WriteOutLoud

Do We Really Need School?

"Six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years? Is this deadly routine really necessary?" -- John Taylor Gatto, in Sept. Harper's Magazine.

Gatto, a former NYC/NYState Teacher of the Year, retired 1991, painstakingly traces the origins of our current public school system back to a specific Prussian influence. Very scary stuff. The design is intended to teach young minds NOT to think but merely to be "schooled" into a benign herd of passive consumers--no threat to the state that mandates this homogenization.

Taylor's answer to his rhetorical question, of course, is No. We don't need it. Leave kids alone, he posits, and they will find the educations they want.

When my sister read me bits of this article over the phone the other night, I was stunned. My mind began to race and splutter: "But how would kids learn about . . . but how would kids learn how to. . . but how would kids learn who. . . ?"

Every But had a ready answer. Kids would learn what they want/need to learn by following their noses--into libraries, onto the Internet, into the company of adults who know what the kids want to learn. They don't learn what they don't want to learn, anyway. They learn what they are MADE to learn--i.e., how to take a multiple-choice test--if the stakes are high enough. But the stakes never were high enough for me to learn quadratic equations, for example, so I never did because quadratic equations didn't, and don't, interest me. I've learned a lot of other things because I wanted to, though. A LOT.

So DO we need school? What do you think? I'd love to know.

What the 2003 SAT Scores Really Mean

The College Board is practically wetting itself because this year's SAT-takers did spectacularly well. Yippee! In Steve Giegerich's AP article today, all implications are positive: math scores are through the roof, verbal scores up, too, though not quite as high.

More girls than boys took the test, but boys did marginally better. Nobody's asking why.

Minority students still aren't doing as well as the majority (who IS that, anyway?), and nobody still knows why, along with why Asians did better than everyone else.

But never mind all that, the good news is that just about everybody is doing BETTER.

Better at WHAT, though? And better than whom? Better at taking a multiple-choice test, that's what, than anyone who ever took it before. It's NOT the same kids taking the SAT and getting better as they go along (though they start the practice tests in 5th or 6th grade now)--it's a whole new batch of kids, doing better than each new batch of kids has done for the last 36 years (math) or 16 years (verbal).

What this really means: the SAT has a stranglehold on high school curricula. This standardized test-- dreamed up, after all, by mere mortals--now determines what teachers teach. Say "homogeneity" in any 9th-grade classroom, and I guarantee you, five or six kids will chirp "SAT word!"--and two or three of them will write it down in the section of their notebooks devoted to "SAT Verbal." And the teacher's eyes had better not roll, or her contract will not be renewed.

897 students got perfect 1600s this year, which means 897 applications to Harvard. These are the applicants other applicants fear. But they needn't because (here's the good news) not all of them will get in; Harvard has a few other requirements for admission. A few other colleges are starting to chafe at SAT tyranny, too, and looking for ways to countermand it.

So I cling to my hope that in, oh, 15 or 20 or 25 years, the SAT will merely be a nasty memory. But, in the meantime, what a waste of potential. What waste of teacher prep hours, of classroom hours, of kids' focus and energy, learning answers to questions that actually have answers instead of concentrating on questions that just lead to more questions--the kind that breed real thinking, real creativity, real opportunity to find out who we are. That's the one thing robots can't do: think. They only follow programs. Our kids are getting programmed, and so are our teachers--or they're being tarred, feathered, and run out of the profession.

A Girl and Her Machete

We got standards, here in Trailertown, you bet we do--no parking on the streets (all dedicated firelanes), no visible garbage cans or clotheslines or abandoned vehicles--we ain't trash!--no overly voluptuous landscaping, etc.

In the latter category, I got a little note from Management last week, about the pampas grass that graces the entrance to the Tin Chateau: "Not supposed to stick out in the street."

Yesterday, I hared off to Home Depot, where I found hedgeclippers prohibitively expen$ive, but my eye lit on a long, solitary blade, only $8.95. Aha, the avatar of machismo--a machete! It's a tool! It's a weapon! It'll cut ANYTHING. Didn't I see canecutters in Hawaii using machetes? All the gardeners around here use them to trim the palms. Didn't Castro's and Che's revoluntaries arm themselves with machetes? I will arm myself likewise, and do battle with the offending herbage!

Back at the TC, I suited up in big gloves and a terrycloth headband left over from raquetball days (but not a longsleeved shirt because I forgot my recent lesson). I unsheathed my weapon from its cardboard scabbard and went out to do battle.

I seized a fistful of grass, yanked it aside, and struck at its heart.

Whack. Whack. Whack! WHACK! WHACKWHACKWHACK!!!

Nothing. Nada. Bupkis. I broke off a few bits, but that's all. My "weapon" wouldn't cut butter, evidently. I stared at the blade and heard my brother's voice in my head: "Did you read THE DIRECTIONS?" to which I mentally replied, "DIRECTIONS? Why would anyone need directions? This is a blade, that's grass, DUH!"

But because there always turn out to be Directions in these situations, I retrieved the cardboard wrapper. And read, "Sharpen on a flat stone." Oh, great. This is going to require Technique, isn't it?

The itching stopped eventually, after I showered and slathered myself with Neosporin. My pampas grass is now a fat little pompom about the size of a basketball, well within its proper boundaries.

(I borrowed my mother's hedgeclippers.)

By the time the grass grows back, I will have Technique. And I will prevail.

Who Needs the NYTimes--?

--when you have the Fabulous Fred of Floyd to kick off the day for you? His content is much beefier (not to mention more reliable!), and his masthead far more attractive.

Today, for instance, Fabulous Fred puts me (OK, us) onto an article called "Powerpoint is Evil!" by one Prof. Tufte of Yale, who, like Bill Maher (see previous post) has it SO RIGHT that I get all excited, and write him the following email. If you want to see for yourself additional proof of how right Prof. Tufte has it, go here, and meet our sixteenth president reduced to his (ostensible) component parts, Microsoft-style.

OK, here's my rant to Prof. Tufte:

Thank you, Professor Tufte. You have it entirely right, and it's all needed saying for well over a decade, now. Perhaps someone will pay attention.

One thing I wish you'd made clear, though: teachers inflict Powerpoint on their students at the rate they do, not because they believe it's an effective teaching tool, but because schools have spent zillions of dollars on "technology," and they are by god going to get their money's worth, so they issue the mandate to "incorporate technology" into every classroom. I have taught English literature and composition at UCBerkeley, Harvard, and an array of high schools, public and private, for the past 20+ years, and technology has been the elephant in the room at nearly every faculty meeting I've attended.

In its earliest stages, and not for long, the mandate was cloaked in frisky terms of adventure: "Let's see how many ways we can use this wonderful new tool!" administrative memos chirped: "Free donuts to the department that comes up with the most innovative pedagogical strategies using Technology!" So we English teachers (some of us, anyway) beavered away for a few months, and came up with . . . not much that couldn't be done on the overhead projectors we'd had since 1964. I beavered only briefly; it was immediately obvious to me that technology in no way enhances an experience that absolutely requires a book, a reader, a pencil, and paper. (And oh yeah, a teacher.)

Hamfisted administrators were not best pleased about the results of our efforts but remained civil until Howard Gardner et al came along with "learning styles." Gardner's work has merit and, like Einstein, he bears no responsibility for what school administrators did with it: they used it to seize what they pretend is several acres of moral high ground. "Different students learn in different ways!" they announced (most of them without ever having taught in an actual classroom, anywhere, let alone in the classrooms they administered), and though no one ever demonstrated exactly what some students of reading and writing might learn better from Powerpoint than from skillful deployment of an overhead projector, "We must not deprive anyone of the opportunity to learn from this wonderful new tool!" Duress is now applied: "Classroom use of technology" is a category on teacher-evaluation forms, of equal rank with "Command of the subject" and "Classroom management skills."

In all my years in the profession, I have never--NEVER--met an English teacher who claimed to be able to teach _Wuthering Heights_ or the correct use of the semicolon better than ever, thanks to Powerpoint (or any other technology). English classes have been reduced to "data-driven meetings" (your excellent term). There has always been data in English class, of course, and some students (OK, many students) have hated that aspect of the experience. Now they not only hate it, they know it's being dressed up as something it isn't (kids are smart; they know, instantly, when they're being hornswoggled) and being allowed to command much more attention than it's worth.

And the elephant trumpets on, unrestrained, defecating all over the place, unattended. Except, perhaps, by someone, somewhere, who reads your article and is a position to remediate the situation, even just locally in some small way.

Thanks again!

/s/

College is High School

Normally, I have no use for Bill Maher because although he is smart, he is so pleased with himself, he doesn't leave much room for the rest of us to participate. But a couple of weeks ago, he said something so right, I've been thinking about it ever since: "College is now what high school used to be."

That is so RIGHT, I pumped a fist in the air.

High school used to be where the sorting started. If you didn't show up and do passing work, you didn't graduate. If you misbehaved, you were sent home for a few days or a week or two weeks, depending on the severity of the infraction; if you behaved badly enough (as I recall, coming to school drunk was badly enough), you were expelled, so you didn't graduate. If you didn't graduate, you didn't go to college, as a result of which exclusion, you joined what used to be called "the work force," which meant you pumped gas or sold dresses, or cosmetics or brushes door-to-door, until you decided to become an electrician for the rest of your wage-slave life.

Then, somebody decided everybody in this country SHOULD go to college. This is different from everybody having the RIGHT and the OPPORTUNITY to do so.

As a result, all American high school students--public as well as private--are on a conveyor belt that runs from 8th grade to college. Parents, in concert with high school administrators anxious to please them, have constructed such a safety net under this conveyor belt that it's almost impossible for a kid NOT to go to college straight out of high school, whether or not the kid can read or write, or might like to take a year off to take a look at something other than school.

So the kid arrives at college, having been babysat for the past four years. If s/he was in public school, s/he has been babysat in a succession of overcrowded, rowdy, underfunded classrooms presided over by harried, embittered persons who wished fervently they were elsewhere. If s/he was in private school, the classrooms were less crowded, and the books and supplies were ample, but the teachers were so hamstrung by ruthless administrators and overinvolved parents, they dared not do any really dynamic teaching even if they were capable of it.

So--again--the kid, quite possibly illiterate but in any case having learned almost nothing, and certainly never having been sorted according to abilities or interests, arrives at college. If s/he is at a public institution, the same conditions prevail as above, complicated by the fact that required courses are so over-enrolled, s/he stands slim chance, or none, of graduating in four years. If s/he is at a private institution, and s/he really wants to learn something, s/he can do so if s/he hustles.

Ostensibly, in college, if you don't do the work, you don't pass, and you don't graduate. At last, the sorting begins. But no--wait! You can graduate without actually learning much of anything! The college version of social promotion (one of the safety nets under the conveyor belt) is grade inflation, legacy of the Vietnam War, when professors understandably gave As to save lives. Unfortunately, grades never deflated back to their pre-war standards, so now it is encumbent upon professors to teach in spite of grades.

One Harvard professor has taken to giving two sets of grades: the one for the transcript, and the "real" one. A UC Berkeley professor announces on the first day of class that everyone will get As, in return for which beneficence, he reserves the right to tell them exactly what he thinks of their work. His opinion is often shattering to students who have never had a cold eye cast on anything they've produced. After all, babysitters aren't allowed to critique, or to teach. And if you're 19 years old before anybody ever tells you the truth, you're not a late bloomer, you're dead on the vine.

Thunder in the Desert

Normal weather for this time of year is 105/85, and dry. Yesterday afternoon, though, about 2:30, all color seemed to disappear. I peered out of the Tin Chateau at a distinctly pewter sky. Rumblings commenced, distantly--then, suddenly, they weren't distant, they were right overhead, preceded by flashes, rain was pelting down (making a terrific racket on the TC's aluminum awning), then it wasn't, and all was quiet. "Oooh, that was fun," I thought, assuming it was over, and picking up a book called The Devil's Details, about footnotes. An entire, slim volume about footnotes, on the first page of which, by way of pointing out their value, the author, Chuck Zerby ("CHUCK"?), reminds us that it is only thanks to the editor of The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, Mark Amory, that we know, via his gracefully deployed footnotes, that "the American pornographer" Waugh met at a party in the 1950s was Norman Mailer. "Hmmm, I have that book," I said to myself, marching smartly over to my newly-filled (and therefore, organized) shelves, and pulling it out to check the reference. There it was, p. 573: "One [horse] bit an American pornographer who tried to give it vodka." Of course, Mailer claims he was only trying to pet the horse. Of Waugh's further description of him as "a swarthy gangster just out of a mad house where he had been sent after the attempt to cut his wife's throat," Mailer says only, "I did not cut my wife's throat." I was just laughing at this when the pyrotechnics recommenced, and I ran out again to see and hear. The show lasted FOUR HOURS. Nothing like it since the Flood of 1976. The TC's windows actually rattled. I seized the opportunity to luxuriate on the sofa with the cranky, impossibly snobbish, unaccountably religious Mr. Waugh--and all the sturm und drang he could wish, as soundtrack.

Geezers!

Just when I thought I'd run out of them, a new one comes along: the handyman my mother hired to fix up the Tin Chateau I just moved into.

The "Semper Fi!" bumpersticker on his minivan gives me a head start on his history. When I hear the accent, I guess Boston, but no, it's Jersey. Hackensack. "And the Corps?" "I joined up the first time in nineteen-faughty-eight." "Korea?" "Yeah. And then three tours in Nam. Flew F80s, got shot down twice, see these ankles?" Above the weathered running shoes, wreaths of purple scars. "Hadda eject, knocked myself out, broke em both, ended up in the wata 18 hours, nearly froze ta death. You need a couple switchplates ova hea, Kid."

"Kid": hallmark of my kind of Geezer. Crusty on the outside, pudding on the inside. Great stories. I got my first Geezer when my mother married my stepfather. He wasn't a Geezer, but some of his friends were, and we buddied right up. We'd hang out. At the lake in the summer, we'd do chores together--chop wood, fix boat docks, tinker with stuff. My mother called it "kicking tires," as in (on the phone), "She's out kicking tires with Elbert, I'll get her." I was 35, he was 82. I don't know if I had a crush on him or wanted him as a father replacement (the job had been vacant for years), and I don't care, I was more than content just to hang around with him, and he seemed to get a kick out of me, too.

That's it about Geezers, I think--they still get kicks out of things and people. And they remember kicks they've gotten in the past, and can recreate them (they're all great storytellers) so that you get a kick, too. I overheard Robert Ellingson at a party, offered a cigar out on the porch, bellow, "Cigar? Hell yes, I love a good cigar. Use to eat em! Sig ate em, too." (Sig was his brother, dead before I arrived on the scene.)

The last time I saw Elbert, he'd had a stroke and was on what would shortly be his deathbed. We armwrestled. I really tried. He won.

My mother just called, having survived the ride home with Bert, my new Geezer. Apparently, his father was mobbed-up in the 30s, and his brother weighed over 800 pounds when he died. Oh boy, I can hardly wait to hear these for myself . . . .

Aerobic Weeding: Becoming My Own Grandmother

OK, what I learned this morning is why people who do stoop labor in the hot sun wear long-sleeved cotton shirts and pants: it's hot initially, but when you've swot all the way through them, as of course you are bound to do in this line of work, any breeze is a cool breeze, so you're much more comfortable. And cotton dries very slowly, so you just have to sweat them up good once to stay relatively comfortable all day.

I discovered this while working in my weedpatch. It's 6:30 AM, 85 degrees, 75% humidity. I have arrayed myself in long sleeves, per above, and tied a dishtowel around my head to keep the sweat out of my eyes. Worked like hell for an hour, panting and gasping, at times practically shrieking with effort and, occasionally, frustration. As for instance when one of the tendrils I was yanking on but couldn't manage to budge turned out to be the wire connecting the timer to the sprinkler system, oops, but no harm done.

I thought many thoughts while doing this work. I thought how good it was going to feel to stop. I thought about the dream I had last night, in which I wore uncharacteristically fancy clothes and hair, and flirted with Arnold while trying to stay out of Maria's way, but sneaking into their room and stealing her nylons. Four pair, each one in a separate box, like the boxes they used to come in, in the 50s, but about half the size. Pink, covered in shiny paper with a ribbon motif. Inside, not pantyhose (I made a point of checking), but actual *stockings*, edged in a little ruffle and pink bow. Spent the rest of the dream trying to return them, and never quite hooked up with Arnold.

I thought about having a PhD and doing stoop labor. Lots of people with my educational background and experience are doing work like this for pay; I'm just doing it so the handyman who's coming over tomorrow can see where the sprinkler heads are. But I'm plenty ego-wounded, not being able to work in my profession because the damned thing is collapsing around me.

The neighbor in the trailer next door came out, got in her car, and went to work. I stood in the weeds, sweating, and thinking how glad I was not to be going to work.

Then, suddenly, I was finished weeding, pretty much (actually, I felt faint), so I sat down to survey my accomplishments. And that's when I felt it--my heart, pounding from exertion. It really whanged away there for a while. Sweat poured down, rolled off me; I was dirty all over yet strangely also clean. I hadn't felt like this in YEARS; due to foot problems not to mention general lassitude, I haven't moved fast enough, long enough to get really aerobic, in about five years. But I did it this morning! And when I went in for my shower, I thought about my grandmother and all the early desert mornings she spent similarly attired and occupied, and how eccentric that looked to me at the time but how good it feels now.

More on HELL AT THE BREECH

Still thinking about this book. Wondering why it hasn't been more extensively reviewed. Hoping not thanks to Laura Klein's rant in the NYTimes 6/29, "THE LAST WORD; Authentically Offensive"--she indicts Franklin on charges of "sinning outrageously against verisimilitude" because only the bad guys in HELL AT THE BREECH use the n-word. Evidently, Klein assumes basic human decency is a recent invention. Wonder what Harper Lee would have to say about this. Her Atticus Finch lives about 50 miles from Mitcham Beat, is about the same age as Macky Burke, and in the late '20s-early '30s, teaches his children not to say the n-word, calling it "common." Remember: change comes slowly to the South. If I were a Southerner, I'D be offended by Klein's implication that nobody was decent down there till just lately.

Sheriff Waite and Macky Burke don't use the n-word because they're involved primarily with other white people; their problems don't involve African-Americans other than peripherally, as among those displaced by the conflict. The only black man I recall being mentioned by name is Obbie, a store clerk, whom Franklin describes as "the only black man Waite knew who wore glasses"--one of Franklin's deftest, resonant strokes of characterization (222).

In the worst character's nastiest speech, he refers to white Macky, to his face and in front of the mob, as "Toochie Bedsole's little house [n-word]" (282). The reader recoils. So when the bad guy gets his hideous comeuppance, we are horrified AND satisfied, not only for the sake of the things he's done but also for the unforgettable thing he said. Franklin uses the n-word judiciously, as characterization. And I see no crime in that.

Sticking a Toe In--

My very first blog. When was the last time I did something for the first time?

(tick . . . tick . . . tick) Time's up.

Actually, any time I read a really great book, I feel like I'm doing something I've never done before. And I've been doing this lately, with Tom Franklin's edgy first novel, HELL AT THE BREECH. It's set in rural SW Alabama, where Franklin grew up. (I got onto it via an extensive article in BOOK magazine, July/August edition, the one with Stephen King on the cover--and if anybody understands his essay, "The Shocking Truth About Literary Losers Like Me," will you please enlighten me? I just do NOT get the joke!)

So Franklin's book, which has been called "noir" and Faulkernish, and has a Western feel, takes place in 1898 and is based on a historical event, or a series of them, in this little corner of Alabama. It's armed conflict between sharecroppers and property-owners. Sort of Hatfields-and-McCoys, but brilliantly plotted, and in the best way: action arises so purely from complex, nuanced, occasionally bizarre characters that you absolutely believe the vision of this deeply moral book. Jacket blurb (by Rick Bragg, alas) says when you've read HELL AT THE BREECH, "you have not just read it, you've tasted it."

Not a nice taste. Tastes like blood. But the book gives fair warning. Anybody who gets past the first chapter--in which not one person dies or is even injured, but your hair elevates on its own, anyway-- has no right to complain about what happens later. Having given fair warning, HELL AT THE BREECH goes ahead and earns its violence. By the time the real shooting starts, Franklin has built up a head of steam that has to blow and can only blow in this way, in these characters.

This makes it different from other famously violent stories, like BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy, for instance. I couldn't make it through that one, couldn't weather the violence because McCarthy doesn't earn it, he just exploits it. He doesn't bother to prepare the reader, to get her up to speed: the Judge just rides in and behaves hideously for no particular reason. I felt like I was bound, gagged, and forced to watch.

And when Faulkner tells a story like this, as he does in ABSALOM, ABSALOM, when he acquaints us with Thomas Sutpen and the establishment of Sutpen's Hundred, he stays away from the action; like Conrad, he implies the horror by distancing the reader from it through layers of narrators and time.

Tom Franklin takes us right into his horror, but from the beginning, from the inside out. Two young boys on an adventure--sound familiar, Huck?--that suddenly, accidentally goes terribly wrong. Their misadventure metastasizes; it ignites already simmering hostilities rooted in wrongs done years before, among people they barely know, calling up the best and worst in everyone it touches. Franklin's good enough, and brave enough, to show how indistinguishable the best and worst can be, under this kind of pressure. I just hope he survived his booksigning in his home town!