Category Education and Teaching

Books vs. Movies Part II: Books

Dusty Leave a comment

Here is the second essay: here is the one I wrote because I felt  dirty after writing the first one. Because I don’t actually think movies are better than  books; not at all, not in any way. In fact, I think the preference for movies over books is extremely harmful to our society.

So I wrote this one. Please note: it is directed at my students, who are as I describe them here. I expect that people who read this blog are not the non-readers I describe. Though the ending call to action still applies, to all of us who haven’t given up hope.

Not sure if I have given up or not, yet. But this essay is pretty clearly on the side of despair.

Enjoy!

Everything Is Terrible And We’re All Going To Die

I’m not like you.

I’m sure that’s not a surprise.

Unlike most teachers, I think, and say, that grades don’t matter and test scores don’t matter. Because all that matters is learning, and grades and tests don’t measure that; they may test what you know, in terms so specific that they become useless, but that doesn’t say what you will do with that so-specific knowledge: will you forget it the minute the test is over, the grade is filed? Will you be inspired by that knowledge?  Affected by it, changed by it? Tests can never measure that, and grades can never rate that. That change, that inspiration, is the purpose and value of education. That’s what matters.

Unlike most of America, and presumably the rest of the world, I don’t like money. I like a few of the things it can buy me, like a comfortable home, food, electricity, pirate outfits, Converse, books, coffee; but money itself is a trap. It leads us down a very specific path, a path that we must not deviate from, or else we don’t get the money; the problem is, that once we reach the end of that path, we find that the money isn’t what we want. What we want is freedom from the money, or more precisely, from the need to continue procuring the money. But the more money we make, the more stuff we buy, and the longer we have to keep getting money to pay for the new stuff. It’s a trap. I don’t like it. That’s the rest of the reason why I don’t believe in the value of grades: because every argument for grades comes back to money.

I’ve already lost you, haven’t I? Sure: you don’t care about me, or about what I believe; if what I have to say has some interest or benefit for you, you’ll read it – but if not, then you won’t. And me preaching at you doesn’t interest you or benefit you: it doesn’t entertain you, doesn’t dispel the cloud of melancholy that darkens most of your days, and which you are constantly seeking to escape through whatever momentary distraction you can find; and it doesn’t earn you money. Why would you read this, just for the sake of reading? Please.

Because unlike me, you don’t read.

DISCLAIMER: Yes, I know there are exceptions. I know there are people reading this who are readers. But I also know there aren’t very many. (Let’s be clear: “reading” Facebook or Twitter or Reddit is not reading. Reading here means books. E-books count, but memes and BuzzFeed and the captions on YouTube videos do not.) Most people read when they are forced to, by English teachers like me; most people will read something if there is “buzz” about it. (Meaning: if it is exciting.) But most people would rather wait for the movie. Even with assigned reading, the majority of people don’t read the whole book; they read enough to know they don’t want to read any more, and then they look at the SparkNotes, or they get their friend who is a reader to tell them about the rest of it, or they just fake it on the test – because the reading doesn’t matter, what matters is the grade, which gets you into the college, which gets you the job, which gets you the money.

Allow me to quote from a book that most of you haven’t read, or if you have, you didn’t pay enough attention to.

“Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending…Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumour of a title to you, Mrs. Montag) whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: ‘Now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbours.’ Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.

“Speed up the film, Montag, quick…Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!

“School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?”

That is from Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

And it’s you. You only read to get to the ending; once you know the ending, you stop reading –  and for the same reason, you never re-read. If you know enough to answer questions about a book – or about anything, really – you don’t see any need to keep learning about it; you can already answer the questions. You don’t see the need to learn anything other than what you will need to earn money, hopefully lots of money; and the purpose of earning that money is – pleasure.

The movie-vs.-book argument is built on a flawed foundation, the same flawed foundation that the dystopian society in Bradbury’s novel is based on: the idea of happiness.  Captain Beatty, the same evil clown who explains to the protagonist Montag how our society turned into theirs, also says this: “Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.”

When we try to decide whether movies or books are better based on the idea of which is more entertaining, the argument is immediately flawed: not only is entertainment transitory and essentially meaningless, but it is also too subjective to offer any coherent judgment: this fellow says he likes books more because they are more entertaining; this chap says he likes movies more for the same reason; and neither can be wrong, and neither can be right. We must turn to Bradbury – a novelist, of course – for a reasonable determination of value. If we believe that human society is valuable and worth preserving, then books offer a better opportunity for the continuation of the species than do movies. If, on the other hand, human culture is nothing more than what Beatty describes – something that exists only to provide its constituents with pleasure, with titillation –  then it doesn’t matter whether books or movies are better; at that point, humanity doesn’t matter, because something that exists only to please itself is too insular, short-sighted and pathetic to survive.

In that case, movies can be better. You can just keep watching Netflix until the ice caps melt and the water supply vanishes and the food supply follows; maybe you can watch The Road to get some pointers on what comes next. I’d tell you to read the novel by Cormac McCarthy, but – well. Don’t worry: the movie has Viggo Mortensen.

Bradbury shows in his book – and any observant student of humanity can confirm –  that books stimulate thought, and that novels promote empathy. Books of any stripe can provide evidence, rational argument, and conclusions about any subject; following the path of reason improves one’s ability to do the same. Novels create characters, who then give the reader a glimpse into their lives and psyches; understanding those people, assuming one can suspend disbelief enough to see the characters in a novel as people, at least potential people, improves our ability to understand actual people. Movies do neither of those things. Bradbury, who loved movies and television, has his Wise Old Man character offer the possibility that movies and television could offer the same thing that books do  – the same argument I’ve been hearing for years from my students when they try to explain to me why they don’t need to read, not really – but in my opinion, Bradbury was wrong about that. I don’t think movies and television can help, not at all.

The key, I think, is imagination. Imagination is the survival skill that enabled humanity to rise to the top of the food chain; because we could imagine what would happen when the mammoth came by, or when the saber-toothed cat jumped out of those bushes, we were able to plan for the possibility; that advance preparation made up for our total lack of physical prowess compared to other species. Imagination gave us the chance to survive long enough to build a civilization; imagination, in the form of ambition and aspirations, gave us a reason to build a civilization and allowed us to build civilization into what it is today; imagination would allow us to solve the problems we face that threaten our survival in the future.

If we still had imagination, that is. But you see, imagination requires a human intellect to create: to fill in blanks, to build images and scenes based only on hints. The kinds of things we do when we read, where even the best authors can only tell, never show. The kinds of things we never do when we watch movies or television, because they show: the images are created for us, the characters are presented to us, a fait accompli, without any need for our participation, for our imagination. The most we can do with a movie is decide if we like the image as presented to us; decide if it is entertaining or not.

Now, someone with imagination can watch a movie or a television show and have a new idea; they can think of what could have happened if the characters had encountered a different situation, or had different traits, or different resources; a person with an imagination could think of how a situation they watched on Netflix could parallel one in real life, and how the Netflix situation could lead to a real-life solution.

But you don’t get imagination from watching movies. You get it from reading books.

There is some good news. Our technology already exists, as does our science; and the lucky thing is, one person with imagination can keep a hundred engineers working, a thousand, more –  just ask Nikola Tesla. So as long as there are a few readers, a few thinkers, those people may be able to keep us afloat, in terms of problem-solving and innovation, for a few generations more; but that’s where we hit the empathy snag. You see, the notable problem in the society of Fahrenheit 451 (By the way: are you tired of me talking about a fictional society instead of the real world? Yeah. Check your phone: maybe there’s something more interesting to watch on YouTube. People falling down, or something. “Life becomes one big pratfall, Montag; everything bang, boff, and wow!” What am I saying? You’re not still reading this.) isn’t a lack of technology; their technology is more advanced than ours. The problem is that they don’t care about each other, and thus they don’t care about themselves. They run each other down in cars for fun. They commit suicide at an absurd rate – and they don’t care. They go to war, and nobody really pays any attention until the bombs actually drop on their heads: and even then, they only notice when the television screen goes blank, in the split second before it all turns to ash and dust and nothing.

You’re heading that way, now. People don’t care about each other the way they used to. Oh, some still do; most still care to a certain extent – but a lesser extent than in the past.  I can tell because look at your politics: not that you elected Mr. Trump, but the reason why you did – because you got tired of caring about other people’s problems. You don’t want to worry about refugees, or about problems in other nations, or the reasons why people do things we don’t understand, like carry out terrorist attacks in the name of an ideal; you don’t want to think about long-term issues like climate change, and you don’t want to pay taxes that don’t help you directly – don’t want to pay for other people who can’t find jobs, or who get hooked on drugs. You want to keep your money for yourself, not spend it on other people. Just like you don’t want to learn things that don’t directly increase your chances of finding a job that will earn you more money. Those other things don’t matter. Those other people don’t matter.

In Fahrenheit 451, when Montag goes looking for a way to solve the problem – he can’t possibly think of a solution himself, never having used his imagination and barely his intellect in his bookless life – he finds an old English professor, a man named Faber. He asks Faber what they can do, and Faber doesn’t give Montag much hope.

“The whole culture’s shot through. The skeleton needs melting and re-shaping. Good God, it isn’t as simple as just picking up a book you laid down half a century ago. Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord. You firemen [In the novel, the firemen burn banned books, and the houses where they are hidden. And sometimes the people who hid them.] provide a circus now and then at which buildings are set off and crowds gather for the pretty blaze, but it’s a small sideshow indeed, and hardly necessary to keep things in line. So few want to be rebels any more. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily. Can you dance faster than the White Clown, shout louder than `Mr. Gimmick’ and the [television]`families’? If you can, you’ll win your way, Montag. In any event, you’re a fool. People are having fun.”

“Committing suicide! Murdering!”

A bomber flight had been moving east all the time they talked, and only now did the two men stop and listen, feeling the great jet sound tremble inside themselves.

“Patience, Montag. Let the war turn off the families. Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.”

“There has to be someone ready when it blows up.”

“What? Men quoting Milton? Saying, I remember Sophocles? Reminding the survivors that man has his good side, too? They will only gather up their stones to hurl at each other. Montag, go home. Go to bed. Why waste your final hours racing about your cage denying you’re a squirrel?”

“Then you don’t care any more?”

“I care so much I’m sick.”

“And you won’t help me?”

“Good night, good night.”

On the off-chance that you don’t like what I’ve said here, and you care enough to do something about it, the solution is simple: read. Read for real, read for your mind and your imagination; read for your future. It doesn’t matter what you read: it only matters how, and how much. Read with your mind, and read as much as you can. If you ever have younger people you can influence, as a teacher or a parent or a mentor of any kind, try to get them to read, too. It doesn’t take everyone: it just takes some. More than a few, if we can.

I hope for your sake that you do. As for me, I’ll be dead by the time the world falls apart. I’d like to think that the books I write will outlive me.

But I doubt it.

Good night, good night.

Books vs. Movies, Part One: Movies

Dusty Leave a comment

I’m having my classes write arguments, one at a time, which we then discuss with the whole class; one student starts an argument on any topic they wish, and then someone else has to volunteer to argue the other side of that topic. If nobody volunteers, either the first student has to write a second argument from the opposing viewpoint — or I write an argument opposing them. Last week one of my students wrote about why books are better than movies; he did a good job, and nobody wanted to argue with him.

So I did it. And writing this made me feel so awful that I had to write one about why books are better than movies, which I did; but that one made me so depressed about the current state of the world that I had to write a third essay, more upbeat, about moderation between the two.

I’ll be posting all three over the next three days. Here’s the first installment: the dirty one. Enjoy. (Don’t hate me.)

All right: pay attention, because I’m only going to say this once, and then after that, I will go back to denying everything in this essay.

Most of the time, I mean what I say. I really think that grades don’t matter, that math is evil, that violence is never the answer – and that books are always better than movies.

But sometimes, those things aren’t true. Sometimes the opposite is true.

Grades matter when the reward for the grade is worth the time spent earning the grade. Grades matter when you set yourself a grade-based goal, and then, through hard work and improvement, you achieve it. Grades matter when you need grade-based scholarships to pay for college, which is too damn expensive to be worth it. Oh – and sometimes you don’t need college at all.

Math is both the foundation of the universe, and the clearest expression of its poetry. There is no work of literature more musical than the Fibonacci sequence, or the Golden Rectangle. I don’t think there should actually be a distinction between math and language; both get you to make the same journey, from concrete fundamentals to abstract concepts that bend and hurt your brain. Both are necessary. Both are fascinating. And I genuinely like, and admire, Dr. Sade. [Blogger’s note: Dr. Sade is the head of the math department at the school. He is a brilliant man and an outstanding teacher, and one of the most sarcastic, cynical people I have ever met. He and I have a running feud about math and English: he says that I love to hug my students, and I call him an emotionless mathematical golem. It’s fun.]

Violence is always wrong, but sometimes it is necessary – and sometimes the positive outcome is worth the cost. The Nazis needed to be stopped, and nothing but war would have done it. Bullies need to get their asses handed to them, and rapists should be stripped of a pound of flesh – probably a very specific pound. People who suborn terrorists and create suicide bombers need to be set on fire, and then we should all gather round and spit on the greasemark they leave behind. If you hurt my family, I will buy a gun, learn to use it, and then shoot you in the face.

After I admit all of that, it isn’t very hard to say that movies are better than books, is it?

Because they are. Not in every case, no – but in quite a few of them. Mostly, they’re just – different.

The real problem is the same here that it is with the whole math-English feud: this shouldn’t even be a fight. The real problem with this argument is that books and movies simply can’t be compared: they have different purposes, different strengths and weaknesses, and different definitions of success. A book is successful when it changes you; a movie is successful when it creates an intense immediate response, laughter or tears or a scream. A movie can create an immersive experience, tantalizing  your senses and crafting a new reality for you; a book forces you to create your own reality, without any connection to your senses — thus movies are fun and books are useful. Movies are fast and books are slow. The purpose of a movie is to offer an escape from reality; the purpose of a book is to bring us closer to reality. There are some books that reach for the movie goal and movies that reach for the book goal, but they aren’t the best, in either case. The best movies make the world disappear for a few hours: The Lord of the Rings. Star Wars. The Marvel Universe. They take us away from our world, and bring us to another world, where things are – not necessarily better, but the problems are not the same problems we face. Even in serious dramas, the ones that win Oscars, the problems aren’t the same as they are in the real world, for real people: Hollywood chooses extraordinary people with extraordinary stories, so that when the rest of us watch the film, we can imagine a life entirely different from our own, for a few hours. Slumdog Millionaire is about a penniless orphan growing up in the slums of India in the present day; The King’s Speech is about the King of England during World War II. Neither is about me.

Marshall McLuhan, an influential media theorist, said “The medium is the message.” He meant, among other things, that the way information is transmitted to the audience is at least part of the essential meaning of the transmission: that is, these things I am writing now, for this class, would be different if I were simply saying them; the fact of my speaking rather than writing would change the words I would use and the way you would understand them. The fact that I am writing this out instead of simply rambling on from behind my podium has a large influence on what I am really trying to say, even apart from the point I am making with the words: I am trying to say that this thing, these words, this essay, is a more important point than one I would be making in discussion. If I made a channel on YouTube and recorded a video of myself talking about this, that would change the message as well. There are things that you can only say in a two-hour movie, and other things you can only say in a 300-page novel; and they are not the same things. If you try to say the same thing in both mediums, one of them will fail. This is why movie versions of books are inevitably different, and the only time they are really successful is if the message is changed to fit the medium.

For example: The Shining is both an excellent book and an excellent movie; but the book is about how isolation can drive an alcoholic to violence; the movie is about how a haunted hotel can make an unbalanced man really lose his biscuits. The movie is visually stunning; the book is incredibly creepy, with one of the most subtle, slow builds of suspense that I know. The movie has very little suspense: as soon as the winter starts, Jack Torrance starts losing those biscuits; it’s just a question of how many he will lose, and what he will do when they’re all gone. As an audience member, though, you’re not even thinking about that: you’re just looking at that screen, watching the blood come pouring out of the elevator, wondering what’s really going on in Room 237, freaking out over those two little blonde girls at the end of the hall. It’s an entirely different experience. Is it better than the experience of the book? I don’t know; is filet mignon better than remembering how to solve a difficult math problem on your final? How do you compare the two experiences?

You don’t. But because books and movies have this one essential similarity, that they seem to tell the same story about the same people and the same events, people inevitably compare them; because books and movies are two things we truly love, and because different people tend to like one or the other more, we talk about this comparison a lot, and we have a lot riding on the answer. Every time a movie person agrees that the book is better, it feels like a win for the book side – which wins should include The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Watchmen, and The Black Cauldron and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – and every time I say that movies are better than books, it’s a win for movies – which have to include, among others, Stand By Me, The Godfather, Jurassic Park, James Bond, and everything written by John Grisham.

So let me just go ahead and take a side. Movies are better because brevity is the soul of wit: the goal of all literature is essentially entertainment, and it’s simply easier to be entertained when you don’t have to work hard for it. It is easier to be entertained for the two hours of a movie than it is to be entertained for the twenty or more hours of a book; parts of that book, no matter how good it is, are going to get boring. Movies never have to be boring. Movies are unquestionably more popular, and therefore more influential: there were 1.36 billion movie tickets sold in the U.S. and Canada in 2012; there were about 620 million books sold in the U.S. in 2013 — half as many. We also re-watch movies more frequently than we re-read books; I’ve seen The Lord of the Rings twenty times or more, but I’ve only read it three times all the way through. Books represent the work of a single person, the author; a movie can have many different talents adding to the overall effect, from the writer to the director to the musicians on the soundtrack to every actor in the film; therefore where one person may be weak, someone else can pick up the slack. In a book, though, if the author is bad at, say, comedy, or action, or interesting dialogue, you’re just out of luck: that part of the book is going to suck.

Because movies can create a more immersive, sensation-rich experience, they can have a stronger visceral effect on us: movies scare us, sadden us, anger us, and elate us more easily and more intensely than do books. We cry at movies; we sigh at books. Movies make us laugh out loud until our bellies hurt; books make us chuckle, a little. We can get an adrenaline rush from movies, which no book can really do. Movies can be extremely sexy; books trying to be sexy are just awkward. We remember particular lines and scenes from movies far more often than we do from books. I can quote you pretty much all of Monty Python and most of Star Wars; but I can’t remember anything from a book with the same accuracy. We bond over movies, going to see them with friends and family and on dates; who goes on a date and reads a book together? Who sits with their friends and reads? It’s not “Barnes & Noble and chill,” after all: there’s a reason for that.

The truth is, books are a part of our past. An important one, still, but a fading one. Movies are our future. Don’t let yourself get stuck in the past.

Lie For a Mockingbird

Dusty Leave a comment

So I have this essay I wrote yesterday. It’s an example for two of my classes: my AP Literature students and my Honors Freshman English — the latter we enjoy calling HELA 9, while the former insists on “It’s Liiiiiiiiiitt.” I was going to write two essays, one for each class; but both are writing literary analysis, just on different works and using different prompts: HELA 9 is writing about To Kill a Mockingbird, using simple essay questions I came up with; the AP class  is writing about Macbeth, using old AP test prompts. I wrote this one about TKAM, using an AP prompt; I figured that way I could use it for both classes, without stealing anyone’s topic idea.

I don’t know if people want to read these essays I write for school; but right now, this is pretty much all I’m writing. And, as my wife pointed out when I talked to her about posting this, this is part of me, my life and who I am. And God, I love this book. Just reading the last scene to find the quotes I wanted actually made me choke up a little.

So, here you go. Enjoy. I’ll post another essay in a couple of days, and a book review as soon as I can get to it. You can always pop over and read my time-traveling pirate serial, Damnation Kane.

 

(2016) Many works of literature contain a character who intentionally deceives others. The character’s dishonesty may be intended either to help or to hurt. Such a character, for example, may choose to mislead others for personal safety, to spare someone’s feelings, or to carry out a crime.

Choose a novel or play in which a character deceives others. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze the motives for that character’s deception and discuss how the deception contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole.

There’s a lot to argue about in literature: was it the Lady or the Tiger, was Shakespeare one man or many (or a woman?), is it Gatsby’s fault or Daisy’s? But one thing we cannot argue about – for it is true beyond contestation – is that Atticus Finch is the best human being ever to exist. Best father, best lawyer, best person. Bar none. No question.

It says something, then, that at the end of Harper Lee’s classic, Atticus, the pillar of moral rectitude, the antithesis of all hypocrites and liars, the man who is the same on the public street as he is in his home – that man chooses to lie. And not only to lie, but to convince his young daughter, Scout – the second best person in all of literature – to lie, as well. It says that sometimes, in certain extraordinary cases, it is not only acceptable, but even good, to lie. Because sometimes, telling the truth would be like killing a mockingbird: harming someone who never did anything bad to anybody. And that, of course, is a sin.

Not all liars are good liars. Two other characters in To Kill a Mockingbird, Bob and Mayella Ewell, lie extensively, and perniciously. The court case the Ewells precipitate serves as the major conflict for the novel’s larger scope; the story is both about the children growing up, and also about this case, and how the Ewells attempt to take advantage of the prejudice of the time even as Atticus tries – unsuccessfully – to fight against it. The case is built entirely on lies, and Atticus shows the jury the truth – against their will, at least in part, because so many things would be so much easier if they could just believe that the Ewells are telling the truth. But they can’t believe that, because the Ewells are not telling the truth. Atticus shows the jury the truth, both about the specific case and also about the Ewells; and because he does, he becomes a target of Bob Ewell’s violent tendencies, his savage and furtive need for revenge; this then creates the need for Atticus’s own lie, and Scout’s as well.

Mayella, the victim of a series of family secrets, including her father’s alcoholism, his physical and mental abuse, and even his sexual abuse of his eldest daughter, tells a number of lies in the name of finding some small token of real affection – because what her daddy do to her don’t count, as we hear from her own victim. When Mayella, a 19-year-old white woman in the town of Maycomb, Alabama, in the 1930’s, decides she wants to kiss a man who is not her father, she seeks out a man she can manipulate and control: a black man. We can understand this, as Mayella has no control over her own life, which is spent taking care of her drunk father and her seven younger siblings; but Mayella wants something more than a life of filth and degradation, as we can see from the geraniums she grows and tends in the junkyard where her family lives in squalor. We appreciate this. Mayella is harmed, repeatedly, by those who are stronger and more violent than she; so when she looks for romance, she tries to protect herself from harm in this vulnerable moment – perfectly understandable. And, as far as it goes, this gives us a reason to at least forgive her various lies: she sends her siblings to town for ice cream, so that she can be alone with her would-be lover; she tells the man as he passes by that she needs help with a repair job inside the house,  so that he will come inside with her, which he would normally never do, knowing how impolite it would be considered for a black man to be alone with a white woman – and also, how dangerous. Then, when Tom Robinson, this kind-hearted man – chosen also because he is, as Scout sees, a fine figure of a man (or would be, if he were whole and not lacking the use of his left arm – and there can be little doubt of the symbolic value of that handicap for Mayella, who is frequently and savagely beaten by a left-handed man: Tom must be a man she does not need to fear), and chosen despite the fact that he is married with three young children – comes into the house, Mayella lies again to get him into her actual grasp, telling him to get her down something from on top of a tall bureau, and then grabbing him around the legs in an awkward and almost precious embrace.

All those lies for Mayella would be forgivable (Though the fact that she attempts to ensnare, through deception, a married man, makes all this much less sweet – a mood that is portrayed perfectly when Mayella tells Tom, “Kiss me back, nigger!” Ah, l’amour.) except for the most important lie, the lie that Mayella tells herself: that she can get away with this. It’s really quite absurd: we don’t know how long it would take the Ewell children to go to town and get ice cream, but neither does Mayella, and since Tom doesn’t see the children at all, they’re already on their way when Tom walks by after work. How much time does Mayella have, in the best case, for her tryst? Not even that long, of course, because her drunken abusive father returns home even sooner than the children – another circumstance she should have been able to foresee, but must have told herself was safely impossible – and catches her kissing Tom. In that moment, we see the truth of Bob’s twisted psyche: he does not rage against Tom, despite the obvious “sin” he has committed, the unforgivable sin of embracing a white woman; no, Bob yells, “You goddamn whore, I’ll kill ya!” at his daughter. Bob knows who is behind this, and we know a truth then about Bob. This truth, of his hatred of his daughter and his attraction to her, as well, leads him to beat her black and blue, even while Tom runs away.

But Tom doesn’t escape, as Mayella must have known he wouldn’t; she then turns him into her scapegoat, aided and abetted – perhaps provoked – by her father. It is not immediately clear to the reader why the Ewells do this, or even who is really behind it. Does Mayella insist that Bob help her create this fiction, in order to protect her virtue? Does Mayella see this as one small show of love she can actually garner from her father? Or does Bob run for the sheriff in order to teach Mayella a lesson? Maybe he does it to show Tom that he can’t get away with trying to put the moves on a white girl? Does Bob lie to himself about that? Do they seek only to gain the temporary approval of the white people of Maycomb, who are glad for a chance to put the blacks in their place, and might be a little grateful to the Ewells for creating that opportunity? That may be: Bob gets away with several small offenses against the elites of the town, including Atticus; he even, for a little while, gets a job, before turning back into the welfare-cheating drunkard he’s  always  been. But we don’t see any reward for Mayella. All she gets is a beating. Presumably more than one.

When Atticus argues this case in the Maycomb County Court, he describes Mayella’s act as something like what a child does when she breaks something: she puts the evidence of her crime as far away from herself as possible. Mayella, Atticus says, is putting Tom Robinson as far away from her as possible, in order to cover up her crime of lusting after a black man. Perhaps the childishness of that metaphor gives us our clue about Mayella’s role in this: perhaps she seeks only self-preservation. But I don’t think so: because it is Mayella, far more than the foolish and untrustworthy Bob, who seals Tom’s fate. After Atticus shows how much of her story is a fabrication, Mayella makes one last statement. She talks about another fiction of the time and place, Alabama in the 1930’s; a commonly accepted one. By calling up this fiction, she forces the men of the jury into a role that at least one of them (who argues for acquittal) does not want, but cannot escape. Mayella says,

“I got somethin‘ to say an’ then I ain’t gonna say no more. That nigger yonder took advantage of me an‘ if you fine fancy gentlemen don’t wanta do nothin’ about it then you’re all yellow stinkin‘ cowards, stinkin’ cowards, the lot of you. Your fancy airs don’t come to nothin‘—your ma’amin’ and Miss Mayellerin‘ don’t come to nothin’, Mr. Finch –“

In the next line of the book, Scout observes that “she burst into real tears.” Real tears, because Mayella is indeed distraught, as who wouldn’t be; but real, also, in contrast to the falsehood she just spoke. The men in the courtroom – and mostly, she is speaking to the jury, as Atticus and Judge Taylor and Sheriff Tate are unlikely to come to her defense – are not cowards, or at least not in this instance. But by insisting that she is the victim of a sexual crime, committed on her white self by a black man, those fine fancy gentlemen have no alternative but to act as Southern gentlemen would have acted at the time: they must kill the black man who defiled the innocent white girl. They cannot take the word of a black man over the word of two white people, not even when that word is the truth. And indeed, in the face of that universally accepted lie, Atticus’s fancy airs don’t come to nothin’. The jury convicts; Tom goes to jail; he is there shot and killed, supposedly while trying to escape – but that is another lie, as he is shot seventeen times, a number of wounds impossible to credit were he actually in the process of climbing the fence of the football-field-sized exercise yard. Tom was, of course, executed by the white prison guards, probably as revenge for his “crime.”

That’s a sin.

Bob Ewell tries to commit another sin, equally heinous; unable to directly harm his perceived enemies, Judge Taylor and Atticus, Bob goes after two other people who did him no harm: Atticus’s two children, Jem and Scout. Bob tries to kill them both as they walk home in the dark on Halloween. But Bob unwittingly chooses the worst possible place to make his attempt on the children’s lives: he attacks them near the Radley house, where lives the most dangerous man in the entire town: the mad boogeyman, Boo Radley. Boo Radley’s reputation is another lie, because the genuinely kind-hearted shut-in hears the struggle, and at great risk to himself, charges out of his hermit’s cave and saves the children by killing Bob Ewell with a kitchen knife. Sheriff Heck Tate investigates the scene once the children are brought home safe – by Boo, who may actually get to compete with Scout and Atticus for the title of Best Person in Literature (He’s certainly the dark horse candidate) – and then the sheriff goes to talk to Atticus about what he found. Atticus is trying to think clearly through his haze of terror about the near-murder of his children (At least partly his fault, both for opposing Bob Ewell and then underestimating the brutal drunkard’s willingness to cause harm), and trying to figure out how much red tape Jem will have to go through for having killed Bob in defending his sister, which is the story that Scout told them both. Not a lie, that one; she wasn’t able to see what really happened, and she’s guessing; Atticus takes her at her word.

But Sheriff Tate knows better: Sheriff Tate knows that Boo Radley brought out a knife from his kitchen and stabbed Bob Ewell with that knife. Tate knows this because he found Bob Ewell’s knife, a switchblade, at the scene, possibly in Ewell’s hand – he says he took the knife off of a drunk man. Tate pockets that knife, and then tells the Finches a lie: he says that Bob fell on his own knife, the kitchen knife, which Tate says Bob must have found in the dump. “Honed it down and bided his time… just bided his time.” Atticus thinks that Tate is trying to save Jem from having to go through the legal system, but that isn’t it. Tate is trying to save Boo. Because Boo is a shut-in, a deep recluse who is nervous just being in a room with other people; and if the truth comes out, then Boo will suffer.

“I never heard tell that it’s against the law for a citizen to do his utmost to prevent a crime from being committed, which is exactly what he did, but maybe you’ll say it’s my duty to tell the town all about it and not hush it up. Know what’d happen then? All the ladies in Maycomb includin‘ my wife’d be knocking on his door bringing angel food cakes. To my way of thinkin’, Mr. Finch, taking the one man who’s done you and this town a great service an‘ draggin’ him with his shy ways into the limelight—to me, that’s a sin. It’s a sin and I’m not about to have it on my head. If it was any other man, it’d be different. But not this man, Mr. Finch.”

Mr. Tate was trying to dig a hole in the floor with the toe of his boot. He pulled his nose, then he massaged his left arm. “I may not be much, Mr. Finch, but I’m still sheriff of Maycomb County and Bob Ewell fell on his knife. Good night, sir.”

And Atticus, finally understanding Tate’s point, makes the decision. He turns to Scout and says, “Scout, Mr. Ewell fell on his knife. Can you possibly understand?”

Atticus looked like he needed cheering up. I ran to him and hugged him and kissed him with all my might. “Yes sir, I understand,” I reassured him. “Mr. Tate was right.”

Atticus disengaged himself and looked at me. “What do you mean?”

“Well, it’d be sort of like shootin‘ a mockingbird, wouldn’t it?”

Atticus Finch – and Heck Tate, who is also a genuinely good man – decide to tell a lie in order to save Boo Radley from attention, which to him is equivalent to harm. The decision is surely made easier for them by the fact that Boo has not, in truth, done anything wrong; by the laws of our society, his act was justified, and no murder. But these men do not lie easily or willingly; throughout the book, Atticus has refused to contemplate saying something or doing something other than what he believes to be right. He won’t even tell little white lies: when his brother Jack explains to the very young Scout what a whore-lady is simply by putting her off with a distraction, Atticus says, “Jack! When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness’ sake. But don’t make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles ‘em.” And then when Scout asks Atticus what rape is, he responds by saying it is “carnal knowledge of a female by force and without consent.” Where most people would hem and haw, where even the otherwise bold and straightforward Calpurnia told Scout to ask her father what it meant, Atticus simply gives a clear and uncensored definition. He tells Scout the truth.

But in this case, in this one case, Atticus is willing to lie. He is willing to tell his daughter to lie, as well. Because Atticus knows that what makes an act a sin is not truth, or falsehood: it is harm. Because they do nothing bad to us, it is a sin to kill a mockingbird. It is not a sin to lie for one.

Truth

Dusty Leave a comment

It seems to me there are three ways to come at this essay about the different kinds of truth. The first and most obvious – to me, at least – is to quote the diabolical Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons, who, when on the witness stand and told that the court wants the truth, scoffs, “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth! No truth-handler you! Bah, I deride your truth-handling abilities!”

The second (and only slightly less amusing) is to make reference to the classic Dwight Schrute meme where Dwight points out the problem with a statement – here, if I may indulge in a visual, is one of my favorites:

Image result for dwight schrute false meme

But I believe I will select the introductory quote about truth that is nearest to my own heart: Dan Rather, the former anchor for the CBS Evening News, said, “The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called ‘truth.’”

I would like to poke you with a sharp stick called ‘Truth.’

This would seem, at first, a fruitless enterprise. After all, truth is truth; how can there be kinds of truth? But in fact there are, simply because we are flawed creatures, we humans; we cannot know everything, and so we cannot know absolutes: there may be circumstances and conditions under which anything we think to be true may in fact not be. Therefore there are at least two levels of truth: truth we can know, and truth we cannot because it is absolute and thus requires omniscience. Or more simply, truth we can know and truth we cannot know, but which is nonetheless truth. The key here is to accept that knowing truth changes its truth-value, which is the concept I hope to prove in this essay; the upper limit is truth which requires omniscience to know, but there are degrees leading up to that limit, and recognizable categories, which I will attempt to explicate.

By the way: because I wrote out that Sideshow Bob quote, now my word processor wants to autocomplete “truth” into “truth-hand” every time I write it. This is both wonderful and annoying.

Like truth.

Let us begin with a basic understanding of truth. Truth is perhaps best defined through defining its opposite, falsehood; I would argue that there are essentially two kinds of falsehood, which are one, untruths, and two, lies. Untruths are things – ideas, statements, assumptions – that are not truth because when one attempts to verify them objectively, one finds reality does not match the untruth. If I were to believe it is raining outside because I am in a room with no windows, I can look out through the door and discover whether my belief is true, or untrue: if it is raining then the belief is true, and if it is not raining, then the belief is untrue. This is the first point in arguing that knowing truth changes the truth-value: because the belief that “It is raining outside” is objectively true somewhere, presumably at every possible instant that one could believe it – especially if one broadens the concept of “rain” to include liquid precipitation on other planets and celestial bodies. So sure, it is always raining SOMEWHERE – but unless it is raining where I personally can verify it through my senses, then it doesn’t really matter to the truth-value of my belief; if I were to step outside into a sunny afternoon and say “It’s raining,” someone’s response would likely be

Image result for dwight schrute false

The second kind of falsehood is a lie: this is when the truth, objectively verifiable through the senses, is known, and an idea is put forward that is known to be counter to that truth. This is when I am in a room with windows, looking out at the sun, and I say, “It is raining.” The advantage for our purpose here is that it doesn’t matter which kind of falsehood it is, the truth is always the same: objectively verifiable through the senses.

But there is a difficulty there. Because there are truths that we have discovered, truths that we know, that are not verifiable through the senses, that are not objective. A strict prescriptivist of truth would argue that these truths are therefore not true, because only objectively verifiable facts can be true. To those people I say: talk to Heisenberg. (And this is funny, because it’s mostly science-y people who would say that, and Heisenberg is about as science-y as you can get. Take that, science!) The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle tells us that when a particle has two complementary properties, such as position and momentum, we cannot know both properties at the same time. If we know precisely where the particle is at a given moment, then we have frozen that particle in time, which means at that instant, to us, it has no momentum: picture it as a snapshot of the particle, showing us where it is, but in that snapshot, it is not moving. Alternatively, we could know the particle’s momentum, its velocity and direction; but we can only measure that by tracking its movement – which means that, over the time period when we re tracking its movement, we cannot say precisely where it was: only give a range, somewhere between Point A and Point B.

The real point is, that particle has both momentum and position, and both of those properties have objective truth, both are definite, verifiable facts – but we can only know one at a time. Knowing one makes it impossible to know the other, but it doesn’t change its truthiness.

Therefore we must add a word to our definition of truth: truth is an idea that is potentially objectively verifiable through the senses. If we had world enough and time, we could verify it; therefore it is true. But I hope we can all see that a truth that is objectively verifiable through the senses has more impact, more weight – more gravity, let us say – than a truth that is only potentially verifiable. If I suspect that the rain falling outside my room is in fact acidic, but I don’t have the instruments to test, then I may want to respond as if it were acidic, and act to protect my plants, let us say; but in the process I will undeniably encounter the verifiable truth of the rain itself: I will get wet. I am more likely to respond to the fact of wetness than to the theory of acid; that truth, then, has more weight, more potential to change my thoughts and actions. That truth has more gravity.

As I was saying, then, the lowest level of truth is one that is only potentially verifiable, but cannot be objectively verified. In fact there is one level of truth lower than that, based on knowledge – or rather, on ignorance; because if knowing a fact gives it more weight, then not knowing gives less. So the lowest kind of truth is truth we don’t know. It’s true, but for us, it is meaningless; because of our ignorance, this is equivalent to the absolute truths we can’t know. In either case, we can’t act on it, or change our thought process or paradigm because of it; it has no impact on us. For us, it might as well not be true, and so it has only the barest sliver of truth. That bottom level is the fact of rain outside a room with no windows and no doors. Or whether or not the worm currently crawling through the earth beneath me is depressed. I don’t know, and so cannot act on it. That’s the lowest kind of truth—and I apologize for using an underground worm’s depression as an example; I really didn’t think about the pun there.

As for truth that could be verifiable but can’t be objectively verified, let’s use as an example the infinite nature of the universe. Is the universe infinite? No idea. We’ll never know. In theory one could find a mathematical proof of it, if we could find the existence of the multiverse and the mechanism whereby new universes are created, but we can’t ever know it for sure. The only thing this kind of truth can do for us is give us a headache: it feels like we could know, but we can’t actually know. This kind of truth is a tease. At best a Zen koan.

Just above that level is an idea that I think is true, but I don’t know why I think it’s true. This kind of truth has the potential of being objectively verifiable, but I as the knower don’t know how to do that, and therefore could never verify it. This is where most racist ideas live. Why do racists think white skin is better than brown skin? They don’t know, but they think it’s true. There are quite a number of outright lies at this level, because people might be able to figure out how to verify their beliefs, but they don’t want to, because the truth will likely be the opposite of what they believe it is. That, in my opinion, is a lie: when I say it’s raining outside, but I refuse to open the door and look because I think it is probably sunny – but I won’t admit that.

The next level up is something that I am sure is true, and that I have evidence for, but which is not clearly objectively verifiable based on my evidence. This is where superstitions are found: Michael Jordan believed that his lucky shorts were one of the reasons for his success, and he wore them for every game he played. He won six NBA championships and three MVP awards wearing those shorts; so there is some evidence that the shorts were lucky. Just not verifiable evidence, because “luck” can’t be tested for – but just like (Okay, not just like) the uncertainty principle, if we were to create a laboratory experiment to confirm that the shorts were not lucky, the element of luck in the form of blind chance or influences on the experiment that we could not control would ruin the results: if we had Michael Jordan play half the time with his lucky shorts and half the time with “control shorts” (Which makes him sound like he has bladder control issues, which is just sad), that doesn’t mean we can make his teammates play the same in both games, or his opponents play the same, or even control all the other factors that go into Michael Jordan playing well or poorly. We can’t prove the shorts are or are not lucky, but there’s objective evidence in the form of success that says they are. And that’s why luck still exists as a concept, and why Jordan wore the same pair of shorts every game for almost fifteen years.

Oh – he did wash them, by the way. After every game.

The next level is one I don’t want to include, but I have to because of the parameters I have set forth. If someone knowing a thing makes it more true than something that nobody knows, then if a lot of people know a thing, it has to be more true than if only one person knows it. Because a known fact has more weight, more gravity, and that is an element of the fact’s truth-value. So the next level up is a thing that is known, with evidence but without objective verification (but still potentially objectively verifiable – have I broken your brains yet?), by a lot of people. I hate this because I don’t want to say that the popularity of an idea has any bearing on its truth, but in fact, if we want to include a truth’s potential to change someone’s mind or behavior – and I do, because otherwise there is no point to speaking about truth at all – then I have to make this a separate and higher level, because something that a lot of people believe to be true has a much greater chance of changing their behavior. This is something like this statement: Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server makes her a poorer candidate for president (Meaning she would have been a worse president than someone otherwise identical but who didn’t use a private email server; the statement that the private email server made her less likely to win is objectively verifiable truth, because: well, look.). A lot of people believed that Clinton’s private email server made her less trustworthy, and therefore a bad candidate for the Presidency. And because a lot of people believed it, with evidence (Because that’s an untrustworthy act) but not objectively verified (Because she never became president and so we can’t see how untrustworthy she would have been in the Oval Office), it had more weight: it had more impact. It changed enough votes that it, along with other factors, changed the outcome of the election. That truth had more value, more gravity, because more people thought it was true.

Are we having fun yet?

The next level is something that is true not because it is objectively verified but because it cannot be disproven. This is sort of an offshoot from the last level, because there isn’t objective verification, but there is somewhat more weight to these ideas because there is an argument to be made for them, that nobody can disprove the idea, that makes it more likely that people will accept it as truth, which increases the truth-value or gravity of the idea. (Don’t worry: we’re almost at the top. Almost at simple truth. But not quite.) This is the level where God lives. The existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, non-material personal deity is impossible to disprove: there is no observation I can make that would prove that God doesn’t exist. According to science, this makes the god-hypothesis false, because it is unfalsifiable; but I’m not talking about science, I’m talking about impact on humans through the intersection of objective reality and knowledge. There are quite a few people who know God’s existence is real, and since God cannot be disproven, that gives the idea more weight than Michael Jordan’s lucky shorts. (You have to be an atheist to make that statement with a straight face. Okay, I was smiling a little when I wrote it.) It moves the truth of religion to a higher level, how’s that? Not objectively proven, but not objectively disproven, either.

But now, at last, after ignorance and belief and faith and falsifiability and religion and – Lord help us – even sports, we come to the simplest level, and nearly the top. This is where we find: the truth. Simple truth. Facts, with known evidence, which are objectively verifiable: I can look out my door and see that it is or is not raining, and I can actually test it to make sure that it is rain. I can step outside, and I will get wet. Truth. Simple truth.

Of course, even this level isn’t that simple, because the evidence of our senses is, sadly, not necessarily reflective of objective reality; all my senses could verify that it is in fact raining, but I could be mad, or in the Matrix. But that moves us over into the question of absolute truth, and since I can’t know absolute truth, it doesn’t matter to me: absolute truth is actually down at that bottom level, truth I don’t know. (There’s no way out of Descartes’ labyrinth here, by the way. In the Matrix, it is possible to know that the Matrix is not real – but then, the second movie shows us that there is another level of truth, that Neo is the sixth version of the One, and the other characters did not know that truth; and then past that there is another level – because the character Neo, like the character of the Architect who makes him, who made the Matrix, don’t know that they’re actually in a fictional movie. The only truth we can ever know is what our senses tell us. Period. Cogito ergo sum.) We take our reality as just that, as reality, and that is all we know, and all we need to know. That is truth.

One level left: that is the important truth. The weighty truth, the truth that is both objectively verified and also able to change thoughts and actions of humans; the kind of truth that makes a paradigm shift, that combines both science and popularity, and therefore moves mountains and changes continents. Proven facts that also have gravity. This is, for example, the truth that every living thing dies.

The truth that love conquers all.

The truth that money makes the world go ’round.

The truth that man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.

The truth that art is humanity’s highest calling.

The truth that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

The truth that evolution through natural selection is sufficient to explain all complexity in the biosphere.

The truth that we’ll never know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

My last truth is this: we can handle the truth. We can. We do.

Just not enough.

So Much Crap.

Dusty Leave a comment

Ron Barnett's portrait.

Me and my crew in front of the Box Office/Concession Stand
Look at all that hair!
Break time outside.

I haven’t had a lot of different jobs in my life: only two, really. Sure, I worked for two months in a library, and another two months in a discount bookstore. I was a residential care provider in a group home for developmentally disabled adults for a while, a job I absolutely loathed; and I took photos for college IDs, a job I am forever grateful for, because that’s how I met my wife.

But none of those mattered; you might as well count the money I made mowing my parents’ lawn, or the change I’ve found on the street over the years. I never cared about what I was doing, never thought of it as a part of my identity. But work is, at least in this society, an indispensable part of a person’s identity: it is the first question one asks after “What’s your name?” and the source, after family, of our greatest pride, and of our greatest distress. Nobody asks, “What are your hobbies?” or “What is your favorite meal?” No, we want to know what people do. Our job is how we make a living: what a telling phrase.

The two jobs I’ve had in my life are polar opposites in many ways: the first was blue collar, the second white collar; the first had irregular hours, the second a schedule set for me down to the minute; the first was done almost entirely alone, the second could not be performed without other people involved – or, well, it could, but it would be pretty pointless. It would be nice, though: I often joke about how much better the job would be if it was just me alone in a room.

My first job was often just me, alone in a room.

But there are also aspects that are nearly identical: in both cases, I have worked for the government. In both cases I have usually worked early in the morning and been done by midafternoon, and I have always worked on weekends. Both jobs have tried my patience. Both jobs have given me good coworkers and bad, clients I liked and those I couldn’t stand, bosses who made my job(s) easier and ones who made it much, much harder. And both jobs have, on occasion, revolved around crap.

From 1995-2000, I was a custodian and maintenance worker. Since then, I have been a high school English teacher. I have often found it hard to know, for sure, which job I would rather have.

Being a custodian was great. The daily work was never too bad: the facility where I worked, the Civic Auditorium in Santa Cruz, was a public building; so every day the bathrooms needed cleaning and the various offices needed to be vacuumed, dusted, and have their trash and recycling emptied. That was my most frequent task for the first half of my standard five-hour shift. The second half was more general maintenance: I would sweep and mop the hallways, vacuum the mats in front of the doors, touch up paint, restock the concession stand, organize supplies and storage, and clean windows. If we had an event, I would set up for it; if we had just finished an event, I would break down equipment and clean up the main hall and the seating area – 1100 fixed theater-style seats. I dumped a lot of garbage cans and I swept a lot of floors.

Image result for santa cruz civic auditorium

I had that custodial job all the way through college. But I finished college in December of 1999, and so in June of the next year – in time for the summer hiring season for new teachers – I quit, and my wife and I moved to San Diego County, where I started applying for full-time teaching positions. And found one, at San Pasqual High School.

I did not like being a teacher right away. The daily work that first year was brutal: I got hired in late July for a school year that started in mid-August; this was not a lot of time to prepare. I had three different classes, none of which I had ever taught before, and so I had to make up, every day, what I was going to teach. I had to write all of my tests, all of my assignments. I had to make up vocab lists, after I made up a system for teaching vocab. I had to lecture, and lead discussions; I had to create group projects; I had to grade. The grading never stopped, never ended. It still hasn’t, 17 years later. In addition, I didn’t have my own room, and so I traveled that year, going from room to room and building to building during every five-minute passing period, pushing a cart full of books and papers and my coffee cup. I worked 60-hour weeks, spending hours every day after school grading papers and creating curriculum, sleeping only a few hours a night because I spent most of my time worrying about whether or not what I was doing was having any positive effect on my students, and pretty sure that it wasn’t.

I never worried about being a custodian. There were certainly days I didn’t want to go to work: we used to have certain events that were particularly long or difficult, such as whenever the Pickle Family Circus came to town, since they would do two shows a day, which meant we had to clean the hall in between the two shows. The summer Wine and Music Festival meant twelve- and sixteen-hour days, mostly outside in the California summer heat hauling equipment and supplies and garbage up and down the street. The hemp show people were a nightmare, as were the Gem and Mineral show vendors. And then there were the raves. They used to have raves at the Civic, once our manager realized he could sell 2000 tickets at $20 apiece, and then trap all 2000 people inside for twelve hours with no food except what they bought from our concession stand. The Civic made huge amounts of money on those things. And then we maintenance staff had to clean the place up. Imagine 2000 sweaty people, dancing for twelve hours, throwing around food and drinks the whole time, and – to judge from what they left behind – taking lots of drugs, taking off their clothes, and having way more sex than seems appropriate in a crowded concert hall. We had to mop the whole building, including the walls, and that was after we had swept out an entire dumpster worth of waste.

I’m not even going to talk about the bathrooms.

After my first year at the Civic, I got – well, sort of a promotion. They realized, first, that I was responsible and reliable; second, that I was particularly good at fine details and spending hours and hours on one tedious task; and third, that as a college student, I was totally willing to be exploited. So they made me a shift supervisor – but, you know, not really. I didn’t get any more pay, or any promotion or anything. They just gave me more responsibility. They had me lead crews for setup or cleanup, and they had me supervise alone for some of the smaller, quieter weekend events. And they gave me The Binder. The Binder was pages and pages of maintenance tasks that only needed to be done three or four times a year, like clean out the furnace room, or sweep the attic catwalks, or polish the brass door handles. I was now responsible for everything in the binder. In addition to everything else I did.

That didn’t happen after my first year teaching. No, it would take six or seven years before I got extra responsibilities – but then they came all at once, just as the actual teaching part was getting easier. I still got exploited, though. I was made the Chair of the English department – only a year before the school cut the stipend that came with the position. I was asked to be the “guru” for our new grading and attendance program, which was fine the first year when they paid me for it – but then after that, everybody just came to me for help, though the school didn’t pay me any more. I ran a Gaming Club, and then an Argument Club, and then a Philosophy Club, and then a Gaming Club again – along with a lunchtime talent show I co-hosted, when I wasn’t singing in the staff band.

But that was okay; I liked the musical tasks, and the clubs, for the most part. Serving as the head of negotiations for the teacher’s union was less pleasant, since we had a contract dispute that almost led to a strike that year. So along with teaching all of my classes, grading and planning and preparing, and all of the conferences and meetings and trainings that come with the job, I also had to have meetings with my union team, and contract negotiations sessions; I had to give updates to the other teachers, and lead union activities like marches and such. I slept even less that year, as any minute not spent thinking about my classes was spent thinking about how every teacher in the district was counting on me to do a good job.

Amusingly enough, that was also the year when I was waiting to see if the state would strip my license to teach, after I got busted for writing mean things about my students and my job on a public blog, which was a violation of the computer use policy as well as – well, let’s call it the honor code. That was a little stressful, too, since I knew I might be looking at the end of my teaching career. But here’s how that all ended up: we got a contract; I was named Teacher of the Year for the district; and then I got suspended for thirty days without pay. That was when I quit and moved to Arizona. Where I had to appear before an ethics committee to explain my suspension. They called me “morally reprehensible.”

It’s funny: I used to steal stuff from the Civic all the time. I mean ALL the time. Toilet paper, paper towels, these thick cleaning cloths that my wife used for cleaning her paintbrushes; Windex, bleach, hand soap, light bulbs; we used to borrow tools, painting supplies, even the carpet cleaner when we needed it. And that’s not even getting into the food I used to take from the concession stand. I can’t tell you how much coffee I got for free over the five years I worked there. And the candy: every time I brought candy to the stand from the storeroom, some of it disappeared into me. So did all the leftover popcorn. If ever I have been morally reprehensible at work, it was while I was a custodian. And yet I never got in trouble for it there.

The best part of working as a custodian was that I got to work alone. I almost never had to speak to people; when I did, it was always very brief and businesslike. Then I would put on my headphones and listen to music while I vacuumed and mopped and dusted. Even when I led shifts, I would assign the tasks, and usually take the worst for myself – which was generally the bathrooms. But I didn’t really mind: turns out bathrooms have great acoustics if you’re the type who likes to sing along with music. My pay eventually caught up with my promotion, and I made decent money, had benefits and a guaranteed twenty hours a week, on a schedule I could pretty much pick and choose. I also got into any concert I wanted, free.

The best part of working as a teacher is the fact that I’m a teacher. I do love literature, even more than singing; I like my students more than my mop and broom – well, mostly. I certainly like them more than the brass polish: that stuff was nasty. I believe in what I do, as much as I’m actually allowed to do what I believe in, which is not all the time. I have much better pay and benefits, and summers off, which I love. And I never have to scrape gum off of the bottom of 1100 fixed theater-style seats.

That was a lot of gum. People who put gum on the bottom of their seats are morally reprehensible.

I still cannot say, though, which job I would rather have.

The nastiest thing I ever had to do at the Civic was clean up the lobby after an elderly man had a bathroom accident, not in the bathroom, during the Symphony. Or maybe it was the several times I had to clean up what the homeless people left in the bushes outside. No – no, it was the bathrooms after the raves. Definitely that. Let me just say this: people stopped using the actual toilets, figuring that anywhere in the room was good enough. The nastiest thing I ever had to do as a teacher was when I had to report a sex crime. I would rather clean the bathrooms than do that again.

The worst I was ever treated at the Civic was when the Brazilian Jiu-jitsu people kept me there for four hours longer than they were supposed to, just because they were hanging out instead of cleaning up, and every time I said something, they Bro’d me out of the room. (Bro, chill out, bro! We’re working on it, bro! We’ll be done real soon, bro. Hey, do you lift?) The worst I ever got treated as a teacher was when seventeen of my Honors students cheated on the same essay because they didn’t read the book. Or maybe when I caught three girls cheating, and they yelled in my ear for ten minutes while I had to walk across the campus (That was when I was traveling, remember?) to find the proof – which did finally shut them up: because even though they kept shouting at me that I was wrong and they were offended that I would ever insult them with that accusation, I wasn’t wrong.

But being right doesn’t stop people from arguing with me, questioning me, telling me how to do my job, which seems to be everyone’s favorite pastime: students, parents, administrators, random people I meet on the street, they all want to give me ideas for how to teach. That might be the worst treatment I get. Or maybe it is every single day when my students, who talk about how much they (generally) like me and like my class, spend most of that same class ignoring me while they are talking, sleeping, doing math homework, or staring at their phones.

No – no, it was that morally reprehensible thing. That was truly the worst thing that has ever happened to me at work. Ever. I would rather clean those bathrooms with my bare hands than deal with all of that again: the meetings with superintendents, the consultations with my lawyer, the threats from the state’s lawyer, the fact that I will always have that black mark on my record, for something that isn’t half as bad as the things that have been said online about me – and sometimes, to my face.

Working at the Civic meant cleaning up a lot of crap. Working as a teacher means taking it.

So I suppose that’s really the answer: I would rather clean bathrooms. I wonder if anyone is hiring.

Tread All The F$%^ Over This

Dusty Leave a comment

(To Secretary DeVos, Part II. Part I Here.)

It starts with the tests. It always starts with the tests. But really, it isn’t just the tests: it is the very concept of “accountability.” Accountability says that we need to have paperwork — data — that shows that our schools are accomplishing what they are supposed to accomplish, and that the teachers are doing what they are supposed to be doing, and not something else. Accountability is founded on the idea that we don’t trust teachers. We think — because sometimes it’s true — that teachers are in it only for the paycheck, that they don’t care at all about the students who pass anonymously through their room.

We all have that story, right? Of the teacher that taught exclusively through movies and worksheets? I’ve known several (Though honestly, I never had one when I was in public school.) at the various schools where I’ve taught: there was the health teacher whose entire curriculum was canned, who showed his students videos four days a week and then tested them on the videos on the fifth. There was the math teacher who, every single week, Xeroxed the next chapter out of his textbook and handed it to his students while he sat at his desk and read the newspaper. Yeah, I’ve known those teachers. And I think those teachers should be gently pushed out of the profession. Or maybe not that gently: because the harm they have caused to my profession is entirely out of proportion to their actual sins.

They brought the idea of accountability to the fore. From lazy bastards like that, we got the idea that there are many teachers who don’t work very hard. And in order to satisfy those who insisted that this was a serious threat to our children’s futures, lots and lots of people agreed to ensure — ACCOUNTABILITY.

And so we get testing. And it’s funny, because everybody hates testing — students hate it, parents hate it, teachers fucking loathe it: but everyone likes, or at least accepts, the idea of accountability which drives that need for testing.

I had a meeting last week. An all day meeting, with all of the English teachers in my — my company, I guess it is; it’s a group of charter schools here in Arizona, some in Tucson and some in Phoenix. It’s a private corporation that runs these schools, though they are public schools, so yeah: my company. (Which means, of course, that I and my fellows are precisely what DeVos wants teachers and schools to look like; except that we collect our money from the state, instead of from tuition or tax vouchers. Down, Voucher, down! Gooood Charter.) And in this meeting, the biggest complaint was about our current testing system. We bitched about it for hours. Literally. Killed the whole meeting agenda. Hey — English teachers, we got a lot to say. Especially about standardized testing. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a stupid testing system, no question. And the consensus was that we should get rid of the clunky thing.

But.

All of them wanted to replace it. With a different system, that would work better. One that would allow more essay tests, for instance, and that would follow our curriculum more closely. (Even though the curriculum is shitty. Know what the selling point for this curriculum was? It was made by other teachers. So it must be good. But it’s not. It’s shitty. But it’s ours, and we plan to follow it. And find a testing system that will align more closely to it. More on why the curriculum is shitty below.)

I don’t know if I was the only one who thought this, or if everybody else was just saying what they were supposed to say, but: I kept thinking — why do we even have a testing system at all? Why do we need to assess student learning? I mean, in theory we’re supposed to do it so as to make teaching more efficient: we learn what students know, and then we know what students need to learn, and then we teach that. That and, of course, accountability: because while the teachers are figuring out what the students know, the administrators and the politicians are using what the students know to determine how well the teachers are teaching.

Except that never works. Tests don’t show everything a student knows. The various members of any given class never know the same things, never need to learn the same things. In theory I’m supposed to differentiate instruction so that each student learns only and precisely what he or she needs, but of course that’s a joke: that flies in the face of public schooling, which is built around the idea of efficiency through mass instruction: I teach 100 students so that we don’t need 100 teachers. But that only works if I can teach 100 students basically the same thing. And I can’t even do that, because not all of the students care, or are interested, or see the value in it; not all of them like me and want to work with me; not all of them are present regularly, and not all of them are sober when they are present, or when they take the tests. And it’s even more skewed because they are sick, to death, of testing. I give them a test to find out what they know, and what I find out is: they know they hate tests. They stop trying about halfway through, and start guessing — if they didn’t start guessing from the outset. And there is nothing I can say that will change that. Somewhere, many years ago, a student guessed on a test and got an A, and every student who doesn’t care has been trying to replicate that feat. And not caring when it doesn’t work, because at least they didn’t put in much time or effort. And if they get a failing grade because of the test (Which is actually a bad idea, the administrator in my meeting told us: because the tests are designed to assess growth, and growth can’t be given a letter grade because letter grades show achievement, not growth [Example: I know everything my 10th graders need to know. If I take the test at the beginning of the year, I will score 100% achievement. When I take another test at the end of the year, I will show 0% growth — because I’ll score another 100%, because I already knew everything. So what’s my grade, the 0% the test says? Or an A+ based on my knowledge of the concepts?]. Which is funny, kinda, because my school administrators told me to make the test score a grade in the class, in an effort to get students to take the test more seriously. Didn’t work. Because:), they don’t really care because they’ll make up for the grade somewhere else, or else they’ll just live with a C as their final grade in English this year. Who cares? Not them.

So then you want accountability, right (Well, not you, but somebody sure does)? So how well am I teaching? Let’s say — because this actually happens a whole hell of a lot — students like my class, and they learn a lot from me; but they’re not too concerned with grades, and they hate standardized tests. So they intentionally blow it off as something of a protest, and shrug when I give them a bad grade — and then go right back to really learning, really thinking, really getting everything I’m trying to help them achieve. What’s my accountability score? Am I a rocking teacher for getting kids who don’t really care about school to pay attention and learn? Or am I a shit teacher for not getting good test scores out of them?

My answer is different from my school’s answer.

So there’s the thing, the main thing, that I am willing to see destroyed by Secretary DeVos if she manages to pull down the public education edifices in this country. If she wipes out standardized testing and the need for multiple layers of accountability, I will be ecstatic. I would like my school to know what I teach, how well I teach it, because they come and watch me teach. Frequently. Because they read my students’ papers, and see the comments I put on them. Because they talk to my students about what they learn, and their parents about what their kids have talked about this school year. On all of those measures, I’m a goddamn rock star. I would love it if DeVos pulls down the enormous wall of tests and lets people see what I can actually do. I would much, much rather be transparent, than accountable.

There’s more, too. The desire to make sure every school teaches the same thing, to ensure that every kid has the same access to the same learning, that everything bloody “aligns,” is a liberal obsession. It leads us to the Common Core, and standards-based education. Which is a goddamn joke, almost on the same scale as testing. Because here’s the thing (And it’s also a large part of the issue with standardized tests): who decides what the students need to learn? That’s the critical question about standards, and it never, never gets asked. But it has to be asked, because the ends determine the means: if I have to teach critical thinking, it’s going to mean a different class than if I have to teach grammar, which will be a different class from the one I teach to create cultural literacy.

So who decides? If it’s teachers, then you can expect to never actually get a working document: because every single person who teaches — who really teaches — a subject is going to have different ideas about the best way to do it, and the precise goals one should be aiming at when teaching that subject. Me, for instance: every English student needs to read Fahrenheit 451, and understand tone and symbolism in poetry. They have to do independent reading, and they need to write personal essays. They don’t ever need to study grammar or read any Victorian literature. There, see? I just caused every English teacher reading this to roll their eyes, and/or drop their jaws in shock. And when they come back and say every student simply MUST read Dostoevsky and the Brontes and diagram sentences, I’m going to puke black bile and India ink, just for them. No, that’s too gross. I’m just going to say No. Not in my class. Not ever.

So who decides? Easy: businesspeople decide. The ones with the money. They hire think tanks, who hire ex-teachers, who say whatever the businesspeople want to hear about what schools can do and what they should do. Because they are ex-teachers. What they hell do they care about what bullshit teachers have to put up with? They got out of the game already! Then those businesspeople bring their information to politicians and say, “This is what the business community thinks their next generation of workers should know. Don’t worry — we asked teachers, and they said all this was solid gold!” And the politicians, hungry for campaign contributions (“Did someone say gold?!?”) and eager to say they helped kids be ready for gainful employment, mandate that all schools in the district/state/country have to teach this vital information. And then maybe — maybe — some teachers sit down and talk about how they could teach that stuff. And they promptly disagree about everything, at which point the school district/state/federal government hires consultants: the ex-teachers who work for the think tanks. And they come and tell us, “It should be done this way.” And the teachers either think, because they’re like me, “All right, bro, but I’m still going to teach Fahrenheit 451 and tone and symbolism in poetry.” Or if they’re like most teachers, who were A+ students and still want to get gold stars, they think, “Okay, well I’ll try that and see if it works. I want to do what’s best for my students.” And there are the consultants, patting them on the shoulder and saying, “Trust me: this is what’s best for students.”

The first part of this process, up through the politicians, creates the Common Core. The second part, with the teachers, creates Engage NY. And the politicians love Engage NY and the Common Core because they make the businesspeople happy, and they mandate that all schools have to teach using that curriculum (or something just like it with a different name), and teach those standards (Or the same standards with a different name — like, say, the Arizona College and Career Readiness Standards, or AZCCRS.). Then they buy a testing system that aligns with those standards and that curriculum (And any liberals involved say, “Well, good, at least every student is getting exactly the same education and the same set of standards! That’s fair!”), and mandate that schools must achieve high scores or the state will impose sanctions. And then the Galileo company comes along and says “Use our test for practice, because then your students will get higher test scores on that state test!” And the administrators, who also have no idea of nor interest in what gets taught and how, buy the Galileo testing system because it’s cheap, and then they tell teachers that they have to do whatever it takes to raise student test scores on Galileo, because, they imagine, that will get students to do better on state tests (Because it aligns! IT ALL ALIGNS!), which will please the politicians, because it pleases the businesspeople. And so teachers — give up. And teach to the test. Because we can’t change the damn system, and we can’t escape it, and we might as well earn a decent paycheck, for once.

But we don’t, because the businesspeople also got the politicians to cut their taxes and cut spending, which means there’s less money for schools; and then they break teachers’ unions, and there’s nobody asking for more money for teachers, or trying to shift the focus off of testing and the Common Core.

All of that, Secretary DeVos. Kill the Common Core and all standards-based curricula, and let me decide, based on what I know and what my students want to know and need to know, what I should teach. Wipe out standardized testing, because if I want to know what my students know, I will assess their knowledge and ability in some way that makes sense: I will assign an essay, and I will read it. And you all can read them, too, if you want; (But only if Mrs. DeVos kills FERPA, the law that prevents teachers from allowing students names and grades to be public information, and which therefore keeps us from publishing student samples — even though one of the very best ways to learn is to read what other people just like you have written.. Please kill FERPA, Mrs. DeVos.) or you can ask me how they’re doing, and I’ll tell you. Because I will know. That’s actually my job, you know. And while you’re at it, lay off 2/3 of the administrators, from assistant principals to superintendents: at least 2/3 of all of the administrators that I have ever known have been even more incompetent and unqualified to run a school than — well, than you, Secretary DeVos. And that’s saying something. The other 1/3 have been outstanding: I would be happy with just those outstanding people running the school. And if you got rid of common curriculum, standards-based learning, standardized testing, and FERPA, then 2/3 of the school’s paperwork would disappear, and we wouldn’t need nearly as much middle management to handle it. Oh — and wipe out 504 plans and IEPs, would you? I have never yet had one of those things actually change the way I teach. Because if a student of mine has a learning disability or a challenge of some kind and they need extra time or extra help or a different standard of achievement, you know what I say? I don’t say, “Where’s your documentation, buster?”

I say “How can I help?”

Because I’m a teacher. Because I’m a good teacher.

So keep me, Mrs. DeVos. And if my colleagues are not good teachers, you can find out by talking to their students and parents, and watching them teach and talking to them about what they’re teaching; and then, by all means, fire them. Go out and find better teachers. Shit, if I’m wrong and I’m actually a terrible teacher, who’s been able to hide in the chaos and paper-smothered madness of modern education, then fire me, too. Find new people with new ideas and interesting subject matter. Let them make up classes — why does it always have to be math and science, history and English? Why can’t there be a class on video games? If it teaches critical thinking, analysis, problem solving, and good communication, who cares if it’s never been done before? Who cares if there isn’t a test for it? Let’s see if it works!

It certainly can’t be worse than the system we have now. Which, as long as you do it carefully and thoughtfully, feel free to break into smithereens. I’ll help.

Don’t Tread On This

Dusty 1 Comment

I don’t want Betsy DeVos to screw up my job.

I sympathize with her, in some ways. In several ways, actually: we both have names that are easy to make fun of. But, Betsy — are we not men? (I know, it’s a stupid joke. It is. Talk to me on Hump Day, Bets.) And we both got picked to do a job for which we were (are) grossly unqualified, me as a first-year English teacher, her as the most important figure in American education. But the main difference is that my time as a first-year teacher couldn’t have screwed up Mrs. DeVos’s chosen career as a billionaire lobbyist and political donor; but her time as the Secretary of Education could certainly screw up my chosen career. In a number of ways.

The thing is, though? It’s already pretty screwed up. My job, that is. In fact, there are several aspects of teaching that I wouldn’t mind at all if Secretary DeVos bit off, chewed up, and spit to her conservative Hellhounds, Voucher and Charter. I have such mixed feelings about education, in fact, that I’ve been trying for five days now to write this blog, but I keep getting tangled up and losing track of the path to Senseville. So the solution I’ve come up with is to split my thoughts into two sections, and write two blogs instead of one: one about the aspects of education that I hope survive this administration; and one about the aspects that I would like to see get thrown to the wolves.

We’ll start with the positives first, shall we? Because really, I think this is the greater issue. I think we would be in worse trouble if this stuff were lost than we would be if the bad stuff remained. Though neither scenario is ideal, and I fear that both may be coming to a head, to a tipping point where we may all lose something precious — perhaps by clinging to something worthless. We’ll see.

All right. The first thing that I think when I consider the state of education today is, this is my life. I was educated by public schools, as were most people I know; and not to toot all of our horns or anything, but I know a lot of smart people. There are a huge number — millions — of really freaking smart people in this country that went through American public schools. It’s hard for me to see public education as doomed and failing when I know scientists, artists, lawyers — and of course, teachers, lots and lots of teachers — who all learned most of what they know from public schools, many of us all the way through college and even graduate school at public colleges and universities. I know that it’s impossible to say how much intelligence or ability comes from schooling and how much from natural ability and inclination, and how much from home environment and social milieu; but still, education can’t be all bad when it helped make all of us. And I’ll bet anyone reading this could honestly say the same thing: you know a lot of damn smart people who went to public schools.

For me personally, I have been a part of the education system from the top side for almost two decades. I have taught enough people to populate a small town. For all the things we get wrong (See next blog, hopefully tomorrow), I do a lot of things right, as do my colleagues. The main thing that I get right is that I understand what my job really is, at the heart of it: I create an opportunity for learning to happen — and it does happen, most of the time, for most of my students. And then sometimes I am able to help create unique moments: moments of clarity, moments of revelation, moments of doubt, moments of change; and it is in those moments that people become something other than what they were before. That is what we are talking about when we use the cliche “making a difference.” In the strictest sense, I make a difference for everyone I teach, because if they hadn’t been taught by me, they would have been taught by someone else, which would have had a different result; but that’s not what making a difference is about. Making a difference is about changing a person in a definable, tangible, unique way. I have done that. I’ve done it with some students through personal relationships, as a friend or a mentor or even an inspiration; I’ve done it with specific classes I’ve taught that have been particularly useful for some; I’ve done it with books I’ve helped students to understand and with concepts I have made clear and meaningful; sometimes I’ve done it with a single statement, a single idea that I put into someone’s head. I don’t know that I’ve done it a lot, because I don’t know every time that I’ve done it, and I don’t know what “a lot” would be; but I know I’ve done it. I know that it’s good.

But even without this hippy-dippy touchy-feely stuff (He said in commiseration with the at least theoretical conservative reader who hates phrases like “make a difference” and thinks teachers are all liberal brainwashers who indoctrinate innocent American children into the wonders of multicultural homolovin’ Communism — aaaaaand now those conservative readers have left the building.), there is something purely valuable in public education, something I suppose I do my part for, but which mostly happens before students get to me: the basic foundations of an educated and thinking populace. Public education ensures that our society includes mostly people with a basic grasp of literacy and numeracy; people who understand how to read a newspaper and calculate their tax burden, even if they don’t always sit down and do either of those things. They can, and so when the opportunity and motivation arises, they do, and that is critical. Because as a society, we can work to get people interested and involved; and there are times in life when events conspire to get people interested and involved — such as the last election and the circus that has followed after it — but if the people can’t take in and grasp the information, then it makes no difference how much we work to get them interested or involved: they can’t be. If you can’t read a newspaper, then you can’t take part in a modern society. (If you don’t read newspapers or other genuine news sources, then you are choosing not to take part in society, but that’s a different issue, and not one that our education system is solving. In fact, it’s probably one that education today is exacerbating. Tune in next time, when despair takes over from hope!) And if you can’t take part in society, then all the democratic ideals in the world don’t keep you from being a slave. Public education does that extremely well. There are still gaps, still people who go through schools in this country and never master the basics and so line up for a life of toil and drudgery; but we do a far, far better job of ensuring that minimum ability in our populace than most societies have, and better than any society did farther back than a few centuries or so.

(Oh yeah: me personally, I teach critical thinking more than literacy or numeracy. I do a pretty damned good job at it, too. But that, unlike literacy and numeracy, doesn’t have to come from schools. The social environment does a better job of teaching critical thinking than it does of teaching literacy.)

I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want Secretary DeVos to close public schools in such ways that thousands, or tens of thousands, or even millions of kids are left without a fundamental education. I don’t want to create a new serf class, and trap them in the dark ages of the mind. Because ignorance sets, like concrete, and then it becomes impossible to dig out; you have to chip that shit away, bit by bit, blow by blow. And even then, you still get dumbfucks who think the goddamn Earth is flat. Jesus wept. If we defund public schools, or take away any educational standards so that a small religious community might decide that their children only need to learn to read the Bible and obey the word of their ministers and the Town Elders, then we may have children who become trapped in bubbles of ignorance — bubbles made of concrete. I don’t want that.

I don’t want to lose inspiration, either. I recognize that homeschooling done right can be incredibly effective — the two smartest students I have had in seventeen years of teaching (And really, I’ve had a lot of smart students, but when it comes to the absolute top, there is no. Freaking. Contest. It’s these two guys.) were two brothers who were homeschooled entirely through what would have been eighth grade, and then entered public schools as high school freshmen. But homeschooling, because it comes in a very familiar environment, is less likely, in my opinion, to be inspiring. Our parents can stand as role models for us, but it is much easier for them to be the people we rebel against than it is for them to be an inspiration; and when they are an inspiration, it often inspires us to imitate, not to create ourselves as something new. I think outside influences are better at that. What I mean is, my father is an inspiration to me as a hard-working and deep-thinking man; my mother is an inspiration as the kindest person I have ever known. But neither could ever inspire me to be a writer, because they aren’t writers. They don’t see literature the same way I see it: my mother sees spirituality that way; my father sees that inspiration in physics. And maybe I could have been like that, too — but like most kids, I intentionally went away from what they were, and so I am an atheist who reads literature instead of physics textbooks. My inspirations were teachers, and the authors they introduced me to.

I don’t mean to overstate this, or to denigrate the idea that parents are inspiring. But I think it is important for young people to see inspiration in people other than their family, in people who are tangibly different. School is not the only place that can happen — but it’s a good place. Because school is full of people who are, first, qualified, and often possessed of profound expertise, in their subject; and second, generally decent people. Teachers are good potential inspiration. I think it’s important that we be available for that, even if everything taught in schools could be learned from YouTube.

So I don’t want Secretary DeVos to make the job so difficult, so onerous, or so belittled and undercut, that every good person leaves the profession. We’re already working to drive them out, with our political factionalism taking on schools and teachers as handy scapegoats, or turning schools into the indoctrination centers that they should never be; and DeVos could make it worse, and may want to make it worse: anyone who opposes public education opposes teachers’ unions, which essentially means they oppose teachers. No, really: I understand the arguments against unions, and they’re stupid, but that’s not the point: the point is that teachers’ unions, even if they are too powerful, even if they are too greedy (And they’re not — that’s the stupid part), work only to protect and support teachers. The desire to break teachers’ unions is a desire to break teachers, often for financial reasons, and often for political ones. I think DeVos, with her support for Voucher and Charter (“Down, Voucher! Sic ’em, Charter! Attaboy!”), has both reasons for wanting to break teachers’ unions, and therefore teachers; if she succeeds on a national scale, she will essentially break us. I’ll tell you right now, I work in a charter school in a “Right-to-work” state, and while there are a lot of good teachers at my school, few of them are the new teachers who came up without unions. (Some of them are, which is awesome.) Most of us learned our skills in an environment where a union protected and sheltered us, and that made us better teachers. I’ve worked both with union membership and without, and teaching is unquestionably better with.

I hope DeVos doesn’t kill it. I hope nobody does. I worry that the wall, and the Executive Orders, and the Russian connections, are all distractions from the real harm that could be done to public institutions like the schools and the health care system, the free press and the right to vote. For that reason, I hope that Secretary DeVos, and President Trump, are exactly as inept as they seem to be. Because when it comes to education, this teacher wants them to fail.

How To Be Happier: Teenager Edition

Dusty Leave a comment

This is an example essay I wrote for my AP Language class when they were assigned a Process Analysis. If it’s a little on the nose, well — it’s for teenagers.

 

How To Be Happier

Are you dissatisfied with your life?

You’re teenagers. Of course you are.

But that’s the bad news. (Okay, it’s probably not news. But how would you know? When was the last time you actually watched the news? I’m not even going to ask about reading it.) The good news is that you can fix this. You can change your daily routines, in simple, manageable ways, and the result will be improved satisfaction with your life. In fact, even more than that: your life will get clearly, demonstrably better. I guarantee it.

Let me tell you how. Step by step, so you don’t get lost. Pay attention.

 

Step One: Waking Up

You’re probably still tired. School does come early, doesn’t it? I don’t really have a solution, because even when researchers say school should start later, their suggestion is between 8am and 8:30, so it’s as good as it’s going to get; but I will say that often, catching just a few more minutes of sleep can make you feel a bit more – well, not happy, certainly, but resigned, at least; accepting, maybe – of your day’s new start and the requirement that you must now move, and act, and interact with someone other than your pillow. So the key to that is to minimize your time preparing for school (or work, on the weekends) in the morning. Here’s what you do.

First, put your phone down. Checking the Twitters, or your Insta-Face GramBook, or your text messages or what have you probably doesn’t take a lot of your time, considering that your thumbs can move at skittering-cockroach speeds over the screen; but it does take your attention, and that slows you down. Brushing your teeth while looking at a screen is slower than brushing your teeth while looking at your teeth. Sure, brushing your teeth isn’t nearly as interesting as social media, but the goal here is a few more minutes of sleep: so stare into that bathroom mirror, pretend you’re a rabid wolf foaming at the mouth (Peppermint-flavored rabies is the best kind of rabies!), and get it done quickly. Same with depilation, if that is part of your morning routine: every minute you shave off of your shaving is a minute more unconscious. And that’s always the goal.

Do as many tasks as possible before you go to bed in the evening. Set out your clothes for the next day; floss at night instead of in the morning (If you floss both times, you’re either obsessive, or you snack too much in your sleep. Seriously, who has food in their teeth before breakfast? Do it at night like a regular person.). If you can shower at night without your hair doing alien levitation tricks the next day, go for it. Get your backpack/binder/whatever ready the night before, so you can just grab it and go.

Don’t skip breakfast, though. That’s important. Speaking of which…

 

Step Two: Breakfast

First, put your phone down. If you are one of those incredibly fortunate people with a loved one who actually makes you breakfast, show your gratitude by speaking to them. Try to be pleasant, though don’t demand a miracle from yourself; if this person is actually willing to get up in the morning and cook for someone else, they are almost certainly willing to carry the conversation, and would be happy with the chance to share their overly-chipper-insanity-babbles with you. Ask them what their plans are for the day, and then just try to nod without actually falling asleep on top of your waffles on the way down.

If you, like me, are on your own for breakfast, then it’s toast or cereal that you are looking for. If you’re a toaster: try buttering both sides. For the more cereal person, I highly recommend Mom’s Cereal. It is delicious, and it seems local, organic, and environmentally conscious; actually, it’s a Post brand with a good marketing scheme. It just pretends to be more aware.

Like you.

If you are eating cereal, then the only thing you are permitted to look at is the cereal box. Yes, I know it isn’t interesting; but that’s how cereal must be eaten. It’s a tradition. Try comparing the nutrition facts on the box to anything else you have available with a recommended daily allowance. Like the bottle of bleach under the sink! Pop quiz: which one’s healthier, bleach or Lucky Charms?

(Hint: it’s bleach. It’s also delicious on the cereal!)

All right, all fueled up and ready to hit the road? Then let’s go!

 

Step Three: Driving

This is a bit tougher, because there are two areas for improvement in driving: driving safer, and avoiding boredom while driving. The two can seem mutually exclusive, because things you do to entertain yourself can detract from your safety. But there are ways to accomplish both goals, which is where my suggestions will aim; anything you can substitute for entertainment is up to you. Here’s my idea.

First, put your phone down. Distracted driving is rapidly becoming the largest cause of accidents. According to the Almighty Google, 431,000 people were injured in accidents involving distracted drivers in 2014, and by far the largest population of drivers using phones while they drive is teenagers. You. Putting your phone down is the easiest thing you can do to make yourself safer – and believe me, you do not want to start your day with a car crash. Or end it that way. Or have one in the middle.

In terms of entertainment, try singing along, at maximum volume, to whatever is on the radio. It’s best when you’re listening to opera or Spanish music. When you have no idea what the words are, you get to make them up. And the tune, too! Try it with your windows down – entertain the other drivers! See, it feels good to make other people happy!

Before you know it, you’ll arrive. (Even faster if other people are chasing you.) Time for…

 

Step Four: School

Once again, there are many aspects, some of which can pull you in opposite directions. If you do well in class, does that make you a nerd, and therefore persona non grata among the interesting sex? (If you are interested in women, then no: they tend not to be that shallow. If you are interested in men, then no: they are way too shallow to care about intelligence.) But in any case, I will try to help you out in as many aspects as I can. Here we go.

 

Classes: If you really can get more sleep, that will make the biggest difference. Along with eating breakfast. Nobody can learn while they are asleep. Other than getting more sleep, the next best thing you can do is this: first, put your phone down. Pay attention. I know it can be difficult, but it’s a positive feedback loop: the more you pay attention, the more sense it makes, and that makes it easier to pay attention and also more useful at the same time; at some point, you will be able to get distracted by the ideas in the class, and still pay attention at the same time.

Trust me. That is a very fun way to learn something. Give it a shot; your current method of ignoring the very idea of work, and then hoping that something, somehow, will make sense when the test is placed in front of you, is probably not working real well.

 

Using the bathroom: First, put your phone down. Carefully: you don’t want to drop it here. And talking to someone else while you are on the toilet makes you worse than Stalin. No exaggeration. But it is fun to have a fake one-way conversation while someone is in the next stall. Ask the air how their hemorrhoids are doing. Or if they plan to torture that last one they caught, or just kill it and dump the body. Or try talking to the person in the next stall, demanding a response, and then when they respond, say disgustedly, “I wasn’t talking to you!”

Please note: if you are using the men’s room, don’t talk to people while you’re using urinals. Don’t do it. Ever. Worse than Stalin. Really.

 

Dealing with teachers and assorted “authority” figures: First, put your phone down. The people who think they are in charge of the school are old-fashioned; to them, eye contact is respectful, and looking down and away – say, at a phone screen subtly palmed in one hand (Or both hands, if you have an iPhone 6) –  is disrespectful. I know, I know, it makes no sense – you don’t respect them whether you look at them or not – but you will find that things are much easier when you give people what they want, particularly with “authorities,” when it doesn’t actually cost you anything to give it to them. It bothers my pride, too, to just give people something they didn’t earn (Like passing grades or an answer to their ridiculous questions); but then, in exchange, they don’t give me something I didn’t earn: a Walmart-sized ration of crap. So look them in the eye when they are talking to you. Unless they are angry: then look down at the ground. At the ground, mind you – not at a phone. Teachers hate it when you look at phones while they are talking to you. I think it’s because they don’t actually use their phones. They never have friends. And even if they do, nobody texts a teacher: they correct your grammar. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

A secondary note: teachers never want to see your phone. Never. They don’t want to look at that video, they don’t want to read that webcomic, they don’t want to scroll through those memes or screencapped text conversations. If they look when you bring it to them, they are only being polite, and praying that you will go away soon. If you think you have something so funny or interesting that a teacher has to see it, send them an email. If it’s not worth you putting out that much effort, then it isn’t worth them looking at your cracked screen, trying to make out the tiny letters.

 

Social Life: First, put your phone down. Seriously. Counterintuitive, I know, but listen: people who want to hang out with you will want to hang out with you. Not your phone. There is no meme you can show them that they haven’t already seen. And if you make memes, nobody will want to hang out with you. Ever. Nobody. I mean it. Stop making memes. And when you meet someone that doesn’t immediately make you want to puke with boredom or nap with rage, then try talking to them. Of course you can talk about your phones, but you’re either going to make them feel bad when your phone is better than theirs, or feel bad when their phone is better than yours. Better to just forget about the phones and, I don’t know, talk about music. Or movies, maybe. Or which teachers suck least. Or how individual existence is only an illusion and we’re all connected aspects of one divine godhead. Once you get to know a person, you could sit together for hours staring at your phones together; but it’s better if you don’t. If you want to watch something, get a bigger screen; otherwise you’re breathing their damp, half-used exhaled air, and they’re stealing bites of your Twinkies and sometimes catching your fingers instead, and it’s weird. If you don’t have access to a bigger screen, try going out and doing something together. Take a walk. Go to a dog park or the shelter and pet puppies for free. Go to the mall and race the old people – it’s up to you if it’s more fun when they know you’re racing, or if it’s more fun when they don’t; I recommend both. You always get better stories when you make them than when you see them online.

 

Homework: First, put your phone down. You are fooling nobody when you cheat. Seriously. Fooling nobody, and gaining nothing but disdain and a sense of your own hopelessness. Feel free to not do the homework, of course – who really cares? I mean, teachers, but who cares that matters? Nobody, that’s who. Your parents may think they care, but there’s an easy way out: pretend you’re gay, if you’re not; or pretend you’re not, if you are and your parents know it. Then when they’ve forgotten entirely about that missing math assignment, just tell them it was a phase. It never fails. More advanced options include convincing them that you have fallen in love with, say, a toaster. Everybody knows about teenaged hormones: you can sell it, if you work hard enough at it. Just like pregnant women can convince people that they want to eat literally anything, and usually get the person to provide it. I almost wish I could be a pregnant woman: I’d tell everyone that I was suffering an unbearable craving for human flesh; then I’d stare at them silently, hungrily, and wait to see who was really my friend.

 

All right, that’s the end of your school day. For the drive home, treat it the same way as the drive to school: sing your way home. Pretend your car is powered by music. See if you can get it to fly on the wings of song. As for dinner, treat it like breakfast: if you are provided dinner, show your gratitude by talking to the person about their day, but this time, try to add something about yours. It doesn’t matter what, as long as it isn’t on your phone. If you make your own dinner, read the cereal box. Oh: let me add one thing here that could be scattered throughout your day.


Step In-Between: Waiting in line/in traffic/for your turn

Go ahead and get your phone out. This is what phones are actually good for, other than talking to Grandma. Unless you’re driving: if you’re driving, now’s your chance to really wow your audience in the nearby cars, because they’re waiting with you. Here’s a challenge: get them to listen to you when their windows are rolled up. Try adding pantomime to your singing.

 

Once you finally get through the day, it’s time for . . .

 

Step Five: Evening entertainment

I don’t want to tell you what to do with your free time. I mean, how invasive  and controlling and arrogant, to tell somebody how to live their life. You do you.

 

Step Six: Bedtime

At last, time to get some sleep! After you shower, floss, shave, pack your bags and set your clothes out for tomorrow, that is. Your pillow has been waiting for you all day! Oh, how you’ve missed it! You’ve got your narwhal pajamas on, your six fans directed at you, three of them blowing over heater vents and three over buckets of ice; the alarm is set, the clock is turned away so you don’t obsess over how much time you have until you have to get up; you’re all set. And how do you make your sleep deeper, more restful, more rejuvenating for the next day?

First: put your phone down.

Teaching the Teacher Teachers

Dusty Leave a comment

I never want to be an administrator. I don’t like paperwork. I don’t like dealing with angry people. I don’t like solving people’s problems, unless their problem is, “How do you spell ‘necessary?'” I don’t really like making decisions that affect lots of other people, and I wouldn’t like listening to the bitching that would inevitably result. I know that sounds a little funny coming from a teacher, since I do all of those things; but all of them are less obnoxious for a teacher. I mean, yes, I have too much paperwork to do; but much of it is only seen by students, so the standards are not very high: what I write needs to be helpful, but it doesn’t need to be politic, nor even polite. My students laugh when I make fun of them in the comments. I don’t think the state department of education would chuckle if I put a troll-face meme on the Title I report. And yes, I do some problem solving, but really, most of it is related to my subject, which makes it easy for me to solve; when it isn’t related to my subject — and I have dealt with very different problems, romantic problems, job problems, serious personal issues like drugs and abuse and homelessness — then it is really just one person helping another, and has very little to do with my job. I mean, if a teenager came up to me while I was drinking coffee in a cafe and told me that he was being abused at home, I’d try to do all the same things I do as a teacher, so that doesn’t really feel like part of my job. And making decisions for other people, while also something I do, is something I can very easily dodge responsibility for — “We’re studying this because it’s in the curriculum.” Boom. Buck is passed.

By the same token, I wouldn’t want to be a teacher teacher. I wouldn’t want to teach teachers how to teach, not in a university setting, and not as an inservice trainer. I don’t want to be that guy. I don’t want to follow the current trends, and that’s all those people do; and I certainly wouldn’t want to be that superficially chipper about it. I mean, if I ran an inservice about something that was total bullshit — say, integrating STEM into a literature class, to pick a completely random example — I’d want to be honest, as I am with my students: “I know, guys, this is complete horseshit. But the administrators are making us do this, so let’s try to get through it and then we can do something fun, okay? Like read a poem, or have a debate on a controversial issue.” And if I did that, I’d get fired after the second sentence. If not the first. (Somehow, even though they are adults talking to adults, teacher trainers never let themselves swear. I suppose it’s more professional, but I heard a man, for the first time in my life, use the word “chump” in earnest. And of course it’s because he couldn’t say “asshole.” Or, considering the particular bro I’m talking about, he probably would have said “bitch.” But I’d have more respect for him if he’d sucked it up and said “asshole.” Though less respect if he’d said “bitch.” A little less.)

But despite not wanting those jobs myself, I’m going to give some advice to both administrators and teacher teachers, right now. Because all of those people, despite their general lack of qualifications in my field — their lack of knowledge, and their lack of expertise, skill, or insight — have no trouble at all telling me how to do my job. They do it several times a year, in fact. So now it’s time for me to tell them how to do their jobs.

All right, first, for the teacher trainers: know how to teach. I mean, come on; you are standing in front of a whole room, sometimes a large room, full of teachers. And yeah, a number of them may be new — but some of us have been doing this for a long time. And even among the newbies, many of us are actually quite good at it, and know the way it should be done. So why is it that almost none of you know what I know?

For instance: understand your technology. I get it if you’re bad at technology; I struggle with it sometimes, too. But if you’re going to use a PowerPoint presentation, then use it. There’s nothing more ridiculous than to watch someone skip through slides, saying, “No, we don’t need to go over that.” So then why is the slide there? Or when people set up those cool effects, fades in and out, bullet points that pop up one at a time; and then they just click through all of that stuff to get the final overstuffed slide, which they go through piece by piece. If all you want to do is throw a bunch of information up there all at once, why do the effects? It’s distracting, and it makes you look incompetent.

For another thing, know that you shouldn’t lecture for three hours straight. Give people a break. Include audience participation, maybe some group work. (I mean, I hate that crap, but most teachers are more social than I, and they like it; if you knew your audience, you would include some group work.) Certainly ask some questions, and listen to the answers; maybe have a discussion. Oh — and ice breakers. Don’t do ice breakers. Most of the teachers know each other, and you will never, ever see us again; you don’t need to know our names and what we teach and one wacky thing about ourselves. Don’t make us think of wacky factoids early in the morning the first day back from vacation. Don’t do it. If you really think the ice needs to be broken, then listen to the wisdom of Ogden Nash: “Candy is dandy; but liquor is quicker.”

And please, have basic competence. Speak audibly. Understand a microphone. Know how to make the image fullscreen. Understand how to make your movie clips work, and how to get sound out of them (And get an aux cord. Please don’t hold your microphone up to the laptop speakers, or even worse, crank the volume on the laptop and ask everyone to be real quiet.). Learn how to use the remote, OR DON’T USE IT. Grasp the physics of a whiteboard. Have your materials prepared ahead of time, and make sure they’re the right materials. (All of these, by the way, are things I have seen presenters fail to do, over the course of my 17 years in inservice — errr, I mean teaching. No — I mean Hell.)

Once you get past the same level of presentation competence that I expect from my students, let’s talk about what you’re talking about. Make sure that your presentation is relevant. I know you want the gig — I want to get paid, too! — but I would never take a job as a physics teacher and then show up and talk about poetry. If you are doing an inservice at a high school, don’t talk about elementary school techniques and concepts. Don’t present on English language learners to a school that has a grand total of four of them. I mean, that’s the administration’s fault, too, for hiring you to talk about something essentially irrelevant — but you’re the one that has to stand up there and waste the teachers’ time; I have to think that much hatred focused all on you at once has to be uncomfortable. And if a faculty has already learned everything you have to talk about, don’t go talk to them about it again. Think of something new to say, or cancel the inservice.

Once you know that your subject is relevant, the last key is: talk about your actual subject. Don’t talk about yourself. I’m sure you have fascinating stories about yourself, about your martial arts experience, or your motorcycle, or your world travels, or your penchant for organic gardening (All of those, by the way, were discussed by the same speaker. The only lie in that sentence is the word “fascinating.”), but now is not the time. Teachers, if you didn’t know, have shit to do, especially at the beginning of a semester. We don’t appreciate having our time taken up learning about you and how unbelievably macho you are (“I was doing MMA before MMA was a thing.” Actually, I swear to you, a direct quote. He also used the word “vicarious” when he meant “precarious,” in the sentence, “Now you have put them in a vicarious situation.” I don’t mean to nitpick, but this guy was actually a nit, and he should have been picked, squashed, and flicked at a garbage can. Too harsh? Hang on; there’s more.). Also, don’t insult your audience by saying that you are smarter than them because you got out of teaching (Same guy.), and don’t tell them that anyone who doesn’t sign up for your other, more extensive training is stupid (Yup: also the same guy. Want to guess what precipitated this particular blog?). And I know this is out there — the very idea that someone would actually do this is laughable! — but don’t compare teaching to slaughtering chickens, with the analogy showing how teachers get jaded — just like someone who has cut the heads off of too many chickens.

I really want to say that was a different guy. It wasn’t. Gave a three-hour talk, nonstop, no break, and at the end of it, asked if there were any questions. (By the way: this one is for the teachers in the audience. If, at the end of a multi-hour presentation, the presenter asks if there are any questions, then anyone who actually asks a question, thereby making us all sit there longer and listen to more inanity, is going to go straight to Hell, where they will be strapped into an Iron Maiden and forced to listen to presentations about the variations of Mahjongg, written in Sanskrit and then run through Google translate and read aloud by a drunk with no teeth. Keep your damn questions to yourself. Go up and ask them personally if you have to — AFTER THE REST OF US HAVE LEFT.) The question that was asked (And even though this was a good question, still: straight to Hell.) was basically, “So did you ever tell us the thing we actually need to know?”

To which the answer was, No. He did not. He proceeded to do so, taking about five minutes, which tells me that the entire presentation could have been done in about fifteen minutes, total. In fact, I could do the presentation more effectively in a series of haiku. (No, I won’t torment you with the actual haiku; this was still an education inservice, and nobody who isn’t a teacher should ever go through that, even as a joke.) But then we wouldn’t have heard about his experience pouring concrete, which is what led him into the world of education. Yes, I’m serious.

Administrators: I really only have one piece of advice. Don’t ever hire that guy. Everything else is relatively acceptable. Just. Not. Him.

On the Fourth Day of Blogging, Just Dusty Blogged for Me…

Dusty Leave a comment

*This is an example essay I wrote for my students. I assigned them a narrative essay, after studying several other narratives, with a wide-open topic. They could write about anything that involved them personally, and which had a story with an actual plot involved; it was up to them whether or not it had a lesson.

I suppose this one does.

 

Confessions of a Sign Bandit

burr-park-old

Look close: see the small dark rectangle under the center window? That’s a bronze plaque.

burr-park-new

Same building, same window. No plaque.

 

It all started innocently enough. My schoolchum Charles and I (Names have been changed to protect the innocent – so very, very innocent) left my house one sunny summer day, on our way to play stickball with the fellows, or perhaps to frolic with the bullfrogs at the old fishing hole, when what should we come across but a signpost, lying on the ground. It had been pulled up or knocked down, and it lay, calmly and quietly, as if patiently waiting repair. Charles and I exchanged an impish look, both taken by a playful caprice, as we so often were in those days. We took up the fallen soldier and scampered homeward, to the basement workshop. There we carefully removed the signs – two street names and a Stop sign, the proud red octagon’s warning to us unheeded in our whimsical glee – and made up a sign of our own, which read, “THE GREAT SIGN BANDIT HAS STRUCK AGAIN!” Accenting this message were various ejaculations, “Ha Ha Ha,” and “You’ll never catch me!” among them. Then we returned the sign to its proper place, standing it upright in the ground once more, to tell our tale of tomfoolery to the world. Ah, the hijinks of youth!

 

But I soon found that I had a taste for it. I didn’t know why. The removal of the signs themselves from the metal post had been simplicity itself, the work of a hammer for the street names, and two wrenches for the stop sign. Their appearance, a mixture of urban metalwork with suburban lettering, lacquered white on green, appealed to me. The excitement of the illicit act, particularly the nose-thumbing to authority — I liked it.

 

I never did such things, you see. I was quiet, I was polite, I was shy. I would never rebel against anything. I would never refuse to do what was expected, what I was told, what was right. But I had done it.

 

I wanted to do it again.

 

But how?

 

That question was soon answered when, on a solo jaunt down the same street, I saw the same signpost — red stop sign and green street signs having been replaced by the local sign-wielding proletarians, bless their innocent hearts — once more lying prone, prostrate, fallen.

 

I took it home again. I took the signs off, again.

 

It was even easier the second time.

 

My friends, holders of all secrets, soon knew of this; my girlfriend — delighted, I now realize, by this teeny, tiny whiff of bad boy in the cherubic youth she liked, but was perhaps not enthralled by — asked me for a favor: would I get her the sign from her street? She would like to have it as a memento.

 

I walked home from her house that night, as I had done before. The street was dark, the sign was held in a bracket nailed to a telephone pole.

 

My girlfriend wanted that sign.

 

Really, was there any other choice?

 

Of course not: I climbed that pole, I stood on that sign, I knocked it down. I ran with it to my lady’s house, presenting her the head of her slain dragon. I was victorious. A champion.

 

Soon after, I was up late, watching television, alone in the house, my mother having gone to work, my father having gone to work 3,000 miles away (My father, a particle physicist, had taken a job in Boston unrelated to his field in order to support his family; when given an opportunity to actually do cutting edge particle physics, he had leapt at the chance — but had left his family behind where our roots were. He had an apartment in California and flew back to visit every month.), when I realized: it’s dark outside. Nobody would see me, if I were out there. And — this was the real revelation — I could go out. Not walk back, from somewhere else, going straight home as I usually did; I could leave home. Nobody would even know.

 

So I did. I went out. I walked down the street — nobody stopped me — and then down another street, and then down another. Past where the signpost had now vanished entirely, the sign-wielders twice bitten, thrice shy; I was disappointed.

 

But now I had a new system: signs held up with nails could be pulled down by my weight (As it turns out, I already knew this). Soon enough, I found one such — a No Parking sign, a lesser prize, perhaps, but a prize nonetheless, and the pole it was nailed to was beside a tree that made for easy climbing. I climbed. I kicked. I stole. I ran home with it under my jacket, next to my racing heart. The No Parking sign was no restriction for me, no command: no, it was freedom.

 

It wasn’t enough. I had to find a bigger prize. And at the city park near my house, I found it. The park had been deeded to the city nearly a century before by the farmers who had lived there once, long before the wealthy Bostonites moved in and raised the suburban property values; as the city had grown more and more developed, the family had given the land to the city for use as a public park. It was a lovely park — tennis and basketball courts, soccer and baseball fields, swings and slides, stone walls, wrought iron fences, elms and oaks and rhododendrons.

 

And a beautiful sign. A bronze plaque, three feet by two feet, attached to the wall of the park’s central clubhouse, commemorating the gift of the park to the city. Tarnished by years of weathering, but the black on the edges of the raised letters just gave it gravitas, and a kind of warm, homey beauty. It looked like history. It looked like pride.

 

Attached to the wall with four screws. Flathead screws.

 

I waited until 2am, that time, watching HBO movies slide by unnoticed. I had the screwdriver. I had a long coat that I would drape over it. That sign would be mine.

 

You know what? It was easy. Nobody saw me. Nobody even drove past me as I walked it the mile or so back to my house. Nobody was home when I left, nobody was home when I got back. Sure, it was heavy — but adrenaline makes you strong. I was young, I was free. I was — the Great Sign Bandit.

 

Right: until my father came home for his visit.

 

He went into my room looking for towels, which I had a bad habit of dropping on the floor after my showers and simply leaving where they lay. I did that a lot, actually — schoolwork, books, games, shoes, unfinished projects, stolen street signs; all lay scattered, strewn haphazardly around my room. And when he went in there, he found the signs — hard to miss them, five or six full-sized street signs propped up against the walls or flat on the floor.

 

“Oh, the shame of it! My son, the sign thief!” he said, poking his head into the computer room where I was playing video games. At first, my heart stopped. I turned to look at him, no doubt ashen; what was he going to do to me?

 

But he was kidding. “Just don’t do it again,” he said. I nodded, struck dumb. So . . . he wasn’t going to kill me? I got away with this?

 

Some background is called for. Before we moved to Boston, we lived on Long Island, in a small town called Bellport. (We believed it was because the Liberty Bell had stopped there while it was being smuggled past the British. Not true. But we believed it.) Our property there had been on the corner, and the street sign had been planted in our yard. And for some reason, the local teenagers thought it was funny to bend the sign down onto itself so it somewhat resembled a taco shell. The sign was freestanding, and they would jump up and hang on it, and bend it down so that the name looked down to the street and up to the sky, and then bend the ends down, rendering it entirely unreadable. My father, irritated by vandalism and feeling some civic responsibility, would take the sign down, bring it into his basement workshop, straighten it out, and put it back.

 

The next day or soon after, it would be bent again. So he would straighten and replace it again, this time with cursing at every step.

 

And it would get bent down again.

 

So he sharpened it. He filed the edges so that, when the hoodlums would jump up and hang their weight on the sign to bend it — well, let’s say the sign wouldn’t be the thing laying on the ground.

 

He didn’t go through with it. He thought better of it, took the sign back down, dulled it up again, and then replaced it. I don’t remember why the kids stopped bending it, but they did. No fingers lost. But an indication, I hope, of my father’s feelings.

 

So it was stunning that he let me off. For sign stealing. For vandalism.

 

I was bulletproof. I could do anything!

 

Except then he went back into my room to collect the towels — and under one of them was the bronze plaque.

 

“This is too much,” he told me. “We’re taking it back.”

 

To the Parks and Rec office: I’m carrying the 3’x2′ bronze plaque once more. A woman comes out from a back office as we enter, asks if she can help us. “We found this,” my father says, pointing at the sign propped up against my legs.

 

“Where?” she asks.

 

My father points at me. “In his room.”

 

“Oh,” she says.

 

I carried the sign where she indicated. We thanked her. We left. My father lectured me the whole way home about respecting property and the evils of vandalism.

 

And then he flew back to California.

 

You know what? That woman, at Parks and Rec? She never wrote down my name.

 

And when they put the plaque back up, they used four flathead screws.

 

 

The next time my father came home and caught me — and it wasn’t on his next visit, or the one after that — he “found” the signs where I had left them: in large piles in the sun room, directly off of the dining room, where he couldn’t possibly have missed them. He found there thirty-two street signs, six orange traffic cones, nineteen blinking hazard lights — and the bronze plaque. That time, he didn’t lecture me, and he didn’t take me to return what I had stolen: he called the police. I came home from school that day to find a police officer waiting in the living room with my father. It turns out that I had committed certainly one, and possibly three, felonies: since a stop sign alone was worth better than $500 (I had three of them — never mind the historic bronze plaque, about which there had actually been a story in the local newspaper), there were several counts of possession of stolen property in excess of $500; several potential counts of grand theft; and several counts of criminal mischief. The officer — very kindly, and very calmly — informed me that if my stealing of traffic direction signs had provably led to an accident, then I would be responsible for the damage done, up to and including manslaughter. Fortunately, no serious accidents had resulted; but it was not a good conversation. Or a good feeling.

 

I did have a moment of amusement when the truck from Public Works came and my father and I brought out all of my stolen swag to put in the back of the truck; I watched the PW worker’s eyes get wider and wider as we made trip, after trip, after trip. I wanted to smile at that. I didn’t.

 

And then they left. And I, the now-busted Great Sign Bandit, was alone with my father.

 

 

I’ve told this story often. I’ve usually laughed, and made my audience laugh, when I did. I was lucky, after all; nobody had been hurt by my vandalism. No strangers, at least. But then, that wasn’t who I had been trying to hurt, was it? I did the damage I meant to do, even if I hadn’t known at the time that I had meant to do that. Looking back, though, it’s hard to believe I didn’t know what I was doing. I remember my father sharpening that sign. I remember the anger he felt towards the kids who had vandalized it. I remember sitting alone in my house, because my mother was at work, my brother was in college, and my father was in California. I remember how dark and quiet and cold it was out in the streets at 2am. It was like there was nobody else in the world, and it didn’t matter what I did, and it didn’t matter what I stole, and it didn’t matter who was hurt or angered or inconvenienced by it. There was nobody out there but me.