Tag crap

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I don’t know what to write.

I’m planning to do a post on procrastination, but I’m putting it off.

Sorry. Both things are true, though; I’ve had a lot of conversations over the years with my students about procrastination, and I have some things to say about it — but I don’t want to do it now. Partly because I am fairly close to my maximum stress level, because I’m waiting for an email today that will tell us whether or not we get to move into the place we want to move into, or if we’ll have to compromise even more; and partly because I am in the middle of some fairly serious procrastination for school, because I am not keeping up with my grades. And so because I am doing it, I don’t want to write about it for fear that I will strip away my own illusions and excuses, and then I’ll have to grade things. And I really can’t take that right now.

I want to write a whole post of bad jokes. I love bad jokes. But they actually need to be clever, and I’m bad at clever. I’ve been trying to get one to read right, about sneezing into a mustache, but I can’t make it move.

I want to write about what’s bothering me, about trying to find a new rental; but I already did that, and I don’t know what else to say other than to repeat the same things I said before: renting is a terrible thing, landlords are generally terrible people, the internet has made it even harder to find a place because there’s no longer one source to turn to for listings, like the Classified ads used to be.

Then there are all the things I should be writing about: the wars  around the world, and the likelihood that the U.S. will be entering one so that Trump has something to rally his voters around if the economy craps between now and the election. Climate change, and how nothing else will matter if we don’t do something to solve that — but also, how even that doesn’t matter very much. The fact that reading is dying, and there’s nothing that can be done to save it; our best hope is that something else will take its place, and that the new thing will be as powerful and useful as reading is.

But I can’t write about any of that. I don’t have time to formulate the good thoughts and put them down on the page. I would have written it last night, but I was grading, because I’ve been procrastinating. Because I’ve been looking for a new rental. And also been very stressed over it and not sleeping well and so therefore napping during the day and being very tired, as well.

These are all excuses.

I want to write about what matters, but I’m not really sure what does. Love seems the best answer.

I want to write about the opening line of Highly Suspect’s song Serotonia: “I wish that everyone that I knew was dead/Just so I’d never have to pick up the phone.” That is a brilliant line: I can’t think of anything that could be so self-consciously insightful and idiotic at the same time.

I wrote before about how writer’s block is really about this: when you have too many ideas, and simply can’t choose between them, so they all clamor for attention, all at once, and you can’t pick one out of the cacophony to focus on.

Have I done the right thing here? Bibbling on about this without accomplishing anything useful? This way I give you something to read, maybe some insight into my thoughts; maybe that’s useful. Maybe this is a waste of time. Is it worth it to keep the streak going? I’m up to 73 days in a row, I think; WordPress is very impressed by me. I’ve been thinking that I should try for a solid year of daily blogs, which sounds great, but if too many of them are going to be like this, maybe I should let it go. I figured the constant deadline would give me impetus to write, a way to break through logjams like this and come to a decision; normally it does, but today, not. So this is my compromise: it’s a post, but it’s not a good post.

It’s a Monday post.

I’ll try to write something better for tomorrow.

Scat!

Dusty Leave a comment

Okay: so my job, teaching? It involves a lot of shit. I get a lot of shit from students, both bullshit (“I was sick when you assigned this essay. Can I get more time?”) and insulting shit (“You ever think that you shouldn’t have been a teacher? You’re not very good at it.”), I return quite a bit of shit to them (“Of course I like all of my classes equally. I don’t believe in playing favorites. Though if I did have favorites, it wouldn’t be you.”), and the administration and I have a shit-full relationship, though there the shit-flow is only of one type: they give me more shit to do, and I talk shit about them.

Okay, I’ll stop saying shit. Though there is a reason, and it isn’t just because I have to control my language during the school day.

This week there has been a plethora of poop. A cornucopia of crap. First and foremost, we had our accreditation visit. Accreditation, for those who don’t know, is how schools prove that they are in fact doing what they are supposed to do, namely educating students, rather than using them as sweatshop labor or housing them in cubicles like rental shoes at a bowling alley. It’s a fine idea, as education does not have a terrible lot of oversight, but it does have a terrible number of ways to abuse or neglect the system, which can limp along for quite a long time before it breaks down. That is to say: if a teacher is thoroughly incompetent, students will still be able to learn something from each other, from the textbook, from the extra resources that some usually have, like tutors and older siblings and the internet, and so it may not be clear right away, or at all, that the teacher is truly incompetent. Teachers get observed on some kind of regular basis, but the three districts in which I have worked have observed me twice a year, once every two years, and once every four years; and in every case, with every observation, the person doing the observing has never been an English teacher: so while they are certainly qualified to say that I am not blowing snot rockets on my students during class, they can’t really say that I’m doing a good job helping my students become better readers or writers. The problem gets better and worse according to the subject: mine is pretty straightforward and well-understood by most educated people, but my wife, who teaches art to high school students, has been told directly that the administrators observing her had no idea what she was talking about when she spoke to her students about perspective and value and the like. An advanced mathematics teacher I know never heard the open admission, but was perfectly aware that the administrators did not understand what he was teaching, and so could not rationally judge if he was doing a good job.

That is not to say that all administrators are incompetent to judge teachers, nor that they are all incapable of understanding what is being taught. But I couldn’t follow an advanced math lesson any more than my administrators could; the difference is that they are expected to do so, and I’m not. Their ability to understand what I do is most of the oversight that I work with, other than the possibility of student and parent complaints about me – which, so long as I make my students laugh and give them good grades, are minimal or nonexistent.  Even if I wasn’t funny or generous, the truth is that nobody knows what I do in my classroom other than a bunch of teenagers, and, twice a year (or once every two years, or once every four years) between one and three administrators, none of whom understand what I do. (No, that’s not true: three of the administrators I have worked with have been past LA teachers. But the rest of them go: PE, PE, social studies, religious studies, science, PE, kindergarten, biology, elementary school, science and PE, and nothing – meaning they never taught in a classroom. I’m missing a few, but that’s the trend. Also: schools have even more administrators than they do poop, and administrators usually come and go faster than poop does, too.) That’s not a lot of oversight.

So accreditation, in which a group of inspectors come and do an exhaustive review of how the school functions and how it doesn’t, is a really good idea. Except guess who makes up that group of inspectors?

Right. Administrators. Administrators from other schools, but that doesn’t make them any more competent than the ones from my school.

The larger problem than competence (Though really, that’s enough to sink the whole endeavor) is the obvious impetus for quid pro quo. The inspectors in a given area are from that area; the chances that a principal will inspect the school run by the same principal who inspected the first guy’s school are quite high. When I ask my students to critique and grade each other’s work, they pretty much all get A’s, pretty much all the time, even from students who don’t like each other: because no kid wants to be the one who gives out bad grades, for fear of retribution. Same problem here. There isn’t a profit motive, so the intensity of corruption isn’t the same as with lobbyists in Washington; but the system here is as flawed as how our government asks major industries to regulate themselves; or hires regulators straight from the ranks of industry executives, who go right back into the industry once they finish their stint as a check and balance against abuses in that industry. It’s okay: they’re on a break, so it doesn’t count. Right? Just like Ross and Rachel.

School administrators are taught and trained to look for certain things. They want maximum attendance, minimum disruption in the form of behavior referrals and suspensions, maximum test scores, and maximum awards and recognitions. They love checklists, especially ones with impossibly vague categories and subjective descriptions of the achievement levels in those categories. (The accreditation system we went through has these: student is tasked with activities and learning that are challenging but attainable and student is actively engaged in the learning activities. The marks are: Very Evident, Evident, Somewhat Evident, and Not Observed. Pop quiz, hotshot: you watch a calculus class for 20 minutes, with 20 students in it: if the kid in the second row is facing the board and blinking at an appropriate rate, is their active engagement Evident or Somewhat Evident?) Because our current public school system is so unbelievably diverse, and so varied in its methods and results, the largest and scariest bugaboo for administrators this decade is standardization. They want everyone to be on the same page: to know the same things, at the same time, in the same order, to the same degree. They want teachers to all do the same things in all classes, using the same materials, and hopefully achieving the same results. That way, no child gets left behind (Because they’re all in lockstep, like one of those one-guy-with-five-mannequins-attached-to-him-with-broomsticks Halloween costumes), and all teachers are disposable and replaceable, like any other machine-produced standardized cog in a well-tooled machine. Because they are taught and trained to look for these things, these things are all they look for. They do not look for – Teacher knows what the hell he is talking about, and can answer a student’s random question. Teacher knows how to write a good multiple choice question, and how to score a test fairly. Teacher knows when to let a student go to the bathroom and when to say, “Why don’t you wait a couple of minutes?” The things they see may be important – may – but they don’t see everything that’s important. They’re looking somewhere else, entirely.

Observations in classrooms are something of a joke for another reason that I didn’t mention, which is: we know about them in advance. Which means, of course, that the administrators don’t see us going about our regular routine; they see us trot out the dog-and-pony show. My current school, which is the one that has observations twice every year, has one scheduled observation, for which I choose the day and the class when they come to watch me; and one unscheduled observation – for which they give me a window of two weeks when they may come observe any class on any day. In which case I am left predicting their likely choice based on past choices, such as: they prefer older students; they prefer smaller classes. They like coming in the morning more than the afternoon. So far I’m two-for-four predicting which class they will randomly select. Like the TSA and random searches at airports: look for the dark-skinned passengers, and you know who will be “randomly” selected. Even when I don’t half-expect them, I have still been able to adjust my lesson plans on the spot in order to make them reflect what I know the administrators are looking for; I know they want to see me assess the students’ learning, so I have made up a quiz question for the lesson, projected it on my whiteboard, and had students write a response: boom, instant assessment. Go me. Never mind that I usually don’t have my students do that: the observation went great. This is nothing compared to what many teachers do for their scheduled observations: it is not merely an urban legend, that gag about teachers telling the class, “If you know the answer, raise your right hand; if you don’t, raise your left.” I mean, observations determine whether or not we keep our jobs, and in some cases, our performance bonuses. Wouldn’t you work the system?

So do schools when the accreditors come by.

So in this specific case, we knew a month ahead of time when the inspector would be coming, and we had the observation system he would be using, which tells us what he will be looking for. The teachers were coached by the administrators as to what we should present, if the inspector came into our classroom, and also what we should say if we were interviewed personally about the school’s workings and its culture. The students weren’t coached, but there is a certain select group of students who are somehow always chosen (“Randomly” selected — and yes, one of them is dark-skinned.) to be the spokespersons for visiting dignitaries; they always know what to say. We have trained them well. I mean, maybe not for their future careers or the next stage of their education – but they know what to say to make it seem as though we have trained them for those things. And that’s sort of the same thing, right?

Right?

In my case, even though I was asked to join the teachers’ group interview with the accreditor, I avoided it. I didn’t want to be asked what I thought of the school or the administrators. Because what I think of them is this:

The problems with this school are the same problems with public education across this country: it is designed in entirely the wrong way. We take kids too young, and we keep them too long; we don’t allow them enough freedom, and we don’t know how to work to their strengths, instead forcing them to play to ours, or fail. We try to standardize everything, for no good reason that anyone can name other than the absurd “That’s fair.” It’s not. It’s not fair, nor efficient, nor even sane, and yet that idea – that every student and every teacher and every person have the same outcome from the same set of experiences – is the driving force behind almost every aspect of education. Probably because: when everything is the same, it’s easier to talk about. Harder to understand, of course, but so what? Then, we politicize this thing that we don’t even understand, and then make changes to solve problems we don’t understand, with consequences we don’t understand and don’t even pay attention to – because taking the action in response to the apparent problem is good enough for the politicians. In fact, that’s how we treat everything in education: just do something. Anything. As long as you can show that you are doing something (Preferably the same thing that’s been done everywhere else – that’s what we call evidence-based solutions!), then that’s good enough. We don’t recognize the people who are actually doing the good work, because we don’t recognize the good work, and we don’t reward those people for doing good work; instead we reward those people – both educators and students – who create the most convincing façade of achievement. This school is, in fact, no better or worse than any other: some of the students are wonderful, and some of the teachers are wonderful, and one of the administrators is wonderful; and a lot of the rest are – well, I did say I wouldn’t say “shit” any more, didn’t I? Let’s say “Somewhat evident.”

 

That was Tuesday, when the accreditor came. On Wednesday, we had a staff meeting, in which it took us – a room full of professional educators, mind, several with advanced degrees – thirty minutes to complete a conversation about the differences between two grading systems we have used, last year’s and this year’s. (Here’s the difference: last year each specific score was weighted the same as every other score, based on the percentages; this year a specific score’s total number of possible points is factored in. So last year a 75% on a 10-point quiz and a 75% on a 20-point quiz were the same; this year the 75% on the 20-point quiz is counted twice as much as the 10-point quiz, and has twice the effect on the final grade. Thirty minutes to say that. With diagrams on the whiteboard.) We also talked about how well the accreditation visit had gone, and how impressed the accreditor was with our school spirit and the commonality of our vision (We were coached on our vision statement, since it is different from our mission statement, and both are important. I mean, not to the actual work of education; but they’re important to the administrators who write those things, and then inspect and accredit other schools.).

And then we talked about – poop. Specifically, about how one of our students, or more than one, had intentionally defecated and urinated outside of the toilets in the boys’ room. Somebody soaked a roll of toilet paper in the dispenser, and on another occasion, someone left a pile of feces on the floor. We talked about whether we should have a hygiene class to teach students that this is not acceptable. We talked about whether we should put this story on our school newscast. We talked about whether teachers should check the restrooms regularly, or whether we should hire a new security guard. (That one was easy: security guards cost money. Asking teachers to perform tasks that have nothing to do with teaching is free. Stopping my discussion of rhetoric and syntax in order to try to catch somebody crapping on the floor: priceless.)

If only the accreditor had stopped in to visit that bathroom on that day. I wonder where that . . . piece of evidence would fall on the rubric.

Though the real question is: would he even see the actual shit on the floor? Or would he be looking somewhere else, entirely?

Throwback: Stop Buying Crap

Dusty Leave a comment

(This, again, was from my former blog 20/Infinity, which started off being about what I would do with a time machine, but quickly turned to — who would have guessed? — ranting. But I like that this one made me giggle while I was writing it, and I actually wrote the giggle into a parenthetical comment.)

Good, But Not Cheap

 

No time machine needed this week, because this one is appropriate right now. Stop throwing things away.

That’s the best advice I can give. It needs to be said to everyone in this society, including myself. Stop throwing things away.

Because whenever we throw something away and head on down to Wal*Mart to buy a new one, we encourage the culture of consumption that has been gradually built in this country since the 1950’s, and perhaps even earlier — though the scrap metal drives and paper drives and rubber drives and string drives of the WWII era, and the sheer desperation of the Depression before it, lead me to believe that it was indeed the 1950’s, still seen by Republicans across the country as the pinnacle of America, that started us down this road.

We should be able to make things that last, and we don’t do it. And the only reason we don’t do it is because we, as a people, would rather buy something cheap that will only last a short time, and then when it breaks, throw it away and buy a new one. Paper plates, for instance, and paper napkins and Starbucks cups. The only reason we use paper plates is because we can’t be bothered to wash the real ones; ditto paper napkins. Oh — and they’re cheaper. But look at what’s happened: when was the last time you saw cloth napkins outside of a fine restaurant? Does anyone have cloth napkins any more? Where would you even buy them? Maybe I’m just not paying attention, and cloth napkins abound in the linen aisles which I don’t often frequent (Word geek moment: often frequent. That’s a fun phrase. Sorry — back to what I was saying), but I do know that there are a dozen stores that I do frequent, and often (hee hee!), that carry paper napkins. They are the stores I’m in every day, so they are the stores that shape most of my daily purchasing. If they carry paper napkins, chances are good that I’m just going to get paper napkins, and not think about it. And paper plates. And sugar in little paper packets, instead of a bowl. So it goes.

We as a society shape what’s in the stores, and then what’s in the stores shapes us as a society; it’s a kind of biofeedback on a grand scale. When we are given a choice between, say, a $100 toaster that will last for twenty years, and a $30 toaster that will last for two, most of us buy the cheaper toaster, for two reasons: we don’t think that far ahead — the cheap toaster will make toast when I get it home today, and that’s as a far as I’m planning — and we are not willing to wait and save up the $100, or wait and go without the other things we would buy now with the $70 difference. Anyone who can buy the $30 toaster can save up to buy the $100 toaster, but in the interim, there will be no toast — and we can’t abide that. So we buy the cheap toaster, and then when it breaks in two years, we go back out and face the same choice — and come to the same conclusion: this one will make toast now, and I won’t have to wait to spend money elsewhere.

End result? Over twenty years, we spend $300 on toasters, rather than $100. And the landfills are nine toasters closer to overflowing. And the stores stop stocking the $100 toaster, because it doesn’t sell, and after twenty years when we lose our patience and just decide to drop the money on a toaster that lasts, we can’t find one, and we bewail the fact that nobody builds things that last any longer. Oh, yeah: and the toaster repair shop is out of business, because nobody is going to spend the money to fix a $30 toaster (they would to fix a $100 model) and Wal*Mart has built 3,000 new stores and half of the US’s GNP is in Chinese bank accounts.

All right, it’s time to stop beating around the bush and confess. This is not an arbitrary topic, culled from the massive crop of ideas neatly filed in a drawer in my home. This is really about coffee.

My coffeepot doesn’t work. There’s something wrong with the water intake, so when you turn it on it makes that gurgling noise that signals the last sips of water being sucked up, even though there is a full reservoir of water in the machine, waiting to be run through and turned into liquid gold. It’s probably hard water deposits, somewhere inside the tube, because it can be fixed by running vinegar through the Cleaning cycle — it has a cleaning cycle, which I think just makes it go slowly and maybe a little hotter than normal so as to melt away any dirt or coffee oil residue. This happened for the first time last week, and then again today.

The coffee machine is six weeks old.

Now, I admit to drinking a lot of coffee. No, scratch that; I drink an inhuman amount of coffee. It is no mistake that my online handle, for years, has been “Coffeesaint” or some permutation thereof. I invented, and celebrate, Coffee Day (February 11 — join the fun!). I drink something like 6 pints of coffee a day — that would be around 20 cups if I used a normal sized mug, the kind they serve coffee in at Denny’s or IHOP — and on days when I’m tired or crabby, I can hit the gallon mark. I started drinking coffee regularly when I was 18, and for the last 15 years, not one day has gone by that I have not had coffee. So as you can imagine, my coffee maker gets quite a lot of use, since my wife also drinks what most people would consider a lot of coffee on top of what gets poured down my own bottomless coffee-hole. I can understand that my coffee maker will break down sooner than it would in other people’s households.

But six weeks?

We have gone through three coffeepots in the last year, five in the last five years. The last four pots have all come from Wal* Mart, mainly because that is the only large retail store in town, but also because of the monetary impatience I described above. I really don’t want to wait to get a new coffeepot. I don’t want to do without coffee, and I like my morning routine of waking up, turning on the coffeepot (I grind beans and pour water the night before, so all I have to do is hit the button) and then getting in the shower, coming out to fresh coffee. I don’t want to boil water and pour it into a French press or something like that, some low-tech version of a coffeepot that would last many more years without breaking, but would take twice the time and thrice the effort to make my morning coffee. I hate that idea. I just want a coffeepot that will last for more than six weeks, or six months, or two years. I want one that will last, with some maintenance and maybe a trip to a repair shop, for twenty years. But I can’t find one. At least, I can’t find one at a price that will override the momentary temptation of a $29.99 price tag and coffee right now. So I do the same thing everyone else does: I buy that $30 coffee pot and complain.

But here’s an interesting thing. Like most people, I hate being a hypocrite. I hate telling people to do one thing and then doing something different myself. When I assign an essay to my English class, for instance, I often write the essay myself. Even though I don’t want my dog to eat too many salty snacks, if I get out the box of Cheez-its, I give him one — because I shouldn’t be eating them either, so if I can ignore my health for the sake of a happy belly, why can’t he? So now that I have written this little chunk of handy advice, I’m going to have to take it myself. See, I realize that our society is the way it is because we make it so. As I said, there are no decent coffeepots because we don’t buy them, because we’re not willing to do without, or to make do with some less efficient or easy system. We are willing, even eager, to use shoddy goods and throw them away so long as it spares us some effort, so long as it saves us time. And that’s why the goods we buy — everything from our clothes to our computers to our cars to our food — are poorly made, overly disposable, and cheap.

My father told me a maxim many years ago, and it’s amazed me ever since with how many applications it has in daily life (and he’d love that, because he loves aphorisms — I think he’s always wanted to be Ben Franklin. Or maybe Jesus.). I’m positive that it will come up several times in future columns, and I’m not surprised in the least that it has come up in the first five. The maxim is this: “There are three qualities you can have in any thing you pay for: cheap, fast, and good. You can only have two of them at once. If it’s cheap and fast it ain’t good, if it’s cheap and good it ain’t fast, and if it’s fast and good it ain’t cheap.” He told me this in reference to hiring workers, plumbers and electricians and the like, and I’ve found it to be unfailingly true; in fact, sometimes you can only have one of the three. But you certainly never get more than two. Look at my coffee makers: on the whole, machines are faster than percolators and French presses, so I’m always getting fast as one of my qualities; the only question is whether I want a good machine, or a cheap one. For the last five years, I’ve consistently made the same choice.

This is a truth that we as a society need to remember. We have spent long enough buying fast and cheap. We need to go back to good, because good things do not get thrown away, and so they do not use up our resources and they do not fill up our countryside with garbage. Of all the things we can do to improve our world, I think this is the easiest, because honestly, it would make us happier if we owned nice things, good things that worked well and didn’t need to be replaced while we still have the original receipt stuffed in the checkbook.

So my first piece of advice is this: buy good products. If it means you have to save up for the good products, then save the money; make do for a little while now, and then buy something that will actually make your life easier, and save you money, in the long run instead of just saving you money out of this paycheck and simplifying things right now. And my second piece of advice is this: if you, like me, do some things that you know you shouldn’t do, and you let yourself get away with it because it’s easier to ignore the issue than fix the problem, then start giving people advice. It’s like a nicotine patch for hypocrisy.

Now I have to buy a freaking French press.