Motormanmark.com

Another taboo-breaking scoop offered up by Motormanmark.com!

Some who know me or who have read Fool for a Lawyer know I have a very funny prostate exam story, but this is not it.

And I am being totally serious here.

I think it is safe to say in our culture it is taboo (for reasons related to purity,) to discuss inserting one’s own finger in one’s own anus, especially if you are a man, (for homophobic reasons, maybe,) and I suppose this is the reason why nobody ever discusses the fact that there is a very easy way for a man to check himself for one of the most common cancers, prostate cancer.

We hear so much about checking the beautiful and untabooed female breast, but, though a comparable number of men die from prostate cancer as women die from breast cancer  (27,000 v. 40,000,) it is a real challenge to even Google the info needed to perform a prostate self-exam.

Men, be aware: by the time we reach the age of 80, nearly all of us will have developed prostate cancer.  Still, physicians often neglect to offer a prostate exam, we are reluctant to agree even when they do offer, and it is quite embarrassing to ask for it yourself.  Right?

Now, not being a doctor, I should say this should not be in lieu of the exam you will have done by your doctor, but rather a way of making yourself more aware of your own health and to catch a problem more quickly than you would have without performing the self-check.

All the info I impart has been culled from internet sources I have judged reliable and my own experiences utilizing that info, and since I am talking about a harmless procedure (as long as you wash your hands well afterward,) I don’t think it’s wrong for a regular guy to dispense the info.

So, here we go…

First of all, we need to visualize what you are going to do.  Here’s the best picture I could find:

So, we are talking about getting a fingertip that is lubricated (liquid soap works well, and a rubber glove is unnecessary as you are entering a place that is anything but antiseptic) in there far enough to feel out this walnut-sized organ for hardness or lumps.  Its texture and firmness should be similar to that of the flesh on the pad of your thumb when you make a tight fist. If it’s as firm as your knuckle or you notice any lumps, you should tell your doctor.

If you have ever had a prostate exam before, you know that you can feel it when the prostate is touched.  It is a very peculiar feeling that can be quite uncomfortable, and I would say the feeling you have afterwards is even more uncomfortable.  So, you will need to go in carefully with a well-trimmed fingernail.

The position you want to take is up to you, but I would suggest from my own experience that you sit on the side of the tub, with your feet in the tub.  Lean forward into the tub (so you do not fall backwards,) and slide your butt out so that it is hovering well over the floor.  Now, bring your hand under your belly and between your legs, palm facing up, and insert your lubricated middle finger carefully all the way in to your anus.  Remember where you are going by remembering the picture (above,) and the prostate’s location with relationship to your penis.  You will find your prostate (and will feel the strange sensation when you touch it,) right straight-on where your middle finger naturally ends up.

Now, feel out the surface, all the way around (if you can reach that far,) and across all its interior surface area.  You are feeling for any hardness or inconsistency in texture. If any part of it feels harder or bumpy, let your doctor know.  Don’t be afraid to tell your doctor you examined yourself.

Now, give yourself a pat on the back (after you wash your hands.)

Okay.  Freedom of Religion must have its limits.  When a religion comes to have a significant portion of its followers believing garbage that is antithetical to the needs of all people, that religion eventually comes to deserve curbs.

So, the Ground Zero Mosque debate is not a question of human rights, as some very well-meaning intellectuals would have us believe, which you would find them realizing quickly and effortlessly if the percentage of US Muslims who believe that suicide bombing is sometimes justified rose from its current level of 13 percent to, say, 60 percent.  My point is that the argument is over a subjective judgment of the degree of extremism.   (It is much higher, of course, in other countries, –and, among younger US Muslims, which may be interpreted as a generational radicalization, but hopefully it just represents the radicalism of youth.)

And it should be made clear that what is at stake here is not a basic human right, but a legal right granted by the Constitution.  Religion is not the natural state we are born into, like physical characteristics (such as race and sexuality,) but a construct (that many people see as especially irrational and intellectually primitive.)  History is full of horrifying examples of human constructs that were not curbed, gone wrong.

And don’t let any of these mainstream-media talking heads lead you to believe this is a free speech issue.  Religion represents the antithesis of free speech.  By definition, Religion is the restriction of speech–the delivery of an ultimate truth that is defined authoritatively.

…You may ask, why pick on Islam??  Cat Stevens is a Muslim, and he wrote “Peace Train!”

36% of young British Muslims believe a person should be killed who converts away from their religion. Obviously, a large portion of the world’s terrorists are Muslim-motivated.  Shariah law, under which little girls continue to be barbarically tortured, enslaved and murdered, is a Muslim concept.  If we were to go to war against terrorism and stoning people to death and people who cut off people’s noses and keep girls from getting to go to school or women from exposing their faces in public, it would be seen as a religious war.

I know, my ideas seem harsh, but if we can just put aside this intellectual taboo against offending religion, they can be seen to be clearly true.

However….

… If we are going to curb Islam, we must be careful not to discriminate.  We must appropriately curb every religion that is a serious threat to us.

I’ll start with the religion I was raised with, Catholicism.  Sometimes, to be a threat to society, it does not take even a significant percentage of a religion’s followers to be scumbuckets, as long as their misdeeds are particularly vile.  Such is the case with the Catholic clergy that have committed and covered-up child physical abuse and rape.  Depending on how poorly one views child rape, the atrocity of their crimes may be far beyond 9/11 and all other Islamically-inspired terror acts combined.  This religion as it has been functioning is a scourge and should be curbed in ways I advocated in an earlier post you can click to HERE.

Now, let’s take Christian Fundamentalism, and think back on all that Shock and Awe bloodthirsty baby-killing recently perpetrated by Bush and his Fundamentalist followers, acts which Bush honestly referred to as a “crusade” until the media shut him up (read more about the Christian inspiration HERE and my “Pre-Emptive War is Murder” post by clicking HERE.)  After the invasion of Iraq, any world citizen should look on Fundamentalist Christianity as a scourge comparable to Catholicism and Islam.

I could, of course, go on to detail Jewish support for Israeli cluster-bombing of children, Hindu foundations for enslavement and gender-based persecution, and  human rights outrages that arise from any religion.

Yes, to be instituted in a non-discriminatory manner, this new scrutiny of religion will take sacrifices from just about everyone (to be fair, us atheists, I guess, should make all the decisions,) but I must say I wholeheartedly agree with the Tea Partiers on this one–it is high time religion was held responsible for its evils.

I’ll start thinking it out.  (Let’s see: no mosque at Ground Zero, no Catholic church within 3 blocks of a school or day care, megachurch enrollment restricted to those not registered to vote,…  We can do this!)

Should I send my child to school?  We never ask this question.

Considering the low pay most citizens receive, it is nearly impossible to get along on just one parent’s income, so the school system is simply the only thing to do with your child while you’re at work.  And, anyway, everybody else does it.  What’s there to think about?

It is easy to see ourselves as helpless to our economic needs.  The dual-income lifestyle—if we are fortunate enough to have found a life partner, and if we are both fortunate enough to have found employment in this god-awful economy–is necessary to pay the auto loan, the mortgage, the bills, bills, bills, bills, bills.   But, it must be said that this is still a construct.

We frame in our minds what is acceptable for our lifestyle and what is not.  We build up psychological constructions of identity and feel bound to them.  I remember in my first marriage while my mother was alive I never for a moment considered divorce.  Soon after she died, magically, bizarrely, the idea was there, as if she needed to be out of the way for it to be possible as a construct.  The fact is there are plenty of families that get along on one low wage.  Maybe they don’t own much.  Maybe they live poor (click here to see my “Live Poor” blog.)  All I am saying is that in only very narrow, extreme circumstances should economics get in the way of what is best for a child’s development.

So, let’s look at it fresh.  Let us assume we are intelligent enough to be capable of raising a child to school age competently.  Assume we have nurtured the child well, and we find the child has been learning briskly at home.  The child knows how to read and count and how to use scissors.  The child can set the table, paint pictures, and obey the rules of simple board games.  It can be assumed that we have passed along to the child whatever skills we are especially competent at.

So, why send them to school?  Will they will learn more or learn it more efficiently than they will at home?  Will their being mixed into a class of 25 kids not actually be a hindrance to their further learning?

We haven’t always been as smart as we are now.  Used to be, when we would think what we should eat for dinner, we’d ask what might taste best, or what might give us the most energy or strength, or what might make us larger than other people.  This is why our forbears cooked up big fat sausages made from unmentionables, swizzled their breakfast foods in hot bacon grease, and kneaded together sugar and butter to make snacks.  Then, once Madison Avenue joined in, a generation was eating foods heavily-laden with flavoring and coloring chemical agents and preservatives.

During the natural foods revolution of the 1970’s, we got smarter.  We started asking ourselves what we should be eating considering our natural evolutionary progression.  We learned that rather than pompously ordering our bodies to do what we wanted, we should actually be learning from our bodies what we need to be eating.  Considering the vast majority of our evolution, which has us as leafy green foragers, we came to realize that what we had been doing was all wrong.

So, let’s look at education.

I’d say most people share a common idea about the purpose of schooling, but few have ever attempted to put it into words.  We want schools to provide children with what their minds need in order to develop skills and knowledge in the most efficient manner that still keeps the child emotionally healthy.  Looking back at what is organic as a guide, we might imagine a child watching an elder modeling how to do something (ie: picking fruit, gathering wood, speaking a language,) then practicing with the elder as a guide, and then, later, productively demonstrating the skill independently.  That productivity at the end is as essential to good pedagogy as is the modeling part, not for its own sake, (as, a child’s learning should not be restricted to knowledge they will necessarily use productively,) but it is essential in the role it plays in motivating the learning and making learning relevant.

I have found this very basic way of understanding education to be an insightful and sufficient angle of approach to really any issue regarding pedagogy.  It was not, though, even a significant component in the impetus of US education.  Rather, US education grew from a need to control the massive flow of immigrant outsiders, which US industries actively sought and, indeed, could not function without.  Children running wild in the streets had to be controlled for a productive society.  Workers had to be prepared with a basic literacy in following society’s order.  In Democracy, Education, and the Schools, Roger Soder informs:

Many years before the American republic was forged, the householders of the early towns taxed themselves for schools in which all the young would be taught “the laws of the land, and the principles of religion.” Since they did not need schools for their own children (they could afford tutors and the luxury of sending their children abroad, or eventually to private academies at home), this self-taxing would appear to be an act of considerable magnanimity.  However, it was as much more motivated by self-interest.  These comparatively prosperous settlers did not want the religion and the ideals of self-government they had brought with them to be endangered by the ignorance of growing members of newcomers lacking access to schooling.[1]

In the classroom, in a Puritanical effort to disown our natural proclivities (and those practiced by immigrants,) we selfishly and stupidly regimented a factory order, lining children up in rows, demanding they sit still, and forcing them to learn tedious routines of rote memorization, a particularly foolish practice in suspending all identity to allow for subjection to the motivating cause of the task or educator.  We were just plain wrong—falsely believing the brain learns by exercising like a muscle and that a servile identity is more capable than one which is self-motivated.

US education developed without any regard for, and, in fact, with antagonism to, the natural way the human brain learns.

Thanks to compulsory education laws, the end of the 19^th century brought a huge increase in the numbers of children in our schools, drawing children from the factories and farms, subtly changing their role in the home from what had once been more like that of a servant,[2] to a conception that engendered the family’s pride and affection.  A romantic awareness of childhood innocence began dawning in this period, and the increasingly popular newspaper industry began publicizing cases of child abuse and neglect, which may be seen as the dawning of a profit-driven pop culture exploration of the public’s emotions for tender areas that could be exploited to sell copy, and, feeding itself, driving the further blossoming of this sentiment in the people.  This was a whole new ethic–one that could not be gleaned in the millenniums of moral insight that had gone before, from the Ten Commandments to early 20^th Century US law: Thou Shalt Not Hurt Children.

In the comfort of the financial boom during and after World War I, we learned to love our kids.  For the first time in Western human development, we matured morally enough to begin to appreciate and protect the innocence of childhood.  We outlawed child labor and began making laws to protect abused children.

So, coming to the realization that large numbers of children could not be regimented like robots without the infliction of cruelty, US educators were driven in a more organic direction.  John Dewey told the world that attention had to be paid to a child’s individual impetus.  Children could not be taught at the educator’s convenience, accepting whatever information the teacher wanted to pour into them, but, to learn, children had needs that the educator had to actually put forth an effort to detect.  Dewey’s vision was for working groups of kids to be steered towards socially rewarding goals, each child learning their own natural role in the group and growing within the group by following their own interests.

This idea, being too radical a change, was neglected for a milder application of Progressivism, where the outcome could be more concretely judged as useful to a capitalist society–children would be trained for the work they were most suited to.  So, for the next fifty or so years, children were steered through vocational-ed programs, clerical skills or home-economics classes, or towards college-prep, depending on where educators saw their inclined talents were leading.  Tracking, where kids are tested and assigned to groups of similarly-scoring students may be seen as a modern, more egalitarian extension of this pedagogy (in its use of testing, rather than subjective judgments.)

Today, education is seen really as a way to prepare children to be successful in the US job market.  Children are encouraged to learn sophisticated academic skills, but most never master them.  Even if they succeed in learning the skills, most do not end up using these skills in their employment.  90% of US workers are employed in the service sector.  Computer skills are pushed in school, but, though it grows more quickly percentage-wise than other sectors, the high tech sector accounts for only a miniscule number of US jobs.  Cashier is the fastest growing job category with reference to total numbers of jobs.[3]

A 1984 Cleveland State study showed there is very little correlation between grade point average and income, job satisfaction, and effectiveness. [4]

No, contrary to popular belief, kids are NOT preparing for employment.  They are preparing for the SAT test, which leads to college, which helps lead to better employment than others.  Still, this is an aspirational purpose.  It is not something that turns a successful result in most students.  Only 37% of young adults even take the SAT.[5]

It is not for all children, then, that US education is popularly purposed, but a minority of winners.  (To stay on point here, I will resist the tempting detour discussion of the enduring characteristics of those winning classes and the entrenchment of certain racial minorities that the educational system, generation-after-generation, proves miserably impotent to overcome.)

(And I could detour further into a discussion of whether, in fact, the few students who graduate college and obtain high-paying jobs and lifestyles supported by loads of cash really are winners.  I suspect they are, but only in relation to the losers.  If they had been educated with well-considered values, I don’t think most people would find the lifestyle of, say, an investment banker or a corporate lawyer to be worthy of their energies.)

If you consider the kids entering the doors to the average US school, you will find a variety of needs.  You will find many children are in the midst of a developmental potential for one particular interest over another.  Many will need special attention to get them to make very sorely-needed progress.  Others will need that same attention to help them make advanced progress they are especially capable of.  Some will be resistant to learning.  Some will just need to get up and move around more than others.  And there will be some interested in obstructing the learning of others.

Working on the assumption that cramming all these students together in the same room is a proper first step, our schools have no choice but to teach to the middle of this group.  In fact, not one child may be in the middle, yet in most classrooms the middle student is the aim of the educator.  The average child attending school spends too much time waiting for others to catch up, or so much time compensating for their confusion, or so much time listening as other children are reprimanded, so much time completing assignments of skills they have already mastered or are not yet capable of enough to learn from failing at, or attending to that social world children create to entertain their abandoned minds—a world of gossip, pop culture, social rivalries, and clock-watching.

Tracking students into groups of similarly-performing students has not worked, in that poorly-performing students need better students among them to succeed, so, relegating a student onto a poor track is dooming their educational development.  It is true that highly-performing students do less well with poorly-performing students among them, but, in controlled studies, they aren’t brought down nearly as much as the poor students are brought up, so educators have been rejecting tracking lately.

There are other types of tracks we could choose to identify, though.  There are kids who have been poorly nurtured morally.  There are violent, angry, or cruel children–kids whose parents let them stay up to all hours of the night, so that, in class, the child is grumpy, dull-witted, and a real disciplinary problem.  There are kids whose parents curse nearly every other word they speak, kids whose parents never read to them.  There’s an SUV parked outside the junior high beside my little girl’s kindergarten every day, its speakers blasting the most disgusting rap lyrics while two boys no older than ten sit in the back seat doing their homework, their jerk of a mother polishing her nails, waiting in the front seat for her third child to exit school.

The children are innocents.  They deserve an education.  But there comes a point where society has degraded so far that there is no social connection between my family and that child’s family.  I am nothing like those parents.  And I can not reach them.  What that woman is doing with her rap music is screaming at me to stay away, brazenly proclaiming her difference from me.  I can’t reach her any more than I can reach the corporate lawyer who works around the clock and has his son nurtured by hours-upon-hours of obscenely violent video game time.  At the point the social connection between parents is broken, so is the responsibility of the parent of the highly-performing child to allow their child’s intelligence to serve to help break the fall of the poor student’s intellectual ability.

Sure, if we lived in a true community, where there was at least some social pressure to conform to certain basics, I’d feel a need to work together with my neighbors on education, but we need to be allied in some way more than merely zip code.

For a significant portion of the school day, the average child is not occupied meaningfully, and it would be expected that, once that portion grows beyond a certain level, parents would stop sending their children to school.  And wouldn’t academic failure be a valid indicator of when that portion of the day was too large?

A recent Marist poll informs us that 25% of US citizens are “not sure” which country the US gained its independence from.  And 40% of those aged 19-29 weren’t sure, compared to only 20% of older citizens, which may indicate there is a ramp downward in US stupidity taking place.

The schools were founded for purposes few of us would identify with.  They developed in a clumsy way, meant to shuttle masses of students as best as possible into the right industries.  They have become a mere pretense to goals most kids never grow to achieve, and the real activity taking place is still, a hundred years after Dewey’s prime, poorly addressed to the needs of the individual student.

The disparate and individualistic nature of modern society makes community impossible, so that mass groupings of children that may have been productive in previous generations are no longer capable of being organized in a nurturing way.  The groups are destructive to all involved—a cacophony of interests, unmoored to morality, intellect, or even basic common sense.

So here, I am going to try to reconceive the proper way to educate our children, keeping in mind the organic conception of the elder who models and oversees before the student demonstrates mastery.  I propose the following:

• Children need to be paired closely with an adult model.  Education must be crafted to their own individual needs and competencies.  As they advance further, they should be encouraged to work together in teams.
• In this disparate society, alas, children should be paired carefully with other children whose parents share a commitment to certain basic ideals, or who are, at the very least, making a sincere effort to conform to that commitment.
• Children need to master all skills and knowledge that can be demonstrated to be useful in the life they anticipate, from laundry to home repair, from cooking to a knowledge of human sexuality, from solving emotional problems to speaking with confidence.
• They need a significant grounding in all the traditional subjects, as there is no telling what they may be drawn to with the proper exposure.
• They should understand the way the world works, from an air conditioner to Congress, from history to the stock market to a basic understanding of quantum physics.  I don’t see why they should need to do equations in quantum physics, but they should know how to go in that direction if that’s where their interests lie.
• They should be highly skilled at finding out things they do not know from all sources, at explaining things clearly to others, and at seeking and receiving thorough explanations from others.
• Paying not merely lip-service to character development, I propose children should be trained to develop their own sophisticated rationale for morality.  (See my blog on the importance of morality in art.)  They should be challenged to the point that they are adept at arguing moral principles.  Further, they should be capable of judging and rejecting cultural persuasion, from peer pressure to false advertising.  They should be so involved with the genesis of their own identity that they can easily reject unworthy cultural icons and pastimes.
• Every day should involve them in some rigorous physical activity.
• They should be trained to have a basic competency in all forms of artistic expression.  They should be taught to turn to artistic expression as a healthy way of processing.
• Parenting!  Throughout their upbringing, every child should have regular instruction on what makes a good parent.
• Lastly, children should be very carefully instructed on social and civic responsibility.  They should learn to love and admire the best of their society and they should be raised to see all their fellow beings as worthy of their respect and fraternity.  They should be raised with a commitment to values that respect and support the greater social good.  To quote the motto of The Liverpool Institute High School for Boys, as Sir Paul McCartney did in his oratorio: “Non nobis solum sed toti mundo nati,” or “Not for ourselves but for the whole world we were born.”

In contrast to the ideals my rethink of education generates, schools are becoming vastly less varied in the subjects they offer.  Also, for a variety of reasons, culturally, we have active taboos against the teaching of many subjects, such as citizenship, morality, or even homemaking.

Class sizes make approaches that are sensitive to a student’s individual competencies or needs impossible.  Further austerity-inspired state cut-backs are currently increasing class sizes.

Public schools are incapable of making community bonds strong enough to engender the kind of responsiveness in the parents of problem students that would justify the commitment of advanced students.

The pedagogy practiced in a modern school does push teamwork and creative problem solving, but group-work observed at work in a real classroom is a testament to how sensitive good pedagogy can be.  Group-work has been shown to be more effective in the classroom than children working individually, but this conclusion was reached in controlled studies, where the group-work is performed carefully and with bountiful resources.  When improperly performed, classroom group-work may be much more ineffective than having children work on their own.  Sure, schools love it, because it is a way of justifying larger class sizes and a way to decrease disciplinary problems (as children who are working in groups can’t be blamed for calling out or disrupting the class, and they can spend much of the time talking without the teacher having to know they are off-task.)  Group-work can improve pedagogy in a way comparable to the results seen in studies, but, I would argue, only when being practiced carefully by the exceptional teacher, which rarely occurs.

As for physical activity, classrooms operate with most of the physical inertia they’ve always had, but children are becoming even more inert, being left at computer monitors more and more, occupied in free-time by handheld games and lunchroom video screens.  (Recess is actively being withdrawn with fears of liability for sunburn or complaints in regards to exposure to cold weather.)  Children are not meant to be sitting throughout the day.  Even adults should be standing or moving most of the time.  Click HERE to read more about this.

So, in my home, we have arrived at a decision that was not a challenge, rationally.  We have decided, for our children, to leave school-based education behind.  The simple steps to homeschooling legally are available through a straightforward Google search.  Thanks to the Internet, homeschooling communities abound, along with resources, regular meet-ups, and even group academic classes that parents sponsor for their areas of expertise.  My daughter has homeschool soccer every week.

I see leaving the entire notion of school-based education behind a supreme act of dedication to my child’s individuality.  It is a drastic act only to those who dread the burden of independent thought and action.  We must, though, take our own steps in life.  After all, what else is life about?

[2] “During the early years of the Republic, children were little more than chattels of their families—often referred to not by gender but as ‘it.’” US Dept Health, Education, and Welfare 200 Years of Children, 1976, p. 65.

[3] Tozer, Steven E., School and Society, 2008, p.346

[4] Academic and Occupational Performance: A Quantitative Synthesis American Educational Research Journal June 20, 1984 21: 311-321,

[5] http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/cbs-2009-national-TOTAL-GROUP.pdf

A reading group I participate in recently considered a play by Nicholas Kazan, called, “Blood Moon.”

In the first act, a young woman is subjected to a series of humiliations, and she is then brutally raped. In the second act, she invites the rapist for dinner and verbally enlightens him on the horrendous reality of his act as she tricks him into eating his own child–a mature fetus she self-aborted. (I guess this is why the author made the character a pre-med student.)

The play is about as sophisticated as scrambled eggs. It is important to note its context, though, as it was released in 1983, when rape had not been yet fully digested as a social issue, when it’s popular presentation was limited to action movies (like that year’s Dirty Harry flick, “Sudden Impact,”) in which rapist crooks were always destroyed (and often tortured) in the final scene by the mansome tough guy. This was way back in the prehistoric days when the New York Times would actually assign the review of a play by a male playwright about the rape of a female to a male reviewer (as they did with this one.) Notably, this play premiered a couple of months before the New Bedford, Mass., barroom gang rape that would eventually inspire legislation nationwide to protect victims of rape.

The play is a novel but naive (not to mention outrageously and unnecessarily graphic) attempt to compare the victim’s strength favorably to the rapist’s–an attempt to regain from her what she lost. Its glaring failure, though, is that there is nothing enlightening to be gained from comparing a rape victim to a rapist. Though a rape victim clearly suffers “loss,” a rape is not a contest that the woman has lost. It is a putrid anomaly in society’s psychological stew, like any child molestation or murder. The perpetrator can offer the victim no avenue for understanding what has happened or how to go forth. Her problem does not reside in her social relation with the perpetrator–she has no relation to him, as he has committed an inhuman act, and should be, then, surely to her, no more human than a rabid dog. Sure, she might hate the guy and want to see him tortured, but that is not a revealing insight into the theme of rape. It is, rather, an impulsive emotional response to being victimized.

Some of the group’s members liked this play. One young woman, I’ll call her Kay, objected to my critique, telling me it helped dramatize the horror of rape–how the victim feels, what has been taken from her, and how it affects her. Still, the way Kay stammered over them, I got the feeling these polemic assets were not at the heart of Kay’s response. It seemed that she had a positive emotional reaction to the play that her comments didn’t explore—something that I was not interested in.

We look for different things from art.

Sometimes we turn to what I will call “assertion art,” which seems to speak like us and say the things we want to say. Assertion art can be positive, such as when Beyonce sang “At Last” at President Obama’s inaugural ball; and other times it might instead be negative, such as when a guy who was raised in an abusive home in a crummy and violent neighborhood seeks escape with a nasty flick like “Saw” at his local theater. These are emotions we already yearn to express. The art gives us an avenue. The enjoyment of the art is not enlightening, but reinforcing.

Check out this assertion tattoo artwork I recently noticed on a woman’s shoulder at my kindergartener’s graduation…

On its least sophisticated level, assertion art, though, can be more masturbatory. As in a Dirty Harry flick, the tension might be raised only for the thrill of the release, without any prior yearning involved. Maybe Kay has no particular need to express issues with rape, but just passively allows the play to get her to hate the rapist, and then she thrills in seeing him get his comeuppance. “Yeah!” she feels. Or, rather than her hatred for the rapist, her empathy for the fictional rape victim may be her greatest source of enjoyment; the same mournful thrill people get exercising their emotions by leaving a Teddy bear beside the lake where a disturbed stranger drove her car full of children all strapped into their seats.

Assertion art expresses the good and bad of ourselves whether it is real or fabricated for the thrill. It can make us stronger, but we don’t grow.

I have another invented term to try out here, a counterpart to assertion art. I will call it “scaffolding art.” Rather than reinforcing our stand, scaffolding art creates a space between the artist and us. This space is the difference between what we are aware of and what we are not aware of. A play might get us to think in a way we never did before. Kay may have felt the play bridged a space for her, allowing her to explore the feelings of a rape victim more fully than she ever had imagined.

It is important to note the relativity of awareness in understanding how awareness functions in scaffolding art. The awareness being scaffolded on the pages of the New Yorker, for instance, is entirely different than that in, say, Sports Illustrated or in that of Star Trekker, or UFO Monthly, for that matter. An expert reader of one of these magazines forced to read one of the others would be challenged to appreciate what the magazine succeeds in satisfying its usual readers with. The more esteemed reader, the New Yorker reader, could not be expected to be better at understanding the UFO magazine than could the Sports Illustrated reader. In this relation, the New Yorker has been stripped of esteem. The New Yorker, after all, does not display any objectively superior traits. It does not use an objectively better vocabulary, as one might very well call it worse because so many fewer people can appreciate it. Truly objectively, we’d have to call it novel, at best. Its writers specialize in communicating with a certain narrow group of people, people who have never read the original script to The Wrath of Khan. Your average Joe, picking up a New Yorker, will read the cartoons, maybe half a movie review, and maybe a few paragraphs of a short story before leaving it on the subway bench where he found it. And this is because the writing is not accessible to him—it does not overtly demonstrate some value worthy of the average Joe’s esteem.

Writing found in the New Yorker seeks to reach a sophistication that might be seen, from a Star Trekker’s point of view, worthy of the same humored disparagement with which a New Yorker reader might regard the quite sophisticated fold-out Romulus battle plans featured in Star Trekker’s December issue.

Scaffolding art bridges awareness, but its value can be relative. Your scaffolding art may be irrelevant to me. More perplexingly, though, nowadays, you may find your scaffolding art is irrelevant to you.

Consider the exponential expansion of artistic expression that occurred first with mass popular culture and now driven to a near–infinite expanse with the Internet. We have crossed into a world where knowledge can no longer reasonably be said to be mastered, even if we limit ourselves to an artistic category, like poetry, to use a particularly useful example. Where there was once thought to be a limited stream of published poetry that one might monitor, now there exists an endless sea.

Where once a poet could write with authority, secure in their educational grounding of what they were building on, today they just cannot. More and more, that grounding is shifting to include more ends of the universe that were never before considered. Where once a professor might mock a student for failing to catch a reference, today the same professor won’t dare for fear the student will draw out his own corner of the universe in riposte. I will see your Ovid, and raise you an Osho and a Chrystos.

No edge of artistic expression that is safe now will be safe come tomorrow. No artist will be an expert or even an authority. The nature of art, when the floodgates to human expression are truly open, is as endless as the ether.

In this view, scaffolding art, then, just like assertion art, is limited in value to a time or place, or perhaps a type of person or experience. The romantic notion of greatness, then, is just a romantic notion.

Unless.

Stepping out of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” another play my course featured, one might feel hyperaware of the shallowness of the human constructs practiced by Mamet’s characters. That awareness, it can be argued, has the ability to improve us. It involves a judgment between what is right and what is wrong, a moral judgment.

Morality is a tricky tool to handle. We do not all agree on what we call morality. Some people use the term loosely, including all sorts of superstitious nonsense in what they refer to as their morality. Just about everything to distinguish one from the majority has been seen as immoral at some point in history to some culture. Skin tone, religious preference, sexual preference, marital arrangements, eating with a particular hand, wearing or failing to wear particular garments, having a particular physical deformity, whispering, opposing authority, hairstyle, left-handedness….

My first wife’s mother once confided to me: “You know, they’re the kind of people who put mustard on their cheese sandwiches.”

Still—and this is the crux of what I have to say—I am quite certain that all people share a basic common morality. There is in the nursing mother’s loving, nurturing exchange with her baby, and in the father’s protective embrace of his child to his own chest, a passing of some distinct and very complicated lesson that is true in every far corner of the human universe, that every decently-nurtured person in every culture across our planet can assert. There is a universal. I’ll call it love.

When art asserts or scaffolds the loving ideal it becomes something with a universal grounding, and, unlike other expressions, that art’s value has the ability to claim true objective prowess. Since I was a child, this is what I have looked for in art, from my pre-school thrill with Adam West’s devoted valiance in the Batman shows to my teenaged swoon over Van Gogh’s tenderly loving portrayal of fields and skies and faces as they hung there on the wall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to my young adulthood realization at Ralph Ellison’s “King of the Bingo Game,” standing there on stage, his thumb on the control, yearning for the love that he is due, but that is far beyond his grasp.

The universal ideal of love is the key to truly, objectively great artwork.

This is to announce the “Spring” 2010 issue of pha’titude Literary Magazine is finally out, and you can find, among loads of great poetry and prose, an essay by myself within!   Please peruse.

Here’s the link:

phati’tude Literary Magazine

I know my last blog post was definitively titled “The End of Capitalism… for Beginners,” and, in a summary effort, it included ideas I’ve been blogging about for years, but, alas, I find I am still not done blogging on the matter.  Before I get back to blogging about kombucha, education and poison ivy, I need to make the following point clear:

Paul Krugman and the economic experts that win Nobel prizes and such are just plain wrong to utter any comparison to the Great Depression, a time when you could poke a Glad straw into an anthill in Titusville, Pennsylvania and come up with enough free oil to power the next three years of what was cranking off Henry Ford’s assembly line, back when vast stretches of the world were unexploited, when “explorer” was a job title.

They are glaringly wrong–either fools or charlatans vying for the attention of the Capitalistic establishment mainstream media, which has everything to gain from dragging this economic decline out and so much to lose from a total reorganization of the worldwide political structure (idealistically think: world government) as to make such a change literally unthinkable.

It is amazing how easily unthinkable things can become thinkable, though.  An excellent example:  There’s buddy of mine, a virulent right winger.  He believes social programs are the main reason for our economic decline.  He believes there should be no government, no taxes, no health care, etc….  The other day, trying to get under his skin, I said to him, “What about all this debt we’ve amassed?  What will we do if China tries to call us on it?”

Without missing a beat, he responded, “We’ll just nationalize all our industries,” flipping from libertarian to communist in a mere shrug.

Hilarious.

In my grade school in my wonderful hometown of Media, Pennsylvania, back in the 60’s and 70’s, they taught us rubbish.  I am not referring to them telling us our government, elected by the people as it was, functioned ideally or even equitably, that we were “free,” (if you’d like to see an example of why I put that in quotes, click here,) or that we US citizens were special people with ideals superior to all others.  I am not referring to how they taught us that industry spreading all over the place conquering and exploiting Earth’s frontiers was a good thing.  No, the main fallacy they taught, which spawned all the others, was that we were successful, that we were in control, or that we had the slightest grasp on what we were doing.  My teacher’s mistake was to stand there in front of the class and clear her throat with authority, because not one of her kind had the slightest grasp on reality.

Admittedly, I am one of those extreme types of thinkers who cannot forgive our founding fathers for being slavers and slave rapists, nor our pioneers for being genocidal mass murderers of the native people, nor the early industrialists who smote and ruined countless lives of men, women, and children with abhorrent working conditions, nor those that came later who caused the same human misery, but only after exporting the slave labor to underdeveloped countries, enforced by murderous invasions and US-sponsored wars.

To me, success, growth, or profit are no excuse for killing, maiming, polluting, or destroying.

That’s just me.  Extreme.

But I can still talk to you even if you find my condemnation of capitalism extreme, because recent events have made our differences unimportant.  There’s nothing left to argue about.  Capitalism is over.  It’s pretty much been dead since the late 70’s.  In order to see the truth, we just need to scrape off all that authoritative media narrative that we’ve all got stuck in our brains.

I’ll give you a start.

Just keep in mind: Capitalism requires growth.  If there is no growth, there will be instantaneous and unceremonious death.  Like a dead heart can be kept alive by electric shocks from a pacemaker, capitalism can be kept going by stimulus or raiding of our own assets, but that monster must be fed.  It eats growth.  Natural growth to feed the beast ended in the late 70’s when we were just getting done assigning ownership of the last of the world’s most accessible resources and frontiers.

Late 70’s:  Oil embargo leaves Americans lining up for gasoline.  President Carter rations it.  Jimmy Carter gets on TV and tells his people there just is not enough oil, and it’s going to be running out some day.  We’ve got to learn to burn less, lower our thermostats, carpool.  The most honest, most morally reflective leader we’ve had–the last fiscally responsible president–and his people respond, “Eat me, Carter, you good-for-nothing born-again peanut farmer.”

They vote out Jimmy, and install Ronald “half-on-his-way-to-Alzheimer’s” Reagan, who begins “deregulating” everything, which means he just stops government from watching out for illegal things private industry does.  The effect, in his own interpretation, is to destroy a bloated bureaucracy that stands in the way of innovation.

His hope is actually a little more complicated, though.  Everything we do economically to place ourselves ahead–even if it means our coal miners dying underground or our rivers polluted–has the effect of giving us greater leverage against less developed economies.  For example, if our chemical plants are operating first, or more productively, or more profitably than those of another nation that, say, has more regulations protecting their rivers, we will attain a dominance over the industry now that will allow us to steer the industry’s development to our advantage.  In this way, capitalism directs immoral behavior.

In addition to deregulating, Reagan leads a campaign against unions, and succeeds in severely cutting the taxes of the wealthy.  He liquidates government property and government jobs to raise funds so his budget will appear more balanced–a one-time savings that will cost US workers forever.

Reagan’s deficits (how much more we spend than what we earn) are so completely out of control that the national debt (how much we owe to other countries) triples during Reagan’s years, rocketing up to almost three trillion dollars when it had never reached a trillion any time in history before Reagan.  This causes a very fake boom, the type of boom you see in the expenses of a very irresponsible teenager with their first credit card.

The profits rich people scored were so great that they adopted Reagan’s reckless economics as a theory of government, and so a graph of the federal debt now looks like a hockey stick, shooting up and never falling back, from 1980 (Reagan) to the current day, where the federal debt is about 11 trillion bucks.

During the post-Jimmy Carter period, crucial changes in the law relating to campaign sponsorship, media ownership, and intellectual property assured any democratic control of the type voters succeeded in exercising just after the Watergate scandal would never be able to recur.

In addition to these changes, a huge change occurred as relates to US industry: homemaking women joined the workforce.  This change made it possible to cut wages of the working stiff in half.  What Reagan’s people called “downsizing,” “efficiency” and “productivity” enhancement was simply doubling the workforce or doubling the worker’s load at the same cost to industry.

What I would like you to be observing here is the absurd permanent changes we were led through like cattle that represented a steady decline in our standard of living.  According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the gap between the wealthy and the middle-to-lower income citizens has more than tripled in the past 30 years.

In the same period, corporations moved masses of US jobs overseas, not only destroying US unions (between 1978 and 200, the number of unionized US workers declined by 45%,) but replacing good jobs with a huge overseas labor force of underpaid, non-union, often child, menial labor.

Industry-sponsored Democratic politicians went along, wagging their wealthy tails obediently.

So the growth feeding the beast has been phony since 1980, (with a brief respite in the 90’s when there was a bit of true growth as Capitalism divvied up the remains of the USSR’s communist carcass.)  Well, there were real gains (of the “burn-the-wallboards-for-firewood” variety,) in the liquidation of government assets and services, and in the “efficiency” gained by stripping the worker of his union, halving his pay, and replacing the kids’ mom with pre and after-school group programs and video game/cable TV addiction, but these gains were just a stave.

Over the last 30 years, the capitalism beast has supped primarily on a massive bubble of deficit-sponsored debt, enhanced more recently by an enormous real estate debt bubble.  By “bubble” I mean money that just is not there–fake money that capitalists use to keep the commoner imagining it is not all over.

Don’t get me wrong–I don’t mean to demonize anyone.  It’s not like assigning blame has a practical value.  As I say, it’s all over.

The new millennium brought us Bush-Cheney, who, neither man having ever had an original thought of his own, just carried forth Reagan’s ideas but, with the help of a Republican Congress, they were able to legislate with the hyperactivity of a band of wild monkeys snorting crack.  The corporations were allowed to grow larger than our government (a treasonous success for Bush-Cheney,) as they remain still.

And the standard of living for the common person continued the decline it began in the mid-70’s.

I am not saying all of us felt the decline, fueled as many families were by debt and bubbled assets (ie: mortgages on homes that the real estate bubble had caused to be overvalued to the extreme point that the average house in the desert of Tempe, Arizona was worth a quarter of a million dollars,) but just about everyone has by now.

And now, we have a country full of state and local governments about to go broke because all their investments have gone south and business failures, employment lay-offs, foreclosures and falling home values mean less tax revenue.

So what does the government do?  They say, in essence, we are going to pay to keep this bubble inflated, which, mind you, doesn’t take a great-big 2-trillion dollar stimulus package puff, as they’d have you believe, but a steady flow.   And it does nothing but delay the inevitable.

And who is paying the trillions of dollars in stimulus money??

The media lies to you.  They tell you it is the taxpayer.

Hell, no.  No one is saying we should raise taxes to pay for this.  This is paid for by national debt–with money borrowed from China.  This is further robbery of future generations.  This is the Reagan doctrine, it is the Clinton doctrine, it is the Bush doctrine.  But it is not stupidity, because I doubt any of the people who run our country actually believe there is a positive road beyond the debt.  It seems clear they have the wits to understand the debt they incur will never be repaid.  They are just playing out the endgame so they don’t have to get out of their seats.

So, what is their latest bubble?  What might buy a little more time for them to sit in their seats of comfort?  Austerity.

That’s right.  The growth must continue or it’s all over.  And our borrowing days are rapidly ending.  Who’s going to go on investing in these dregs? (Greece is currently borrowing its bread-and-butter needs at 12 percent!  Tw-e-l-ve perc-ent!)  So where will the “growth” come from? Their answer: from schools and streets, government services and infrastructure.  In Jersey City, they’ve cancelled the July 4th fireworks.  If a government can’t pay for gunpowder to celebrate its independence day, you know the end is near.

Poor countries that once maintained levels of population that could be fed adequately by food produced locally are now overpopulated to provide laborers for manufacturing, and they are dependent on foreign food supplies.  In the economic crisis, as manufacturing declines, with high oil prices, food costs more to transport, process, and fertilize (food comes from oil –see this really great article.) During the 2008 oil price surge, there food riots around the world.

The value of the dwindling resources we are taking from the earth is approaching a tipping point, and the sources of fuel too scarce–we have digested all our frontiers and polluted our planet to the point where it is turning in on us, making growth, which is necessary to capitalism, biophysically septic.

Due to international competition, the people of the Earth are incapable of making decisions for the good of the whole world, and are, in fact, forced to make decisions that are rather ramping up the destruction, such as the need of huge nations like India and China to industrialize and use as many fossil fuel resources as quickly as possible to enable each one’s race to expand and claim its share of the worldwide markets, of which there is not enough to go around because everything on earth that can be owned is already owned by the thieves who just bankrupted the world.

One thing you need to watch for when you hear “experts” talk about economics: they never seem capable of staying on point.  There are two types of economic strategies.  A competitive strategy deals with how we become more competitive with our world neighbors.  A non-competitive strategy deals with how we create more effective ways of living that save us resources.  Listen for it.  An economist is not talking about the challenges our world now faces when talking about being more competitive—that is, investing in infrastructure, educating our people better, reducing regulation, lowering taxes on businesses….  Growth is, in fact, a particularly destructive competitive strategy.  Austerity is, too, in that it is commonly used without a thought for the value of the item we are being deprived of (ie: golf courses should obviously be shut down before hospitals and independence day fireworks displays,) and instead it is used to obediently show industry your common people are willing to take the next step down on the worldwide standard of living decline, undercutting the competing locales.

Our problems are not just our state’s problems or our country’s problems.  Our problems are all global.  We need ways to make us—all of us the world over—more effective at preserving resources.  The experts offer little to no suggestions for addressing this need, probably because the question is just too big for them to consider—they do not believe in our ability to face that problem.

The answer is obvious, but unthinkable, as it brings us all the way back to that idyllic little schoolroom and that teacher who knew all the answers.  It shows her to be a fool, along with all the neat little securities she helped us plant in our brains.  In order to face our future we need to pick up that big, fat old apple pie—Patriotism–and chuck it, face first, in that dark green metal trash can.  We need to serve ourselves, instead, a heaping helpful of the very un-American humble pie.  As we chew, we need to fully comprehend that people are a bunch of ignorant chimps.  There isn’t a damn thing we are doing well with on this earth, not a thing we have any decent control over.  It is a poor mental construct–our way of life, our independence, our capitalism.

Any sane people into whose hands was cast a verdant world as rich as ours once was would nurture it, and find a way to live in harmony with it—they would not grow all over it and digest it, turning it all to waste, but they would care for it tenderly.

So, we define ourselves anew as world citizens looking for a world government.  We purpose ourselves with ideals that include the fate of everyone we share this closed system with.

That is the start.

Mark Crane  Motormanmark.com

Filed under the hardest-learned lessons:

As a child adventuring in the woodsy tracts that followed the railroad tracks in my Pennsylvania hometown, I was yearly assaulted by intense skin infestations of poison ivy. It was absolute hell at the worst times.  In the fall, when it would finally stop, I’d be left with bruises all over my body.

So, trust me, I know where you’re coming from.

My well-meaning parents encouraged me to scrub the new patches with Fels Naptha laundry soap and very hot water, which now I know was the exact thing to do to most efficiently make the problem much, much worse.

So, now you’ve got it, and you want to lose it before it starts taking over all your skin, your hands, your face, yes, even your sexual organs (don’t ask.)

Despite being a camper and hiker, I am no longer even irritated by poison ivy.  You won’t be, either, if you simply remain faithful to the following prescription:

Immediately, get the itchy skin under some ice-cold water. Wash it (and as much of the rest of your skin as you can endure to in the pain of the cold water) with the cold water and hand soap–NOT detergent.

You want to get the poison ivy oils down the drain.  The cold water makes them congeal into solid chunks that the oil in the soap can herd along off your skin as you flush with the cold water.  The cold water also makes your pores close up, shutting out places other than the drain where the poison ivy oils might go.

Wash exposed clothing in cold water and laundry soap that is non-detergent.  (Detergent does not herd poison ivy oils, but rather breaks them into smaller, more insidious bits, that are much harder to completely flush away.)

As for the itching, do not scratch, but hold ice onto the itchy spot until the pain of the cold kills the itch (a great strategy for bug bites, too, incidentally–especially if you’re trying to relieve an itchy youngster.)

Do not put itch creams on or rub the poison ivy–it will only spread it.

Then, learn to identify poison ivy.  To be simple, stay away from any vine or bush that grows in sets of 3 leaves.  It starts as a bright green, dry plant, and grows into a dark green, oily looking thing.  It grows in patches, so if you notice it, you should expect to see it all around you.

If your dog is wagging his tail beside you, put him on notice that your best friendship is on hold until after you’ve fully doused him with the garden hose and gotten your hands on some soap.

Don’t burn it.  The fumes are deadly to lungs, and will infest the entire area with poison ivy oils.

To remove it, get some disposable impermeable gloves and Tyvek shoe coverings and overalls of the type they sell at hardware stores to remove asbestos or lead (if it’s grown high, you’ll need a face shield, too,) and use essentially the same types of procedures they use in dressing and undressing when they are about to deal with deadly materials.

Even with gloves, try not to grasp the stalks–just cut close to the ground and place carefully in plastic bags.

And warn the trash men.

Then spray the roots (which are as poisonous as the leaves) with something someone promises you will kill it for good.

Next spring, keep a lookout for its return in the same spot, so you can nip it in the bud with the spray.

Have a great summer!

I have always enjoyed relaxing with two glasses of wine in the evening.  When I get to the end of that second glass, though, I often find I am enjoying myself too much.  It is difficult for me to pull myself away from the woozy cloud of comfort and go to bed.  Often, I pour a third, and, now and then, even a fourth.  I am not intoxicated, but I have definitely been drawn by the alcohol to drink more than I want, and even to stay up an hour too late.

Soda pop isn’t healthy, and neither are snack foods.  I can’t drink coffee, as I drink it too much as it is during the day, and tea is just too boring for my palate.  And, to my taste, alcohol-free beers have the flavor of swill.

A little while back, I heard about a funky Russian/Chinese health drink that is fermented easily at home, called “kombucha” (the “ch” and “u” pronounced like the sounds in “choo-choo.”)  The guy who told me about it said it wasn’t sweet, so I immediately thought of it as an alternative to my nightly red wine ritual.

The long and short is I brewed it myself and found Kombucha to be a spot-on alternative to wine.  It tastes winey, but it has effervescence, like beer.  It is healthily packed with probiotic organisms (think “pub yogurt,”) that I swear I can taste.  And it contains only a minute amount of alcohol!  Proponents believe kombucha boosts the immune system, helps digestion, fights cancer, among other unsubstantiated, but possible, benefits.

I’ll tell you how I made it.   Kombucha is made simply by allowing microorganisms to grow in sweet black or green tea.  The microorganisms are most easily obtained by purchasing a cold bottle of kombucha from an upscale supermarket or any natural foods store.  Any kombucha can be used as a starter with which to brew more kombucha.

Though you can adjust these proportions to taste, these are the ones I used: 2 gallons of water, 1/3 cup of black or green tea leaves, 3 cups of sugar.

You use about 40 ounces of the water to boil and brew the hot tea, then strain the tea out and dissolve the sugar into the hot tea.

Once the sugar is dissolved, you get another container big enough for all the water and made of either glass or plastic (only use plastic with a 1 or 2 recycling code on the bottom.)  This container should have a fairly wide mouth.  I use a couple of those plastic pretzel jars you get at Costco and a big picnic jug with the spout at the bottom, which is ideal for draining the finished product.  You can brew the tea in a metal pot, but never use metal to hold the kombucha–it reacts poorly with the kombucha acids–and never use it with a ceramic container, as some ceramic has lead in the mix, and the kombucha acids can leach the lead into the drink.

Next, you fill the big jug with the remaining water–cold from the tap, and you pour the hot tea in, making a jug of lukewarm-to-cool sweet tea.  Now that it’s not hot (too much heat kills the microorganisms,) pour the bottle of kombucha in.

Place a paper towel over the mouth of the jug, and a rubber band around it to keep out fruit flies, but to allow oxygen in.  Place the jug in a warm place away from sunlight (the warmer it is, the quicker the organisms will grow, but direct sunlight can kill them,) and give it 7-10 days to brew.

Over this period, you will notice a big, ugly mushroom growing on the surface.  Kombucha-lovers call this the “mother,” as it can be moved from any batch to easily start a new one.

Your kombucha will be ready when it develops a brief initial vinegary bite to the taste.  If it’s too sweet at first bite, you haven’t let it sit long enough to let the organisms eat up the sugar; if the taste after the initial vinegar bite is too sweet, you need to use less sugar next time.

Once the taste is right, pour it out, leaving a small bit of kombucha and the mushroom behind as a starter for a new batch.

Cap your kombucha tightly (to keep in the effervescence,) and refrigerate it.  The cold and lack of oxygen stops the organisms from advancing any more, but keeps them alive, which is what gives kombucha its health benefits.  Some people seeking a buzz will cap it but not refrigerate it, which will cause alcohol to ferment, but this self-defeatingly causes the organisms to die from alcohol poisoning.

Keep all your implements clean, and don’t add other juices, fruit, etc… to this mix or you’ll get stuff that isn’t healthy growing in your mix.

Na zdorovyeh!  (Phonetical “Cheers!” in Russian.)

Two days ago, the MTA took a Lexington-Avenue-line train operator out of service for “improper use of a train horn” and “refusing to follow an order,” because he has been insisting on entering stations cautiously when passengers are waiting over the yellow platform warning line.

His supervisor claimed he was ordered by the line superintendant to discipline the train operator after the superintendant noticed the train operator was returning from runs several minutes late as a consequence of the cautious operation entering stations.

The train operator claims ever since the March killing of a passenger at the 77th street station, he has been doubting the safety of status quo train operation, which is to enter at full speed, regardless.

Subway trains can take nearly a full train length to come to a stop, depending on the grade of the track and the train’s speed.  Train operators are required by MTA rules to operate in a “safe” manner and are legally liable in certain  situations.

“If there are two yellow lines, what are they there for?” the train operator asked, referring to the lines that warn passengers away from the dangerous edge of the subway platform.  “If they’re there because it’s a safety problem, then, by rule I should enter with caution.”

Today, the train operator was working a make-work job on a platform, standing there in a vest, earning his 60K salary, plus benefits, plus training, etc…, of the public’s money, serving no apparent purpose, instead of operating his train, as he awaited the MTA’s Labor Relations Department to draw up formal charges.

The MTA is currently experiencing a fiscal crisis and is laying off workers.

The MTA is also currently experiencing a string of subway train collisions-with and killings-of high-profile passengers (attractive, young, or white victims,) in addition to the low-profile (minority, elderly, homeless,)  4-killings-a-month routinely caused by its subway trains.

Yesterday, a day after this disciplinary action, 2 attractive, young passengers were struck by a train operated by another train operator, which was entering a station at the routine speed required by the MTA.  One passenger was killed, the other is being treated for life-threatening injuries.

See my blog entries decrying the MTA’s lack of responsiveness to deadly safety issues and the recent New York Magazine article about how sick train operators are of being a party to these killings so that the MTA can get an extra ounce of performance out of the system.

The following is a reader comment I found on a New York Times column.  It is so direct, heartfelt, and insightful, I felt I had to reproduce it here:

dc

nj

May 1st, 2010

1:50 pm

What I am hearing is green eyed jealousy and envy. Our economy stinks so people in the ‘private sector’ are encouraged to turn their anger toward fellow middle class workers rather than direct it toward the CEOs and others who are really their ‘enemy.’ Don’t you see you are being manipulated? How transparent does it have to be? Wake up. Bankers and CEOS make millions off the backs of the middle class, they fire people left and right the second they find a cheaper worker (not a better worker, a cheaper worker) and you’re angry at the TEACHERS? Governor Christie here in NJ is an expert manipulator, stoking up all the anger people should be feeling toward HIM and directing against teachers, most of whom are middle class women. He calls for pension cutting, yet his pension is untouched. He calls for a wage freeze yet his wage is increased (and it is many times my own wage). He calls for massive cuts in public schools which will negatively impact millions of kids, but his own kids are untouched–he sends them to private. When the kids protest, he accuses teachers – teachers- of manipulating them! The hypocrisy is mind boggling, but you guys are angry at the TEACHERS?

It is beyond ridiculous for some people here to say that teachers earn big bucks. $100,000??!? I literally don’t know a single person in my school who earns that salary and I work in NJ, where our salaries are higher. Maybe in some very upper class districts, if you’ve worked there for 20 years and you have a PhD. I myself earn $51,000. I have two masters degrees, am 47, and am a single mom. I don’t work during the summer AND I am NOT PAID for that (I get NO MONEY during the summer, 10 weeks). I work about 55 hours per week; I am actively in front of the classroom, teaching, 25 hours; planning lessons for at least 10 hours; grading at least another 10 hours; and doing paperwork/parent calls/discipline follow ups/meetings with parents/ meeting with fellow administrators/etc etc etc for the remainder. Many times, I grade for far more that 10 hours/week, as I am an English teacher. Some weeks I work the entire weekend, 12 hours each day, in addition to working at school.

Nearly every teacher I know works during the summer at another job to make ends meet, or works during the school year. I tutor for the SATs. On Fridays, I tutor two kids. I leave my house at 6:00 am, and don’t get home until 6:00 pm. That’s Friday alone, for an example.

Teachers are easy fodder because we are mostly middle class or blue collar. THe people in power, white collar and above, no longer feed into teaching, so they know no one who is impacted; and they send their OWN children to private. Thus, this is most definitely a class issue as well as a gender issue. I honestly believe some of the vitriol is because teaching is largely a female profession. You don’t get the same vitriol for, say, firefighters, and you certainly don’t get it for politicians, who have far MORE benefits (pensions, health care), far higher incomes, and definitely, definitely far greater corruption and incompetence than teachers.

Finally, it is beyond insulting and degrading to see these attacks. We work with your children. We love many of them and serve them when so many parents are not doing their jobs, and others are trying, but need our help. I work in a low income white district. Off the top of my head, here are SOME examples of the students I serve: a crack baby, several FAS, many physically abused (DYFS is called all the time), many kids living with aunts or grandparents because their parents are in jail or because their parents abused them, many parents who couldn’t give a damn and tell their kids that (eg “I wish you were never born” or “I should’ve had an abortion”)–the list is endless and terribly depressing. Guess how I know all this? That’s right, the kids talk to me, I tell them to aim high, I tell them how to sign up for the SAT, to go to college, I teach them how to write a cover letter, how to behave to a boss; often teachers are the ONLY people who actually listen to the kids and care about them. It’s a hard world out there. ANd yes, many kids DO NOT CARE about education, because their parents don’t. Wake up. Teachers are the LAST people we should be criticizing here. Our morale is SO low. I am actively advising people to not become teachers. Keep it up, America. Soon the only people who will teach your children will be desperate, young, stupid, low level, easily replaced ‘workers’. Why don’t you just hire robots and be done with it?

200,000 gallons-a-day of comeuppance will continue to spill onto the coastal wetlands (think birds,) bayous, oceanfront, fisheries, and shellfish (shrimp, oysters, etc…,) beds of Republican voters of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and Florida.  This will go on for several months, and should swamp all the gulf states in black gold.  By the end of May, Big-Red-State Texas voters should be so sick of tea-partying on Texas tea that they may start reconsidering the revolution.  They’ll breathe in the toxic fumes from the small amount of oil BP is able to burn off the slick surface, but, as if they were watching a fireman urinate on a burning barn, their hearts will be hollow.  Those glory days of McCain/Palin-convention mass-anti-intellectual hysteria will not be visited again until this history can be forgotten and “Drill-Baby-Drill!” can be resurrected by a new generation of mouth-breathing knuckleheads.

But, I will be looking for them this Sunday.  I will enjoy seeing which Republicans show up on the Sunday political talk shows.  I want to see their spin.  I would, of course, rather be watching Democrats drop-kicking Republicans on the issue, if only Obama hadn’t chosen this issue to mollify Republicans with just prior to the gulf spill.

Obama should not only rethink his political posturing on this issue, but on nuclear power, too.  Let’s not wait for a meltdown.

A little preface:

In the mid-1990’s, I was an investigative Probation Officer for New York City’s Kings County Bureau.  While there, I read an unprecedentedly comprehensive New York State study of child molester recidivism (click HERE if you want to read it,) which demonstrated soundly that child molesters can never (to my satisfaction, at least,) be surely reformed, and that their inclination to reoffend is extremely high.  This issue is often confused in various media sources lately (see THIS idiocy by the usually entertaining and insightful Times “Ethicist”,) by comparing child molester recidivism to shoplifters and prostitutes and such, which is absurd and misleading because, unlike most crimes, the result of a single act of child molestation can cause life-long suffering.  Child molester recidivism is, in fact, very possibly the most insidious and treacherous problem faced by our criminal justice system.

Not only that, but, due to the fact that child molestation’s victimization is virtually all psychological, and, so, intangible, it is the most under-prosecuted or punished of the most horrific class of crimes.  Few of the child molesters I saw as city probation officer were looking at any real prison time.  That is because they were sorrowful, otherwise harmless people.  And their victims were walking around on two feet.

After comparing the New York State report to lax Probation Department practices, I researched studies of child molester behavior, and I then convinced the Director of NYC Probation to terminate the use of the (recidivism) risk assessment instrument in use at the time for child molesters.

If anyone should be inclined to close their mind to what I am about to write by attributing it to an anti-Catholic bias, you should know this comes from the son of a Catholic school teacher, the great-nephew of nuns, and a former altar boy and particularly devout member of the Legion of Mary.

It seems likely that Pope Benedict XVI, a.k.a. Ratzinger, as archbishop, oversaw the protective reassignment of at least one serial child molester (who had been found out) to a new locale and a new pool of unsuspecting children to victimize.   Another, he clearly protected from being defrocked long after his crimes had been exposed and despite pleas from local church authority to take action.

With all the enabling of serial-child-molesting priests in the Catholic church that has come to light over the past 15 years, the question must be asked whether the clearly systematic protection and transfer of them to new pools of victims (NONE were properly prosecuted until a few very recent examples,) has involved a complicity by those enablers … -not in the cover-up, but in the perpetration.  That is, the likes of Ratzinger not only knew they were keeping the priests from the prosecutorial reach of their victims, but they also may have known they were putting the priests in a place where they would rape more children.

The Catholic priesthood has clearly been a long-time haven for the most monstrous and vile breed of men–child molesters.  It is crucial to note these are not good men turned evil by the absence of females in their clerical society, nor by what some believe to be the anti-natural sexual repression of the priesthood.  (Priests aren’t really so sexually repressed–they die of AIDS by a rate that is at least four-times that of the general population.) Not at all.  Child molesters are essentially a different mental breed of people, having almost always been molested or in some other way severely abused as very young, innocent children (often by priests, it might be assumed of these priest-molesters, as they are devout Catholics.)

These messed-up brains with their irrepressible desire to destroy the identities of children through violence and humiliation, are attracted to the priesthood–not perverted by it.  They are drawn to be priests, perhaps, because they hope an environment of repression will help them repress their desires or, perhaps, because they sense the presence of brother molesters, or simply because they know it is an easy way to get intimate access to victims in a cloak of secrecy.

The question I pose today is whether the Pope and all the myriad other bishops, archbishops, cardinals, etc… who reliably give these monsters renewed access to child victims aren’t actually a real part of an unspoken culture of child molestation that is integral to the priesthood.

It could be that the “enablers” actually enjoy the child molestation vicariously, or that they get aroused by coming to the aid of the molester and discussing the molestation/urges with him.

Do not discount these possibilities for the notion that child molestation is a sin.  Sinfulness is not antithetical to Catholicism.  Indeed it is inseperable from it.

The most drummed indoctrination inflicted on us in Catholic school was that we were, every last one of us, sinners.  This cult of sinfulness is fully realized in the holy sacrament of Confession, where children are required to admit to sinfulness whether or not they believe they have done anything they knew they shouldn’t have.

I should note that the sins are confessed privately to a priest, who one is required to enter into this intimate relationship with, under real threat of eternal damnation.

The act of committing sin and the various acts of achieving redemption are necessities to the practice of Catholicism.  A priest not only can sin, but cannot conceive of being without sin, and, in fact, to aspire to be sinless is to aspire to being equal to God, a herecy.    It does not embarrass a priest for another priest to know he’s committed a sin–even the vilest one.  It validates their life’s devotion.

Enlightening to the Papal scandal is that priests do not see it as their mission to eradicate sin.  They believe that is a pompous human aspiration.  Only God can be “without sin.”  After all, if humans could aspire to be purely loving, what would be so special about God??  In this way, a priest can pass a repentant child-raping priest on to another diocese and go to bed without a moral crisis, as what is beyond his direct agency is in God’s hands.

So a UN judge has called for Pope Ratzinger’s arrest and prosecution.

It is high time we started holding church officials to a human, rather than a Catholic, standard of morality.  There is no rational basis for us to accept secrecy as an essential component to religion.  All records of the Catholic church should be examined, and the universal human ideal of Love should be enforced on the wayward god of the Catholic church.

This god, by-the-by, failed to ever once even acknowledge what should have been, maybe even ahead of Murder, Commandment Number One: “Thou Shalt Not Molest Children,” or Three: “Thou Shalt Not Enslave People,” or Four: “Thou Shalt Not Assault,”… each of which the Holy Bible seems instead to endorse.   (Click HERE if that seems an extreme statement.)

To a reasoned analysis, though, that should not come as a surprise to a world that has only in the last hundred and fifty years developed a true appreciation for the innocense of children or of the rights of the victims of the powerful.

My blog is getting many hits due to the recent subway killing.

My readers are familiar with my efforts to stop subway killings, and the other day yet another passenger was killed by making a simple mistake that was unreasonably fatal.  So, for your info, here is a copy of a letter I wrote, years ago to the Transit president.  I received a limp response 2 months later from the VP of Corporate Communications, Paul Fleuranges, saying he’d refer the matter to the Track Safety Dept., but of course, (no matter who I wrote to, whether it be Bloomberg or Cuomo or MTA Corporation,) nothing was done:

Howard H. Roberts, Jr.

President, MTA NYCT

370 Jay St.

Brooklyn, NY  11201

June 30, 2007

Dear NYC Transit President Roberts,

Though I am a train operator, today I am writing to you as a NYC resident, not an employee.

When Governor Spitzer appointed you to your position recently, I think many were hopeful to see an end to the pass-the-buck, do-nothing mentality of previous Transit bosses.

With this hope I offer a simple, inexpensive and urgent solution to one of Transit’s most critical problems.  Every year at least one passenger is killed while descending to the roadbed to retrieve something she’s accidentally dropped over the platform edge.

[Actually, the number may be many more than one per year, as Transit refuses Freedom of Information Act requests that would allow inquiry, so the number could be as many as 4 per month.]

We should as soon as possible install signage on the wall/pillars across from platform edges and between the running rails facing the platforms in each station stating clearly:

PLEASE DO NOT DESCEND TO THE TRACKS TO GET AN ITEM YOU DROPPED THERE.

CONTACT ANY MTA EMPLOYEE AND WE WILL BE HAPPY TO RETRIEVE THE ITEM FOR YOU.

Certainly the next fatality’s life is worth the cost of some printed plastic placards, nails and glue.  Why this obvious idea has not been generated or put to any use by the previous administration defies logic and offends a common moral decency.

Also — though the speed with which trains enter stations that are preceded by curved tracking is, of course, a more complicated issue, train operators should be limited, as a rule, to restricted speed in stations in instances where time is not a concern, a policy that would have saved the fatality that occurred a couple years back with a train moving swiftly into City Hall, after making the loop, rushing (as is the standard) just to wait in the station for a departure time.

I am ever hopeful for positive developments in our culture’s institutions, and I offer these solutions to you in an effort to start looking at subway fatalities as human tragedies, rather than public relations liabilities.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Mark Crane

I wanted to share this with my readers and encourage you to visit the site:

Dear Mark,

Just a short note to thank you for your contribution to Medicine For Peace’s Haiti relief efforts. Seven weeks since the earthquake struck, and it is still difficult to describe the extent of the devastation in Port-Au-Prince or the squalor in the tent cities and makeshift encampments that are now scattered throughout the capital. More than a million people fled the city creating a critical need forshelter, clean water, food and medical care in the countryside, as well.

 We work in Gros Morne, an impoverished mountainous region 65 miles north of the capital. Twenty-five thousand displaced people have resettled in Gros Morne. They are unlikely to return to Port-Au-Prince. MFP’s efforts have been focused on building earthquake-resistant single family dwellings, and providing medical care to displaced families. We have focused on the most vulnerable: children and the elderly.

 You can follow the situation on the ground in our updates on the “Haiti blog” on our website (www.medicineforpeace.org). Again, my Haitian colleagues and I thank you for your help.

 My best regards- Mike

Key to motivating children to read literature that is not junk (see my previous post: Throwing In the Towel with Reading Workshop,) is finding a relevance that connects the child to the book, educational psychology having long-ago established relevance spurs an interest in reading (obviously.)

In this anally racial-attentive US culture, what has been known as “multicultural literature” has commonly been an effort by educators to use racial identity as a source of that elusive relevance.

When educators with a No-Child-Left-Behind fire under them (see my recent post about NCLB,) are searching desperately for some way to improve performance, their knees jerk hack writers to fill the school shelves with exciting books about White/Black/Hispanic kids (as per your school make-up.)  In this way, the focus is wrongly on the book selection offered to the child, with the educators gathering books that are crudely relevant to the child rather than focusing on the child’s concept of relevance–that is, the child’s ability to find the relevance that more advanced thinkers find in great works of art that are not focused on their own cultural identity.

The reason a rich White guy who writes for the New York Times Book Review appreciates Gabriel Garcia Marquez is not that Marquez is a rich White American guy—he isn’t.  He appreciates him for the myriad talents and innovations Marquez brings to the art of writing.  This is relevant to the Times reviewer because the Times reviewer is an appreciator of literature.

This pedagogical avoidance of the child by gathering racially-focused books instead of engendering an appreciation of literature the child is unfamiliar with, is the result of the fact that in the US it is taboo to dare encourage the child to imagine any notion of identity that undermines what has been assigned them by their parents or the culture.  I am not complaining that teaching Hemingway and Salinger and Dickens to a Black child may cause his parents to object that the curriculum is not balanced racially.  I am saying that requiring the child to change into the type of person that has a natural interest in all these materials is a violation of some dysfunctional social strictures we have set up in the modern USA.

I propose this has dire consequences for the child.  I offer the following theory with regards to the mysterious character strength that educational psychologists refer to as a “Need for Achievement,” which is essentially a drive and confidence for success in school.  This Need for Achievement is well known to mysteriously drop off in African American youth at about the 4^th grade—not in other racial identities.  This means that Black kids of the same socioeconomic status and neighborhood as White or Latino kids will, on average, fail in comparison to their classmates after the 4^th grade for a reason that is unknown.

You would think such a problem would be too crucial to leave at that, but the problem has been known for many years (Cooper, H., & Dorr, N., 1995; Review of Educational Research, 65(4), 438-508,) with little effort to diagnose or solve it.  Maybe it is that educational research along racial lines is a little too easily confused with Nazi eugenics for the comfort of the institutions that provide such funding.

I offer this interpretation: The Black minority is unlike other minorities, including African émigrés, in that Blacks do not identify as outsiders at all.  Other minority children–even Native Americans, (coming from reservations,)–may be expected to see themselves as separate outsiders to our culture, so they may understand their low socioeconomic status as a result of that disadvantage.  Non-Black-minority kids may be expected to aim for overturning their situational disadvantage now that their family has arrived here.  They may see doing so to be just what their father or mother or sister or brother or aunt or uncle would have done had they had the same advantages.

A Black child cannot have the same outlook, knowing full well Black people have been here longer than most Whites.

It is a whole different identity, an identity that, held up to a success-obsessed US culture, (which I’d say most Black people endorse to the eyeballs,) reeks of failure and incompetence no matter how much “Pride” is enthusiastically encouraged.  It is the scar that lives at the heart of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Richard Wright’s Native Son, and which is overcome (by an elevating transmutation of identity) in The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

It goes beyond self-esteem.  Self-esteem can be strong in children who fail.  It is identity—who they think they are, who they hope to be.  Being wealthy and successful is not identity but aspiration.  You can want to be rich like Bill Gates, but, at the same time you don’t want to be Bill Gates—you have no real interest in or drive towards the study of computer programming.

Every urban teacher knows this.

And kids want to grow to be like their mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles… who they see as their own.

To expand a child’s potential, we must expand that same child’s sense of identity, so that they still identify with their “own,” but that they can truly identify with others beyond their family, too.

But it is a very hard argument to make to racially-obsessed Americans that racial identity should take a back seat to education.  And this defensiveness is logical, considering our nation’s historical efforts to annihilate minority identity.

Telling ourselves we were making up for this history, we brought “multicultural literature” to the schools, and immediately thereafter we lost track of what we were doing, passing the Black books out to the Black kids and the Latino books out to the Latino kids.

Multicultural literature is a fallacy.  There is nothing multicultural about Black or Latino literature, any more than there is anything multicultural about Western White literature.  Together, they add up to US literature, still very, very narrowly focused.

But just imagine if literature was chosen on its literary merit, without a cultural selectivity.

International literature, translated literature, literature from unexpected sources or sources we are oblivious to—sources we search to the ends of the Earth for, then, should be what we call multicultural—not what teachers are passing to kids nowadays, glossy teen lit with the same themes you can find by clicking any TV on–about typical US kids who are trying to navigate the concerns of US teenagedom, whether they be defined as White or that category that sets White culture as the benchmark: “non-White.”

The purpose of multicultural lit should not be to enforce the definition of me, but to help me understand somebody else I don’t know about.  Those choices that tell me about me are entertainment or emotional exertion, or maybe they belong in a history or civics class (ie: a book about people experiencing the Birmingham Bus Boycotts or about a child who is picked on for being different.)  They do not contribute to a literary education.

When I (47-year-old White guy that I am,) listen to a Springsteen song, I rant out the words along with the Boss because the art is a careful erudition of my emotional expression. This is not educating me.  It is giving me something fun and emotive to do with emotions that already belong to me.

Now, sit me down at the opera, and the fun ends.  I need to pay attention.  The people around me have to shut up and not crinkle any gum wrappers.  My brain has to focus very carefully on what is coming in to capture and appreciate its beauty.

Real multicultural education reaches into the unknown and investigates. A Language Arts teacher must inspire and actively promote.  Passing out reading that is unimportant to the study of literature is not teaching.

I propose the stake in the heart of racially unequal education in the US will be true multicultural education built on a historical foundation of the great building blocks of all the literature that led to it.  In this way, we don’t level the great accomplishments of the curriculum, but, rather, we equalize our presumptions toward the identity of our students.

Many fear this idea to the point that they do not want it heard.  Racial identity, culture, forms of expression must be preserved.

But, why?  People should be respected, and so should the things they say and the ways they say it, but, we should not be purposely perpetuating cultural identity.  Yes, yes, we should keep it from being maliciously destroyed—but we have no business keeping it from being neglected. Educators should see it as their business to expose a student to the whole spectrum of possibilities outside of their own familiarity and it is a crime against that child to restrict those possibilities in order to respect identity.

Barack Obama’s election was a great stride forward for multiculturalism, President Obama having grown up in Indonesia and having an African father and White, Middle American mother.  A Black kid looking to identify with his president will take the example of a person who invents himself.  It would help if that child’s parents and teachers stopped telling him he is Black, but that he is a member of humanity, and that one day it will be up to him to decide his own identity.

Any identity (ie: racial, national, religious, gang, gender, professional…,) is simply a social construct that saves insecure or intellectually lazy people from defining themselves.  It is only necessary if a person is incapable of finding a worthwhile self-definition on their own, and I do not believe Black kids are so incapable (as I believe many of their teachers and parents assume they are.)

As our age of unsustainable, reckless consumption comes to an end, we will eventually reach a point where we will have no choice but to see ourselves as world citizens, rather than US or Western citizens, and, just as we are learning now to see beyond our national confines of racial separation, that day, multiculturalism will blossom naturally.

The key to the future development of our students as readers is a carefully, intelligently chosen collection of literary works from a truly remarkable pool, rich in choices that are foreign to what currently fills our students’ conception of identity.  The relevance of these works will be found by the student, inspired by a good teacher, because, despite our national racial hang-ups, the fact is: the narrower the reader’s ability to see the relevance of anything, the more limited is the reader’s potential for growth.

And it is the teacher’s job to open the child’s mind.

I offer this list of multicultural reads that are accessible in the Young Adult sections of most US libraries, not as examples of great or even necessarily important literature, but as well-written books that effort successfully to connect our kids with the struggles of kids in cultures they are foreign to:

Koyal Dark, Mango Sweet, by Kashmira Sheth

Sold, by Patricia McCormick, ,

Bog Child, by Sidbhan Dowd,

The Song of Kahunsha, by Anosh Irani,

A Step from Heaven, by An Na,

Perseopolis, by Marjane Satrapi, (graphic novel,)

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie.

It used to be that the Language Arts programs of the typical urban high schools taught traditional classics like Animal Farm, Sounder, Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye….  In those days, schools that could get kids to read them did so, and schools whose kids would rather throw paper balls around the room and chat did that.   Thanks to No Child Left Behind, (see my recent post,) that second type of school—the crummy, failing school—is currently being set upon by forces of change.  The idea is that the old ways of overlooking failure are at an end and that something must be done this generation to change poorly-performing schools.

The new answer to the request by the failing school to continue as is, despite its demonstrated inability to function successfully, is: No.

Anyone with a bit of familiarity with the US education system knows that it tirelessly goes through fads—catchy new modes of teaching that last for about ten years—ideas that are supposed to be the final solution to the failure that clings stubbornly to US education like a second skin.  The teaching community, like an endless row of baby ducks, gloms onto these ideas and institutionalizes them to the point that no one can raise an objection.

When I was a boy, I was given a reader that had an “e” glued to the back of an “a” every few words, as that was supposed to help me sound out words phonically.  In high school, they had us “diagram” sentences, which had us all drawing lines and circles around various parts of speech and recording them like they were mathematical equations or something.  When I was teaching school back in the 1980’s, there was a resurgence of this “phonics” fad, but also a push for what was called “multicultural literature,” an addition of material  by and about US minority groups.  More recently, they are talking about “holistic literacy,” whole word reading, eschewing sounding things out for, rather, getting kids to identify the “sight words” as little pictures.

And multicultural literature has been found to be a false god.  Someone has realized that “multi-ethnic” literature is rather the true and ultimate salvation.

In the 1980’s we realized how neglected inner-city youth were of “PRIDE.”  This abstraction (one of the seven deadly sins,) provided through additive lessons focusing on human rights activists (in addition to the popular practice of printing the word across T-shirts and painting the word in huge colorful letters across the front wall of city schools during this era,) was sure to make minority students start studying.

Despite these passing fancies of educators, all the while, student performance rolls along in a straight or declining line, oblivious.

The most recent fad in the Language Arts classroom is the Reading Workshop model of teaching.  It begins with a “mini-lesson,” focusing on some technical aspect–maybe the use of the comma, or verb-sentence agreement—and then students are paired into small groups to read books they choose to read from a large selection.

To address student disinterest with reading, teachers have replaced what they call canonical literature—“the classics,”—with anything kids might like.  Rather than discussing the role of Lenny in Of Mice and Men they are discussing the role of Massie in P.S.: I Loathe You (trust me: there ain’t much to discuss there.)  The plots are usually about some US teenager, going through something mysterious, humorous, fantastical, or romantic; and, most often, they follow the tired, snarky interior narrative.

They are “reading” graphic novels, too, which are big, thick, glossy comic books, wherein all literate description has been mulched and replaced by felt-tipped marker sketches, and round-eyed anime standardized gestures, their teachers never competent enough to take the deliberation necessary to realize that a real book teaches kids how the language can flow to describe the entire world experience.  And it sets patterns of speech in their heads—patterns that will return throughout their lives every time their mind searches for a way to express itself.  Graphic novels are not evil, but, as they are capable of being digested through a mere cursory read, they are not a way to grow a reader or a better reader, a good writer, or a literate thinker.

Also among these classroom choices can be found absolute garbage by authors of pathos like Junot Diaz (who, according to my grad school Education Methods teacher, recently spoke before a convention of the National Council of Teachers of English, and, to my teacher’s awe and delight, “…used the f-word sixteen times!”)

Even the branch libraries are in on the act.  Over the past ten years, they have dumped their traditional literature off the shelves for splashy modern choices that are simpler and much less challenging.

This letting the kids decide what to read is a teaching cop-out, because it is so easy to get a child to sit with something comic-bookish or something full of violence, sex, or teenaged angst, compared to the difficulty of motivating a student to learn to appreciate Canterbury Tales or A Passage to India, Dante or Shakespeare.

This Reading Workshop model, the way it is practiced, is a true transformation of Language Arts taking place in the name of reform.  And it is based on theory, too.  Small groups have been demonstrated an effective learning tool.  The relevance of the material (much of the subject matter takes place in neighborhoods like their own to kids like them,) is a proven effective way to pique learning.  Reading skills can be assumed to improve with eyes on text, which is certainly easier to achieve with such reading choices.

The Reading Workshop model sets a framework that is assumed to be greater than the teacher.  The idea is that an inept teacher following the Reading Workshop model almost as a job description can be made capable.  I’ve watched inept but enthusiastic teachers sticking to this model and I would say it is poor.  It only seems successful because it is heads and tails over what used to go on in these same classrooms 20 years ago (nu-thing!)

Other teachers believe they should not lead.  The students should be encouraged just to be whatever they are, and it is wrong for somebody to tell a kid they need to do something to become better than they are.  These lazily use the Reading Workshop model, thinking it gets them the best performance possible.  It is the greater society that is at fault (which is true) so I shouldn’t worry about finding a way to improve, (which is not true.)  They are eager for the entire NCLB initiative to fail, so they can return to the security of the old days when nobody cared what they were doing

Teachers who merely elicit student preferences in choosing appropriate literature so as to serve students something along the lines of what they like, are serving up of empty calories that may not even bring enjoyment sufficient to justify the notion that getting a student to like reading will lead them to seek out something richer next time.   Though these teachers often see themselves as nonconformists, their approach is quite tediously conventional, learned from our society, in which culture responds to what will most effortlessly engage us, which is why we waste our time watching “Maury Povitch” and “Survivor” between commercials for products assembled by children toiling in sweatshops across the sea.  We end up engaging ourselves in what is most riveting, not what would help us grow into better people.

Our responsibility to our students is to scaffold upward—to draw them towards something better they have yet to imagine, not to cater to their interests, Madison-Avenue style.

This takes an effort not laid out in the Reading Workshop model.  It takes an appreciation of great literature and a well-thought-out path of relevance from the bookshelf to the housing project.

(Watch for my next post: A New Definition of Multicultural Literature.”)

No Child Left Behind (NCLB,) an initiative introduced by both Republicans and Democrats, represented by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, has raised a panicked stampede of emotions from educators that is just delightful to see. I remember substitute teaching in the day when teachers used to drag themselves into school, half-zonked from partying the night before, slouch in their seats and throw out some make-work for any student who wanted it. You’d walk down a hallway of just about any school in an un-wealthy area of the city, and you’d see very little going on in just about any classroom door glass you’d choose to glance through. Lucky for the Board of Ed, schools were off-limits to the public and to any cameras, so this fact was never easily related in the media.

Still, the teacher-authored book about pathetically poor teaching environments was so common it was a veritable genre, though always ending up with the teacher-hero succeeding in reaching and transforming the students—something that just never occurred in real life, but, thanks to those books and movies, there were plenty of idealistic young teachers who banged their heads against the wall for a year or two before moving on to other careers. That was me.

In those days, principals could spend very little time at work, teachers transformed playgrounds into parking lots for their cars to make the suburban commute, and very few people gave a rat’s ass what any of the kids were doing with their lives.

There was already much psychological research that indicated the keys to transformative teaching: group work, personally-relevant projects, enthusiasm, high standards, reinforcement (rewarding kids with praise for doing good work,) and accurate assessments of what a child can do so as to challenge with realistic goals. Still, few attempted to use these time and energy-consuming tools to change the march of failure, and, to be fair, a single teacher can do little. You need school-wide change, as students are not going to spend all the rest of their classes goofing off and transform to studious just for your class.

Every school had a few older teachers who dragged their feet and complained in moaned tones, read the newspaper at their desks, and treated the students like, perhaps, a friendly prison guard would his inmates. Other teachers would just run through a routine, making no effort to raise enthusiasm in themselves, let alone their students.

No teachers would fight, which was what you had to do just to set the stage for an attempt at real teaching. It would emotionally destroy you.

After all, there was no discipline. Do you have any idea what it takes to motivate a class without discipline? I will tell you: you must perform. You must compete for attention with distractions and win. Your lesson must be more entertaining than the new electronic device in this student’s purse or the story of a new boyfriend that student is about to tell the one sitting behind her.

It wasn’t just the rotten teachers, (which were I’d say a greater percentage than most educators are willing to admit,) but it was the rotten principals, and the rotten administrators, all the way up to the rotten federal policies.

NCLB promised to change it all and do so rapidly, as if another generation could not be spared.

And in many ways it has. For the first time, US educators are being pressed to perform. The churning changes bubbling up all through the system, even if they are not successful, are creating an environment where at least the status quo will not be tolerated. Compared to the warehouses I worked at in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, Anything is an improvement. You hear all these educators caterwauling about being forced to “teach to the test,” but it is a great, great improvement from not having to teach at all.

This is not to say the argument has no place. I am talking pretty strictly about poorly-performing schools. I have no idea why a school that performs well should need to administer more than one standardized test a year. But the schools that don’t cut it should be dragged out into the light of day and castigated, which cannot be accomplished without testing.

Mayor Bloomberg wants to chop these rotten schools up and turn them into charter schools. I do not approve of Bloomburg’s media-sponsored reign, and this can be seen as just another power grab for control by him, but, aware of the actual nature of a poorly-functioning school, I am confident that any fair-minded person who truly cares about the kids would decide that anything—ANYTHING—is preferable to allowing that school to drag on despite the fact that it is failing to improve on standardized tests it cannot even get a passing grade on.

Good teachers are key to achieving success.

We don’t have to acknowledge that, I realize. The easy way out is to say the truth: that parents are neglecting the kids. They too often send us poorly-behaved, spoiled, foul-mouthed know-it-alls who have an attention span no longer than the space between sit-com commercial breaks–who went to bed at midnight last night and ran out of the house this morning after ingesting a donut and a Coke. We cannot be expected to reach them.

This is too easy because it leads to nothing constructive. With a minimum wage of $7 in your nation, you cannot expect parents–who are only adult versions of their uneducated, poorly-nurtured children, after all–to have enough time free of work to parent the kids properly. Sure, you can appeal to them, but a good teacher must be prepared to teach kids who are poorly nurtured.

Otherwise, spare us, and just drag your dead-weight to another career.

And once you accept that good teachers are key to achieving success, it is clear that some very, very special people are needed. A good teacher is not only a true expert in their subject area but good at communicating with inner-city kids and highly intelligent… and emotionally intuitive… and sincere.

Though many teachers are kind that does not stop them from being dull-witted. They may be intelligent, but selfish. They may be friendly, but foolish. Immensely knowledgeable, but easily exhausted.

Teachers need to be experts, communicators, intelligent, intuitive, sincere, kind, clever, generous, friendly, and they need an abundance of energy and enthusiasm. Think about it. Turn one of these assets to its inverse and you have a fatal flaw in teaching. Just one. A stupid teacher is worthless to a school. A selfish person, a dishonest person, a person who is emotionally needy or frigid. People with flaws like these are all around us, thriving. Teaching is one of the only careers where the professional cannot lack in one area. It just won’t work.

Say their only problem is they need affection and are not selfless enough to keep from seeking it from students in exchange for, say, homework—or say their only problem is their parents never pulled them away from the TV, so they don’t enjoy reading and writing, which was not a big problem on their way through college and even grad school, because, as my teacher at Lehman recently confided to the class: “This is grad school. Everybody gets an A.” (The same teacher who openly brags about falsifying NCLB assessment tests at the high school where she works.)

Good teaching requires you have it all. Everyone else is a hack, and really none of them should be teachers. Teachers like to say a few bad students can ruin a class, but a few bad teachers can ruin a school’s generation of kids. That’s a fact. The good news is people who are so well roundedly virtuous are often naturally drawn to this low-paying profession. The bad news is we have no way of weeding out the worst teachers. Teaching is so complicated an art that assessment is impossible, (though NCLB has panicked teachers into thinking they’re going to soon find a way.) So we must run a system with hacks.

And this has brought us to a strange place. An interesting place. So interesting, that I recently decided to return to the classroom, which is why I’m now pursuing my masters in Education. I am hopeful that in such an environment of change I can make a difference that I found such a futile pursuit years ago when absolutely nothing was going on in the NYC school system.

A quick missive to those fellow world citizens wanting to help:  I’ve got an uncle who runs a truly selfless organization that has been providing relief to Haiti since I was a kid.  The organization is Medicine for Peace, (Medicineforpeace.org.) They suffered many losses, but they’re still kicking and could use any help you might offer.  I talked to a friend today who is buying a $1200 computer.  “Dude!” I said.  “You could pay half as much and have the exact same happiness.   And then you could send the rest to Haiti.“  He told me he cell-phoned $5.  He’s a good guy–really–but he could do better.  Right? 

Holy cow!  How could we have missed it?? 

Do you know what “cow pus milk” is?  To increase production, dairy farmers drug their cows with growth hormone so that the mama cow breasts swell up and they make more milk.  Here’s a link where you can see the results of this disgusting practice.  

After watching that horrific video, in my family’s lingo, any milk that doesn’t have a growth hormone disclaimer on the label is “cow pus milk.”   It is very easy to avoid it–nowadays they don’t even have it on the shelf at most NYC supermarkets.

A couple weeks ago, I walked into the Starbucks across from Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.  As usual, they were out of milk at the little preparation counter.  I asked the woman pulling lattes, and she poured it in my coffee straight from the plastic jug.

GROSS!  It was cow pus milk!  I couldn’t believe it.  With the money they get for their products, you’d think they could afford to pay the few extra pennies for growth-hormone-free dairy products.  Really–the growth hormone-free stuff is not expensive, like organic, but it is literally a few cents more. 

Is this a new approach Starbucks is taking in these economically-strained times?

If so, it tastes like “New Coke” to me.   As the  recent Starbucks instant coffee taste test seemed so well to demonstrate, and as any fool can tell you, it’s not the taste as much as the trust in high quality that makes Starbucks so desireable.

I emailed Starbucks before publishing this entry, but was answered by nothing but cold, white, pus-laden silence. 

Go ahead.  Don’t take my word for it.  The next time you’re in a Starbucks, ask to see the milk jug first.

 Starbucks Milk Is Cow Pus Milk!