MindSpinner

Anybody who cares about teaching, schools, and our what government really ought to be doing shouldn’t miss Michael Winerip’s NY Times piece today, “Teachers, and a Law That Distrusts Them.”  The sad part is that this piece concludes Winerip’s four-year stint writing about education for the Times. I wish he’d open out this piece into a book showcasing what education should be and debunking nonsense that passes for attempts at progress.

But don’t stop there.  Also read, at Creek Running North, Chris Clarke’s account of his wife Becky’s teaching experience in a school district obsessed with implementing “progress” from above. Somewhere buried down in the comments I put in my two cents worth, from which I’ve excerpted the last paragraph:

There’s something truly insidious about the kind of education Becky was being required to implement, especially if it’s stretched over twelve years.  It’s mind-numbing, and it rewards compliance.  It’s a torment and a deterrent to creativity and curiousity.  Who wants that?  I’ve begun to think that there are those who do indeed want to produce a skilled population of workers trained to comply and long discouraged from asking big essential questions like “Why are we doing it this way?” or “What are the larger consequences of this course of action?” These graduates are likely to depend on others to think for them without deeply analyzing and are thus fairly easily manipulated by those who know how to orchestrate their prejudices, fears, and desires to net votes at the ballot box.  One can fleece their futures and simultaneously make them grateful for crumbs, lead them off to war waving flags, keep them stirred about minor moralities instead of issues of global consequence.  The result can look like a democracy when really it’s a ruling class managing its sheep.

Yesterday I took my kids to lunch and to see Pirates of the Caribbean: The Dead Man’s Chest. The scene worth having, as far as I’m concerned, entails Jack Sparrow finding his own selfless heroism, while Elizabeth Swann finds that she’s part pirate after all. (Everybody is, and we’re better people for knowing it.) As usual, intensely orchestrated, fast-moving, lengthy action sequences deploying all sorts of film-making wizardry eventually bore me. Johnny Depp does not bore me, though this script seemed thinner on characterization than the last.

The big thing is that we did something as a family before my son leaves this weekend. He’s trying to cram in all the time he can with his friends, but those activities often take place in the evening, so a matinee was perfect. I couldn’t help stealing glances at him during the movie. Something says this parting would be easier if he were, say, going off to college this fall, instead of to an intensive military-style turn-around program for at-risk kids. For my part, I went to college at his age (17), 600 miles from home. I felt mostly ready. He’s not mostly ready, but that’s what this program is about, so I waver between concern and hope. Assuredly, I must “Let it be.”

I have written his name - last name, first name, and middle initial - on one pair of dress black pants, two pairs of sweat pants, two sweatshirts, two pairs of shorts, and four t-shirts (all in atheltic gray), on seven pairs of white boxers and fourteen white crew socks, on inner tongues of white running shoes and black dress shoes and the inside of his black dress belt, as instructed for each item. I couldn’t figure out how to label the black dress socks, not with a Sharpie Laundry Pen, anyway. I have put everything into plastic garbage bags (no luggage allowed), and written his name on these, too. Four more days.

His father, as if awakened from a four-year sleep, is suddenly taking an active part in his son’s life. This - long, long overdue - has its positives (kids suffer profoundly when fathers withdraw from their lives) and its downside. It is partly a vote of no confidence in my parenting skills, “Why is my son on Adderall and Cymbalta? Have you read the side effects of those medications?” (An amazing question) “Are you trying to use medication to control him?” “His living with you has been a disaster!”

Have I mentioned how grateful I am to be divorced?

No surprise, then, that my son tried going without a few of his pills last week - his gradually improving mood took a nosedive. Returning smiles went away until he and his psychiatrist had a knock-down, drag-out discussion about the matter of treatment compliance at last week’s appointment and he began, for the first time, to take the full therapeutic dose of his anti-depressant. I began to recognize telltale small improvements again yesterday. I admire this psychiatrist. She’s smart and gutsy. She deals well with people who get their sense of things all askew. She’s not on our preferred provider list for insurance, so I dish out $95 for an appointment, but last week she should have earned double.

Months ago I earnestly thought there would come a day when I’d be making some sort of happy announcement with regard to a new relationship - I’ve grown cautious about assuming outcomes from the first blush of interest and affection, and I’m very private in some ways besides, but now I watch as that possibility seems to be receding into extended silences. I must let that be, too. The people I’ve dated post-divorce who at one time or another took a relationship with me seriously have remained close friends, so I don’t lose them altogether, and that is good. I’ve gotten to know a handful of really fine people. They are no less fine people because we have Outcome B, C, or D instead of Outcome A. Middle life affords no shortage of obstacles to successful long-term relationships.

Still, I explained to a friend the other day, “I want this oasis of a relationship, something delightful to dive into, something involving proximity and contact and conversation, and I keep getting a sip of water and a trip across the desert. I am not a camel.”

I’ve been thinking about that camel remark all week. I was wrong. I’ve actually become quite the camel, having incrementally adapted to crossing deserts - not that I wouldn’t trade in my hump and my ability to subsist off prickly pears to be a water bird that dives and flies and lives at oasis’ edge. The trick to camelitude is to find beauties and sustenance where I am instead of looking to what is not. Looking to what is not can serve to blind me to what there is. The second trick is to remain open to possibility despite the fact that embracing possibility always means embracing risk. The alternative is something less than living. The third trick is to refrain from becoming the sort of camel who spits a lot.

And this would be the pep talk I’m giving myself today. The last secret to being a camel is that you are in charge of giving yourself your own pep talks.

Afternoon Addendum: It did my ex a world of good to be the parent to take our son to his doctor’s appointment and counseling appointment today. Whew!

School starts two weeks from today for teachers at our semi-year-round school, with a week of teacher training funded by a Federal Striving Readers Grant. My daughter and I will be off to see my mother next week, so this is school prep week. There’s a day of planning for each course and a day of filing to do. Moreover, I need to make the room look welcoming in time for our Open House on July 26. I’ll print out quotes again for the walls, repaint the wood table with better, less peelable paint, and work on the bulletin board.

It feels good to work in my big sunny classroom while I listen to NPR on an old radio from college or to an audiobook. Today’s audiobook title was American Theocracy. I can’t work and follow as closely as I could if I were reading, but the disturbing gist of the book is unfolding nonetheless while I file or clean or map out unit plans. Without the pressure of too much to do in too little time, school is a pleasant place to be. Work on leisurely summer days is usually interrupted by one or two lengthy conversations with colleagues or staff who happen to be at school (or must be), and I enjoy these, too.

Out in the hallway by the office, as I come in, a big desk has been sitting for weeks. It must be six feet long; it’s all of warm-colored wood or a convincing reproduction thereof, with distinctive drawer handles. In short, it’s the sort of desk teachers never see unless businesses donate them or the school system buys them somewhere used on the cheap. I’m not sure how this one came to be in the front hallway. The fact that the front panel of the middle drawer is missing is trivial indeed. It could be replaced and stained to match. Since my desk upstairs is not a desk at all, but a wobbly semi-circular table under which I’ve stacked plastic drawers from Wal-Mart, it is natural that I should succumb to desk lust. I’ve offered to adopt it if it happened to be homeless, but I learned today that it’s going to one of the new teachers, likely the literacy coach we hired thanks to the grant.

I’m all for this - really. New teachers deserve a good start, a perk or two, to show them that they are valued and supported. My perk is my big sunny classroom, though I practically had to excavate when I came last year. My plastic drawers work well enough - drawers are drawers, after all - and the table probably has as much surface area as the desk. But I have to wish that the maintenance staff would hurry up and move the object of my desire into that new teacher’s room and out of my sight so that I can stop thinking about it when I pass by. Now that the head of maintenance knows I want a real desk, he’ll probably generously try to find one for me. He gets things done and quickly, too. (This is a rare and wonderful thing.) But, sigh, I can see this desk now: metal with chipped paint and much smaller. I’ve had it before, over and over, for years. Once it came to me with a bum leg and the word “Dildo” emblazoned on it in permanent marker that just wouldn’t come off. I managed to doctor it a bit and made the word “Bilbo” instead, as if a Tolkien fan with a marker in his hand had not been able to contain himself.

I first grew Illini Blackberries years ago, accepting, when I ordered the plants from Miller Nurseries, the recommendation of the woman I spoke to on the phone. Today, as I reached gingerly through thorny briars for berries the size of a man’s thumb, catching my shirt here, getting stuck there, and occasionally squealing because I’d impaled a finger, I thought wistfully of Chester Thornfree and other thornless varieties. I questioned whether eating berries with “wild blackberry flavor” is really worth being covered with little scratches.

Though the berries are just now getting ripe and there will be many, many more to pick next week, we had enough for a cobbler. I’ve just eaten a small bowlful, hot from the oven, and I’d just like to say, as I savor the last tart-sweet, intensely blackberry bite, that the woman on the phone was a genius, and the thorns ever so worth it.

I’m funny about watching movies. I don’t care to watch them by myself, so I don’t see many of them, even on video. I think of watching a movie or eating out as something one does with somebody else. This is, of course, silly, but there are some things you can’t reason yourself out of. When I do see a movie on my own, I’m having this mental conversation about it with somebody who isn’t there - likely someone who would have shared my interest in it.

When Beowulf and Grendel opens in this area, however, I’m just going to have to grab somebody and go or else go by myself. I love the old poem, especially in Anglo-Saxon, and John Gardner’s Grendel, too. So I can’t wait to see how this new film rendition of the story comes off. Any retelling of an old tale embodies as much of the psyche of the age that retells it as it does the psyche of the age in which it was first composed, which makes for intriguing overlays. The poem itself, of course, is a product of these.