doesn’t make any logical sense – it won’t help. And, Aspie’s are logical creatures to a fault. Part of what is mystifying about socialization is it’s lack of logic. (Does it really matter if I part my hair to the right?)
Where, especially, are these Aspies, who have a fairly high unemployment rate, supposed to go now? I’ll tell you where because it’s on my list: disability. Having a condition which makes it impossible for you to fulfill the requirements of almost any job is one criteria for qualification. And what are reinforced to me in all of the results of our most recent contract, are my inadequacies. It really could be possible that people like me, who once contributed meaningfully to the economy and society, could be rendered incapable by a culture which is unwilling to respect or pay for our experience and which attends more carefully to the loose cuffs on my shirt than to what I am saying. (Based on a true story: I had an interview with a principal who could not get his eyes off of the fact that my shirtsleeves were loose and a little to long for my jacket. Meanwhile, I was trying to engage him in a discussion about how to help the children at his school.
Never mind the reality that some of my colleagues look like movie stars, but if they have over ten years of experience, fat chance of anyone picking their fat salary up. Take a pay cut, you say. Sure – if you give me back my Seniority rights.
Meanwhile, there are many of us Aspies among the Absent Teacher Reserve. Meaning, they are floating around between schools, waiting for someone to take them on. Each week, we go to different schools. That wouldn’t be easy for anyone, but for someone who has difficulty adapting socially, it’s a nightmare. Forget what it feels like once we get to the school. The ANXIETY that knowing you will have to face different people every week can produce in a person with Asperger’s Syndrome would probably be unfathomable to most people. Imagine you were crippled by the realization that you had been misunderstood at a meeting – that you unintentionally insulted a colleague or friend. Think of what it would do to you to know that you will have the opportunity to make that mistake again and again and again. That you will feel like everyone is speaking on a slightly different radio wavelength from yours. And when you finally think you’ve just about got it, you have a whole new one to learn. That’s just the adults – what about all these new children.
This morning I go off to my weekly assignment. Each week I am moved to a different school in which I substitute for absent teachers, help new ones (ironically), team teach or all three. In any subject. Why? I’ve been given several reasons. None of them even pretends to ignore the reality of how difficult this practice is for the teachers, administrators and, of course, the children. You know how you might have bonded with someone and worked with them – especially if they were lucky enough to be in a room with another teacher so that they could give you more attention? Forget that. I’m leaving Friday. No risk of co-dependency. Or trust. Or of long-term intervention. Or being taken seriously. As one student said to me, candidly, “You don’t carry much weight.” I can cajole. If I’m lucky, I’ll be put in a room where I might actually get to teach something I know, English or a familiar part of another discipline. In the best of circumstances someone has left a lesson plan which is actually relevant to what the kids are doing. In the worst, there is nothing and no one. Twice, I have covered classes in other disciplines which are without teachers and have been since the first day of school. I’ve interviewed for English jobs at schools which still don’t have anyone. (Ok, they can’t afford me, but they can’t afford anyone? It is frigtening to think they might be waiting to see if someone cheap comes on the market, like a baseball team looking for an extra reliever who won’t cost too much if he doesn’t work out.) Let me tell you, the children are, understandably, not amused. For those of us 99 percenters who happen to be experienced teachers in the New York City public schools, we are not just prisoners of Wall Street, but prisoners of the children of Wall Street and its prisoners. And they are, in turn, prisoners of an educational system which is supposed to be preparing them for their right, as Americans, to have the opportunity to join the ranks of the 1 percent, should that be their dream. I think they know that there’s a punch line coming.
28 December, 2011
The Death of the Liberal Class
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?
(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?
25 December, 2011
Refugees from Santa
Last night, Christmas eve, at about 8:30 EST, a group of about 50 people ranging in ages of 35-50, huddled in a kind of "L" shape across from the row of restaurants at the heart of the East Village's Little India. Certainly they were not waiting to enter one of the many establishments which are decorated in gold and silver tinsel lit with all patterns of hanging lights, in colors ranging from pink and green to white and red 365 days of the year, not just on Christmas eve. The irony of the desire of these restaurants to try to induce the feeling of an extended Christmas party is poignant, too, on more than just this specific night. Even on this cold night, teenagers and young men dressed in black and white beckoned to passersby across the street to "Come in, have dinner, no waiting, Miss? Mister?" Across the street, the increasing curl of bodies held its faces in wraps, alternating between the support of the iron gate and the warm light of the street.
As I joined the end of the line, I interrupted a lively conversation between two couples, with a brusque and perfunctory, "Are they not letting people in?" An equally arch response came back at me, "They've JUST started, but it's very slow," Then, the shorter woman in the couple whisked a hair upward in the same motion with which she rolled her eyes, "Good timing." I tried to unleash my hokey, "Well, I do my best, ma'am," smile, but it was no use. The sarcasm had no place in the group I eagerly joined tonight. For, it seemed, practically every New York Jew I could have gone to Hebrew school with (was not only on this line, but would file in all evening) to the exuberant, "Nittle Nacht" celebration at Sixth Street Community Synagogue, packing the place with a few hundred people. As the crowd grew, the age range extended broadly to include those who would have gone to Hebrew school with my parents, grandparents and my grandchildren.
Of course, the reason the doors were just opening had to do with the end of the Sabbath - there hadn't been that much time between sundown and show time to get over to the building and set-up. Nevertheless, they should have known that the audience would be eager to come inside - the evening promised to be a novel take on the yearly escape from Christmas eve made by Jews worldwide. Traditionally, this ritual involves things like Chinese food (some of it Kosher, some, well...), movies, cheesecake and card playing. This isn't to say that we don't like Christmas. Pop culture is replete with Jews hosting Christmas specials, producing albums of sacred and fun holiday music - with the most famous, glaring, and ironic example being "White Christmas," written by our own Irving Berlin The holiday begs the "Jackie Mason"-like remark: "If it weren't for Jews, there would BE no Christmas."
The star performer at the Sixth Street Celebration, John Zorn, has also produced a Christmas album. On this night, Zorn and a group opf talented Klezmer musicians did a rip-roaring rendition of "Winter Wonderland," that had the audience snapping it's fingers. If there had been room in the aisles for swing dancing, I'm sure that some people would have leapt to the dance floor, and everyone else would've been envious of their courage. The music throughout the evening was a fantasia on the traditional "Jewish Jazz" sometimes switching from electric guitar to one stringed lutes, but always keeping a wild, euphoric beat. Only a crowd of over-educated, hyper-self-conscious, post-modern, and self-referential New Yorkers would JUST SIT THERE, bouncing their heads to it and not actually dancing - there was sufficient room in the aisles for some kind of rhythmic movement. I've never felt more comfortable in my whole life.
The desire to dance, to sing, and to be a part of our own wild traditions was what drove both those who stood outside and those who waited for the precise moment when they thought the streets would be quiet to make the pilgrimage. It wasn't for lack of things to do downtown. The streets were not as crowded as they usuallly would be on a Saturday night, but they were filled with rich eavesdropping experiences. At St. Mark's Bookshop, where, I'm afraid, I was NOT the first person to think of this as the perfect night to buy a book by the late Christopher Hitchens (sold out), as I tried to decide whether I needed left wing exhortation or Mallarme, the tapping of a pen against a cell phone diverted my attention, "No, Alexander, no. Bubba (Yiddish for grandfather) cannot turn the car around now! If you were well enough to go this morning, you are not suddenly SO SICK now. You are meeting him in front of the opera and I don't care ....We've had this planned FOR WEEKS. You made a commitment. Alex, I'm being reasonable with you....Just, NO...Yes, I'm sure." There were about five of us in tears as the woman tousled her vines of red ringlets away from her face and pretended that she was not, in fact, in a store full of Jewish people who had a pretty good picture of Alexander, Bubba and all of the conversations that her family has had for the last two generation, perhaps more.
The "Nittle Nacht" celebration provided a place for all of us to confront and rejoice in our heritage in mor than just the fact that we were surrounded by people whom we all vaguely recognized. (There were a fair number of possible members of the Goyishe persuasion in the audience, by the way, though I cannot be sure) Rabbi Greg, a gifted saxophonist who leads his own, Ayn Soph orchestra (which sadly came on at midnight when half the audience had already left for the long subway ride and the LIRR) encourages musical exploration that is as intense as prayer. The highlight of the evening was John Zorn whose music unleashed the celebratory Hasid in all of us - the whirling dervish dancing to the delight of god. But, all of the performers were incredible and ambitious - one band interpreting Shlomo Carlbach through the lens of Fela. At intermission, there was a staged reading by 24/6, a theater company in residence at the synagogue. The play was a kind of SNL skit with the aim of teaching the audience the meaning of "Nittle Nacht" - the Jewish reaction to Christmas eve. For centuries and even now (I learned about this in Hebrew elementary school) Jews have made a habit of not engaging in any religious study on Christmas eve so as not to seem to be advocating in any spiritual way on Jesus' behalf. "Santa wasn't such a popular character until Coca Cola revived him! Christmas eve has meant pogroms for us. We have to honor these memories." When the husband claims never to have heard of this tradition before, despite being observant his entire life, the wife exclaims, "You're a Litvak, what would you know about it!" "Oh, some local Rebbe said it," counters the husband. With that debate, the couple shook much of the audience back to a corner of a room in their childhood home infused with the traditions and gossips of their forefathers and in which the rivalries between Jews of different sectors of Europe felt as palpable as those between Yankees and Red Sox. Any minute, I could see my grandmother mugging the high mannered ways associated with the academicians of Lithuania. Although my grandmother's town was one of the early centers of Reformed Judaism, she retained her regional respect for the Shtetl synagogues of Poland and the words ot the reigning local Rabbis.
After intermission, there was more Klezmer, though the crowd began to thin, worrying about transportation on Christmas eve/early morning. Those who waited were treated to two really good numbers by Ayn Sof which performed starting around midnight. Even later, there was a mix of music and spoken word which, perhaps because of the thinning crowd, was especially acerbic. At past midnight, it wasn't necessarily fair to ask an audience to enter into debate about which escape from the floods of Santa-colored windows and packaging was THE SMARTEST choice for the evening's refugees. I was feeling good - shaken by the music into a wish to talk, but not to debate with other Jews about how I should have spent my evening. It was a naive urge, certainly, but one I needed to follow out of the synagogue.
When I left the synagogue, I felt a strange desire to tell everyone about my evening. Since it was well-past midnight, and I really should have left with the crew taking the train back to affordable housing, I grabbed a cab. Unsurprisingly, but to my delight, my driver was a devout Muslim. "Obviously neither of us is celebrating Christmas,," I announced smuggly, as if I could just high-five my long-lost cousin and declare peace in the Middle East. I went into my well-rehearsed monologue about the irony of killing a tree and putting it in your house in honor of the birth of a savior. But, while he chuckled, my driver was much more solemn. "Jesus was killed because he wanted to teach people the right way, and the Romans wouldn't allow him to do it. Just like Moses and Muhammad. Human Rights have never been respected in this world." His comment brought me back to Egypt - 2011 and all the issues throughout Israel, the West Bank and Middle East. And everywhere. While I had huddled with a happy audience to escape the Yule logs and kids everywhere tracked Santa on Google, it seems obvious, but it doesn't go without saying that most of the world is not that lucky. Perhaps next year, or even sooner, we should be doing concerts and tracking the development of freedoms while listening to each others' music. The wait has been far too long.
As I joined the end of the line, I interrupted a lively conversation between two couples, with a brusque and perfunctory, "Are they not letting people in?" An equally arch response came back at me, "They've JUST started, but it's very slow," Then, the shorter woman in the couple whisked a hair upward in the same motion with which she rolled her eyes, "Good timing." I tried to unleash my hokey, "Well, I do my best, ma'am," smile, but it was no use. The sarcasm had no place in the group I eagerly joined tonight. For, it seemed, practically every New York Jew I could have gone to Hebrew school with (was not only on this line, but would file in all evening) to the exuberant, "Nittle Nacht" celebration at Sixth Street Community Synagogue, packing the place with a few hundred people. As the crowd grew, the age range extended broadly to include those who would have gone to Hebrew school with my parents, grandparents and my grandchildren.
Of course, the reason the doors were just opening had to do with the end of the Sabbath - there hadn't been that much time between sundown and show time to get over to the building and set-up. Nevertheless, they should have known that the audience would be eager to come inside - the evening promised to be a novel take on the yearly escape from Christmas eve made by Jews worldwide. Traditionally, this ritual involves things like Chinese food (some of it Kosher, some, well...), movies, cheesecake and card playing. This isn't to say that we don't like Christmas. Pop culture is replete with Jews hosting Christmas specials, producing albums of sacred and fun holiday music - with the most famous, glaring, and ironic example being "White Christmas," written by our own Irving Berlin The holiday begs the "Jackie Mason"-like remark: "If it weren't for Jews, there would BE no Christmas."
The star performer at the Sixth Street Celebration, John Zorn, has also produced a Christmas album. On this night, Zorn and a group opf talented Klezmer musicians did a rip-roaring rendition of "Winter Wonderland," that had the audience snapping it's fingers. If there had been room in the aisles for swing dancing, I'm sure that some people would have leapt to the dance floor, and everyone else would've been envious of their courage. The music throughout the evening was a fantasia on the traditional "Jewish Jazz" sometimes switching from electric guitar to one stringed lutes, but always keeping a wild, euphoric beat. Only a crowd of over-educated, hyper-self-conscious, post-modern, and self-referential New Yorkers would JUST SIT THERE, bouncing their heads to it and not actually dancing - there was sufficient room in the aisles for some kind of rhythmic movement. I've never felt more comfortable in my whole life.
The desire to dance, to sing, and to be a part of our own wild traditions was what drove both those who stood outside and those who waited for the precise moment when they thought the streets would be quiet to make the pilgrimage. It wasn't for lack of things to do downtown. The streets were not as crowded as they usuallly would be on a Saturday night, but they were filled with rich eavesdropping experiences. At St. Mark's Bookshop, where, I'm afraid, I was NOT the first person to think of this as the perfect night to buy a book by the late Christopher Hitchens (sold out), as I tried to decide whether I needed left wing exhortation or Mallarme, the tapping of a pen against a cell phone diverted my attention, "No, Alexander, no. Bubba (Yiddish for grandfather) cannot turn the car around now! If you were well enough to go this morning, you are not suddenly SO SICK now. You are meeting him in front of the opera and I don't care ....We've had this planned FOR WEEKS. You made a commitment. Alex, I'm being reasonable with you....Just, NO...Yes, I'm sure." There were about five of us in tears as the woman tousled her vines of red ringlets away from her face and pretended that she was not, in fact, in a store full of Jewish people who had a pretty good picture of Alexander, Bubba and all of the conversations that her family has had for the last two generation, perhaps more.
The "Nittle Nacht" celebration provided a place for all of us to confront and rejoice in our heritage in mor than just the fact that we were surrounded by people whom we all vaguely recognized. (There were a fair number of possible members of the Goyishe persuasion in the audience, by the way, though I cannot be sure) Rabbi Greg, a gifted saxophonist who leads his own, Ayn Soph orchestra (which sadly came on at midnight when half the audience had already left for the long subway ride and the LIRR) encourages musical exploration that is as intense as prayer. The highlight of the evening was John Zorn whose music unleashed the celebratory Hasid in all of us - the whirling dervish dancing to the delight of god. But, all of the performers were incredible and ambitious - one band interpreting Shlomo Carlbach through the lens of Fela. At intermission, there was a staged reading by 24/6, a theater company in residence at the synagogue. The play was a kind of SNL skit with the aim of teaching the audience the meaning of "Nittle Nacht" - the Jewish reaction to Christmas eve. For centuries and even now (I learned about this in Hebrew elementary school) Jews have made a habit of not engaging in any religious study on Christmas eve so as not to seem to be advocating in any spiritual way on Jesus' behalf. "Santa wasn't such a popular character until Coca Cola revived him! Christmas eve has meant pogroms for us. We have to honor these memories." When the husband claims never to have heard of this tradition before, despite being observant his entire life, the wife exclaims, "You're a Litvak, what would you know about it!" "Oh, some local Rebbe said it," counters the husband. With that debate, the couple shook much of the audience back to a corner of a room in their childhood home infused with the traditions and gossips of their forefathers and in which the rivalries between Jews of different sectors of Europe felt as palpable as those between Yankees and Red Sox. Any minute, I could see my grandmother mugging the high mannered ways associated with the academicians of Lithuania. Although my grandmother's town was one of the early centers of Reformed Judaism, she retained her regional respect for the Shtetl synagogues of Poland and the words ot the reigning local Rabbis.
After intermission, there was more Klezmer, though the crowd began to thin, worrying about transportation on Christmas eve/early morning. Those who waited were treated to two really good numbers by Ayn Sof which performed starting around midnight. Even later, there was a mix of music and spoken word which, perhaps because of the thinning crowd, was especially acerbic. At past midnight, it wasn't necessarily fair to ask an audience to enter into debate about which escape from the floods of Santa-colored windows and packaging was THE SMARTEST choice for the evening's refugees. I was feeling good - shaken by the music into a wish to talk, but not to debate with other Jews about how I should have spent my evening. It was a naive urge, certainly, but one I needed to follow out of the synagogue.
When I left the synagogue, I felt a strange desire to tell everyone about my evening. Since it was well-past midnight, and I really should have left with the crew taking the train back to affordable housing, I grabbed a cab. Unsurprisingly, but to my delight, my driver was a devout Muslim. "Obviously neither of us is celebrating Christmas,," I announced smuggly, as if I could just high-five my long-lost cousin and declare peace in the Middle East. I went into my well-rehearsed monologue about the irony of killing a tree and putting it in your house in honor of the birth of a savior. But, while he chuckled, my driver was much more solemn. "Jesus was killed because he wanted to teach people the right way, and the Romans wouldn't allow him to do it. Just like Moses and Muhammad. Human Rights have never been respected in this world." His comment brought me back to Egypt - 2011 and all the issues throughout Israel, the West Bank and Middle East. And everywhere. While I had huddled with a happy audience to escape the Yule logs and kids everywhere tracked Santa on Google, it seems obvious, but it doesn't go without saying that most of the world is not that lucky. Perhaps next year, or even sooner, we should be doing concerts and tracking the development of freedoms while listening to each others' music. The wait has been far too long.
24 December, 2011
16 December, 2011
30 November, 2011
Bernie turns FIVE on December 1
And I couldn't be prouder of him. He has proven to be one of the most loving, caring, sensitive, playful, adorable, handsome, kind and warm creatures on the planet. As you can see, Larry feels the same way. They are often found cuddled around each other, sometimes with Larry all scrunched up against Bernie or Bernie stretched out along Larry. Or like they are now, taking in how lucky they are to be together. This past year, Bernie has become as protective of Larry as his big brother is of him, and as you can see in this picture, he will sometimes shield him with his brawny, beautiful self.
22 November, 2011
Happy Birthday, Karen Beth Hunter, wherever you are!
Karen loved birthday parties in the true childhood sense. She also often said she felt like Gumby, both for his innocence and for the feeling of being stretched and stretchable. So, I've posted the Gumby video "Balloonacy" in her honor, below. Her birthday is tomorrow. She would be 60.
I'll try to be silly, tomorrow.
I'll try to be silly, tomorrow.
05 November, 2011
Goodbye, Mr. Geller
I didn't have you as a teacher. I remember how many of my fellow students liked you, and pronounced your name with awe.
Here's a link to an article about Richard Geller, who taught Math at Stuyvesant for 29 years. 29 is a prime number, as he points out.
http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2011/11/02/stuyvesant-students-mourn-a-math-teacher-who-was-no-1/
Here's a link to an article about Richard Geller, who taught Math at Stuyvesant for 29 years. 29 is a prime number, as he points out.
http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2011/11/02/stuyvesant-students-mourn-a-math-teacher-who-was-no-1/
01 September, 2011
The Sixth Anniversary of Losing Karen B. Hunter
Every Sept 2, I have little truthfully to bring to the day but regret. I have good memories, certainly. All "they can't take away." But my life hasn't grown, except in the ways it always does -- the relationships with my cats. This year I have some stronger human friendships, some strong internet friendships and some new live friendships. I have wizened a bit to the ways of friends she had long ago wanted me to cut off from. I'm finally talking with her daughter which means a lot to me, though I don't know how long she will want to speak with me as, the more I remember, the more mistakes I remember making, some of them critical. I remember Karen going to a fortune teller who predicted her being in danger at night and then her calling me and telling me she was coming home at night and my not saying anything the night she died. But I took no stock in fortune tellers -- I was as smugly Western then as one could be. I'm not sure I had even remembered the fortune teller that night. But Karen did, I'm certain. She took tremendous interest in what they told her. Why this took me so long to put together, I don't know. I remembered having premonitions about night and not wanting her to fly at night. I remember not being able to tell her because I didn't want to second guess her in any way. But, her telling me and telling me angrily -- was she angry because I made her check in with me or angry because she was looking for the right response. I have always felt responsible.
I always come to this day with more and more regret, uncertainty and maybe some personal growth. I'm grateful for those who trust in me, especially those who are new and those who have come back after long absences. Those who are tireless in their fur. Those who want to understand even when they can't. I can't say it is only losing Karen that has made it so hard. Not having her to face the changes in the DOE is also hard. The changes themselves have torn at me. It's not a question of how to teach, but just how to let oneself teach without being consumed with worry about the future.
What I want is a time machine. Take me back to 2004. Summer. August. Whisper in my ear the phrase "build a life with her."
I'd be ever so grateful.
I always come to this day with more and more regret, uncertainty and maybe some personal growth. I'm grateful for those who trust in me, especially those who are new and those who have come back after long absences. Those who are tireless in their fur. Those who want to understand even when they can't. I can't say it is only losing Karen that has made it so hard. Not having her to face the changes in the DOE is also hard. The changes themselves have torn at me. It's not a question of how to teach, but just how to let oneself teach without being consumed with worry about the future.
What I want is a time machine. Take me back to 2004. Summer. August. Whisper in my ear the phrase "build a life with her."
I'd be ever so grateful.
05 August, 2011
THE PLOT TO KILL SUSAN BOYLE
THE PLOT TO KILL SUSAN BOYLE!
I didn't see her Cinderella-like debut the night it happened, but learned about it during a peremptory class trip given to select members of the senior class at one of those large, historic high schools which was subsequently closed in Brooklyn, New York. About 30 members of that school's last graduating class had been volunteered the day before, to teach lessons they had never seen to kindergarten and first-grade children a few blocks away. In six inch heels and oxfords with sharp, pointy toes, our kids arrived somewhere between 8 and 8:30am for this unpaid teaching assignment, chatty, hungry and with no training for what they were about to do. Among the many reasons given for the closing of the school was its poor four year graduation rate, attendance and high rate of lateness. I can't say that even those who met the appointed time limit always hit all the other benchmarks, but you could often find high levels of intellectual and emotional accomplishment on both sides of the finish line. The kids that day were working very hard to do whatever it was they were supposed to be doing at around the time they were supposed to be there – not that I knew what either was, and I had everything but a doctorate.
A colleague who had done this for years, was in a suit and tie. All I had been told was that I was going on a trip, so I wore the generic black pants, white shirt, and black sweater purchased from some store which could pass for Old Navy. In a crisp, mandarin jacket which hung beneath her waist, was the woman from “QuestCon”, carrying about 30 lean plastic folders. “Shandeliquia?” “Um...she's not here yet,” said my colleague, as he gave her petite figure so inordinately thorough a review it made me blush. To lighten the mood, he started a conversation with me. “What do you think of Susan Boyle?” I pulled my body from head to toe as if I were Gumby, to seem as tall, thin and geeky as possible. Sure, I am actually under five feet tall and dumpy. I aimed to camouflage my body shape and turn my impish face upward in an effort to make the teacher and the accompanying vixen feel old. If you broke me open and counted the rings, I had fifteen less than " have- aviator glasses- will -think- he's -ageless" and ten less than" Ms. Where-Are-My-Unpaid-Slaves-Don't-They-Want-To-Be-Republicans?" It seems that yesterday she had cornered my colleague and made him, literally, grab every nice kid he knew and make them agree to a specific grade they would teach today. On their way to Music or lunch or the bathroom. By some miracle they all arrived and they brought friends who could help. I'm sure they sensed that my colleague was in trouble and that maybe the wench in the bad suit had a gun.
“I don't know who Susan Boyle is.”
“She's this woman in her 40's who went on Britain's got talent and might win. She's all over YouTube. She's got great courage. I really like her.”
“Is she really beautiful?” “No, she looks like—she could be any woman off the street. She's even kind of heavy. But, she's got a lot of spunk. She's funny. I think she's great.” He talks her up to the kids. “Oh yeah, the fat British chick with the amazing voice. I'm rooting for her.” It's a pathetic gesture, but I buy in.
We take the bus and get off way too early. The school we've been assigned to was the site of the murder of a little girl last year by a fellow kindergarten student. The principal spoke to us in the hall and now I remember the recordings played on the news. “She's turning blue.”
One of my students practices his list of rules on me. They sound fair. If they don't work, his partner, who still barely speaks English, will make lots of funny faces. Also sounds good. They haven't read the lesson yet. We weren't on the bus more than three minutes. I promise to come in and watch, and I do, almost immediately. So does my colleague. It's a relief to see the faculty is pretty casual and their parental instincts come out for our big kids, as well, but it isn't necessary. Within two minutes, it's clear. Our kids walk in, they are MOVIE STARS. Bona-fide real teenagers just like on TV and not related to me. And CUTE! Ten minutes in, and I see what used to be a class clown having the “perhaps when you are grown, you will understand speech” with a teary girl whose hand he is holding. The other girls look on. They are working very hard to suppress the “AHHH!” Our celebrities pull stories they see on the bookshelves which they recognize as good and start reading them. Or they make them up with the class. A lot of the kids talk about what happened last year while they do this.
Some of our teenagers have a real gift for this and emerge with their classes for lunch as...CHOO CHOO TRAINS.
The entire First-Grade was lead out by one student who was the front engine. If you broke the train, you had to go back. Each class was linked by another student. We bought our budding “Little Engines that Could” Chinese food. School lunch would've been a very cruel response to their ingenuity. They ate vigorously while their charges continued to eat the plastic food look-a-likes at tables nearby.
“YOU DIDN'T USE THE LESSONS.”
“Well, no.” “They already know what a penny is, Miss. And they have better books here. Plus, they're still not over the shooting. DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THAT? God, I'm still crying.”
“This is a complete failure.”
Frank O'Hara once wrote that children know they want their backs broken. I think teenagers know they don't. The default position for less than literate men who feel defensive and teenagers who feel they are being told how to live before they know what life is, is “chair back, foot against another chair, etc.” We had thirty kids in that position instantly.
I looked at the colleague who was my senior and said, “Oh, Mr. Rogers?”
“Yes. Miss, the children our students have worked very hard with today are happier than they were when they came in. Look at them. They're not fighting. They're in their seats. They are smiling and laughing. They came to the cafeteria as a choo-choo train. They all read or created stories which are very good literacy activities. Ask their teachers if they felt this was a meaningful day.”
“I will do just that.” With a barely visible swing of her woolen suit, she moved forward. “What does her face look like?” “You know,” answered a student named Paul, “that's a good question.”
“If they hadn't been so happy, we wouldn't be deafened by the clicks of her cheap plastic shoes,” I couldn't help noting.
When we came back from lunch, I sat in the rectangular, windowless lounge, lulled by the flyswatter-sound of the soda machine. With her jacket slung over her shoulder, our corporate sponsor shifted quietly in. The words came out quickly and she faced the floor. “I'm sorry. The principal is very happy with what your kids are doing. I was totally and utterly misguided.” My hand lifted some cold water from around my can of soda, applying to my face, while pushing my second can toward her. “Please, I have two. You'll dehydrate.” “Thanks.” She looked genuinely surprised. “I heard you talking about Susan Boyle. Isn't she amazing?” “Actually, I'm going to have to go home and watch her on YouTube. I missed it. I dean and teach. When I get home, sometimes I hit the floor like lead, right after I feed the cats.” “Well, there you go,” she said, and she eyed me like a salesgirl who thought she had found just the right shade of blush without knowing that I don't ever wear it. “Oh?” “She loves cats!” “She has a cat she loves so much and she lives with her mom and works in a bakery. That's been her whole life till now. That and her singing lessons. She's 48 years old.” “Jesus, what drudgery.” “She cares about her mom – and you, yourself said you love cats.” “The cats are great. But the bakery and going home to your mother when you are in your 40's. People must make so much fun of her. She must have a thick skin.” “Or, I hope so.”
Two years later and the school has come and gone, three small schools sitting in place of one, occupying the same building, only now it is called a campus. I ask myself, what if someone had done a news report on the work of our students that day, would it have saved the school? Or would it have won temporary, relatively useless recognition for the students involved, perhaps small checks toward books in their first year of college. Of course, a good deed is supposed to be it's own reward, but so is academic study -- ideally, you aren't supposed to be weighted by how quickly you learn but by the fact that you keep trying. I think of those students as part of the same mystery of Susan Boyle's career in this same period.
I've now seen the Youtube video of that very first night and heard the Henry Mancini level productions that Simon Cowell put together of Susan Boyle. The first night is better than Frank Capra, especially because the technicians have clearly directed the show – they had to know she was going to win everyone over. You know they love her. The bells ringing like a boxing match is coming up. She's all adrenaline. The shift of the hips at Simon – “Take a ride on these hips, fella,” she seems to say. How could anyone have ever thought she was slow? Just very nervous and not from a major city. Or, so it seems. Admittedly, I don't watch these talent shows on a regular basis because they make me bilious. There seems something unfair to the millions of singers who braved piano bars a few towns over, found whatever kindred spirits were available, found their ways to a train, plane, bus, to audition after audition and then either luck or a family and some scrawny offspring named Baby June/Biff. Then again, we wouldn't have many talented artists without some of these shows, and talk shows are a kind of venue for new comic talent that aren't really available for other fields. I've “bought in” again to the story, though part of me wonder what of it, is a fix, the way people wonder about Babe Ruth's home runs.
Accusations appear and re-appear, especially when acts are put on television like man ubiquitously referred to in the tabloids as “the anti-Susan Boyle” - a man so deluded that he was disappointed to find out that the woman to whom he had dedicated his song about suicide was actually alive and well. He was, however, certain, he was set-up for as the butt of a joke and I'm sure he's right, that he knew that beforehand and that he couldn't have been happier – all the more reason to have had him sent to a hospital and not a green room. You can tell those two, adorable and fairly experienced sound technicians know Susan is going to do well that night and they'd have to be deaf and the world supremely unjust to be wrong. Does she know? And is she so overwhelmed at the end because she didn't believe the world would be just or because she didn't believe the world would have a moment when it wouldn't? What also struck me is all the times that the judges said that the audience was against Boyle from the beginning. THEY weren't against Boyle from the beginning. Amanda seemed charmed, Piers seems to know that this woman has something. Only Simon thinks she might be a nut job. The audience sits back when she talks. She's not talking B.S, she's not ragtag, and she's picked a good song. It feels as if she's already gotten good word of mouth from somewhere. This, “everyone was against you” bit seems phoney. Is it because the judges feel cognitive dissonance, or are they covering for a set-up that maybe even SHE doesn't know about?
Every time there's an interview, I buy it. I'm not looking for the deeper side of Susan Boyle. If anything, I'm quite content to accept that she might not be urbane, but I believe she's funny and been through enough to make her credible. Perhaps she may have been discouraged from thinking too much beyond what you need to do to get by because nothing in her life would have improved by doing otherwise. The “Susan Boyle Story” J find on Youtube is a whole seven minutes long. Why isn't there a film? She was was such a big story. Such a big discovery. Is she inflexible? Does no one in her village understand her? Has she opened up to no one. I can't imagine there was an individual in her life who would have understood if she had. One of the hard things about having an extraordinary dream is you often can't explain it to the people sitting next to you. You have to go far away to get recognition in order to be accepted at home.
Carole Cadwalladr, who wrote one of the few articles critical of the way Boyle's career has been handled, interviewed neighbors who testified that, "They used to taunt her and call her names and throw eggs at her door. And now they cheer her and ask for her autograph.” Noting that Boyle was Sony's best-selling artist in 2010, she concludes, “Susan Boyle has transformed her life and she's made a lot of money in the process, well in excess of the £4m in royalties she received with great fanfare from Simon Cowell last year on her birthday.” Those who taunt her and now seek out her valuable signature, also try to calculate her portfolio. Cadwalladr even found a priest in Boyle's hometown weighing in. “Father Ryszard Holuka, the local priest (Susan is a devout Catholic), does a quick bit of mental arithmetic when I tell him she's Sony's biggest-selling artist. "What do you think she gets? A penny a record?" He thinks for a moment. "That's a lot of pennies."
When I go back to that very first audition, I'm overwhelmed again. The face was actually, for all the awkwardness of the gangly haircut, vital and sensual. An audience of fashionably dressed people were lifted to their feet and their wasn't the least bit of rancor or pity in the ovation. When she walked immediately off the stage, I didn't think it was because Boyle was afraid. I thought it was because she had performed. Her audience had applauded and the natural thing to do was to walk off (come back for the “Brava!”) The three judges were now an intrusion. She'd never say it and she didn't think it, but she felt it. When Cadwalladr approached Boyle for her article, Boyle sounds as if she was much more frightened than she was on that stage. "I can't say anything without their [Syco's] permission. So sorry. Goodbye now. Goodbye.” A close friend, also afraid to be identified, confided that Boyle is afraid that Sony might drop her. That very thing happened to just a few weeks before SYCO signed Boyle to then 18 year old Leon Jackson over issues of things he said to reporters. Reflecting later, Jackson said he would always be, “grateful to The X Factor, but for an 18-year-old who'd never lived away from home it was a brutal introduction to the music industry. 'I had no control over anything,' he says. 'But especially not the music.' I can't believe that this is what Susan Boyle wanted, but Cadwalladr disagrees, adding the viewpoint of Boyle's sister
It is the dream, though. It's what the world wanted for Susan Boyle and what she wanted for herself. We wanted her to triumph against the world and she wanted to be a singer, more than anything. "And she's proved herself to everybody," says her sister, Mary. "She always said, 'Just you wait. I'll show you!' You can see it on her face in the film. I know that face so well. It's, 'Just you wait!'
There's no question that Boyle showed the world what she could do. What she didn't get to do was show them more than once. Nor did she get to be herself more than once. Like my students, who left that afternoon, tired, and won no recognition for what they did, nor did they help to erase the perception which people have of young people who can't be exactly on time every day or who might not graduate in the time frame you hope them they do. I don't know what I would do with a child who had watched a friend bleed to death, but my students did. I have a slight feeling Susan Boyle might. Most likely, my colleagues and I would do best to buy everybody lunch and to help the world to better understand why they are reaching the world stage a tad overage.
What disappoints me most though, are the Oprah interviews. Of all the people in the world, I expected Oprah to accept someone who might have limitations in one way and a wide birth of understanding in another. Or who might just be able to tell about a hard life, and sing of it. Simple poetry. She comes on like a child who has been coached not to say certain things. Oprah doesn't talk to her for more than five minutes. She sings for maybe ten and it's over. She could have gone with her to her village Gone to the Bakery. Met her mother. Sat with her and the cat. Made a whole show about it. Encouraged someone to make a short film. How many women sit alone in small towns, with beautiful voices, learning difficult music about history, but living the most simple, hardened lives. What does her mother really say to her at home? If there's rancor, what is it? If she's depressed, what's behind it? Why not let her sing something sad --- Introduce her to music she doesn't know? Maybe the truth is, she decided she doesn't want to make albums and that's what they're afraid she'll say. They're afraid she'll say, the real business of music didn't seem like music, that the technicians who appreciated her were the last people she felt comfortable talking with. Or worse, that she couldn't believe that is was SO HARD for people to imagine on that day that it was so unlikely that her voice would be so beautiful. That like kids who show up late and come from a closing school can understand how to calm down children from a few blocks away who have lost a friend, a woman who has a dream can sing beautifully about it at any age. When my students left the school building that day, they were worn through. They had given everything, and like Boyle the only immediately appropriate response to their astonishing debut was the applause of their audience (received). Just like Boyle, however, my students were UNPAID for producing a spectacular moment for an organization which was paid handsomely, this time by the Dept. of Education. My students, I think, were already jaded enough not to expect recognition, and as they continue their studies at Cornell, Oswego, Hunter and some struggle to stay in school, they probably wonder if those little kids are all right. Not enough people wonder about them, I think -- had there been, at least, one news story, perhaps, there might have been a "Where are they now?" segment somewhere, if nothing else, to check up on that promising trackstar, Pre-Law student at Cornell (in China as we speak at an economic conference). The air was full of gasoline and the tartness of flat paint glaring in your eyes and they walked into it with the memory of that day, and they have only that. What about Susan Boyle? So, now she has viewed things from the mountain-top and the robber-barons have used her for their own quests and cons they should help her to discover herown real dreams that aren't lacquered up like the four walls of a coffin to make those who were uncomfortable with her appearance on stage feel better about themselves. I was moved by her voice and her ability to connect immediately with an audience. Everything afterward is just promotion of charity work. It's like hype for a funeral. This time, nobody is turning blue, but somebody is definitely disappearing.
Works Cited
1. , Sunday, May 30, 2010Cadwalladr, Carole, “What Happened to the Dream,” The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/may/30/susan-boyle-the-dream
I didn't see her Cinderella-like debut the night it happened, but learned about it during a peremptory class trip given to select members of the senior class at one of those large, historic high schools which was subsequently closed in Brooklyn, New York. About 30 members of that school's last graduating class had been volunteered the day before, to teach lessons they had never seen to kindergarten and first-grade children a few blocks away. In six inch heels and oxfords with sharp, pointy toes, our kids arrived somewhere between 8 and 8:30am for this unpaid teaching assignment, chatty, hungry and with no training for what they were about to do. Among the many reasons given for the closing of the school was its poor four year graduation rate, attendance and high rate of lateness. I can't say that even those who met the appointed time limit always hit all the other benchmarks, but you could often find high levels of intellectual and emotional accomplishment on both sides of the finish line. The kids that day were working very hard to do whatever it was they were supposed to be doing at around the time they were supposed to be there – not that I knew what either was, and I had everything but a doctorate.
A colleague who had done this for years, was in a suit and tie. All I had been told was that I was going on a trip, so I wore the generic black pants, white shirt, and black sweater purchased from some store which could pass for Old Navy. In a crisp, mandarin jacket which hung beneath her waist, was the woman from “QuestCon”, carrying about 30 lean plastic folders. “Shandeliquia?” “Um...she's not here yet,” said my colleague, as he gave her petite figure so inordinately thorough a review it made me blush. To lighten the mood, he started a conversation with me. “What do you think of Susan Boyle?” I pulled my body from head to toe as if I were Gumby, to seem as tall, thin and geeky as possible. Sure, I am actually under five feet tall and dumpy. I aimed to camouflage my body shape and turn my impish face upward in an effort to make the teacher and the accompanying vixen feel old. If you broke me open and counted the rings, I had fifteen less than " have- aviator glasses- will -think- he's -ageless" and ten less than" Ms. Where-Are-My-Unpaid-Slaves-Don't-They-Want-To-Be-Republicans?" It seems that yesterday she had cornered my colleague and made him, literally, grab every nice kid he knew and make them agree to a specific grade they would teach today. On their way to Music or lunch or the bathroom. By some miracle they all arrived and they brought friends who could help. I'm sure they sensed that my colleague was in trouble and that maybe the wench in the bad suit had a gun.
“I don't know who Susan Boyle is.”
“She's this woman in her 40's who went on Britain's got talent and might win. She's all over YouTube. She's got great courage. I really like her.”
“Is she really beautiful?” “No, she looks like—she could be any woman off the street. She's even kind of heavy. But, she's got a lot of spunk. She's funny. I think she's great.” He talks her up to the kids. “Oh yeah, the fat British chick with the amazing voice. I'm rooting for her.” It's a pathetic gesture, but I buy in.
We take the bus and get off way too early. The school we've been assigned to was the site of the murder of a little girl last year by a fellow kindergarten student. The principal spoke to us in the hall and now I remember the recordings played on the news. “She's turning blue.”
One of my students practices his list of rules on me. They sound fair. If they don't work, his partner, who still barely speaks English, will make lots of funny faces. Also sounds good. They haven't read the lesson yet. We weren't on the bus more than three minutes. I promise to come in and watch, and I do, almost immediately. So does my colleague. It's a relief to see the faculty is pretty casual and their parental instincts come out for our big kids, as well, but it isn't necessary. Within two minutes, it's clear. Our kids walk in, they are MOVIE STARS. Bona-fide real teenagers just like on TV and not related to me. And CUTE! Ten minutes in, and I see what used to be a class clown having the “perhaps when you are grown, you will understand speech” with a teary girl whose hand he is holding. The other girls look on. They are working very hard to suppress the “AHHH!” Our celebrities pull stories they see on the bookshelves which they recognize as good and start reading them. Or they make them up with the class. A lot of the kids talk about what happened last year while they do this.
Some of our teenagers have a real gift for this and emerge with their classes for lunch as...CHOO CHOO TRAINS.
The entire First-Grade was lead out by one student who was the front engine. If you broke the train, you had to go back. Each class was linked by another student. We bought our budding “Little Engines that Could” Chinese food. School lunch would've been a very cruel response to their ingenuity. They ate vigorously while their charges continued to eat the plastic food look-a-likes at tables nearby.
“YOU DIDN'T USE THE LESSONS.”
“Well, no.” “They already know what a penny is, Miss. And they have better books here. Plus, they're still not over the shooting. DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THAT? God, I'm still crying.”
“This is a complete failure.”
Frank O'Hara once wrote that children know they want their backs broken. I think teenagers know they don't. The default position for less than literate men who feel defensive and teenagers who feel they are being told how to live before they know what life is, is “chair back, foot against another chair, etc.” We had thirty kids in that position instantly.
I looked at the colleague who was my senior and said, “Oh, Mr. Rogers?”
“Yes. Miss, the children our students have worked very hard with today are happier than they were when they came in. Look at them. They're not fighting. They're in their seats. They are smiling and laughing. They came to the cafeteria as a choo-choo train. They all read or created stories which are very good literacy activities. Ask their teachers if they felt this was a meaningful day.”
“I will do just that.” With a barely visible swing of her woolen suit, she moved forward. “What does her face look like?” “You know,” answered a student named Paul, “that's a good question.”
“If they hadn't been so happy, we wouldn't be deafened by the clicks of her cheap plastic shoes,” I couldn't help noting.
When we came back from lunch, I sat in the rectangular, windowless lounge, lulled by the flyswatter-sound of the soda machine. With her jacket slung over her shoulder, our corporate sponsor shifted quietly in. The words came out quickly and she faced the floor. “I'm sorry. The principal is very happy with what your kids are doing. I was totally and utterly misguided.” My hand lifted some cold water from around my can of soda, applying to my face, while pushing my second can toward her. “Please, I have two. You'll dehydrate.” “Thanks.” She looked genuinely surprised. “I heard you talking about Susan Boyle. Isn't she amazing?” “Actually, I'm going to have to go home and watch her on YouTube. I missed it. I dean and teach. When I get home, sometimes I hit the floor like lead, right after I feed the cats.” “Well, there you go,” she said, and she eyed me like a salesgirl who thought she had found just the right shade of blush without knowing that I don't ever wear it. “Oh?” “She loves cats!” “She has a cat she loves so much and she lives with her mom and works in a bakery. That's been her whole life till now. That and her singing lessons. She's 48 years old.” “Jesus, what drudgery.” “She cares about her mom – and you, yourself said you love cats.” “The cats are great. But the bakery and going home to your mother when you are in your 40's. People must make so much fun of her. She must have a thick skin.” “Or, I hope so.”
Two years later and the school has come and gone, three small schools sitting in place of one, occupying the same building, only now it is called a campus. I ask myself, what if someone had done a news report on the work of our students that day, would it have saved the school? Or would it have won temporary, relatively useless recognition for the students involved, perhaps small checks toward books in their first year of college. Of course, a good deed is supposed to be it's own reward, but so is academic study -- ideally, you aren't supposed to be weighted by how quickly you learn but by the fact that you keep trying. I think of those students as part of the same mystery of Susan Boyle's career in this same period.
I've now seen the Youtube video of that very first night and heard the Henry Mancini level productions that Simon Cowell put together of Susan Boyle. The first night is better than Frank Capra, especially because the technicians have clearly directed the show – they had to know she was going to win everyone over. You know they love her. The bells ringing like a boxing match is coming up. She's all adrenaline. The shift of the hips at Simon – “Take a ride on these hips, fella,” she seems to say. How could anyone have ever thought she was slow? Just very nervous and not from a major city. Or, so it seems. Admittedly, I don't watch these talent shows on a regular basis because they make me bilious. There seems something unfair to the millions of singers who braved piano bars a few towns over, found whatever kindred spirits were available, found their ways to a train, plane, bus, to audition after audition and then either luck or a family and some scrawny offspring named Baby June/Biff. Then again, we wouldn't have many talented artists without some of these shows, and talk shows are a kind of venue for new comic talent that aren't really available for other fields. I've “bought in” again to the story, though part of me wonder what of it, is a fix, the way people wonder about Babe Ruth's home runs.
Accusations appear and re-appear, especially when acts are put on television like man ubiquitously referred to in the tabloids as “the anti-Susan Boyle” - a man so deluded that he was disappointed to find out that the woman to whom he had dedicated his song about suicide was actually alive and well. He was, however, certain, he was set-up for as the butt of a joke and I'm sure he's right, that he knew that beforehand and that he couldn't have been happier – all the more reason to have had him sent to a hospital and not a green room. You can tell those two, adorable and fairly experienced sound technicians know Susan is going to do well that night and they'd have to be deaf and the world supremely unjust to be wrong. Does she know? And is she so overwhelmed at the end because she didn't believe the world would be just or because she didn't believe the world would have a moment when it wouldn't? What also struck me is all the times that the judges said that the audience was against Boyle from the beginning. THEY weren't against Boyle from the beginning. Amanda seemed charmed, Piers seems to know that this woman has something. Only Simon thinks she might be a nut job. The audience sits back when she talks. She's not talking B.S, she's not ragtag, and she's picked a good song. It feels as if she's already gotten good word of mouth from somewhere. This, “everyone was against you” bit seems phoney. Is it because the judges feel cognitive dissonance, or are they covering for a set-up that maybe even SHE doesn't know about?
Every time there's an interview, I buy it. I'm not looking for the deeper side of Susan Boyle. If anything, I'm quite content to accept that she might not be urbane, but I believe she's funny and been through enough to make her credible. Perhaps she may have been discouraged from thinking too much beyond what you need to do to get by because nothing in her life would have improved by doing otherwise. The “Susan Boyle Story” J find on Youtube is a whole seven minutes long. Why isn't there a film? She was was such a big story. Such a big discovery. Is she inflexible? Does no one in her village understand her? Has she opened up to no one. I can't imagine there was an individual in her life who would have understood if she had. One of the hard things about having an extraordinary dream is you often can't explain it to the people sitting next to you. You have to go far away to get recognition in order to be accepted at home.
Carole Cadwalladr, who wrote one of the few articles critical of the way Boyle's career has been handled, interviewed neighbors who testified that, "They used to taunt her and call her names and throw eggs at her door. And now they cheer her and ask for her autograph.” Noting that Boyle was Sony's best-selling artist in 2010, she concludes, “Susan Boyle has transformed her life and she's made a lot of money in the process, well in excess of the £4m in royalties she received with great fanfare from Simon Cowell last year on her birthday.” Those who taunt her and now seek out her valuable signature, also try to calculate her portfolio. Cadwalladr even found a priest in Boyle's hometown weighing in. “Father Ryszard Holuka, the local priest (Susan is a devout Catholic), does a quick bit of mental arithmetic when I tell him she's Sony's biggest-selling artist. "What do you think she gets? A penny a record?" He thinks for a moment. "That's a lot of pennies."
When I go back to that very first audition, I'm overwhelmed again. The face was actually, for all the awkwardness of the gangly haircut, vital and sensual. An audience of fashionably dressed people were lifted to their feet and their wasn't the least bit of rancor or pity in the ovation. When she walked immediately off the stage, I didn't think it was because Boyle was afraid. I thought it was because she had performed. Her audience had applauded and the natural thing to do was to walk off (come back for the “Brava!”) The three judges were now an intrusion. She'd never say it and she didn't think it, but she felt it. When Cadwalladr approached Boyle for her article, Boyle sounds as if she was much more frightened than she was on that stage. "I can't say anything without their [Syco's] permission. So sorry. Goodbye now. Goodbye.” A close friend, also afraid to be identified, confided that Boyle is afraid that Sony might drop her. That very thing happened to just a few weeks before SYCO signed Boyle to then 18 year old Leon Jackson over issues of things he said to reporters. Reflecting later, Jackson said he would always be, “grateful to The X Factor, but for an 18-year-old who'd never lived away from home it was a brutal introduction to the music industry. 'I had no control over anything,' he says. 'But especially not the music.' I can't believe that this is what Susan Boyle wanted, but Cadwalladr disagrees, adding the viewpoint of Boyle's sister
It is the dream, though. It's what the world wanted for Susan Boyle and what she wanted for herself. We wanted her to triumph against the world and she wanted to be a singer, more than anything. "And she's proved herself to everybody," says her sister, Mary. "She always said, 'Just you wait. I'll show you!' You can see it on her face in the film. I know that face so well. It's, 'Just you wait!'
There's no question that Boyle showed the world what she could do. What she didn't get to do was show them more than once. Nor did she get to be herself more than once. Like my students, who left that afternoon, tired, and won no recognition for what they did, nor did they help to erase the perception which people have of young people who can't be exactly on time every day or who might not graduate in the time frame you hope them they do. I don't know what I would do with a child who had watched a friend bleed to death, but my students did. I have a slight feeling Susan Boyle might. Most likely, my colleagues and I would do best to buy everybody lunch and to help the world to better understand why they are reaching the world stage a tad overage.
What disappoints me most though, are the Oprah interviews. Of all the people in the world, I expected Oprah to accept someone who might have limitations in one way and a wide birth of understanding in another. Or who might just be able to tell about a hard life, and sing of it. Simple poetry. She comes on like a child who has been coached not to say certain things. Oprah doesn't talk to her for more than five minutes. She sings for maybe ten and it's over. She could have gone with her to her village Gone to the Bakery. Met her mother. Sat with her and the cat. Made a whole show about it. Encouraged someone to make a short film. How many women sit alone in small towns, with beautiful voices, learning difficult music about history, but living the most simple, hardened lives. What does her mother really say to her at home? If there's rancor, what is it? If she's depressed, what's behind it? Why not let her sing something sad --- Introduce her to music she doesn't know? Maybe the truth is, she decided she doesn't want to make albums and that's what they're afraid she'll say. They're afraid she'll say, the real business of music didn't seem like music, that the technicians who appreciated her were the last people she felt comfortable talking with. Or worse, that she couldn't believe that is was SO HARD for people to imagine on that day that it was so unlikely that her voice would be so beautiful. That like kids who show up late and come from a closing school can understand how to calm down children from a few blocks away who have lost a friend, a woman who has a dream can sing beautifully about it at any age. When my students left the school building that day, they were worn through. They had given everything, and like Boyle the only immediately appropriate response to their astonishing debut was the applause of their audience (received). Just like Boyle, however, my students were UNPAID for producing a spectacular moment for an organization which was paid handsomely, this time by the Dept. of Education. My students, I think, were already jaded enough not to expect recognition, and as they continue their studies at Cornell, Oswego, Hunter and some struggle to stay in school, they probably wonder if those little kids are all right. Not enough people wonder about them, I think -- had there been, at least, one news story, perhaps, there might have been a "Where are they now?" segment somewhere, if nothing else, to check up on that promising trackstar, Pre-Law student at Cornell (in China as we speak at an economic conference). The air was full of gasoline and the tartness of flat paint glaring in your eyes and they walked into it with the memory of that day, and they have only that. What about Susan Boyle? So, now she has viewed things from the mountain-top and the robber-barons have used her for their own quests and cons they should help her to discover herown real dreams that aren't lacquered up like the four walls of a coffin to make those who were uncomfortable with her appearance on stage feel better about themselves. I was moved by her voice and her ability to connect immediately with an audience. Everything afterward is just promotion of charity work. It's like hype for a funeral. This time, nobody is turning blue, but somebody is definitely disappearing.
Works Cited
1. , Sunday, May 30, 2010Cadwalladr, Carole, “What Happened to the Dream,” The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/may/30/susan-boyle-the-dream
16 July, 2011
We still miss you Henry
We lost Larry's twin brother, the Hennybee, July 17, but were lucky that the Bernilius came to comfort us that same year and be Larry's little brother. But life would never have been the same had we not been graced by a fleetfooted creature with pink ears, a white body and a mark of god on his back. We loved him so.
30 June, 2011
Waiting for Superman TRUTH: The documentary
Place this link in your browser and see the real story
http://www.waitingforsupermantruth.org/?page_id=316
http://www.waitingforsupermantruth.org/?page_id=316
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.
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