There are about a billion and a half Chinese, and they all seem to ride the subway at the same time I do. Still, it's interesting to watch people. For example: In China, as elsewhere, girls who really like a guy always look at him in the same way. And when they don't really care about a guy, they will look at him in a different way, but all with the same expression. Also, Chinese girls appear to show their outrage over men in the same manner as women in other countries express their outrage over men. You can always tell when a girl is talking about some guy who has really pissed her off....
One day I received a phone call, and this guy from my past told me he was in town on vacation with his family. I was delighted to hear from him. I hadn't seen him in twenty-five years. We had been childhood friends back in Connecticut, and then, while we were in college, we had a falling out, mostly because we were changing as we became adults.
We arranged to meet at a local pub.
After the first glad greetings and handshakes, we began to reminisce and to fill in our personal histories from the last time we saw each other. At one point, my old friend expressed some degree of surprise when I told him that I was gainfully employed as a teacher and had earned a doctorate degree in my subject area.
When I asked him why he was surprised, he appeared embarrassed, hesitant....
Life may be beautiful, but school is a good place to start learning about ugly and dirty.
You begin the socialization process at around age six by being pushed together with twenty or thirty other kids, many of them with colds and coughs. Kids aren't particularly decorous about their illnesses. Step into any primary school, and you're bound to hear the sound of some kid snuffling back so hard on his snot that it sounds like a vacuum cleaner with convulsions.
Then there's the kid who cuts farts on the school bus-with fifty other kids trapped around him. The smell never varies...
Recently, the Dallas Public School system implemented a new grading
policy intended to ensure "fair and credible evaluation of
learning—from grade to grade and school to school." Here are the key
points in this plan:
Homework grades should be given only when the grades will "raise a student's average, not lower it."
Teachers
must accept overdue assignments, and their principal will decide
whether students are to be penalized for missing deadlines.
Students who flunk tests can retake the exam and keep the higher grade.
Teachers
cannot give a zero on an assignment unless they call parents and make
"efforts to assist students in completing the work."
I don't teach in Dallas, but I am a public high school teacher of
nearly twenty-five years, and I can tell you that similar policies are
creeping into school systems across the country. Soon, I believe, these
blueprints for teaching students to ignore—or even celebrate—mediocrity
and failure will become commonplace practices in our nation's public
schools.
For the politically naïve (and yes, the shaping of school policy is ultimately political), here is why every student must be forced to "succeed" on paper:
It's because public schools can't tell the truth. And the truth is that
as a society, we are becoming incapable of raising children to be
responsible adults....
Today
I thought about the rhubarb patch that my mother kept in our backyard.
Whenever I think of that patch, I see myself as a six or seven year
old, playing underneath an apple tree, and behind me the big stone wall
that traversed the entire south end of our property. There was a field
behind the stone wall, and a horse that grazed there. Sometimes, the
horse would come up to the stone wall, his head peering over, and my
sister and I would give him a lump of sugar or an apple. I remember the
feel of his wet lips, the slobbery gulp as he lapped the food from our
hands....
I remember that day so clearly. I was still a young man then—not much over
forty, as they say in the AARP youth brochures. I had been teaching at Emerald
City High for at least fifteen years.
I was writing subject-verb
agreement sentences on the blackboard and I wanted to proceed slowly and with
great care. This particular class was somewhat resistant to instruction. One
student had recently bitten a classmate in her biology class (her counselor told
me that she had "personal space" issues). Another student was struggling to fart
on command, while another was sucking her thumb. They were all part of a college
prep program. As we say at Emerald City High, college prep means that you have
no definite plans for going to jail….
"Does anyone know which
subject you would choose to figure out the verb form?" I had written an example
sentence on the board: "Either four cars or a bus (is, are) needed to take
the Y group up to Devil's Lake." I was about to underline the word "bus"
when it happened. Across my shoulder floated the white cylindrical shape; a
ghostly missile fired near my head. It hit the verb "is" on the board with a
soft "pfft" sound. Then it fell.
I am constantly told by the media that we are living in times of
upheaval. China looks to be the world's next super power. An
African-American has been declared the democratic nominee for
President. Prices are skyrocketing, the result of an oil crunch that's
apparently here to stay. The list goes on and on, and if you wanted to
examine the list with even a modicum of interest, you would marvel at
the drama, danger, and possibilities of our era. As Charles Dickens
once said, "It was the best of times and the worst of times."
I wish I cared more about the times in which I
live. It's not that I'm uninvolved. I simply don't feel the continuity,
the sense of cohesiveness about my relationship to society that I once
did...
(Exterior: Long Shot. Camera pans
across a sea of rusted mobile homes stretching deep into the horizon. As the
camera moves in for a closer view, we see a ragged band of dirty children
playing hop scotch in the dusk. We hear a shot fired in the distance. The
children stop playing and listen attentively as more shots are fired. Soon, we
see rockets flaring up in the sky, sparkling and twisting into fantastic shapes
and colors of red, white, and blue.)
CHILD ONE: Oooh, pretty!
CHILD TWO: Pretty lights! Pretty
lights!
(The children dance in a circle,
delighted by the noise and fanfare. The camera cuts to the door of a mobile
home. A grizzled, gray haired man and woman step outside to admire the
fireworks. They are dressed in cheap cotton pants and shirts. Across the front
of their shirts are stitched the same words: "Coca Cola is Mother****ing
Good! Drink the God**** Coke, Yo!")
GRANDPA JOAD: Yep, the fourth of
JU-ly. Mighty good to see the country celebrating.
GRANDMA JOAD: Reckon the gov'mint
will give us our three gallons, Pa?
GRANDPA JOAD: Hope so. They
promised us three gallons a gas at Christmas. Wouldn't do to lie on Jesus
birthday, now would it?
Medium Shot: Two children run
toward GRANDPA and GRANDMA JOAD: They are carrying something in a bag; they are
very excited.
PANASONIC JOAD (he is a boy of
about fourteen): Look what we found, Grandpa! (He dumps the bag upside
down and several corroded cell phones and Ipods fall on the ground.) Ain't
these the talking machines, Gramps?
GRANDPA JOAD: (he picks up the
devices; then breaks into a broad, toothless grin.) Panny, you know what
you got there?
PANASONIC: I dunno. If they ain't
the talkin' machines, maybe they be—what do you call 'em—digitalis watches?
GRANDMA JOAD: (She cackles in
glee): No, they ain't no watches, Panasonic Samsung Joad! Them's phones!
And them other ones is for music.
SNAPPLE JOAD: (she is a dirty
faced little urchin of six or seven. In a pleading voice): Tell us about
the rap music, Grandpa! Tell us about the S.U.V.s and the fast food and the
bling...
Recently a student of mine
nearly punched me in the head over Shakespeare's Globe Theater.
Allow me to explain:
Every so often, I give failing
seniors extra credit assignments as a chance to redeem themselves as academic
aspirants. Since the statewide initiative was put into place mandating that
schools "teach through all modalities," extra credit assignments can now be
delivered in various ways: written, oral, visual, or interpretive
dance. This particular student chose to build a miniature replica of the Globe
Theater. On the day the assignment was due, he, with obvious pride, placed his
creation on my desk.
"What's this?" I asked.
He gave a politely restrained
snort. "What do you think it is?" he
said.
"I don't know. That's why I asked."
"It's the friggin' Globe
Theater, dude!"
(Students nowadays really do
call their teachers—even teachers over 50—"Dude.")
I stared at the thing. It was
round, more or less. It was made of Popsicle sticks. I saw remnants of the
original flavors all over the "theatre" walls. I counted lemon, lime, grape,
raspberry, cherry, chocolate, and orange among the construction materials.
Possibly boysenberry.
"It's just a bunch of old Popsicle sticks arranged in a circle," I said. "For all I know it
could be Stonehenge—or Gumby's house."
"Could I get credit for that,
too?" the kid asked eagerly.
"You haven't given it enough
thought. You haven't even washed the sticks."
"Dude, I worked on that for an hour!" the kid said, affronted. "Do you
know how many Popsicles my family had to eat so I could make Shakespeare's
condo or whatever? We all got cold headaches."
For a little while we argued
back and forth. Finally I executed my professional prerogative to make a
judgment. "I am not giving you extra credit," I said. "In fact, I'm pretty
amazed that you would even think of submitting this for a grade."
The kid turned purple with outrage.
"If—if you weren't a teacher, dude, I would punch you in the head!" he nearly
screamed. Then he added in a wounded tone: "You are really hurting my self of
steam, man."
I looked at him. "Your what?" I
asked.
"My self of steam!" he shouted.
"Are you deaf, old man?"
Several years ago I made a
startling discovery. My students really like themselves—a whole lot, in most
cases. But they don't want people like themselves to represent them in court.
Or operate on them. Or do any work for them that might require real
proficiency.
I learned all this when I proposed the following scenario to them. Read more at:
I’ve been a high school teacher for nearly a quarter of a century. During that time I’ve seen the effects on children who live without the regular and sustained influence of caring, grown-up men. It is a mess. There is no other way to describe to it. It is a harmful, hurtful, angry mess. Of course, there are happy, well-adjusted children (and adults) who have lived without fathers. But an absent father leaves a special kind of hole in a person’s life.
I decided long ago that I didn’t want children. Sometimes my students ask me why. They assure me that I would have been a “good” father, and that I should get busy solving this problem right away. They assure me that just because I’m over fifty, I can still make up for lost time. I explain to them that being with kids for forty five minutes a day is nothing at all like being a father. I explain to them that being a father requires a lifelong commitment, a willingness to put a child’s best interests first above your own. I explain that unless you are a hundred percent certain that you want a child, you probably shouldn’t have one. I explain that neither my wife nor I ever heard the “bell” go off announcing that we wanted a child.
My students seem to find this puzzling, if not downright “selfish,” the label society reflexively applies to anyone who chooses not to have kids.
My wife and I certainly are selfish, if you define that word as caring about both our own happiness and that of any kid born into this world. We’ve always felt that kids deserve to be the center of their parents’ lives. Their parents should give up things for them— not reluctantly but joyfully. They should want to sit by their sickbeds, and see what their homework looks like, and insist on feeding them healthy things. If they don’t feel this way, then they don’t have “the calling.” There’s no law that says everyone has to have kids. There are already lots of kids, and too many of them aren’t getting the attention they need to grow into fully-developed human beings. My wife and I are able to give attention to kids; they just happen to be other people’s. We’ve tried to be selfish—responsibly selfish.
As Father’s Day approaches, my wish for my male students is that they will grow up to fulfill the responsibilities of parenthood. I hope they do a better job than my generation (many of whom are their parents) did. And if they’re not certain that they want to be fathers, then I would strongly encourage them not to make babies. In this way, too, they will honor both fatherhood and childhood.
