Walkers

Jejak PandaSelamat Datang Di Blog Kesayangan Anda Dan Selamat Membaca
bandarq terbaikI was going to start this first post of the year by complaining about this or that educational proposal. And there certainly are plenty of goings-on to critique, but then I thought that, rather than set a negative tone by beginning the year tilting at educational windmills, I would try to begin on a positive note. So here goes.

I was saying to my wife the other day that I really don’t like summer, and I don’t know why I ever pretended I did. It is too hot and too humid. I burn in the sun in a matter of minutes. There’s too little structure for me. I like fall, and I’ve always liked fall. I like the sunny days without humidity and excessive heat. I like the cool nights with a window open and the air conditioner off. I love to jog down the street and watch the sunlight fall through the golden leaves of a slowly turning maple tree. I love to feel a slight chill in the air and to need a sweater. I love the smell of wood smoke. And I love school. I always loved school.

I have wonderful memories from kindergarten and first grade when I walked to school with a pack of neighborhood kids that slowly increased in size the further along we marched and the closer we got to school grounds. My neighbors Gary and Walter and I would start out together. Walter was Gary’s older brother, and he received fifty cents a week from my grandmother for walking with me to and from school each day. I would walk six houses to Gary and Walter’s and then we would proceed up Fenway Drive, picking up Walter’s best friend Michael, who would run across the street to meet us, then David on the corner at the top of the hill, and finally Reggie and Joyce at the intersection. Joyce was our only female walker. From there we would cut through a neighbor’s yard, running alongside his garage, and we’d pop out in his side yard where he had an apple tree we sometimes stole apples from. Most of our neighborhood was post-WW II construction, and the area had been covered in orchards before the war. Many of us had fruit-bearing trees in our yards, mostly apple, but I had a pear tree and two plum trees in my yard, and my grandmother and aunt spent the fall baking apple pies and pear torts. We always cut through that one neighbor’s yard because his house fronted a T-intersection, and we would walk along the intersecting street to where it met School Street. From there we turned right and marched onto the grounds of Ridge Hill School, which had been built in 1969, the year I was born.

I know my memories are idyllic, and I know that my experience with this walking pack of boys wasn’t always so bucolic and idealized. We argued and fought. I hated Walter’s friend Michael, and resented that Walter, who was usually good to Gary and me, could degenerate into a bully around Michael. And we were yelled at and chased on more than one occasion by the neighbor whose yard we cut through, but mostly I have good memories of the time, and wish I had been able to continue to walk to school after we moved out of the New Haven area when I was seven.

This fall my daughter has begun preschool and my son has begun first grade. We live two houses down from his school and have a crushed stone sidewalk in front of our house. He’s a walker like I was, though he doesn’t have a pack of neighborhood kids to join. Most of our neighbors are older, grandparents now, and the few little kids who live in the area take the bus or are dropped off by car by parents who can’t or won’t enjoy the walk I cherish. School doesn’t begin for my son till nine, and he wakes up around 6:30, so while the weather remains warm and pleasant we are spending our mornings exploring the neighborhood.

My son turned six earlier in the week, and he received several new books on dinosaurs, fossils, and wildlife. He usually tells people he wants to be a scientist, an archaeologist, or a paleontologist. He was reading one of his new books this morning and asked if we could go look for fossils later. I reminded him that this would have to take place in the late afternoon or early evening since we all had school. He was a little disappointed by this, so I put down my paper and we put on our shoes and headed outside. It was eight and we had close to an hour to ourselves, so we walked up to a field behind a neighbor’s house where there used to be a pig farm. Cormac and I scoured the ground looking for fossils. We found lots of cool rocks, some charred wood, old scraps of pottery and porcelain, and three small bone chips, the spongy remains of the marrow calcified into a hard, porous substance. He was delighted; he had a treasure for show-and-tell. We hurried home to change into dry shoes, wash our hands, and then walk down to school. We were early enough for Cormac’s teacher to find him an old butter tub to put his treasures in, and I left him there at his seat waiting eagerly for the time when he would be able to show his finds to his new friends.

I walked home slowly along our sidewalk, beneath the old maple and oak trees that line our street. It was foggy rather than sunny, and I walked a little slow, reluctant to get home and break my reverie. I enjoyed the oddly pleasant mix of early morning autumn air—dampness and leaf-smell intermingling with diesel exhaust from the school buses—and then got into my car and drove to the university.

Less Is More, Or The Big Paycheck

Jejak PandaHallo Jumpa Lagi Kita Di Website Ini
judi bandarqI wrote a nostalgic piece last week, but I can’t do that two weeks in a row. Today, I have to comment on a conversation I had with a dishwasher repairman.

My dishwasher may be dying. It still washes the dishes and it isn’t spraying water across the kitchen floor (it did that once before and I had to change a filter), but it has been making this god-awful high-pitched screeching sound, which is why I have been doing dishes by hand all week. The repair guy was scheduled to come today, but like the cable guy, he gave me a four hour window of time during which he might come, and then he called with about twenty minutes left in that window to say he’d be arriving in thirty minutes, and then he arrived fifty-five minutes later—not that I’m bitter, as my colleague Gina would say.

OK, so Tim was a nice guy as appliance repairmen go, and while he tinkered around with my dishwasher he struck up conversation, and he asked me if I had to take the day off today to be there to meet him, and I said, “Sort of.” Now, I like the fact that my job allows me to be able to take a day like today for things like meeting a repairman coming to my house, but I hate being asked about it because I know what’s coming. It’s like when people ask teachers what they do and as soon as you say, “I’m a teacher,” they make some comment about all your time off and how nice and easy it must be to get out of work so early each day—yadda, yadda. You all know the conversation. Fact of the matter is, I rarely take days, and I only take days when I have things like repairmen who give me four hour windows of time and then arrive an hour late, or doctor’s appointments, weddings, funerals, that sort of thing. Otherwise, I’m a workaholic. I check my email in hotel lobbies on vacation. Heck, I’m writing this at 11 PM. So I know what he must be thinking, and I don’t want to get into it because I fear that I’ll sound like Hamlet’s mother, protesting too much. But then he surprises me by saying his mother was a first grade teacher, and I’m thinking, “All right. I can probably talk about education with this guy without the misperceptions and the innuendos.” But then he says, “Hey, can I ask you about something? What do you think of the dedication of teachers today? Is it the same as it was years ago?”

Well, I don’t know how to answer this question. I’m not THAT old, and I haven’t been teaching even twenty years quite yet (18 or 19 if you go back to student teaching), so I say something along the lines of how teacher preparation is much more rigorous than it once was, and the standards are higher, and the required content knowledge is greater. But he says, “No, I mean dedication to the field. Are they willing to do the things teachers used to do?” So I must be looking at him with a funny look, you know, my head tilted sideways like a dog does or something, and he proceeds to clarify that it was his opinion, gleaned from his mother, that teachers were more dedicated back in the day, and that these days they’re just in it for the paycheck. OK, now I don’t know where to begin responding. So I say, “Are you suggesting that in the good old days teachers worked harder because they were paid less?” And I’m thinking, Would you have gotten here about three hours earlier than you did if I paid you less? But I bite my tongue. He clarifies by saying no, not exactly, but that he thinks that when the pay was low only the truly dedicated went into the profession, and these days too many teachers just want the big paycheck. That’s what he said. The BIG PAYCHECK. He then proceeded to tell me a second-hand story about some student-teacher his mother had years ago who refused to do all sorts of unspecified things she was asked to do and how she just wanted the short hours, the vacation time, the pay. Et cetera.

Once again, I don’t know where to begin with this guy. For one, if the paycheck was so great and all, why do we have shortage areas in just about every area? At the secondary level, I believe Social Studies is the only non-shortage area. Two, why do so many teachers I know have second jobs tending bar, waiting tables, running a Christmas tree farm, or selling perfume in a department store? Don’t get me wrong. I know we’re paid well and that tenure, even though it is intended to ensure our professional rights, also functions to give us a great degree of job security. But most of the teachers I know work their asses off and usually spend their vacations (and weekends and evenings) grading and planning. If we got paid a decent hourly wage we’d make significantly more than our salaries. I’m sure everyone knows the old joke about getting five dollars an hour for babysitting your students. If you had 100 students and saw each one for an hour a day you’d gross $90,000 at the end of a 180 day school year. How many of you make that?

The New York Times ran an editorial today by Timothy Egan titled “Lesson Plans, 2009.” It’s a cynical piece that the Times staff chose to highlight with a box that says “It’s back to school with bad teachers, bored students, and baffling parents.” In it, teachers are accused of being overpaid, selfish, incompetent, insubordinate, lazy, and—to beat all—drunk. Nice. I finished reading the column and I thought to myself, “Well, maybe if they paid us all less …”

Journeys, Innocence, And Suffering

Jejak PandaHallo Ketemu Lagi Di Situs Kesayangan Anda
daftar bandarqEach Fall I have been teaching American Literature To 1880, where I can teach Hawthorne, but this time I was given a section of the companion course, American Literature Since 1880. What’s more, because budget cuts have made it necessary to fill seats, I have a section of forty students rather than my customary nineteen. I was initially concerned that it would be difficult to have a decent discussion with so many students, but so far the class has been going well, and I have a good dozen students who participate regularly and intelligently.

This past week we have begun reading Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! I love the novel, but I had to wonder if interest in the book would fall along gender lines. I’m pleased that it hasn’t. Anyway, one of the reasons I love the novel so much is that it is deceptively simple yet filled with many seemingly insignificant lines that, upon closer inspection, are simply pregnant with meaning and significance. My favorite line in the book, and perhaps my favorite line (or at least one of my favorite lines) in all literature is uttered by a character named Carl Linstrum. Observing changes that have taken place on the Nebraska prairie during his long absence, Carl observes, “there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before, like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.” I like to throw that line to my students and ask them what they think the two or three human stories are, and then to ask them to identify those archetypal stories in works from different periods, right up to the contemporary era.

Over the years I have gotten lots of good responses to this question, but the students’ initial answers are usually pretty generic. They suggest things like Rags to Riches or Coming of Age, which are fine answers, but I press them to be more specific. Inevitably they want to know what I think the stories are. I preface my answer by saying that I don’t think my two or three are THE answers, but I tell them that there are a few stories I see recurring in literature more often than any others. To me, these are the stories of Odysseus, Adam and Eve, and Christ. To phrase them generically, I could say Life is a Journey, Loss of Innocence, and Deliverance through Suffering. One could even say that the generic examples I gave above from students are versions of these three stories. Coming of Age is essentially the story of Adam and Eve, and Rags to Riches is a materialistic version of the story of Christ.

Nonetheless, it’s a great question to use as a framing device for the course, and in fact the selesai paper the students have to write is on a version of this question. I began this fall’s course with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884, and I use the line from Hemingway that “all modern American literature comes from” Huck Finn. I said to the students that I agree with Hemingway to the degree that I think Twain is using one of these three basic human stories (the story of Odysseus) but that he is telling a modern American version of that one human story. (I might argue that thirty-four years earlier Hawthorne had done the same thing with the story of Adam and Eve and The Scarlet Letter, but that’s an argument for another day). So for the selesai paper, after we have read nine major works of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century works, the students have to tell me an American version of one of the two or three basic human stories. They have to name the human story, identify its manifestation in at least two of the works we’ve read, and then connect it to a contemporary text (which can be fiction, nonfiction, print, film, whatever).

Half way through the second book of the semester, the students seem to be getting the hang of it, and this is, in part, because O Pioneers! is such an exemplary text for what I’m talking about. We had a great discussion this past Wednesday about how Cather was alluding to both the stories of the Garden of Eden and Pyramus and Thisbe, and treating them as versions of each other. At one point there is a beautiful description of an orchard (the apple tree from the Garden of Eden) bordered on one side by a Mulberry hedge (like the Mulberry tree from Ovid’s tale of Pyramus and Thisbe) and on the other side by a new field of wheat (good old American ‘amber waves of grain’). I asked the students if they could see how this one paragraph of description gives readers a tableau that provides an interpretive image of Cather’s idea of a singular human story and three permutations of that story—one Biblical, one Classical, and one American.

I was especially pleased the following day when one of the students from my class stopped me in the hallway outside my office to tell me that her professor for her Milton class came in and wrote just the word “typology” on the board, and then proceeded to explain to the students what typology was and how Milton was using it in Paradise Lost, and, as the student said, she suddenly realized that I had been talking about basically the same thing without using the word itself. And she was right. Nice when that sort of thing happens.

For Tuesday, I have an invitation from a colleague to sit in on her Beat Literature class. They’re discussing The Catcher in the Rye and its possible influence upon Kerouac’s On the Road, two books about disaffected male youth—another human story that seems to repeat itself as if it never happened before. Can you think of a Biblical or Classical precedent?

Common Sense (?)

Jejak PandaTerima Kasih Telah Kunjungin Web Kesayangan Anda
bandarq terpercayaHave you seen the big, full-page ads of Linda McMahon’s head? If you’ve missed them, she’s running for Senator, hoping to unseat Chris Dodd. Now I’m no cheerleader for Dodd and I won’t even begin to be an apologist for the sweetheart real estate deal he received that has gotten voters so disgruntled recently, but McMahon’s campaign bothers the heck out of me. If you recall, McMahon is the wife of Vince McMahon and past President and CEO of the World Wrestling Federation. She was involved in a federal investigation of steroid use by WWF wrestlers back in 1993 and prides herself on being the force behind the WWF’s literacy and voter registration campaigns. Earlier this year Governor Rell appointed her to the Connecticut Board of Education, citing her business acumen as her defining qualification. Most recently it has been revealed that the senate hopeful has been rather lax in exercising her own right to vote. She was forced to admit on her campaign blog that she has missed many votes, notably the 2008 Republican primary and the 2006 general election. Yet she has given very generously to both Republican and Democratic politicians, as well as to many political causes. Both Joe Lieberman and Jodi Rell have been the beneficiaries of McMahon’s largess.

I was outraged by Rell’s appointment of McMahon to the Board of Education because she has no qualifications. She has never taught and never served on a local school board. Other than the WWF’s literacy campaign, McMahon has no claim to qualification, and Rell’s citing of her business acumen is specious, at best. One, education is not business. If education were run like business the first thing we’d all do is fire our raw materials providers and get new ones that would send us higher quality students to work with, and then we’d layoff most of our teachers and outsource our teaching services to a second- or third-world country with a so-called emerging economy (that means they have weak labor and environmental laws and a low tax rate). And two, if we were to run education like the WWF, we’d pump the teachers and students full of steroids, dress up everyone in sexploitational clothes, and beat each other up. And all the matches (read, tamat assessments) would be rigged for entertainment value and not for the assessment of the actual performance skills of the participants. No. McMahon was appointed to the board because she donated a ton of money to Rell’s campaign. Period. I’m not naïve; I know how this is how government works on both sides of the aisle, but I get particularly upset when these political behaviors end up affecting education.

And now the woman is running for Senator, and she doesn’t even vote. Of course, she doesn’t have to vote. She exercises her political clout by waiting to see who is nominated or elected and then giving them lots of money. To paraphrase Leona Helmsley, only poor people vote. If the Republican Party of Connecticut has any sense or sense of decency they will at least put their money and hope on Rob Simmons. At least he has served in the House of Representatives and is married to a public school teacher (who happens to be a Teacher Consultant of the CWP-Storrs, by the way). Unfortunately, Simmons probably doesn’t have enough money.

One of my students stopped by my office a few days ago to chat. She was upset because three of her five professors this semester are not very good teachers. One has yet to give an assignment, and the student has heard from others who have taken courses with him that he never returns any papers anyway. They just get an arbitrary grade at the end of the semester that is based on they-know-not-what. Another professor up and assigned a book that was not on the syllabus nor ordered and stocked in the book store, and then spent all of ten minutes discussing it but still assigned a paper on it. Part of my student’s visit was to ask if she could talk to me about the book so she at least had someone to bounce ideas off of. The third professor is four weeks into the semester and hasn’t gotten out of chapter one of the first book yet. The other day he realized how far behind he was and so assigned an unreasonably large amount of reading for the next class so they could all catch up. It wouldn’t be so bad if the students had a syllabus and so were ahead in the reading, but he never handed out a syllabus; he just tells them daily what to read for the next class. (I should note that the same student had similarly critical things to say about a couple of her high school English teachers, including one who spent thirteen weeks reading a play!). My student said to me, “You’d think it would be common sense after all these years of teaching certain books to know how to teach them and when to move on to the next chapter.” And I said, “Well, that’s one of the big problems with public education and the public’s perception of education. Everyone thinks teaching is easy, that it is common sense.” And when you see or experience a teacher who does it really well, it seems easy, it seems like common sense, it seems like anyone could do it. But we know it’s not. This is why great teachers are so rare and memorable.

But this prevailing public attitude is why Governor Rell can appoint Linda McMahon to the Board of Education with little public outcry and a 34-1 vote in the Democratic-held senate and a 96-45 vote in the Democratic-held house. People think that if anyone can teach, certainly anyone can serve on the Board of Education. Who needs training, experience, or credentials? Those are for medical doctors and lawyers—maybe. Certainly not for teachers—or politicians, for that matter.