After a summer lull, which brought the birth of Ruthie Mae, grandchild number 5, and the engagement of daughter Catherine to Jesse Brenneman (check out his YouTube comedy skits on "Loser Bar"), I mean to get back into the swing now. I'm afraid I'll do so rather grumpily, despite these genuine blessings.
This September, our news, and not merely in the sports
outlets, has been filled with Baltimore Ravens football player Ray Rice’s brutal
assault on his wife in an Atlantic City elevator. Rice was at first slapped on
the wrist by league commissioner Roger Goodell: a two-day suspension. Goodell
increased the penalty to indefinite suspension only on seeing –for the first
time, by his questionable account, when it went public on TMZ—the video of the
knockout punch.
Since Rice himself had given a full account of his hideous
behavior, and since it was available in the police report, one is appalled that
the commissioner needed visible
evidence before taking harsher action.
I won’t rehearse the legitimate controversy over the problem
of domestic abuse that all this has engendered, though that epidemic will in
some cases be directly relevant to my commentary below. As for Goodell’s
cover-up (for who can doubt that’s what it was?), so reminiscent of the
Catholic hierarchy’s insidious response to far-reaching child molestation
amongst its clergy, I’ll stop short, lest the rant that follows grow even more
intemperate.
For now, let me cite Mr. Goodell’s annual compensation for
his supposed leadership– 44 million dollars.
Let that figure linger in your mind, please. I hope to
indicate that that salary’s exorbitancy is also related to what I have to say.
But what I have to say is in fact primarily motivated by a recent reading of Getting Schooled, the latest brilliant
book from Garret Keizer of Sutton, Vermont. It chronicles a year in which
Garret returned as a leave replacement to a north-country high school where he
had taught for an extended time up to a decade or so before.
It is a cliché to say that certain nonfiction reads as
grippingly as the best novels, but Getting
Schooled is proof of the pudding. Garret fills many of his pages with
illustrative personal narratives, some funny, some heartwarming, many
profoundly saddening, and all compellingly rendered. Among other things, he
brings to light just how demanding it is to be a public school teacher in our
time.
It is fashionable nowadays to
berate teachers, especially those who belong to unions. Let me insist that only
those who have never stood in front of a class full of young people, some more
than merely unruly, would ever mount such a criticism. I spent one year
teaching in a relatively posh private high school, at the end of which I
concluded that I was not psychologically equipped to endure that sort of
stress. We should treat teachers, especially those of goodwill and
longstanding, as heroes, not whipping boys and girls.
People who note that the school
day normally ends in mid-afternoon, and the school year makes for a three-month
vacation, fail to consider a number of other factors, first of which is the
sheer drain on one’s personal time. There is no water-cooler interlude if you are a
teacher, no checking the email (and whatever else) from one’s cubicle, no
coffee break. Even lunch requires the teacher to exercise chaperone duties at
best. Further, if a teacher in my field of English, for example, assigns a
single paper per week, and if he or she has fifty students (I err on the low
side in a lot of cases), and if each of those papers demands no more than
twenty minutes’ attention (another low ball)... well, do the math, and then
multiply that week by 36. Then add the preparation and marking of tests and
exams, the reading and commenting on term papers. I could go on.
Ah, those awful unions, we cry,
even if in fact they are scarcely an element in American enterprise as I write.
Since the Morning in America days, our percentage of organized labor has shrunk
to 7%. Might I venture the notion that it’s not union workers who are being
paid too much, but so many other working men and women who are getting too
little? And don’t even start
to tell me they don’t work hard. Some of the hardest-working folks I know are
among the most poor.
Roger Goodell need not worry
over all this. Roger Goodell makes 44 million bucks a year.
It is claimed by free market
hyper-enthusiasts that society will most abundantly compensate those who
provide us with what we most value. There seems to be a lot of truth to this,
alas. Clearly we value professional football (and the struggles of no-talent
reality TV celebrities) more than we do a vast array of other “services” to our
national community.
And yet education having gone
south, we think teachers ought to fix our world up, even as we lament the cost.
Roger Goodell makes 44 million
per annum.
I am reducing my broad and avid
responses to Garret Keizer’s testimony to focus on the main thought it
engendered in me. The educational issues we quarrel about –do we need smaller
class sizes, better facilities, a core curriculum, standardized testing, and so
on?– remain far from exclusively educational when all is said and done. They
are social and political, and without for a moment suggesting that I have The
Solution, let me opine that we can dream up any educational theory we want; we
can pour as much money as we can gather into facilities and, yes, into the
salaries of teachers, almost all of whom could make much more lucrative
salaries in the private sector; we can test and test and test and test. But so
long as so significant a portion of our student body, above all, of course, in
our most impoverished communities, where the stress on teachers that I referred
to above often involves fear of actual physical harm– so long as that portion
goes home to a dysfunctional context, our remedies will amount to little. (Of
course, some don’t go home at all: Vermont leads New England in its proportion
of actually homeless young people)
Roger Goodell makes 44 million
dollars per annum.
As Garret Keizer points out,
many students experience literal trauma on the home front, with addiction
and/or domestic abuse often part of the picture; many have one parent only,
often herself the product of a similar background, confused, devoid of
personal or professional resources; many, in today’s economy, are essentially
parentless, because mom and/or dad is/are out working a whole slew of jobs just to pay
rent, buy food, afford doctor’s bills, what have you?
Roger Goodell makes 44 million
per annum.
One of my dear friends is an
energetic, committed, and imaginative elementary school principal. His school,
like most in Vermont, has been described as “failing” by our state educational
monitors. But as he points out, it’s the same kids, year in and out, generation
in and out, who account for the failing measure. They will go on doing so until
each can somehow be assured a measure of safety and sustenance. Some high-tech
company may generously offer free laptops to every student in School District
X, as Getting Schooled indicates, but who will provide each with freedom from terror and want?
Roger Goodell makes 44 million
dollars per annum.
We are at a curious and
lamentable place with regard to education. We ask teachers not only to teach
what used to be called the Three Rs and more; but we also seem to think it’s
their job to socialize children, too great a number of whom have had no such
guidance at home. But before any of us relatively comfortable critics start
keening over the loss of so-called family values, before we start lecturing the
parents of our dispossessed, let us in all humility imagine how we would cope with dire poverty,
joblessness, addiction, poor mental or physical health. How well would we raise our children?
Roger Goodell makes 44 million
dollars per annum.
We all need fuel, food,
medicine, and other stark necessities, and for many parents, to choose one or
two is to slight a number of others. But what the heck? Let’s dress the kids
(in whatever we can) and send them off to those fat-cat teachers, so outlandishly
compensated and perked. They have a job to do.
Do they ever.
Roger Goodell makes 44 million
dollars per annum.
Let me repeat. I am no political
or sociological genius. I don’t want either liberal or conservative readers to
take what I say and mold it so as to lengthen their list of slogans. Indeed,
our recourse to slogans plays too big a part in the mess I speak of: rather,
can’t we all, simply as concerned citizens, come to recognize that everything
we consider a plague on educational success is in fact a societal issue, not a
narrowly educational one? Can’t we put our heads together, at least on a
regional basis, in the admirable old Yankee manner, and come up with some
strategies? And while we are at it, can we quit scape-goating the teachers,
most of the ones I know doing their level best against odds they did nothing to
create?
The football commissioner banks
44 million bucks a year.
Years ago, I was asked to
participate in a publishing project at a local school. Each student would
compose a story that would address some experience he or she felt important. I
saw then in too many sad cases what I have been trying to address in this
column. This poem came out
of that experience. You'll have to guess at the format here and there, as I am too low-tech to make it look right on the blog.
Publishing Project
It was a great idea, so sure, of
course, I volunteered to type
for the local fourth graders,
who wanted to “publish” a book of their stories;
I myself had been publishing
stuff for years, but my early attempts
still somehow felt important,
even if glory
didn’t attend them (and hasn’t
elsewhere since, I moped in self-pity): Jeep
was one of my earliest
magazines, and Creative Moment, and The Lamp
and the Rabbit (Say what?)
But after a while, as I sat at
the keyboard, I felt trapped
in some pop culture dream, where
everything had to do
with Power Rangers, Nintendo,
and boom and zap and budda-budda-budda.
Where, I wondered, did
imagination ever go?
Or so remained my attitude till
one narrative came along, in which, rather
than reciting the struggles,
lapses, and recoveries
of superheroes, the author
provided an unheroic account
that rang too unhappily true.
“Too true
a tear” it almost evoked, to
quote the 17th-century poet Vaughan. (Who?)
It was one of those same-old
same-old stories of discovery,
although the heroine didn’t seem
to know what she’d actually found.
(The fiction, clearly, was no
fiction.) It involved a wedding,
at which, she said, Daddy kept shouting and laughing also
dancing
and Mommy and me and Tiffny however didn’t dance with no one not once
and Mommy and me and Tiffny however didn’t dance with no one not once
She spoke briefly too of the moon, but more tenderly of standing by
a fence
behind the groom’s trailer, which, unlike her own (on good days)
was not kept neat, and of how there was a pony out there
it was between a brown
and a bay
(she knew horses, I guess) and acted better than where it came from
and there was so much
wiskie and smoke the pony smelled better than the air
and it was a dirty
rotten shame to leave him and a shame
me Mom and Tiff had to
go home with Uncle Ware
which wasn’t ever that
nice to us and isn’t an uncle but Mom says he’s a friend
and look!! this is
supposed to be a story of one of the good days
and you can see how it
ends up just like this by Tami THE END.
