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What is this?

Dusty 2 Comments

(Please note: throughout this piece, every use of “I” and “me” should be taken to mean both myself and my wife; we are equal partners in this endeavor. She has read and approved this before publication, and she has kindly let me speak for us both. It was just too awkward to keep saying “Toni and I.”)

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This is the dog who lives at my house. The question is, what does that make me?

I call myself his father; I call him my son. But of course, he’s not that; we are of different species. He doesn’t look like me at all. I don’t treat him as I would a human son. He doesn’t eat at the table. He doesn’t wear clothing. He doesn’t have Legos.

My human son would have Legos. I would teach him to read, and to talk like a pirate. We would watch The Iron Giant and Monty Python together, and play Sorry and Parcheesi and War. I would learn to play chess so I could teach him.

None of these things are true with the dog. So he must not be my son.

The law calls me his owner; him, my property. But how can that be? The measure of an individual life, the distinction between an object and a person, between animate and inanimate, is sentience. Sentience is the ability to feel or perceive: the dog can clearly do both. His perceptions are markedly more sensitive than mine, in some cases.

Not in all cases, though. His sense of taste, for instance. Not only does he regularly chew up live, squirming insects of any kind that he can catch, he also picks up anything — anything — that might resemble food, no matter how remotely, while on his walk. Sure, he grabbed that discarded Goldfish cracker, and he tried to eat the doughnut that someone dropped and then ran over; but he also picks up bird feathers, cigarette butts, flower petals, balls of lint and hair, pieces of tar and plastic, shiny things, and the excrement of other animals. He also regularly licks the tile floor in the kitchen, for minutes at a time. I have doubts about the functionality and acuity of those taste buds.

But there is no doubt that he can feel. He misses me when I am gone. He is happy when I return. He loves to cuddle, and to play tug-fetch. He has trouble with anxiety: when I change my routine, it can upset him, and he — well, he freaks out. He starts moving and breathing quickly, and he tries to get as close to me as possible, nipping at me and whimpering softly, desperately; if he doesn’t calm down at that point, the next stage is a good five minutes of sprinting, at top speed, in and out of the room where I am, throwing himself as violently as possible onto the bed or couch where I lay, barking at every turn and biting anything or anyone who intervenes. Clearly he has feelings — prodigiously strong feelings. He suffers because of it.

The mechanistic paradigm would hold that these are nothing more than reaction to stimuli and conditioned response, and perhaps so. As such, they are no different from any of my feelings, about which one could make the same argument — I smile when he comes to me and rolls onto his back because doing so ensures me a pleasurable experience, namely rubbing his belly, which feels good to my fingers, lowers my blood pressure, and so on. Such affection is pleasurable because it signifies pack bonding, which helps to ensure my individual survival: for I have allies in the hunt and against my enemies.

Whatever. The point is, he is as sentient as I. I do not think he can be considered an object. Property. No more than I.

When I come home, he meets me at the door, wagging his tail, but he is not a jumper; he likes it when I come down to his level. I crouch down, usually with one knee on the floor and the other out to the side, and he curls into me, pressing his body against my leg and across my torso, and I put my arms around him and bend low to kiss his head, and he is surrounded and encapsulated by me. Each morning when I get up, I lay on the couch to drink my first coffee, and he leaps up to lay beside me, sitting in the space made by my sideways lap. He leans against me while I pet him, and if I use only one hand, he puts his front paw on the other one and tugs, as if to say, “Why aren’t you using this hand, too?” So I do. And he smiles. Within minutes he melts, oozing down to lie beside me in the narrow space I do not occupy, his long legs lolling over the side of the futon. Often he rolls onto his back, hoping that I will gently scratch his belly. That’s his favorite.

He wants to be in the room where I am, no matter what. As I move back and forth between kitchen, living room, bathroom, bedroom, he follows me, his chew toy in his teeth, laying down on the bed even for the half a minute while I put on my belt and pick up my shoes. Whenever I go to any door, he wants to lead me through it, the grand marshal of my daily parade.

So what does that make him, all of that? My pet? Too condescending. My shadow? Too stalker-y. My companion? Perhaps.

I call him my friend. My buddy. (I sing the song, which I learned by heart during my adolescence when the television burned at both ends.) And it’s true. But there’s more.

I named him. We call him Samwise — Sammy for short — after my favorite character in the same books that gave my name to my parents (Well, my second-favorite character, but really, The Witch-King of Angmar, Lord of the Nazgul is no name for a dog. That’s a cat name. Or a bunny.). I named myself for him, because I speak for him as I speak to him. I recognize that the names, like the words, like the personality and the voice that I have created for him (He sounds like Sniffles the Mouse from the old cartoons) are all and only of and from me, not from him; but he takes them on, for me. He lets me color him in. He lets me play with him when I want to laugh, and hug him when I want to cry, and always, he makes me feel better.

So what is he, to me?
Here’s why it matters, what he is to me; here’s why I’m writing about this. Here. This is the second time I’ve had a dog-friend-son. The first was Charlie.

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Charlie died last year. He died because of a brain tumor. But really, he died because I killed him. I told the doctor to poison him, and I held him while he died.

If Charlie was my son — and just as I do with Sammy, I called him such, called myself his father; my parents called him their grand-dog — then I would not have done this. I would have fought that tumor, would have put Charlie on the medication, gotten him the CAT scan, talked to doctors about surgery, about chemo and radiation, about prognoses and time and quality of life.

If Charlie was my property, I wouldn’t feel badly about his death. When a possession is broken — and that tumor broke him, at the end, sent him into grand mal seizures, caused apparent blindness and confusion and loss of equilibrium and loss of bladder control, and I can’t imagine how much pain he’d have been in had we not had him on analgesics — you throw it away. Maybe you miss it, but you don’t regret throwing it away. I didn’t even throw Charlie away: I kept his ashes in a white box, high on a shelf, with his collar beside it, and the Christmas ornament we got for him, embroidered with his name.

But I feel badly about Charlie’s death. I regret the decision I made, even if it was the only one I could have. I know it was the only one I could have made, and the actual decision took almost no time; there was no question that it was the right thing to do, none at all. But I wish I hadn’t had to make it. I still wish he was here. I miss him. I loved him. I still do.

If he was my friend, then his death at my hands makes some sense. He was suffering. He was losing himself, and every day that he lived would have taken him further away from who he was. When you face that, it may be your friend — your buddy — that you ask to pull the trigger, to pull the plug, to end it.

But I’ve had friends. I have friends. None of the other ones live with me, and even when they did, I never, ever scratched their tummies like they liked. There’s a connection here, a trust and an intimacy, that friendship does not include. And, more, there’s this: the truth is, I don’t know if Charlie wanted me to have him put to sleep. He didn’t ask me for that. He didn’t decide.

I decided for him.

If I had a human child with a terminal illness, at some point, I would make the same decision — though I might decide differently. But still, I would decide to keep fighting or to let go. I would. Not the child. And I would never make that decision for a friend. Only for someone whose life was actually in my hands, someone who trusted me so completely, that I knew so well, that I could make that call for him. I’ve never had a friendship that close, and don’t expect I ever will.

That kind of relationship is family.

So, I guess that’s what Sammy is, what Charlie was. My family. My pack. My son.

My dog.

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Stay in School. Learn Everywhere.

Dusty Leave a comment

I just saw this on Facebook.

So my first reaction is, “So you are a poet, a musician, with the fire to have something to say and the deftness to say it with music — but you don’t think there was any value in studying Shakespeare? Well you must be a goddamn idiot, then.” But that’s not fair.

Before I get into this any further, let me share this, as well.

 

All right. Not an idiot. Someone who understands that the speaker in a poem does not represent the author (And yes, I’m a little ashamed that I made the obvious assumption, too. But hey! He insulted English! Them’s fightin’ words!). Intelligent young man with, if I may say, some wrong ideas mixed in with the good ones. So only one part of his brain is a goddamn idiot. No, I’m kidding. And I kid because I love.

I love this goddamn idiot.

(Re: the rhetorical question you ask in the response video about why everyone cares so much about your hair. Bro, have you seen your hair? First of all, it’s beautiful; I kept my hair long for twenty years and never got that much length. Secondly, it is by far your most noticeable feature. People look at your hair the way they look at puppies in a pet store window: with the strength of inevitability. It’s like gravity, and your hair is a black hole. It draws the eye and holds it, and thus becomes your identifying quality, and so of course people comment on it.  If you didn’t have the hair, people would call you the thin guy with the lovely hands and the zombie-pallor. If you’re upset that people notice and comment on physical features, get in line behind every woman ever.)

Right: first, let’s address the concern expressed in the song. He claims that the syllabus of required material in public schools is inefficient, that it spends far too much time on material that is not of any practical use, and that it lacks any standardized instruction in areas that would be of tremendous practical use, such as the laws of the country, good voting practices, taxes. And first aid. And human rights. In the commentary video, as in the captions at the very end of the song, he explains that he thinks the more esoteric subjects like higher math (He says “maths” because British, and I wish I could because I like the term better, but I’m not British so it would be pretentious) should be voluntary, and that the current subject matter choices were made arbitrarily hundreds of years ago, and have no applicability to the modern world.

My instinct when I hear this is to circle my arms around my pretties and frown aggressively, like a four-year-old who scored all the good toys at playtime. I don’t mind him ripping on math, but nobody can touch my English classes! How dare you mock Shakespeare? Do you not realize the influence that man had on our culture? Don’t you see that studying Shakespeare is studying life?!?

Then I remember. I remember first that I myself have argued many times against the specific run of required classes. That I have wished for more electives and greater freedom for students, and even for me as a teacher (Why can’t I teach The Watchmen and V for Vendetta? Oh right: sex and blood. And I quote: “Loosing her virgin belt, he lapped her round in sleep and when the god had consummated his work of love he took her by the hand and hailed her warmly: ‘Rejoice in our love, my lady! And when this year has run its course you will give birth to glorious children— bedding down with the gods is never barren, futile— and you must tend them, breed and rear them well.” Yup; a divine Roofie and rape, followed by, “Hey, be happy now! You’re going to have kids, too!” That would be from The Odyssey, by Homer. Want me to quote the part where Odysseus plunges a burning stake into the cyclops’s eye?). I remember my own public school experience: I hated math, too. If I could have dropped it, I would have pursued more art, probably — I loved my calligraphy class, and I could have gotten behind some ceramics. Or another go at woodshop. That would have been excellent. Of course in my case, I was already taking choir and Italian, and I had gone through every English elective the school offered by Junior year. My school was not the school he is talking about.

I also remember that I kind of hated Shakespeare. I enjoyed Macbeth, but Romeo and Juliet killed me. Seriously? Your plan is to fake your own suicide? That’s what you came up with? Then again, you are seventeen and thirteen, and you’ve known each other for all of three days (By the way: a plot hole that I can never really talk about when I teach this is the fact that the pressure on Romes and Ju-Ju comes from her father’s intention to marry her off to the Prince. The solution to which is to marry the Montague first. They already have a man of God to perform the ceremony, and consummation is not an issue — after which the Prince wouldn’t even want her, and would go away. Because there is no divorce at this time. The Prince or the Capulets would have to kill Romeo, and that little weasel’s harder to kill than cockroaches. Scandal? Ostracism? Sure, but they already have that with Juliet’s plan. And this way, no dying, not even fake dying.). And the best scene in the play is when Mercutio gets stabbed, and cries out, “Oh, I am slain!” and then AFTER that, Romeo asks, “What, art thou hurt?” My friends and I had a field day with that one.

I get it. Especially the hatred for math and the quadratic equation. But higher math is a low-hanging fruit: it seems readily apparent that the more esoteric math is nothing the average person would use on a daily basis. After you come for math, though, the next thing you reach for is the study of great literature, particularly poetry and quality literary non-fiction, George Orwell and James Baldwin and Virginia Woolf. Because why would anyone need to know Shakespeare? Or haiku? And there, I see problems.

Here’s the thing: high school is not about teaching valuable facts. There are not that many valuable facts in the world.  Yes, the things he mentions should be taught, universally and intentionally; his point about people dying for a lack of first aid/critical care knowledge is well-taken. I got first aid, but not everyone does, and everyone should. And we should teach how to balance a checkbook and fill out taxes just so people will stop throwing that in the face of public education every damn day. But you’re talking about maybe a week’s worth of material, in only one class. How long does it take to learn how to fill out a tax form? Maybe the British ones are brutal, but the 1040EZ? Seriously? Even without TurboTax, it’s like fifteen minutes, and the instructions tell you where to find everything. Same with balancing a checkbook: “Save receipts. This column is for Bye-Bye Money, and this one is for Hello Money. Finally, learn how to do math. Now for our next lesson, boys and girls . . .”

I’m exaggerating, and I shouldn’t. Yes, there should be a life skills class. Yes, it should cover the actual method of finding a job, registering for college, and the basics of finance, and laws and rights. I don’t know about parenting, which seems to me a larger subject than could be taught in any school, anywhere — but sex ed? Hell yes. How to recognize mental illness? Probably good, but might be better in a psychology class; I would think that would do better for those interested, rather than everyone. Things that could be taught in a simple manner, and that would be directly applicable to life: I can agree they should be in school. And it really wouldn’t take much to make that happen.

Voting, on the other hand. And human rights. That’s a more complicated thing. That, we should teach more seriously.

That, we do teach. Seriously.

I don’t know much about the list of human rights; I’ve  never looked at them. (I probably should.) But I teach good voting. I always have. How do I do this, being an English teacher? I teach critical thinking. That means, to me, that I teach my students not to accept what they see at first read. When we study a poem, we read it through first, and then we try to understand it — which generally means taking each piece of the poem both as an individual statement of meaning, and also contributing to a whole. I teach my students to look for added meaning, like emotional shading and bias, in the words the author chose, in the characters that novelists build, in the specific details that writers include and those they leave out. And I teach my students to connect their lives to the lives of the characters, and the authors; to feel empathy, as much as that can be taught, and to see parallels that aren’t always immediately obvious. These are the very things that should make people good voters: reading motive and sincerity, knowing the difference between facade and reality, understanding the tension between allegiance and independence, and questioning everything. I teach a lot of questioning.

Does every student get it? No. Would more get it if I taught these things explicitly, rather than asking my students to make the mental leap from my class to their actual lives? Probably, but then they wouldn’t be able to make the leap from my explicit lesson to any other aspect of life — as in, if I taught how to vote in a presidential election, could they then use the same skills in determining guilt or innocence when they serve on a jury? If they can’t make the connection themselves between The Crucible and modern politics, why would they make the connection between voting for President and voting guilty or not guilty? At some point, students have to use what they are taught themselves, which means they need to adapt it themselves to their own lives; I cannot teach everything, nor can I walk through each of my students’ lives like some freaky stalker-Yoda, dispensing just the right advice at just the right moment to all of them, forever.

The point is, high school is not where you learn what you need to know. High school teaches you how to think. (College gives you something to think about.) You will never use directly 90% of what you learn in public education, not poetic devices, not the terms of each President or king, not the quadratic formula. You will always use the habits of mind you learn — and not the ones you don’t. And I’ll tell you something else: that quadratic formula that is burned into your mind? If  you don’t use it, you will forget it. I did.  You were rattling it off in your rap, and I was gaping slack-jawed at all the strange letters and symbols. Then I thought, “Okay, I kind of remember that. Not how to use it, though.” But even in the few seconds I was looking at it and thinking about it, and the few minutes afterwards when a shred or two of the formula stayed in my mind, I started to break it down. I thought about simplifying the equation. I thought about the order of operations, and how to isolate a variable.

I thought like a mathematician. Because I learned how to do that in high school. (Thank you, Jo Ellen Hillyer, and all the other teachers whose classes I hated, but learned in anyway.) I took enough math, and learned enough in those classes, to gain a habit of mind. I haven’t used it often, not consciously; but I have learned something about logic, and I have no doubt that when I put on my logic hat, the tag inside says “Math.”

So I think, sir, that you and everyone who agrees with you (including teachers) are thinking of public school curriculum in the wrong way. Don’t think about isolated facts and their utility. Think about the ways you think, and how easy it might be for you to change from a math situation to a science situation to a history to a language. If you took all those classes in college, or if you work in, let’s say, CERN in Switzerland, and you might have to go from an engineering meeting to a physics meeting to a PR meeting to lunch with the French speakers on staff, then consider whether or not the required classes in public school were of use to you.

 

Now. Is all that to say that the schools work well? No. Common Core, standards, and the hegemony of Data are killing American education, and probably having some influence worldwide. Are the required classes the right ones? No; I think you’re probably right about the upper level math making better electives than requirements. But the issue should not be whether a kid is interested in the subject; and it should not be whether a kid is going to use that material in his future career: one of the things killing education, and making your problem worse, is the urge to prepare students for making money; because the business folk will tell you they want students highly trained in math and science. So starting from a career orientation is just going to bring the math hammer down. Allowing pure free choice, while a good and important ideal, will lead to students who take only the easy classes, and others who take classes only in order to get a certain job, and not necessarily one they care about: one they think will get them the right money for the right effort. Free choice is not what you want to base the decision on, not for teenagers. What you want to do is consider this: has the student mastered the habit of mind that comes with that subject? Once you learn to think in math — and I would say that probably comes with algebra, maybe trigonometry or geometry, because proofs and the like, and the manipulation of formulae, and the conversion of functions to graphs and back, are all good mathy ways of thinking — then that’s probably enough. Same with history and language and science. But we need to remember what school can do and what it should do — and it really, really isn’t for allowing kids to explore freely. That’s what the world is for. School is for teaching you how to find what you need, and recognize it when you find it, and that can be taught in any subject, and isn’t taught in enough.

Now: where were those human rights, again? Ah. Here they are.

Teaching Hard

Dusty 2 Comments

I’m tired.

I hate the end of the school year.

But let me tell you why.

Teaching requires an inordinate amount of energy. It’s why there is such a prejudice towards younger, newer teachers, and against older, wiser teachers: we all know that both age and inevitable cynicism detract from available verve (By the way, if I ever need a stage name, I’m going to use Available Verve.), and we know (Some of us know) just how much pep is required in this profession.

It’s a lot. Because we have to fight children all day.

I’m just going to leave that image to simmer for a minute.

Aaaaaand now I’ll explain.

Elementary school teachers have to fight to first contain, and then direct, a classroom full of sugar-hyped attention-deficient kidnadoes. Think about what it takes to force a child to eat when it doesn’t want to, to sleep when it doesn’t want to, to take a bath when it doesn’t want to; now think about making them do math. Elementary teachers have to be an unbreachable wall standing against a stampede, an immovable object against 25 — or 30 — or 35 — irresistible forces.

High school teachers have the opposite problem: our classrooms are carpeted with anthropomorphic phlegm-globs, like the spittoon of a frost giant with a head cold, that would rather sleep than breathe (And who would be ecstatic if they could sleep without breathing. Or circulating blood. Except you wouldn’t recognize the ecstasy, as expressing it would, like breathing, be too tiring.), and somehow we need to motivate them to read poetry and study history and solve mathematical equations. We must be an irresistible force for a room full of immovable objects.

In either case, it’s bloody exhausting.

Add in the requirements of pleasing supervisors (who want pre- and post-observation conferences, and PLC meeting minutes, and professional development buy-in) and calming frazzled parents (The most-common phrase a teacher hears from adults is probably “I just don’t know what to do with him/her.” It has always amazed me that I, who am and will ever remain childless, can somehow give out parenting advice without getting a face full of “Excuse me? Who the hell do you think you are?” It’s not because my advice is good, though — it’s because I care enough to give it, because I take the time to try. But this, too, is exhausting, because I am handing over just a little bit more of my time and my energy.) and the endless paperwork and the endless guilt, and you might be able to imagine how tiring this profession is.

But that’s not the hard part.

The hard part is that teachers, more than any profession other than the medical fields, emergency services, and ground-level social work, get emotionally invested in the work. My clientele, if we can call them that, are people. They are children (Though in my case they have beards, breasts, and body odor [Not all three at the same time (Well, not often [See, I can’t even make this joke without feeling bad for mocking them in such a personal way. But as an English nerd, I am very pleased by this:].).].), children that are unhappy most of the time. They are confused: confused by difficult school subjects, confused by awkward romance and even more awkward bodies, confused by changing social alliances and the tidal forces of unstable families. They are bereft of childhood, and lament that lost innocence; they are terrified by a future both uncertain and looming, and avoid everything that reminds them of it. And they are angry, and sad, about all of those things.

In “Dover Beach,” Matthew Arnold described our modern world this way:

…For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

 

Arnold was describing a world without faith. That’s adolescence. That’s my students.

I sympathize with them. I remember it. I remember how my world got so very much harder when I became drenched in hormones around 8th grade (though not, sadly, drenched in sex appeal and confidence to match), and then exponentially harder again when I got to high school and, for the first time, had to work hard to succeed academically. I remember my hopes and dreams feeling shattered by reality. How everything seemed so dark, and so hopeless, and so insane. All of my writing at the time was about madness, loss, betrayal, destruction, murder. About fear and anger. That’s all I was for several years, a ball of fear and anger. With pimples. And an erection.

So when I talk to my students, I feel for them, and I want to help. Helping generally means listening to their problems, really listening and then trying to give some sort of useful response. A lot of the time — too much, really — I can’t help, and I know it; but that’s not any easier, especially when it’s because I know they wouldn’t listen to what I have to say, or that I shouldn’t say it because they should figure it out for themselves. Holding the words in is as hard as speaking them. Sometimes it’s harder. When one of my nerdy students — and as a lifelong nerd and a former awkward loner (Perhaps I flatter myself with that “former,” but my wife tells me I’m handsome and cool and funny, so shut up.), I feel the nerds’ pain more intensely — when one of them tells an awkward joke, or says the wrong thing at the wrong time, or laughs like a dork or fails to control their body odor, I want to say, “This is why girls don’t talk to you. This — and your hair.” But I can’t say it. It wouldn’t help. And it wouldn’t be right for me to do.

It’s hard to remember that. It takes effort to remind myself that I don’t have all the answers, that what worked for me won’t work for all of my students, that often they cannot hear me or believe me because of who I am. The key is to remember that they are in the same situation: no one can hear or believe them, either, because of who they are. But even when I remember that nothing I say will help, I still want to help. So I do what I can: I help them with schoolwork.

I try not to give my students busywork, because I want to show that I value their time. So my assignments tend to be lengthier, and more thoughtful. To help them both be successful and feel confident, I try to read everything they write, and give the best feedback I can; I am known for writing more on some essays than the students themselves. I respond to their thoughts more than the form of them, the grammar and syntax and vocabulary, because the ideas are the important part and also, much of the time, their strength.

But all of that takes time and energy. If I just gave them worksheets all day, I could grade everything in five minutes — or even give them to a T.A. to grade. Or my wife, who loves grading. She likes the power of the red pen. But because I give them extended questions and thought-provoking assignments, and because I want to respond to their thoughts, it means I have to grade everything myself, and I have to read everything, and I have to pay attention while I’m doing it.

And then I have to try to fix their problems. But it’s just like fixing their life problems: sometimes I can’t, and sometimes I shouldn’t; and even when I can and should, it takes time and effort. At least when they come to me with their life problems, they want an answer; but when the issue is that they don’t know when to use a semi-colon or what the point of The Odyssey is, they don’t generally want to deal with fixing that problem; they just want it to go away so they can sleep.

This is probably the worst thing: that when I try to help them, by making their assignments more meaningful and effective, they want me to give them work that is easier. They want worksheets. Because they are tired and stressed, and they don’t want to think, and if I’m trying to be helpful, why can’t I just give them easy stuff to do, or even better, no work at all? Why do I have to make them think all the time?

That’s why they turn into a sticky layer of marshmallow fluff melting over a desk. And then it’s up to me to motivate them, to scrape them up, mold them back into a vaguely humanoid shape, and crack open their brains so I can pour in the knowledge.

Except that’s not actually the way it works. I have to get them to think. Which means I have to get them to want to think.

Which is hard. And it makes me tired.

So then the end of the school year comes slouching towards us. They’re tired and sick of school, and thus that much harder to motivate. I am exhausted myself, and so now I need to do two motivatings: I have to perk myself up to perk them up. God forbid I have seniors, because then the inertia of the Senior Slump becomes quite simply insurmountable. And, though I don’t want to set myself up as being different from other teachers, I do have a couple of added difficulties that I don’t know if they share: first, I didn’t and don’t like school (though I love education), and so the glamor of the end of the school year, the proms and the yearbook signings and the graduation ceremonies, all fail to cheer me; and second, I don’t want to use grades as a means of motivating my students.

I don’t believe in it. Too much emphasis is placed on grades already for this very reason, so that they might be a more effective stick and carrot for tempting and prodding the phlegmatics. (That’s the name of my new band, by the way. The Phlegmatics. Available Verve and the Phlegmatics.) But grades are deceptive: they are an inaccurate measure. If a kid gets an A in my class, was it because of hard work? Natural ability which made effort unnecessary? Is the kid a successful cheat? Was it because my class was too easy? Because this kid had the advantage of a stable home life, with enough money for food and clothing so that this kid didn’t have to work 20-30 hours a week after school? Was it because this kid has learning disabilities and consequent accommodations?

Grades do not help students learn. Grades teach students to game the system. My students focus on large assignments rather than small ones, because small ones don’t change grades as much. But without the practice that comes from doing small assignments, and the steady incremental improvement gained thereby, they don’t do very well on the large assignments. So they ask for extra help. They ask if they can do work over again for a higher grade (Meaning I have to grade it a second time, after reading it a second time), or ask if I can look over work before they turn it in (so I can look it over again) and tell them what grade it would get (Before I grade it again, officially). They hunt, like pigs after truffles, for extra credit. And, of course, they cheat. Not because they’re lazy or stupid, most of the time, but because they don’t think they can do the assignment well enough to get the grade they want. And much of the time, they’re right — again because of the lack of steady incremental progress. That’s what grades do: they focus only on the ends, and thus destroy the means. They harm education. They replace education.

And then because we use grades as carrot and as stick, they cause stress, for students, for parents, for teachers, for schools. And that makes everything worse: my students are more miserable, and more exhausted, and so am I, both from their stress and from my own. Which is always worst at the end of the year, when the grade becomes THE GRADE.

I don’t want to add to their stress and misery. I don’t want to scare them. So I don’t hold their grades over their heads. They’re up there anyway, that sword of Damocles called THE TRANSCRIPT and THE PERMANENT RECORD, but I don’t point to it and put on my angry face. (Full disclosure: my own transcript, which was pretty ugly, hurt me exactly — none. Affected me not at all. Which is part of the reason I don’t try to use grades as a stick, because they meant zip to me personally back when I was a rage-horn-ball. But again: does that apply to all other people? Probably not.)

Unfortunately, that means I have to find some other way to motivate them. And the best one — the only one — requires of me a higher output of energy. I have to make the class, and the work, interesting. To teenagers. I have to make it useful, and also fun. I have to treat my students like the unique feeling individuals they are, and I need to show them that what matters is the thinking and the learning — not the grades.

I have to do that five times a day, every day, for ten months. And the farther we get into the year, and the closer we get to summer, the harder it gets.

I hate the end of the school year.

I’m tired.

Responding to Comments

Dusty Leave a comment

When I started up this blog, I decided that I was going to try to reply to every comment I get (I’m waiting for the spam to start. I hope I get good spam.). It hasn’t been too onerous, of course, as only a few folks are reading as of yet (Thank you, by the way, to those out there included in that number.) — but this week, there’s a certain someone who replied to my last post who deserves and needs a response.

Mr. Ted Cruz of Texas.

SIOUX CITY, Iowa – Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) reiterated his support for Indiana’s controversial religious freedom law Wednesday, despite a fresh push by that state’s governor to “fix” the measure.

Speaking in a stuffy, cramped auditorium at Morningside College here, Cruz said that religious liberty is not a “fringe view.” Cruz staked his claim to the right of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who signed the law but said he wanted to see “a fix” to the law that makes clear it does not give businesses license to deny services to customers on the basis of sexual orientation, and Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R ) who asked lawmakers Wednesday to recall or amend a religious freedom bill.

“We’re seeing in the news right now a lot of noise because the state of Indiana bravely stood up and passed a law defending religious liberty. I’ll say this: I will commend the state of Indiana for doing the right thing,” Cruz said.

When asked by Tyler Brock, 41, what he would have done if he were in Pence’s shoes during the past week, Cruz refused to bite, saying that he doesn’t want to second-guess the Indiana governor.

“I admire him for standing up and signing the legislation,” Cruz said, not mentioning Pence’s request for a modification.

Before I address Mr. Cruz’s argument, let me say this: I appreciate the irony in commending the state for “doing the right thing,” while simultaneously backing away from denouncing the governor’s next action, which would, according to the statement of a second ago, be the wrong thing. Does that mean, Mr. Cruz, that you can hate the sin but love the sinner? Why does Mr. Pence get that much consideration, that you won’t throw him under the bus despite disagreeing, vocally, with his altered stance — but anyone whom your faith teaches to be wrong can become the platform on which you hope to become President?

Let me also appreciate the irony in this sentence: ‘Speaking in a stuffy, cramped auditorium at Morningside College here, Cruz said that religious liberty is not a “fringe view.”‘ Right: the crowd you gathered in that “cramped” auditorium at a college I’ve never heard of is clearly the majority view.

Now let’s get to Mr. Cruz’s comments.

Cruz’s comments on the Indiana law and his denouncement of same-sex marriage was well-received by the audience, which interrupted him with applause when he spoke about religious freedom.

The Texas Republican said that, unlike many other Republicans, he was unafraid to take on same-sex marriage and the religious freedom bill.

“A whole lot of Republican politicians are terrified of the issue,” he said. Cruz also castigated Fortune 500 companies for condemning Indiana’s passage of the bill, telling the crowd that they are “running shamelessly to endorse the radical gay marriage agenda over religious liberty.”

Cruz pined for a time when there was bipartisan consensus where people “defend the civil liberties of Americans. Even those we disagree with.” Now, he argued, the Democratic Party elevated partisanship over the issue of gay marriage.

“This is all part and parcel over the fight over gay marriage. And because of their partisan desire to mandate gay marriage everywhere in this country they also want to persecute anyone who has a good faith religious belief that marriage is a holy sacrament, the union of one man and one woman as ordained as a covenant by God,” Cruz said, to loud applause.

All right: in the bigger picture, this is actually helpful to my intention to try to understand the conservative stance. Because I want to mock the claim that the desire to mandate gay marriage is partisan (though I will mock that particular phrase: because I don’t know anyone who wants to require gay marriage; the idea is to insist on legal protection for the civil rights of citizens, not to “mandate” anything). And I want to do it by saying that what he is arguing for is actually the partisan thing; calling the fight to legalize gay marriage a partisan fight is arguing that, first, there are no Republicans who would support gay marriage, and second, that there are no Democrats who would oppose it, and that’s ridiculous.

But if there are people in both parties who are on opposite sides of the issue (and of course there are), then I shouldn’t call his argument a partisan argument, either. I can’t assume there are reasonable Republicans and then castigate the Republican party for being unreasonable. Hell, the GOP in Indiana backed away from this whole argument. So this should probably be seen, at least on the local level, as an attempt by the Indiana legislature to represent the desires of their constituents. Because if they held this view themselves, strongly enough to write and pass the law solely because they believed it as Cruz claims to, they wouldn’t back away from it. And even though serving the fickle masses is one of the things that today’s politicians do wrong, it is also part of their job: they are elected representatives of the will of the people. It seems that they wrote the law because they thought people wanted it, and then changed it to disallow discrimination because it turned out that people wanted that. Wishy-washy? Sure, but also representative of the will of the people. So I won’t castigate the Indiana legislature for doing the wrong thing, since they followed it up with the right thing, regardless of why. Forgive and forget, right?

So back to Ted Cruz.

The Texas Republican said that, unlike many other Republicans, he was unafraid to take on same-sex marriage and the religious freedom bill.

“A whole lot of Republican politicians are terrified of the issue,” he said. Cruz also castigated Fortune 500 companies for condemning Indiana’s passage of the bill, telling the crowd that they are “running shamelessly to endorse the radical gay marriage agenda over religious liberty.”

I love that you turn this into a matter of courage, sir. Because what a handy way to cover up the fact that your stance is stupid: doing a stupid thing, especially when you know it is stupid, is indeed seen as a courageous act in this country. Just ask my students about Truth or Dare. They have a thousand stories about the ridiculously foolish things they do, which they tell with pride. Of course a lot of Republican politicians are terrified of this issue; look what happened to the small(ish) and generally unobtrusive state of Indiana when they took up this issue. They got the crap knocked out of them by the public. Who all disagree with them. And why is it, may I ask, that Fortune 500 companies should be defending religious liberty? Shouldn’t they be, I don’t know, conducting business and making profits and such? How is it you think that companies should feel shame about not supporting religious political positions?

Oh, right. Because corporations are people.

Hey: if corporations are people, doesn’t that mean that a merger is like a marriage?

Do you think that two companies in the same business — like, say, Comcast and Time-Warner — would be essentially the same gender?

Does that mean that corporations are carrying out legalized gay marriage right under our noses?

“And because of their partisan desire to mandate gay marriage everywhere in this country they also want to persecute anyone who has a good faith religious belief that marriage is a holy sacrament, the union of one man and one woman as ordained as a covenant by God,” Cruz said, to loud applause.

As I said in the last post, people do not have the right to have their opinions defended by the government. By the same token, enacting laws (or in this case, opposing laws) that go against your opinion is not actually persecution. You are free to continue believing in your definition of marriage; you simply have to accept that this country has a legal definition of marriage that does not match your religious one. But since the country is not a theocracy, that’s exactly as it should be. May I also point out that in no way should it affect a devout Christian’s beliefs about marriage to sell a wedding cake to someone with a different belief. Your product, despite the marketing world’s views of branding, does not represent your ideas: selling your product does not represent an approval of the buyer. It represents a profit.

But again, I suppose that doesn’t gel with the view that corporations are people, and that their products and customers (and the specifics of employee health benefits — right, Hobby Lobby?) actually do somehow represent an adherence to the religious beliefs of those corporate persons; who you sell your products to is a function of your loyalty to your faith. In that world, your products are in fact your children, and if you hand your children over to the gays, you are allowing them to be corrupted.

My question here is: what does that say about a company that makes food, that makes wedding cakes? Are they selling their children to be eaten every time they have a customer? Is their entire continued existence as a corporate person predicated on the creation of children solely to be devoured? Jonathan Swift, move over.

“Religious liberty is not some cockamamie new theory that the Indiana legislature just figured out yesterday. It was literally among the founding principles of our nation, and we have to be able to explain that cheerfully and with a smile,” he said.

I just wonder about this one. Why do we have to be able to explain this cheerfully and with a smile? Who are “we” and who are “we” going to be explaining this to? And just as I question how the rights of another person somehow infringe on religious liberty, especially when the interaction between those people is the exchange of money for goods and services, I question how the lack of this law somehow makes it harder to explain, in this strange, hypothetical conversation, the First Amendment. How does Cruz see this conversation going?

“We have a legal protection here for people’s religious beliefs.”

“Why, are those threatened?”

“Historically, they have been, when a government uses religion to help control the masses, as in Henry VIII’s England or Catholic Spain; there is also a potential threat when a government uses religion as an identifier when persecuting a group of people, as has happened to Jews around the world.”

“What kind of legal protection do you have?”

“Our most fundamental laws include the statement ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or restricting the free exercise thereof.’ The first part is how we are protected from the creation of an American church which would impose a specific belief, and the second part is protecting us from the intentional persecution of any specific belief.”

“But what if it offends you that people you disagree with want to give you money? WHAT ABOUT THAT?!?”

“. . .”

That would, indeed, be hard to explain with a smile.

 

 

As a writer, I know that I should stop here. I’m at 2000 words or so, which means I’ve used up my readers’ attention for this topic; I have thoroughly addressed the Senator’s comments, and I found a good way to wrap it up with a joke. But the thing is, you see, when I was looking for an article to reference with this “rebuttal,” (The one I used is here, by the way) I found this other one, about an interview Mr. Cruz gave this week on this same issue. And — I just can’t let it go. So if you’ve had enough, thank you for reading, go on and have a lovely day. Come back again sometime.

If you are up for more, hold on to your butts.

 

Here’s the headline:

Ted Cruz: Banning Anti-Gay Discrimination In Public Services Like Forcing A Rabbi To Eat Pork

(source)

In an interview with Dana Loesch on Tuesday, Sen. Ted Cruz praised Indiana’s new “religious liberty” law, which goes even further than similar measures in other states to allow businesses to discriminate against customers in providing services.

Deliberately obfuscating the history of the bipartisan federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was skewed by the Supreme Court in its Hobby Lobby decision, Cruz claimed that Democrats have recently “decided that religious liberty is disposable, that it is unnecessary” and “accordingly, we have a vilification of people who are engaging in acting out their faith.”

Cruz declared that a “partisan leftist group” is now “demonizing the state of Indiana for acting to protect religious liberty there.”

Here’s the audio from the interview:

 

Now, it’s the same argument. He uses the same phrase about the bipartisan support enjoyed by religious freedom “not too long ago,” which still makes me wonder what he’s talking about, because I don’t recall a time when religious liberty was genuinely under threat in Congress. Somehow he sees refusing to provide a service to a specific customer for a specifically religion-based bigoted reason as just people “engaging in acting out their faith.” Which I don’t understand: I’d understand if he was claiming that stoning adulterers is acting out faith, and defending that act; but I don’t believe anything in the Bible states that a company should not sell wedding cakes to heathens, nor that a company (since he talks about Hobby Lobby and that convent [And I love how he tries to spark outrage by talking about how that big mean Obama is going after nuns. NUNS. Clearly Mr. Cruz has never seen The Blues Brothers.] who also wouldn’t provide birth control to employees) should not pay for hormonal birth control for their female employees. Once again, I think the law is trying to protect people’s opinions, not their rights, and Cruz is all for that.

Here’s the good stuff.

Laws preventing businesses from discriminating against LGBT people in public services or requiring them to offer full health care coverage for female employees, he implied, are as much as an infringement on religious liberty as forcing a rabbi to eat pork.

“Nobody in their right mind would force a Catholic priest to perform a Protestant wedding. Likewise, nobody in their right mind would force a Jewish rabbi to perform a Christian wedding or, for that matter, to violate kosher and go consume pork,” he said. “We have long had a tradition from the beginning of this country of respecting religious liberty and accommodating and respecting the good-faith religious views of our citizens.”

“And it is only the intolerance of the current day of the far-left that views with which they disagree — the far-left is such a radical proponent of gay marriage that anyone whose faith teaches to the contrary, anyone whose faith teaches that marriage is a sacrament of one man and one woman, a holy union before God, the far-left views that religious view as unacceptable and they’re trying to use the machinery of the law to crush those religious views. And I think it is wrong, I think it is intolerant, and I think it is entirely inconsistent with who we are as a people,” he added.

– See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/ted-cruz-banning-anti-gay-discrimination-public-services-forcing-rabbi-eat-pork#sthash.qfdOBEJU.dpuf

Audio:

 

This is a slippery slope argument. The argument here, based on this comment that “the far-left views that religious view as unacceptable and they’re trying to use the machinery of the law to crush those religious views,” is that the opposition to a law allowing people to discriminate based on religious beliefs is only the first step (along with this war on the Catholic Church which he keeps talking about, which I suppose can only be the fight to keep abortion legal; though he might be including everything that Catholics historically haven’t liked, like divorce and contraception and evolution and Halloween and Friday night meatloaf. And Jews.), and that next the “far-left” will start banning religious holidays, and then closing down churches, and then putting Christians into concentration camps. Because apparently refusing to allow legalized discrimination is an attempt to crush religious views.

I can’t argue with that (Not that it’s right, I just can’t argue with it). There is no logic here, so pointing out the numerous flaws in the logic means nothing. This is an argument based on fear-mongering, the promotion of a paranoia that allows people to be bigoted and irrational because they believe they are defending something that is in danger, namely their faith and their right to practice it. Somehow, refusing to allow people to be intolerant is now intolerant. (“You won’t tolerate my intolerance! You toleranceist!” [There goes the meaning of THAT group of letters.]) The goalposts have been moved out from religious freedom and into the freedom to persecute others because of a religious belief, and now if we don’t allow that, we are persecuting them. Just as if we forced a rabbi to eat pork.

It is not in any way like forcing a rabbi to eat pork. Forcing a religious person to act against the specific tenets of their religion would be forcing a Catholic to have an abortion, or forcing an evangelical Christian to have homosexual sex. I don’t believe discrimination is one of the tenets of the Christian faith, therefore forcing someone not to discriminate is not forcing a rabbi to eat pork. And if discrimination is one of the tenets of the Christian faith, if in fact selling a cake to a heathen is actually banned in the Bible, then there is still a flaw in the argument: because this is a business we are talking about, and this is a customer. So the government would have to be forcing the baker to make the cake, for it to be similar to forcing a rabbi to eat pork. It’s not. It’s saying that if you offer to make someone a cake, by opening a cake-making business, you can’t turn them down when they ask you to do exactly what you said you would do, simply because you don’t like their sexual preference (or something else similarly none of your damn business.). That’s not forcing a Catholic priest to perform a Protestant wedding, or even a gay wedding; it’s asking a Catholic priest to perform a Catholic wedding. It’s asking someone for the service they specifically, intentionally, voluntarily offered. Don’t want to make cakes for certain people’s weddings? Don’t open a business providing wedding cakes to the public. Do the wedding cakes as a favor, out of your home — or maybe through your church — and sell cupcakes to anyone who walks in the door. If a customer comes asking to pay you for the service you offer, and the government doesn’t allow you to say No because of your bigoted, discriminatory opinions, that’s not forcing a rabbi to eat pork. That’s offering him a sandwich with bacon on it  — when he asks for a bite of the bacon sandwich. He can turn it down (or not ask, rather). You can refuse to provide wedding cakes if this is a problem for you. You just have to refuse to provide them for every customer. And if the government came into your bakery and required you to make wedding cakes against your will, or tried to strap you down and force you to eat bacon sandwiches, I would oppose them. Me and Ted Cruz.

Free To Be . . . You And Me

Dusty 1 Comment

So I was trying to figure out what to write about tonight. My dog, Sammy? Who is adorable, sweet, quirky, and entirely mystifying in terms of his breed? How about the sulcata tortoise we got recently, whom we named Neo? Or I could continue with the book reviews, as I also recently read “Stiff,” by Mary Roach, which is about what happens to the bodies of people who donate themselves to science?

I could write about school, of course. About the observation I recently had. Or the news stories I’ve been seeing about the problems with teachers and with schools. I had an idea for an essay analyzing King Lear (I’ve been grading those recently), and blaming Cordelia instead of the usual  villains, Goneril and Regan or Lear himself: after all, why the hell couldn’t she just tell her aged, semi-demented father what he wanted to hear? Is it so wrong that he wanted her to say how much she loved him, and lie a little?  Who doesn’t lie to their parents? Who doesn’t pretend to feel more affection for family members than they actually feel? How the hell is it virtuous to enrage your 80-year-old father in order to — what, protect your honor?

I could write about Trevor Noah taking over for Jon Stewart. Maybe about the breakup of One Direction. Or about the infuriating way that Cox refuses to put the new episodes of The Amazing Race on demand in any kind of rational way. I could talk about everything that’s wrong with The Voice, which should be an excellent show, and instead is just okay.

So many possibilities. But see, I have been wanting to follow the 2016 Presidential campaign, especially the Republicans. I want to understand the conservative stance. I want it to be rational. My wife, who is perfect in all ways, tends to see Republicans as dangerously stupid lunatics whenever she and I discuss politics, which we do pretty regularly. And hey — considering that the GOP is represented by people like George Bush and Dick Cheney, and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, and Mitt Romney and John Boehner — and people in our own new state like Jan Brewer and Doug Ducey, and the people who tried to mandate that everyone join a church or tried to gag teachers and school officials who disagree with them — Toni has a valid point.

And in the interests of pursuing this conservative campaign project, I really should write about Ted Cruz. The first Republican to officially declare his intention to run for President, despite being grossly unqualified, grossly unsuited, and basically just gross. I’m sorry: I don’t mean to rip on Republicans just because they’re Republicans, or conservatives; I’m serious about wanting to understand why people believe what they do and why they vote the way they do. But this guy? This guy?? THIS GUY?!?

How am I to take this man seriously?

I will try. I promise. But while I was looking through Ted Cruz’s website tonight, looking for information and an angle I can take on him, I checked out the Cruz News! link. And found this:

CRUZ: I’m proud to stand with Gov. Mike Pence, and I urge Americans to do the same

03/30/15

Issues Statement on Religious Freedom Restoration Act

HOUSTON, Texas — U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, issued the following statement today in support of Governor Mike Pence’s effort to defend religious liberty and protect against the government forcing individuals to violate their deeply held beliefs:

“I want to commend Governor Mike Pence for his support of religious freedom, especially in the face of fierce opposition. There was a time, not too long ago, when defending religious liberty enjoyed strong bipartisan support. Alas, today we are facing a concerted assault on the First Amendment, on the right of every American to seek out and worship God according to the dictates of his or her conscience. Governor Pence is holding the line to protect religious liberty in the Hoosier State. Indiana is giving voice to millions of courageous conservatives across this country who are deeply concerned about the ongoing attacks upon our personal liberties. I’m proud to stand with Mike, and I urge Americans to do the same.”

source

There we go. Something at least for tonight’s blog.

Let’s start with Indiana and the “Religious Freedom Restoration Act.” First, you can’t restore a religious freedom that didn’t exist in  the first place. And while religious folk do have the right to think what they want about anyone they wish, and the right to say whatever they want that isn’t directly defamatory or libelous (the same right we all have, with the same restrictions), they do not have the right to treat people differently because of a religious disagreement. That’s called discrimination, and it is a violation of civil liberties. In other words, my right to freely patronize your restaurant overrides your right to throw me out of it, barring dangerous or harmful actions on my part — a category which does not, unfortunately for religious bigots, include thinking sexy thoughts about Charlie Hunnam.

(Sorry if  the reference is obscure — we’ve been watching Sons of Anarchy. Allow me just to say this: Mmhm.

)

The moment a business — or a church –opens its doors to the public, it grants the public the right to come through those doors. The minute you offer a service to that public — including sermons and ceremonies — the public has a right to make use of those services, if their use falls within the same guidelines offered to other people. So if you let a Christian man use your bathroom, you have to let a Muslim man use your bathroom. Or a gay one.

Them’s the breaks. That’s the way America works. I do understand the objection, honestly: there are students that I would much rather throw right the hell out of my classroom, and sometimes it has been because I disagree so strongly with their views — particularly, in my case, religious ones. (Especially some of the self-righteous holier-than-thou pro-life zealots I have been sorry to come across in the last fifteen years of teaching persuasive essays) But I don’t have that right, and I wouldn’t even if I weren’t a public school teacher. You know what I do with those people? I argue with them, when I can; I hate them on the inside — and I treat them like my other students, and I grade them fairly. I gave an A to the guy who argued that white people really were better than blacks or Latinos. Because he wrote a decent essay. No — I think I gave him a B. He didn’t cite sufficient evidence. Probably because he was full of crap.  But it really was a pretty good piece of (disgusting, appalling, and downright distasteful) writing.

Patronizing a place of business is not, in any way, by any stretch of the imagination, an imposition on the proprietor. You are offering money in exchange for goods or services; this is not asking something unreasonable, and it is not an infringement on private space: the business owner invited the public in. But refusing services, for a reason that is based on a personal opinion, most definitely is an imposition, especially if this must be done publicly, by asking the person to leave or refusing to serve them. Someone being gay in your vicinity is not a harmful act, and therefore you have no reason to throw them out of the restaurant.

Therefore, this act is not protecting the freedom of the business owners. It is protecting their opinions. I do not think anyone has the right to have the government protect their opinions, other than keeping someone from wrongfully stealing and profiting from those opinions, through plagiarism or copyright infringement. And I do not believe that a lot of people are going to steal “We don’t serve homos” from some deep-fried pork rind joint in Indianapolis and put it on a T-shirt. The government should protect the right to express those opinions, and any business owner who wants to write a letter to the editor saying that they don’t like homosexuals is welcome to do so. They deserve what they get.

They just don’t get to tell people they can’t buy a cup of coffee.

On a final note, let me address this specific piece of the Senator’s statement:

There was a time, not too long ago, when defending religious liberty enjoyed strong bipartisan support. Alas, today we are facing a concerted assault on the First Amendment, on the right of every American to seek out and worship God according to the dictates of his or her conscience.

When, Mr. Cruz? When did defending religious liberty enjoy strong bipartisan support? When has religious liberty ever been threatened — genuinely threatened — in this country? As for the “concerted assault” on the First Amendment, what the hell are you talking about? Concerted by whom? Who is calling the shots, coordinating the efforts, to — what? Force bigots to look homosexuals in the eye and say “You want fries with that?” Allow me to point out that the freedom to “seek out and worship God” is in no way threatened by insisting that people treat others fairly, and with dignity. Not unless you belong to the church of Don’t Sell Gel-Sole Shoe Inserts To Homosexuals.

Which, in this genuinely wonderful country of ours, is totally a church you could found yourself. And you can even become a reverend through the Universal Life Church, and gain tax-exempt status for yourself. No shit.

 

Respect my authority!

Dusty Leave a comment

Okay: that title actually takes me into a different topic than I meant to talk about. So let’s see if I can tapdance my way into a confluence of ideas.

Here’s where I was going to go with this: This story about the drunken Secret Service agents who crashed into a White House barrier. Now, I’m tempted to bash law enforcement in general about this — and I think there’s grounds, because the worst part of this story, for me, is that a senior Secret Service agent overruled local law enforcement that wanted to drunk test and detain the two agents. Somebody actually told some cops to stand down and let the drunken agents drive away — and then they promptly crashed their car right into CNN (Not literally. Though that would have added a nice zest to the story. It’d be even better if they ran over Rush Limbaugh. But then they’d be heroes.). This shows the way our unquestioned “respect” for policemen has damaged our objective judgement, and therefore corrupted the police, who seem to believe they have carte blanche simply because they are police — and in Ferguson and Coney Island, indeed, they seem to have just that.

So I could go there. But I was thinking that the problem I wanted to speak to here is the lack of respect for the office of the President. Barack Obama is a President that has been called a liar, during a State of the Union address, by a U.S. Congressman. This is a President that had to grin and snark his way through another mocking round of applause when he said he had no more campaigns left to run, during his most recent State of the Union. Applause from people who wouldn’t applaud all of the good things the man has accomplished, simply because they don’t like the man. Think about that: they dislike the man so much they are unhappy when he helps the country. This is a President who has had to “work with” a Senate minority, now majority, led by a man who stated, plainly and unequivocally, that his party’s only goal in 2009 was to make sure that Barack Obama was a one-term president.

This is a level of disrespect that nobody, no dedicated professional in any field, should have to put up with. (Well — maybe Rush Limbaugh.) Let alone the President of the United States. Think about that: the man is the pinnacle of achievement, here. Out of 330 million Americans, he has done the best of us all (Except for the other four guys still living who did the same thing. No disrespect meant to Presidents Carter, Clinton, Bush, and Bush. Seriously. I think George W. Bush was terrible for our country, but the man was still the President. He managed to accomplish more than any of the rest of us. And so if he came into the room, I would stand up, and I would salute, and I would be honored to shake his hand. And I wouldn’t say to his face all the mean things I think about him. I sure as hell wouldn’t shout “LIAR!” during his speech to the entire nation.). This is what we tell kids they can do when we mean to say “You can do anything: you can do the greatest thing you could ever dream of.” And what do we say to exemplify that belief? We say You could grow up to be an astronaut, or the President of the United States.

Barack Obama did it. You didn’t. Show some goddamn respect.

Maybe it’s a stretch to say that the recent spate of absurd Secret Service screw-ups is also related to this same lack of respect, but I don’t think so. I think that’s exactly what the issue is. These drunken idiots did not think, “If I get busted for this, it will reflect badly on my office, my country, and my President.” But they should have. The Secret Service is directly linked to the President. That’s why they get respect — even respect from cowed but genuine police officers, who let drunken dipsticks go when they know better (I am presuming about the details of the law enforcement override, but the point remains regardless), and they should be glad the drunks didn’t kill anyone, and they should remember that even though the President deserves respect and consideration, and so too do his people, we are a nation of laws: and the law against driving drunk is one of those that can’t really be debated, unless you want to make it tougher.

Any road: the agents should have been cognizant of how their actions would affect their President. They should be cognizant of that every second of every day. That, as much as protection, is their job. And I think it is a lack of respect that leads to the slackening of personal standards of behavior, in this case. What else? Maybe that LEO carte blanche I was speaking of, and maybe it’s the simple rise of idiocy — but I doubt it. Drunk driving is not quite the same thing as “protecting the citizens,” which the cops in Ferguson, and Coney Island, and LA’s Skid Row, could tell themselves they were doing; and though every generation seems dumber than the last, these were senior agents, so not young enough to really claim “Electrolytes are what plants crave.”

No: I think the point is that they don’t take their job seriously enough. And the reason they don’t is because the entire country has apparently given up on the idea that our President is, for the time that he is in office, the very best this nation has to offer. He is our leader. He is the one out in front, for all of us.

Show some respect.

 

And then there’s this: as soon as I typed that title (My first thought was to use the line “Show Dick some respect!” which is from one of my all-time favorite movies, but it doesn’t work here, since I’m serious, and nobody in this situation is named Dick. More’s the pity.), I was reminded of the fact that today I had to deal with a class that has been disrespecting me as a teacher. This is not a new thing, but it also isn’t that common for me, compared to many of my colleagues: my students like me, and so it is easier to command, and retain, their ostensible respect (Ostensible because they’re teenagers. They don’t respect anyone. Just ask them.) for me than it is for people who work hard and teach well, but maybe aren’t as popular as I am. But still, all it really takes is a class where the good kids are quieter — in this case, the best students are all girls, who are, because this is America, generally quieter and far less confrontational in a classroom than are boys — and some combination of indifference, perversity, or circumstances. And in this class, I have a student who has absolutely no respect for the educational process, who thinks of school as a series of boring hoops that must be jumped through in order to make money, and who is entirely up front about this opinion; and I have a group of students who are computer/math folk, and don’t care much about English; and I have a student who flirts with anything female, during class, before class, after class, and who survives by dimples alone. And the class is the last of the day. It’s enough to make them push a little more than usual to do nothing, every day — which to me, even though I know it is only teenaged laziness, still shows how little they respect what I do, or the effort I put into teaching them — and to try to get me to break rules for them, to let them go early, or let them out of class, or just — watch movies and stuff. Which shows their lack of respect for literature, and for rules. There’s more, too, but that’s enough to make the point.

The point? This shouldn’t be an issue. I shouldn’t have students talking when I talk. I shouldn’t have students packing their stuff up and trying to move towards the door while I’m still talking. I shouldn’t have students groaning when I say it’s time to work, and yelling out, “Can’t we just do nothing instead?” (Okay, maybe that last one is universal. But it’s still annoying. And disrespectful.) This stuff shouldn’t happen. But it does: and the reason is the same. They may like me personally, they may think (Most of them do) that there is value in education, and that teachers deserve consideration for our efforts; but there is a pervasive lack of respect for the entire endeavor of public education in this country, and especially in this state, and the kids pick up on it, and act accordingly.They may know that they shouldn’t talk while I talk — but they don’t really understand why, and so when push comes to shove, when they have something to say while I happen to be trying to teach, then they go ahead and say what they wanted to say.

Those Secret Service agents may have known that they really shouldn’t drink and drive — but they didn’t know why, or else they wouldn’t have done it. (They may have known, but ignored the reason. But that’s not better.) They should have known that their actions not only show respect, but help to create an atmosphere of respect. It’s a positive feedback loop: show respect, and you make respect more common.

My problem, in the end, is this: I have absolutely no idea how to fix this. When that class came in today, I said nothing at all to them. Because what could I say?

How do I teach them to respect me? How do I get them to listen to me when they’re too busy thinking of ways they can get out of my class?

And where the hell is this all going to end?

The Right Idea

Dusty 2 Comments

I had an idea.

I received an essay from a student arguing that the drinking age should be lowered to 18. I have seen this argument before, and believe me, this was not the cleverest attempt; this student failed to offer even the traditional outrage over the idea that one could join the military and fight and die for one’s country, but not even buy a beer! I mean, come on!

I’ve been looking for the just-right response to that particular “argument” for years. I’m trying to choose between, “If you cut off your left hand, you can’t cut off your right. Is that fair?” or “You’re right. And you know what else? Boko Haram lets their soldiers drink.” or “I heard you can make a lovely Cosmopolitan out of the blood of a slain enemy and just a little wasabi. I bet the Army lets them drink THAT.”

Although I did not have the opportunity to appreciate, again, the absurdity of being allowed to shoot people and not be drunk while doing it, I did get to enjoy my very favorite class of argument: the “Everyone on Earth thinks like a perverse, obnoxious adolescent” argument. In this instance, it goes something like this: People think drinking is cool because it is against the law, and teenagers want to be rebellious. Teenagers do things for no other reason than because people tell them not to do those things. Therefore, if the drinking age were lowered and kids had access to alcohol, it wouldn’t seem so tempting and dangerous, and therefore fun and cool and stick-it-to-the-man-y, and so they wouldn’t do it as much.

Ah, yes. Many times I have thought, “You know what would be cool? Building an addition without a permit. That would really impress my biker buddies.” Whenever I need street cred — and I can’t count the times I have needed to cash in on my street cred — I just fail to report an accident, or I make a fake 911 call. Because I’m a thug, and thug life means jaywalking, yo. I’ve always been a rebel: I remember back in high school, one morning I told my bathroom mirror, “I’m going to falsify legal documents. Yeah: then the head cheerleader will notice me!”

It worked, too.

But while I was reading this particular essay, and trying to think of the best way to point out how absurd is the argument that laws against certain behaviors actually make those behaviors more attractive and therefore more common (I usually ask if the student thinks that murder would become less common if the laws against it were eliminated. Just picture all those murderers thinking, “Yeah, sure, I could go out and kill someone tonight. But where’s the spice, without running from the cops? Unless I’m risking jail time, there just doesn’t seem any reason to kill people. Sigh. I miss the good ol’ days.”), I got to the conclusion, which argued that things would be a whole lot better for everyone if drinking were considered an individual right, not a fascinating vice.

That’s when it hit me.

That student was absolutely right.

The key is not making things legal: the key is making something a right. That’s how you get people to walk away from it.

Just think: our forefathers fought for the right to build a government based on the rule of law and the basic principle of democracy, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And they won that right, too. Then it only took us 200 years or so to tear the whole thing down and replace it with Citizens United, and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, and the Wall Street bailout, and the Keystone Pipeline: a government that represents money and power, and nothing else. A government of the rich (or at least only interested in the rich), by their puppets, for the profit margin.

Know why they do that? Because we’ve been told for years that greed and corruption are wrong. That makes them cool. (I can’t tell you how tempted I am right now to turn this whole thing against God and the Ten Commandments. But the problem with that is the Bible actually supports the claim that I’m currently mocking: after all, God told Adam and Eve not to eat the apple, and they did exactly that, and lost Paradise for us all.

Come to think of it, this bullshit really is the Bible’s fault.)

Then for decades, people fought against slavery, fought for the freedom not to be treated as a commodity. They won that, too, after struggle and war and destruction. And now we happily enslave ourselves: we work harder and for less reward than any other people of any other civilized nation. We do whatever the boss says, whenever the boss says it — you’ll never see a better example of this than teachers. “Why are we giving up the things we know are right for our students, like actual literature and field trips and creative endeavors? Because the boss says we have to raise test scores. Well, then, I guess we have to do it. Somebody pass me that stack of Scantrons.” We all happily give up our free will, duck our heads, bow and scrape, and do what we are told. Some of us even become Ditto-heads, and Moonies, and Beliebers; we “Let go, and let God.”

We have the right to vote: we don’t do it. We have the right to speak freely: we are silent. We have the right to a free press: we stopped reading the ones that spoke the truth, and now we have Fox News and CNN. We have the right to peaceably assemble, and we stay at home and tag each other on Facebook. We have the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, and instead we simply grieve.

It’s true: make something a right, and we can’t run away from it fast enough.

Therefore, I am advocating for the right to murder, the right to hate, and the right to celebrate and enforce ignorance. I believe all Americans should have the right to exploit each other, the right to feel no compassion for any other living thing, and the right to pervert and corrupt every goodness on Earth for the sake of instant gratification and petty, spiteful vengeance. Screw that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness stuff; we need to have those rights taken away. Life and liberty — and happiness — should be outlawed. Then they’ll be cool.

Then we’ll want them. Like everything else we can’t have.

So I hereby stand corrected in my basic intent as a blogger: we do not need to fight for the natural rights of man, we do not need to fight for justice, nor peace, nor love.

We need to fight for the right to treat each other, and ourselves, like dirt. The right to drink beer. And bacon: definitely the right to bacon.

I Don’t Like the Drugs.

Dusty 6 Comments

(Yeah, okay.)

I’m teaching argument right now, to my AP Language and Composition students. And as I always do when I teach persuasion and argument, I have them write an essay about any controversial issue they like, and I help them generate a list of possible issues. It allows me to encourage those who pay attention to the things going on around them — students who are aware, for instance, that the dipstick new governor of Arizona has proposed a budget that cuts education spending rather than increasing it; this in a state that currently scores 48th in the nation in education achievement, and one in which the legislature refused to follow their own laws and increase education spending to match inflation. The state currently owes Arizona public schools $317 million for one year, and might owe over $1.3 billion. It also allows me to push them towards topics that are genuinely controversial — gun control, for instance, rather than “Pollution is bad.”

Yes, I’ve had students write about that.

And whenever I ask teenagers to come up with topics they would like to argue about, they always — ALWAYS — bring up legalization. They usually go for marijuana, though I am fond of hijacking their topic suggestion and making it legalization of ALL drugs; because it is essentially the same argument for heroin, methamphetamine, and LSD as for marijuana. In all cases, there is a legitimate medical use — LSD seems effective in treating addiction (Like alcoholism. Ain’t that a trip?), heroin is essentially a form of morphine, and methamphetamine is an effective upper/energy pill/weight loss drug — and in all cases, crime rates would plummet, saving our jails and police and court systems, not to mention a large proportion of poor and minority people in this country, particularly urban men; and regulation of the quality and supply of the drug would drop overdose cases to almost nothing, thereby saving lives, money, and misery.

My students shy away from the “Legalize EVERYTHING!” argument, but they love arguing for legalized pot. And the reduction or elimination of the drinking age — they love that one, too. And at some point in these conversations, someone is sure to ask me my opinion of the issue; and as a corollary, they are sure to ask me my opinion of the substances.

My opinion of the issue of legalization is what I explained above. I am opposed to the war on drugs, a feeling that grows more intense with the militarization of American police forces and the concurrent breakdowns of our courts — leaving me wondering Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? — and the privatization of prisons. I do believe that regulation and taxation of vice would better serve our country, by far. I think that we need to, at long last, get over out Puritan roots, and the belief that fun is sin, that recreation is bad, that pleasure is not a valid reason to do something. And I think that the hypocrisy that allows alcohol to be sold at the rate of $162.2 BILLION per year while imprisoning a woman for twelve years for selling $31 worth of pot (Story’s right here. #2, Patricia Spottedcrow.) is one of the more appalling facts about us as a nation and a culture.

But how do I feel about the drugs?

I admit it, I’ve tried them. They’re fun. But when I think about drugs, I can’t help but think about Layne Staley. I mean, look at him. Listen to him. Just for four and a half minutes.

While you’re at it, you can look at Mike Starr, playing the bass in that same video. Because he used to do heroin with Layne. And now he’s dead, too. With Layne. Who, if I may say, was not only one of the most talented and innovative heavy metal singers, but — damn, that was a pretty man. Just look at him.

layne_staley

Dead. Heroin overdose.

I think of Brad Nowell. Who couldn’t even appear in this video, because by the time this song hit, he was already dead, also of a heroin overdose. Though that is his dog there, looking even sadder than his former bandmates, trying to act like they have the heart to do any of this bullshit after their frontman and songwriter died.

Hell, I think of Elvis Presley. I mean, sure, it was a whole lot of hard living that did him in — but I think we know what the primary cause was. It wasn’t those fried sandwiches. And my God, what a voice that man had.

I think of Heath Ledger. Who I loved from when I saw him in Roar, and who just — I mean, come on. What can I say?

He even makes Christian Bale act well. (Unnecessary dig. Bale’s not bad. But Batman in the movies is boring without the villains — and this is the best one. Bar none. Better than Nicholson in the same role. Nicholson has three Oscars. Ledger’s dead. Because of drugs. )

I believe that the purpose of humanity as a race — as compared to our purpose as individuals, which is most simply put as “Make yourself happy,” a commandment that pushes us to do the things we think are right, as well as prioritizing our limited time and focusing our scattered attention on what really matters, while allowing us to be the free individuals we must always be — our purpose as a race is to do the things that other species cannot do, and that is, in my opinion, to find truth and to create beauty. Artists, along with others, do that. And the sheer number of absolutely wonderful and unique and gifted and visionary — in the best sense of the word: human — artists that have been destroyed by drugs makes me weep.

And I’m not even counting alcohol. Because I’m a writer, and if I start that list, we’ll be here forever.

And so I end up in a terrible position. A paradoxical and ultimately frustrating position, one that I don’t ever want to defend, but have no choice. Drugs should not exist. They should never be taken to excess, they should never be relied upon; they should be avoided. There is too much goodness in life to need an illusion of it. What we should do is support one another, and love one another, so that people don’t need drugs — and then let them use drugs recreationally all they want to.

What I tell my students is this: drugs make you stupid, and then they make you dead. That’s a question of increased usage, not inevitability, but increased usage is common. I do think — in a painfully simplified sense — that it is the lack of support that forces people into that fatal spiral, a lack of human treatment at the hands of our fellow men; when it is not simply bad luck, or fate, or whatever name you want to give to Dame Fortune and her spinning wheel.

And I think that what drugs have taken from us is just heartbreaking.

Book Review: “Just Kids” by Patti Smith

Dusty 1 Comment

 

 

Just Kids cover

Just Kids

by Patti Smith

Patti Smith is a poet, sure enough. It starts with the title, Just Kids, which refers to a chance encounter these two had on the streets of New York City: dressed in their ragged-fabulous 1960’s artist finery, they were spotted by an older couple, and the wife said “Oh, take their picture, I think they’re artists” But her husband refused saying, “Oh, go on. They’re just kids.”

And they were: barely twenty years old when she made her way to New York, escaping her humdrum New Jersey upbringing, Patti Smith encountered an even-younger Robert Mapplethorpe, and the two began a relationship that defied convention or definition, that survived separation and heartbreak and the trials of everyday life, that lasted decades and, in the end, made art: because these two helped each other to become what they became: rock stars, one in music, and one in photography. But when they met, they were just — Patti and Robert. Both determined to be artists, to create wonders, but neither knowing how. Mapplethorpe hadn’t even found photography yet. Smith, though she wrote poetry, was as much a visual artist as a wordsmith, drawing and painting and assembling collages alongside Mapplethorpe, never dreaming she would be a musician and stage performer.

The world these kids fly into, like Icarus, like Alice, is a magical place. New York in 1967 is not the city we might think of today: the same in some ways — hard and cold, difficult to make one’s way through and survive — but the weird guy that Patti Smith runs into on the street is — Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s a place where you could trade art for rent. Where the man behind her in line at the Automat, who makes up the dime she lacks for her chicken pot pie, is Alan Ginsburg. She writes a song for Janis Joplin, runs into Jimi Hendrix on a stoop; she and Robert are surrounded, it seems, by artists and those who love art. We can see pieces of it in the photographs that appear in the book, and more of it in the words: it is a fascinating place to read about, as these are fascinating people. Moreover, both the scene described, and the people in it, are deeply inspiring to an artist like myself.

I confess I did not know many of the people Smith met, collaborated with, or was inspired by; I can’t even say that I knew well who these two were, though I remember Mapplethorpe from the controversy in the 80’s, and I had heard Patti Smith’s name and music before. I think the book would be even more intriguing for someone more steeped in the 60’s and 70’s culture, who would know everyone, and could have the same vicarious thrill I had when she mentioned Edward Gorey — “in his large tennis shoes” — coming into the bookstore where she worked, so many more times with more names than I knew. Someone who would recognize the genesis of her songs in the experiences she describes and the snippets of poems she includes. But even if, like me, you aren’t versed in Andy Warhol’s circle, the book is still a wonderful piece of writing, an entirely open and vulnerable and honest slice of a fascinating life, with or without fame and fortune. There is love here, and beauty, and art, in a way that I have seldom heard, and that I believe has only rarely occurred. It is worth knowing.
The joy in this book is, first, in reading the words

Flu + Family = Fatigue

Dusty 3 Comments

As I said on my last post, I haven’t been posting for the last several days because I had the flu. Well, it lingered, all last week; I was coughing and sniffling, I still felt feverish whenever I got too tired (which was at the end of every day), I had to take NyQuil every night in order to sleep and suck on Ricola several times during the day. It was pretty miserable, especially when I had parent conferences on Wednesday. (Though that was up and down: I had one parent snipe at me, one parent praise me to the skies, and one parent show some genuine concern because the kid thought I hated him, and the parent wanted to know why the kid thought that. And no, I don’t hate him — the kid likes to argue, and so do I, and we’ve gone at it several times; he is, quite understandably, wary of teachers who disagree with him, because so many of my colleagues would indeed punish him because of the disagreements. But I put him in front when I made the new seating chart because that’s where the d20 put him. Teachers: I’d recommend it. Get some Dungeons & Dragons dice and use them to determine seats. 20 kids in the classroom is real easy, but with multiple dice you can get any number: a 6-sided die and a 12-sided, for instance, can give you 1-36. Then roll for each seat, and count down the roster to place them. Easy-peasy. Just re-roll if the wrong kid ends up next to someone he shouldn’t sit next to. And no, that’s not why this kid was in the front. I really did roll him there. Though I felt terrible that he thought otherwise. Anyway.)

Then, at the end of a long week of half-sickness and weak voice and still-fuddled brain and catching up on the work I missed while I was more actively ailing, I had a joyful event: my father and his wife came to Tucson for a visit.

All right, there’s some sarcasm there. But not much. I love my dad, very much. I love his wife, though there’s some friction between her and my wife, which doesn’t please me. I wanted to see them, and I wanted to show off my cool new town, so much of an improvement over the last one.

But there is some sarcasm. Because I was freaking tired. And I am an introvert, which means I recover energy when I get to be quietly by myself; being with people, even people I love, tends to make me even more tired. And on the weekend that came after my half-sick still-recovering-but-have-to-work week, it was tough. It was pretty tough.

I had to ask for time off from them. And to their credit, despite the fact that they are serious extroverts, who are happiest when they are spending time with people, especially with people they love like their son, they accepted my requests with good grace. For the most part. I think there was a little disapproval when I asked for a couple of hours home alone on Sunday with Toni and the pets before we met for dinner, a request that was met with a few seconds of silence before my dad’s wife said, “Sure, no problem,” and when they came back, there was a question about whether I had gone on a two-hour walk with the dog — that being the time frame and the activity I had used as an excuse. I hadn’t, it was a half-hour walk, and another hour and a half of simply sitting quietly, not visiting.

So here’s my point. Was it rude of me to ask for that? Is it rude of them to expect more time spent visiting, which would make them happier, though be harder on me? Let me give another example: when we asked where they wanted to go for dinner, their response was, “You choose.”  So is that polite, or annoying? It was fine in this instance, but — they were the guests. And they paid for the meals. So should they be choosing? Doesn’t seem right, otherwise. We are new to Tucson and had only eaten in one of the four places we went for a meal; who should choose the other three, then? The guests? The hosts? The foodies? The ones who pay? Or this: at one point while we were all sitting around in the house, chatting, Toni — who is even more introverted than me, and who, after all, is only their child by marriage (Doesn’t that mean she doesn’t have the same responsibility to be as open and entertaining as I am with them? Right? But then, how often can I invite them to my home, when it is her home too? Should I be more giving to my parents, who want to see us more, or more thoughtful to my wife, who would in general rather not have company?) — got out her sketchbook and drew for a while. Still participating in the conversation, but without eye contact, because that’s more comfortable for her, and also because — it’s her job. She draws. She does it all the time.

So was that rude? I’m not even sure they were upset by it, though it kinda seemed so.

I don’t want to simply avoid my parents. But I don’t want them to come as much as I’m sure they’d like to come, and I generally don’t want the visits to last as long as I’m sure they’d like them to last.

So who decides?

All I know is, I’m glad they came, and I’m glad they got to see Tucson, and meet my new dog, and we got to catch up, It was great. And I’m also glad it’s Monday. Now I can relax.