Month: February 2019

CARE-GIVER

/ janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment
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It was Billie’s 90th birthday party and we drove over 200 miles each way to attend. I have known her since 1969, but Gary has known her longer and she remembers him with great fondness. Back when I met her, Billie’s hair was a curly mass of mostly-gray tied into pigtails. She was the picture of the Hippie mama, beautiful in that particular Billie-manner, and uniformly kind and wise, and full of fun.

Gary sat down next to her yesterday and she said, “Gary, you’re not a kid any more.”

Long ago she told me a story about a chair that has stayed with me. This would have been in the early 70s that I heard the story. She wanted a beautiful wooden rocking chair she saw in an antique store. She could not afford it, she said, on her teacher’s salary. So she calculated what smoking cigarettes cost her each month and gave up smoking. She put the chair on layaway and paid it off from her nonsmoking funds. Her children, who are mostly younger than me, had never heard that story but were delighted. “It sounds just like her!”

These days Billie is frail and her hearing is poor, aided somewhat in one ear (her left) by a hearing aid. While I sat on the ottoman next to her, trying to be loud without actually shouting, she leaned to me. “Is that a baby over there?”

“Yes,” I said. Across the room a beautiful women held a sleeping child. It was her granddaughter holding Billie’s great grandson, 17 month old Enzo.

“I would like to have that baby. If I kept him for a couple of years, do you think they’d notice?” She looked at me with a twinkle in her eye. She was teasing me. Yeah, that’s Billie.

She still lives in the same house where I first got to know her. On her shelves are some of my favorite novels. She has Smiley’s Moo (the black book on the second shelf down behind her toward the right) and Carol Shield’s Unless (my favorite of Shields’s novels on a cart a few feet away) and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. She has some of the same poetry and Norton anthologies I love. There are books and photos and works of art all over, a wedding certificate from over 150 years ago. It is a well-lived home. She is greatly loved.

During the week, she has some sort of professional care. On weekends, some member of her family stays over. Her children and grandchildren take turns. This way she can stay in her home and manage quite well.

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My “Gaga,” my mom’s mother, managed to stay in her home until shortly before her death. My grandmother’s second husband, Papa, brought her coffee each morning before leaving for work. Later, as her health failed, he carried her up and down the stairs until he could no longer manage even her slight weight. Then he cared for her in the living room, carrying her only as far as the bathroom. They were in their seventies by then.

We had cared for my mom for years before it occurred to me to ask my mother if she or her sister had ever provided respite for her step-father.

No, she never had. She seemed surprised at the question.

 

Yesterday we left Edmonds, Washington after staying only a short time at the party. We generally avoid driving in the dark but we arrived home in the recent dark, tired, too tired to eat. Gary had a beer and brought me tea with brandy in it. I don’t usually drink whiskey but it warmed me and made me thoughtful all at once. That rocking chair was still right there in Billie’s living room where it belonged.

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My friends Toni and Billie on Billie’s birthday.

My husband’s Billie Playlist (with links to the videos—he says you have to watch the videos): 

You might cry along with that first one, but you’ll end in a great mood.

WHY TEACH?

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There is a long tradition of public service in my family, and perhaps that’s why.

I scored a dozen essays yesterday and my students will all be disappointed with their grades. Nevertheless, they wrote better essays in two weeks than they did in two months just last fall. They haven’t thought much about that yet, but we will talk on Monday after I finish marking up the other dozen essays. They will write a new draft, and if it is not yet as impressive as it might be, we’ll do a draft after that. Each time they work through the process, they become stronger. The essay is less important than their appreciation of the process.

There were a lot of things I could have done with my life. I am a wife and mother, but I did well in college. I was an art major, but I considered law as a career, or botany, or graphic design. I considered other fields, and I worked in several, but eventually I chose teaching as my profession.

My first three years as a teacher were in a private girls prep school east of Seattle. I wasn’t a very good teacher in those days, but I did the best I could as a very young woman in ideal circumstances. My students were elite—the daughters of affluent and actually wealthy parents who already lived in excellent public school districts but who could afford to buy an even better education for their girls. It was and is a great school, but if I’d had daughters I would not have sent them there. I believe in public education.

When my husband and I moved to my family home in Oregon, I had a variety of jobs: working both the back and front of a bakery, drawing plans for a local architect, designing freelance graphics, and for eleven years I was a sub in my local public schools. I worked one or two days a week and in Kindergarten through 12th grade, every subject including high school foreign languages I could not speak, Physics and Calculus, Band and Choir, Resource Room, and P.E. when all the offices and equipment were in the boys locker room. I went to work on those days masquerading as someone else, struggling to keep up for eight hours. I came home exhausted and hopeful I would work the next day too. After a while kids got to know me and my job was a little easier.

There are plenty of important reasons to become a high school teacher. Here are a few:

  • You want to teach because you discover you are good at it.
  • You want to teach in order to make a difference.
  • You want to teach because students deserve to have people in their lives who care about them, teachers who like them, and teachers who have other options that pay better but choose to teach anyway.
  • You want to teach because students deserve teachers for whom high school was not the best time of their life—they need to be assured that whoever is telling them that high school is the best time of their life is either lying or has led a very, very sad life indeed.
  • You want to teach to make the world a better place, and you want the opportunity to help other people find hope and promise in the world.
  • You want to teach to work hard, to engage deeply with ideas and people, and to know that what you do is important.

And the big one we should all care about—

  • You want to teach because a strong public education system is the greatest tool for developing democracy that exists. It makes us one people. It makes us known and useful to ourselves and to our communities.

There are, in fact, teachers who do not love their job. Most leave within four years for other work. There are teachers who chose to teach high school because that was the best time of their life while they played sports and they want to hold on to their teenaged dream. There are teachers who do a job, and that is the extent of their commitment. I don’t think that last is anything but rare.

My husband likes to say I am “never off the clock.” Most teachers are like that.

I’ve been a teacher for over forty years. And though a few of them have been very hard, I regret none of those years. I am grateful for a few thousand fascinating people who entered my room and listened to me, who sometimes even laughed at my stupid jokes and teased me, who agreed and disagreed with my opinions, who asked me questions I couldn’t answer, who taught me about baseball and boats, computers and dance, 4-H livestock, music, theater, science, and how very, very hard life is for too many teenagers today. Sometimes I made them angry, I hope more often I gave them the skills and the knowledge that they had a right to expect me to share. I hope I sent them away wanting to be better people and that what they learned in my classroom was useful in that effort. I hope they left possessing greater faith in their own abilities, greater trust in the process and in themselves. I know many of them have been grateful for assignments I gave them that didn’t seem important at the time, but showed their value later.

Teaching is one of the great accomplishments of my life. Most days it makes me proud and hopeful. I hope to keep doing it until I die.

 

A follow-up: Less than a month after I wrote this post, I quit teaching in the local school district. I had enjoyed teaching college classes, but in those last months everything became awkward, difficult. I do not regret this decision, though I miss teaching very much. Perhaps I was trying to convince myself of something, because I cannot properly explain my abrupt decision. No one really wanted to know. Why is it that people who are paid a great deal of money to administrate so often fail?

I am not done teaching. It is the great habit of my life, and there are many avenues for pursuing my vocation.

Out of the blue I was recently asked to teach an adult writing workshop next year, and I am looking forward to that. My visual art has been accepted for a show in a local gallery late next year—I had applied on impulse. I look forward to both of these opportunities and home to do well in both.

WHY YOU DON’T WANT TO BECOME A TEACHER

/ janpriddyoregon / 18 Comments

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Snow fell off and on a couple of weeks ago. On the coast we understand a few feet of rain better than a few inches of snow. On a Monday, school was closed.

read “Become a Teacher.”

This happened in 2011 too, but back then it was on a Thursday. I had stayed till 7pm the night before, watching the roads on the internet to ensure the snow didn’t start sticking before I got home. On Wednesday evenings I sat in the school Library (with a math teacher for a few months when we were both paid—I did it for 20 years without pay) to keep the workspace open for kids who needed help, were retaking tests, or who needed computer access. When I packed up for home I lugged the tests I needed to score home but left an eight-inch stack of essays in my room. I would get to them the following weekend and adjust the due date for the other essay that students were supposed to hand in the next day.

The 24th of February 2011 was a snow day, and I was loving it. I had a lot of work to get done but I was taking the day off. This is what I wrote because I could:

I love my job. I say that all the time and it’s true. I’m good at it and I still have a measure of autonomy in my classroom. I can be creative and innovative and my administration actually appreciates me for doing it (I think). I’ve gone gray in this profession. I love my job. I’m proud of the work I do.

Many of my former students have become teachers or are thinking of becoming teachers. And I love them for that too, but it also makes me want to cry, because teachers are not in the same position they were when I was young, or even when I entered the profession.

Ten reasons you don’t want to become a teacher:

  1. The pay is less than you think. I read on Facebook that if you want “abundant wealth” you should choose the private sector.
  2. There is no longer job security. My school lost ten teachers last year.
  3. Your pension isn’t safe—it looks like a pile of money to the public, waiting to be looted.
  4. Parents don’t trust you.
  5. The community thinks you have too much time off. They need to hire a sitter for those stupid planning days.
  6. Even if you teach that kid to read and get him off the streets and are answerable about whether he passes or does not pass all the new tests, you are not heroes like police officers and firefighters—who receive better pay and a sweeter pension package.
  7. If you have a personal blog, watch your words because freedom of speech doesn’t apply to teachers.
  8. Summers you will either be working a second job or going to school or both.
  9. For the same amount of education you could be a nurse with a specialty making twice as much money and no homework on the weekend. You could be a lawyer and work as hard for a lot more money, or a doctor, X-ray technician, plumber, electrician…

The number 10 reason not to become a teacher, the critical reason:

10. Everything is your fault.

  • You’re a lousy teacher. If students are unmotivated, tired, hungry, sleepy, sick, absent, homeless, or in jail, you should have motivated them to show up to school every day and complete their homework.
  • You make too much money. Compare your income with seven or more years of university education, Masters degree, and twenty years of experience to the wages of the drop-out pumping gas (who you should have motivated to stay in school) and you are paid way too much. You have all that time off and we don’t want to hear any whining about class planning and scoring papers and all that.
  • You cause social injustice. If you marry another teacher—surprise! you have an actual middle class income capable of paying for your own children’s college education. But wait! That’s okay for professionals. Everyone understands that if two doctors or lawyers marry they will have a double income. If teachers do that it’s simply unfair. Teachers should be paid less so that if they marry another of their kind they won’t be earning over a hundred thousand dollars between them… after a combined 14 years university education and 30 years of teaching experience. [Seriously, I’ve heard this argument.]
  • It’s your union’s fault the economy is a mess. That pension and all those great benefits like health coverage—all that stuff your union got for you—is just too much. You may have paid in, but if we could just take that money we promised you’d get back eventually and spend it on other stuff, we wouldn’t have to raise taxes.
  • And another thing, your union and tenure are allowing lousy teachers to ruin kids’ education. If it weren’t for unions and tenure there would be no bad teachers. Look how well that approach has worked for politicians, plumbers, and physicians.

[Trump just wants a profit and his Secretary of Education wants to entirely dismantle our education system and turn it into a money-making scheme.] Obama wanted the same thing Bush wanted, a better education system without having to pay more for it. “You can’t solve a problem by throwing money at it.” Right? “You get what you pay for” is another cliché. There’s truth in both, but diamonds cost more than glass. A couch from Ethan Allen is going to cost more than one left on the curb, and anyone who thinks they can rely on a junk store couch having the quality of the new custom-built model is deceiving themselves. Try sitting on them. If we want better schools and better teachers, we’re going to have to find a way to make working in schools more attractive. We could start by offering more money and security and respect.

Unions don’t protect bad teachers. Neither does tenure, assuming you have it in your state. (It’s long gone for K12 teachers in the State of Oregon.) I watched two teachers pushed out of the profession while we still had tenure and it wasn’t any harder than it would be to get rid of a factory worker management didn’t want, and it was a heck of a lot easier than getting rid of a bad doctor, and doctors technically don’t have a union. What doctors and lawyers have is the ability to command a professional salary and to move to another hospital or firm that offers them a better deal. Teachers can almost never do that.

Teachers are paid on a set scale that compensates their labor based on years of education and years of experience. However, no school district hires the best qualified teacher—they hire the one they can afford. That means they will start any new teacher at the lowest level they can get away with. Fresh out of college, inexperienced teachers are cheap hires and a cheap hire saves the school district money. Those new teachers last, on average four years, because the work is harder than they expected. A strong and experienced teacher, by contrast, would cost more, even though districts can almost never afford to pay them a wage that would coax them away from a current employer—and isn’t that how it’s done in professions? If a firm wants that better lawyer, they offer him or her more money. (The only education people who negotiate their pay is administrators. When my district insisted it was too broke to offer a raise, not even cost of living raises, administrators still received raises.) A great carpenter with a great reputation commands top dollar.

No one in another district would hire me for what I am paid in my current job. If I left for another district, a school in Portland for example, I would be credited with only 7 years of experience rather than the 24 I have and I would be paid less. They can’t afford to start a teacher on my pay. It’s not in their budget. And if I wanted to move, I couldn’t afford the pay cut. It would take me 8 years to recover my current salary. [Or actually something less than 8 years since my rural school district pays a lot less than Portland.]

What this means is that if school districts wanted to hire the best available teachers, they would have to revamp the way teachers are paid. I’m not talking about paying people for raising their students’ test scores—recent research shows this isn’t effective—it means we’d need some way to offer better teachers (“better” by some standard) higher wages. And, most critically, it would mean schools would have to have the extra money lying around to lure those “better teachers” away from their current employer. They don’t.

I am 66, and I’ve taught since completing 3 undergraduate degrees with honors and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Washington. I have a masters degree in my field and enough graduate hours for a masters in education too. Until I retired, I worked at least 50-60 hours a week (and all-too-often 70) and throughout the holidays and I STILL had to listen to complaints about my imaginary 3 months off every summer and how tenure protects bad teachers (remember, we have no tenure in Oregon public schools) and how my pension is breaking the state budget (I paid into my pension). I’m supposed to be better qualified, better trained, work harder, and do it all on less salary and with no guarantee that the terms under which I was hired will be honored. Those terms have not been not honored and what I was expecting upon retirement was halved.

…Speaking only for my frugal self, I had no complaints about my salary, but I would have to work full time through my 70s before my retirement income would come close enough to my salary after working in this profession since 1976. I took time out to stay home with my sons, but I had 25 years teaching in my district before a very bad year of stress-induced illness convinced me to retire. Teacher pensions had already been gutted in my state and the public seemed to want more from me for even less respect and autonomy, not to mention less security in my old age.

People who could barely tolerate being in the same room with their own sons and daughters while they were teenagers blame me when I can’t get them to do their homework. It wears me out.

A post on Facebook from a former teacher turned wealthy self-described “Capitalist” explained that if people want “abundant wealth” they will have to leave teaching. He illustrates this with an analogy: “Should trash collectors be paid more than the avg worker? Th…ink about it….Who would you miss more the garbage man, or some Nuclear Physicist?” [I’m not sure if teachers are the trash collectors or the scientists in this scenario.] “Bottom line is– tax payers pay the bill in the public sector… Therefore, it is expected to be a life of service for those who work in our communities…Not a life of abundant wealth…If one is concerned with earning top dollar, then they need to find a job in the ‘private sector,’ where one because of ‘Capitalism’ can earn as much as they desire. So either one should choose to serve the people, or take their talents elsewhere. Teachers work for the public and have to expect a life of service.”

More and more, the person some people seem to want in their schools is not a teacher, but a nun, someone to work purely out of the goodness of their heart. And it’s true that it takes a lot of heart to teach, but that doesn’t excuse blaming teachers for everything the public thinks is wrong with schools. It does not excuse paying teachers second rate wages just because they work in public schools. Second rate earns second rate.

If we are willing to settle for second rate teachers, we’ll have to expect second rate in all public sector jobs. And I do not want second rate air traffic controllers or safety inspectors or police officers or teachers. I don’t think we can expect anyone to work out of the goodness of their heart, as the Facebook poster above seems to expect. When I was a girl I had fantastic teachers… because they were women with limited opportunities and men on the GI bill and the first generation to climb out of hard blue collar jobs.

Today those people find work in other fields that pay better. I think we’re going to have to pay for what we get or we’re going to get what we pay for. That’s true whoever is doing the hiring.

If we want to improve teaching and teachers, it only makes sense that we expect to pay for it.

And it’s likely why excellent public school teachers are in short supply just now.

WHAT THEY NEVER TOLD US

/ janpriddyoregon / 1 Comment

I taught high school beginning in 1976, and except when my sons were little, I taught in private and then public schools until I almost-retired a few years ago. I am grateful forever that I fell into teaching, that I was honored to know and work with thousands of people, many of whom remain my friends. If some wondered if the hearts I sent on birthday greetings were sincere, I can say that every day tears come to my eyes when I think about my students. When they share joy I cheer; when they experience loss, I am saddened.

Most of what I recall about students is tender and delightful and cherished, but there are some incidents that still trouble me. Wednesday evening another high school teacher announced that she wanted to teach a class for future teachers with everything we were never taught in teacher training. We compared notes. 

We cannot save them all. We will make mistakes that haunt us. Students will ask questions we cannot answer and need help we are unqualified to give. Our students will die. They will die in car crashes and of drug overdoses. They will suicide. They will make horrific mistakes and never recover. 

They will test our ability to allow them to be wrong because that is how they want their world to be. It is not our right or responsibility to remake them in our image. When they seem gullible or cruel, I have to step away because it is not my place to stop them.

In a Junior Research Paper, many years ago, a student advocated for the slow death by torture of anyone convicted of a serious crime. That was how the thesis was written: People convicted of a serious crime should be slowly tortured to death. 

Hamid Debashi wrote an Op-Ed on Aljezzerra saying “What the US was doing to the world at large is what Americans now fear Trump might do to the US.”

“Liberal America is now scared that Trump will do to America what America has done to the world. It was just ‘foreign policy’ when America set up lunatic puppet dictators just like Trump to torture, maim, and murder their own people around the globe to protect its ‘national security interest’.

“It was just something ‘Daddy’ did at work. When he came home he was all good, kind, and cuddly—just like Obama. Now the Daddy is about to become a nasty, vicious, domestic abuser—like Trump.

“Trump is the poetic justice of the world. So long as America was only doing to the world at large what America now fears Trump may do to America, there was no outcry. There was consensus. The world deserved what America did to the world.”

Well. I guess the author is speaking to me. I hear him. I know that his outrage and anger are not without foundation. I have tried over the years, as gently as I could manage, to open the eye of students living in what has been a largely white and isolated Oregon community. 

Allow me to be clear. It is not my job to reinforce or alter the deeply held convictions of my students. It is a part of my job to help students understand that there are other people in the world who may not share their view. 

I asked the student with the the death-by-torture thesis for clarification: Define “slow.” At least two or three days. Define “serious crime.” Yes, the student meant the serial killer, but also the robber, mugger, and someone who holds up a bank. I took a breath and pointed out the obvious, that our Constitution forbids “cruel and unusual punishment” and that studies suggest about 1 in 20 murder convictions are in error, AND that the paper needed to address strong opposing positions. In the end, the paper acknowledged that sometimes mistakes are made and an innocent person might be tortured to death, but “that is the price you pay for living in America.” Those words. 

The completed paper followed the assignment. It was weak in either conceding or countering the opposing view, but the student completed required research, drafted, and finished with a good grade. I did not tell the student that the paper was horrifying, though I did confide this judgement to another teacher. 

I will never forget it. 

I was raised to believe in a different America. I was raised to believe that We the People, live together to protect and serve the general Welfare not only of today but of our Posterity. 

I still believe that. It is in our Constitution. And a final word about students who make “horrible mistakes and never recover”—the truth is that most do recover. They might wander in the desert for forty years and then find themselves someplace they never thought would be theirs. They hang on and hang on, and then one day realize they are safe and happy at last. Sometimes being lost is the only way we are found.

TEACHERS AS STUDENTS

/ janpriddyoregon / 5 Comments

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I have not seen and never will see this film. Up the Down Staircase, a novel, was written by a lifelong teacher. Most people who write books about their incredible experience and wisdom as teachers last 1-3 years in the profession before moving on to something that pays better.

A message arrived this morning via email with the image above and the headline below:

Why Teachers Make the Worst Students
As a snarky high school teacher, here’s what I came up with: Teachers don’t make great students.

The author offers a list of reasons teachers are bad students and she is pretty much spot on that they are uninterested in educational or brain theory, have too much to do already and resent being pulled from their classroom, and generally behave like the difficult and only marginally teachable students sitting in the back of their own classrooms. She doesn’t know quite why this is true and asks for help in explaining why teachers are often so unteachable.

It’s a funny post and she uses the complaints of her own students to illustrate common teacher complaints. She’s spot on.

Me? I am generally a sit-at-the-front sort of person with an exceptional academic record. Honest. I read newspapers each day. I have a lot of books in my house, fiction and nonfiction, and I have read those books. “Metacognition” is not an annoying word I dismissed once I knew it was no longer going to appear on a test I had to pass but a concept critical to my profession. I am fascinated by brain theory and willing to stir up curriculum even though it makes more work. I like the work. It’s why I teach.

My own explanations for why some high school teachers are such terrible students:

  1. Teachers are already waaay too busy trying to keep up with classwork to take time out of their day to attend a poor presentation. Liz Oppelt was right on target with this one. This is always true and is the biggest reason for their inattention. They already have a job waiting for them and truly do have more important things to do and most would prefer to be doing those things. Unless the in-service helps make that job easier, they would prefer to be doing their job.  or perhaps . . .
  2. That one teacher would rather not be there at all. There was a teacher in my building who was smart and effective in front of students but also only pretended to grade work and was easily swayed by fellow-travelers who charmed their way through their education. Being clever was enough. Another teacher in my building lay down each day during his prep period and napped or read the newspaper or anything rather than scoring papers or preparing for a class or counseling students. Some rare teachers kept a 40-hour work week schedule. This sort of behavior is not typical among teachers, probably less common than in some other professions. I have known shopkeepers who fail to ring out the registers, health care professionals who never bother to review records, bookkeepers who ignore illogical figures. It is incredibly rare to find a lazy teacher, but this 1-in-100 teacher is texting during in-service presentations. The rare Administrator too.
  3. The presentation is a genuine waste of time. We know bad when we see it because it’s our job. Yes, some presentations are bad. Sometimes really bad. Once in a long while a mandatory presentation is entertaining and held during an in-service week when teachers are in a great mood, even though the lesson doesn’t teach much other than how to play for an hour without actually learning more than four words in Spanish. But more often it is delivered by a hired person who was never a very good teacher to begun with (and maybe that’s why they went to work for the ESD or a private company or administration, jobs that all pay much better and involve shmoozing), or they are presenting material under contract and they do not themselves understand or care about it, or they have forgotten everything they once might have known about teaching and now want to tell about how much they love skiing or about their recent divorce. Or all of the above. (Seriously, this happens.)
  4. Some teachers do not want to be taught. Some teachers are bad students because, frankly, they were never very good students to begin with. (see #2) They are still not any more curious or proactive or ambitious about their subject or teaching as a profession than they were in high school. (Again, I see this in every profession—bankers, contractors, health care providers, small business owners who merely drift through their job.) Some teachers only want to get through their day. (see #1) They are not interested in how to do their job better. If they are teachers, they don’t care about educational theory or brain science now and never were interested because they do not care how people learn and never did. They want activities to keep students busy, or they want to be entertained, which is why they liked the terrible art/Spanish lesson delivered in Spanish that required an hour to teach four words and no art. (See #3)

Some people enter teaching because they thought teaching would be easy. It isn’t. But some small minority of teachers keep no books in their homes, waste time at school, never their profession whenever they walk out the door, and are incurious. They never do the best job they could because that would require too much work.

I love teaching and I love teachers. Most often we are overworked and tired. (see #1 again). We are inattentive because we have more important concerns on our minds as we do our best to educate. Give us something to help us do a better job for our students and you will have our full attention. We are always trying to do a better job.

But seriously, we know a bad presentation when we see one.

 

 

“Weak as women’s magic”

/ janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment

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The spring after my mother’s death, I remained deep in grief and P.C. asked me if I had anything I did with or for my mother that I might do to continue that sense of connection. Her suggestion was wise. I began picking pussywillows for my mother when I was no more than 6. I still do.

I am a feminist deep down into my gut. I inherited my respect for women from both of my parents and from self-respect, and from my own experience that men and woman are more alike than different and equally deserving of respect as human beings.

When I began seriously reading fantasy and science fiction as a teenager and in college, I specifically looked for novels where gender was no longer the most critical fact about characters. This was the late 60s and early 70s, Ms magazine was new of the shelves and I read The Feminine Mystique. My father, a research librarian, complained about women who changed their professional name, scattering their scientific work all over the shelves.

Science fiction and fantasy offered the possibility of riveting stories involving characters interacting in a post-sexist universe. I was there for space travel or fairy princesses. I wanted a future I could live with.  I found novels with powerful men and women, with weak men and women. I found novels with characters.

When I read the line above in Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, I put the book down on my lap and thought for a long time about whether I wanted to keep reading. I did. Le Guin got so many things right, I figured she was allowed to have a character speaking from his culture. And she more than repaid my patience in her later work. Further, I admired her ability to change her mind—such a rare thing—and to discuss a change of her view publicly rather than trying to cover it up.

I cannot say the same for other books. I have read or reread a great many children’s and young adult classics as well as the new hits. I worked with teenagers for a long time and wanted to know what my students were reading. I had never read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as a girl, and I was shocked at what I found there.

From A Tree Grows in Brooklyn:

“Remember Joanna. Remember Joanna. Francie could never forget her. From that time on, remembering the stoning women, she hated women. She feared them for their devious ways, she mistrusted their instincts. She began to hate them for this disloyalty and their cruelty to each other. Of all the stone-throwers, not one had dared to speak a word for the girl for fear that she would be tarred with Joanna’s brush. The passing man had been the only one who spoke with kindness in his voice.”

“Most women had the one thing in common: they had great pain when they gave birth to their children. This should make a bond that held them all together; it should make them love and protect each other against the man-world. But it was not so. It seemed like their great birth pains shrank their hearts and their souls. They stuck together for only one thing: to trample on some other woman … whether it was by throwing stones or by mean gossip. It was the only kind of loyalty they seemed to have.”

“Men were different. They might hate each other but they stuck together against the world and against any woman who would ensnare one of them.”

At one point Francie and her mother discover that they can bond only over their mutual distrust of women.  I found a drunken father beloved by her daughter, and a mother who scrubbed floors on her knees and was blamed. I never felt that was fully redeemed, though she later says she will make an exception for her mother. I still find the lines quoted above misogynistic. There is the child molester, there is undeniable antisemitism. I could not understand how an Irish woman could write a book so hostile toward Catholics (she prefers the protestant Bible?) and the Irish until I researched the author. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was written by a German-American Protestant about Irish American Catholics and is heavily invested in the prejudices and bigotry of the period.

Yes, other authors are racist. The Jungle Book comes immediately to mind, but most stories in that book are not about race or even people. I had to ignore the racism in Normal McLean’s A River Runs Through It. I grieved for McLean’s remorse. I often find I must overlook bigotry of various kinds, even in books I love. Even when I was young, I noticed that while most of the human heroes in the Oz books were girls, nearly all the non-human ones were male. (The glass cat and Patchwork girl were notable exceptions.)

Lately many children’s books and YA books of the past have come under scrutiny. The Little House series, and Anne of Green Gables. I didn’t read them as a child, but sexism and racism and other forms of bigotry were common in the novels I read as a child. Today, handing books to my grandchildren, I must be more cautious. I have made mistakes and regret them deeply.

I wonder now how I would have handled the bigotry that is so clear to me had I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as a child? Would I have noticed and objected or would I have accepted her judgement? I like to think I would have objected. Even though, I was as susceptible as any child to such effectively written messages about the evils and necessary inferiority of myself as a girl. I like to think I would have judged Francie was a fool to side continually with her drunken father against her mother. I like to think I would have objected t that word “ensnare”, that I would been offended at the depiction of racial and religious minorities had I read the book when I was nine yers old.

I would like to think that.

CREATURE OF HABIT

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A baker’s dozen of koi at the Japanese Garden in Portland, Oregon.

“Good dog.” These days we pet any dog that comes near us on the beach. They all like to be told they are good dogs. Even the slightly dangerous ones, the ones that growl or charge, if they gave us a chance, would get a good rub on the occiput and be told they are good dogs.

Our aged goldfish died when we fed it tainted fishfood from China. You might not recall that scandal. That was years ago now. Our last cat and the dog are gone now and we have not had the heart to risk another, though for many years we had five or six sharing our home.

I went to a commercial website the other day, just to get my koi fix. Now their ads show up each day in my Facebook feed. I looked at goldfish too. I imagined refilling the enormous Chinese pot where we having kept goldfish in the past. Koi need running water so they have never been in the program. Still, I miss having fish. I miss having pets—no dog no cat in our house, cluttering up our furniture. No dog to swipe the slice of cheese off the table. No need to be careful of doors open or closed, food left out, getting home in time to walk the dog.

Why would we miss that?

Yet, we do.

SAFE

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Friday, on my drive to work, I listened to an NPR interview with a high school senior whose sister was shot and killed last year. Asked if the death of his sister had altered his beliefs, he responded that his “support for the 2nd amendment” had not changed.

This led me to wondered about that capacity for changing my own mind. My personal experience with guns suggests that people are foolish to place faith in guns to protect themselves. Everyone’s experience is different. Mine tells me that a lot of entirely untrustworthy people have way too many guns, that hiding a gun in a place no one will ever find it is a doomed fantasy, and that expecting even good people to consistently handle weapons with care and accuracy is a pipe dream. 

I need a license to drive a car. There’s nothing in the Constitution guaranteeing my right to do that. Our founders did not anticipate cars, and they did not anticipate a weapon capable of firing a dozen rounds in seconds. No ordinary citizen needs such a weapon. I am not entirely happy that our military has them.

About once a week an American toddler finds a gun and shoots someone, usually themselves, and about half the time that little boy or girl dies. Forty thousand Americans died last year from guns, usually shooting themselves on purpose. But even more telling is the risk to bystanders. Even highly trained police most often miss their target. This doesn’t happen at a target range, of course, but out in public when faced with an emergency, most police officers miss.

In my adult life, knowing local people who fill their freezers, as a vegetarian, I changed my mind about hunters.

I am continually amazed at how frightened some otherwise reasonable men become if they think they might have to walk around unarmed. 

I have walked around unarmed all my life without injury. I walked in the middle of the night in my suburban neighborhood where I grew up and walked through the University District at all times of the day and night while Ted Bundy was killing young women who looked exactly like me. I have been harassed and taunted and experienced all sorts of visual and verbal abuse, but I never needed a gun to be stay safe. No one hit me or assaulted me or shot or knifed or otherwise attacked me.

And I was unarmed.

Woman up.

TONI MORRISON

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For many years I taught The Bluest Eye in the second term of Junior English. Chris Gilde taught The Color Purple in the senior year, another incredible novel about the black experience in the United States, and a provocative read, a beautiful read. He played jazz and introduced other cultural elements relevant to the novel.

A tall door rises up into this nothing; its hardware is heavy, secure. No bell invites your hand. So you stand there, perhaps, or move away and, later, sticking your hand in your pocket, you find a key that you know (or hope) fits the lock. Even before the tumblers fall back you know you will find what you hoped to find: a word or two that turns the “not enough” into more; the line or sentence that inserts itself into the nothing. With the right phrase, this sense becomes murky, becomes lit, differently lit. Through that door is a kind of freedom that can frighten governments, sustain others, and rid whole nations of confusion. More important, however, is that the writer who steps through that door with the language of his or her own intellect and imagination enters uncolonized territory, which she can claim as right- fully her own — for a while at least.—The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison

I wish I could have taught Beloved in the senior year, but I never did. Instead I did my best to introduce the voices I never heard in my own k-12 education—the stories of women and and people of color, Native peoples and immigrants from around the world.

When I was allowed, I taught stories and novels and poetry from many continents. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was life-altering for me and I enjoyed teaching it. If I read it aloud, even less attentive, less skilled students were drawn in. I would have liked to teach the Indian novel Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya, but did not find an opportunity to add it to the curriculum.

The Junior year was traditionally focused on, and at first mandated to focus on U.S. literature. The novels and memoirs I tried were not always successful. Ceremony was a challenge, but A Yellow Raft in Blue Water and Black Swan Green were great favorites. I taught and love still Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. My students loved that novel only if I read it aloud. Bright students generally skim more often than read and lost patience for jargon and slang if they had to read it on their own. They had more patience with Their Eyes Were Watching God. For many years students loved The Catcher in the Rye, though I never did quite love it. Ironically, The Bluest Eye was harder and painful, but it was the one novel I was likely to hear about later. Students in college often wrote their thanks for the introduction to Toni Morrison.

I taught four to six novels every year to high school students, at least a dozen short stories, newspaper articles, a month of poems in the spring, and writing, writing about everything. Students completed four to five essays in multiple drafts each term. They wrote an on-demand essay each week. We wrote fiction and memoir and poetry.

An easy class only teaches students they are weak. Demanding their best reveals how grand their best can be.

 

CHOOSING BOOKS

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Yes, you can have too many books. People who believe this is impossible? Well, that’s fine for them. I have thousands of books in my house. My husband has a thousand more of his own. I only read about seventy books a year, plus newspapers online, stories and poetry in journals and, again, online.

Sometimes I read a book I do not like. If it does not “spark joy” I do not have to keep it. I don’t have to keep it if it is one of seven copies of the same title or if I liked it somewhat but will never read it again or if I read the first chapters and felt no desire to continue reading or if have have not and never will read it for the first time.

Even so, I have thousands of books. I have more books than my 17 bookcases can hold.

How do I choose what to read?

COVER. I picked up Gregory Maquire’s Wicked and David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, both while still in hardcover, for their covers. They remain among my all-time favorite reads. I taught Black Swan Green for years. My students loved it too. There are plenty of books I have ordered online for their covers and found myself irritated because the insides did not match the promise of the outsides.

FIRST PAGE. In my hands, I read a bit. Black Swan Green had me laughing halfway down the first page. This is the safest way to choose, in my experience. I have rarely been disappointed after enjoying a five minute introductory read.

AUTHUR. Some you know you are safe. You know you will love the book because you loved the last one and the one before.

DISTRACTION. I began reading science fiction just to appease my father. Foundation is sexist and homophobic, but still . . . all through college I read SF. I chose books written by women or with a woman on the cover, so long as she was not being carried a la Conan. The Women of Wonder story collections edited by Pamela Sargent introduced me to more authors. I read SF to find a world in which my gender was not all that mattered about me.

ASSIGNMENT. I detested Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaid Singing required for a class by a wonderful instructor, but after considerable struggle, I was able to respectfully and usefully identify what bothered me in May Sarton’s novel. Sometimes people hand me exactly the right book at exactly the right moment. Things Fall Apart was probably the best book I was assigned as an undergrad. Though I never warmed to the recommended stories of Flannery O’Connor in my masters program, I assign “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and both versions of Carver’s “Beginners” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and allow my students to judge for themselves.

RECOMMENDATION. I loved Middlemarch recommended by a former student and I’ve read it twice. Toni Morrison came to me as a friend’s recommendation. I have read and reread Patrick O’Brian’s 20-volume series. Currently I am in the middle of the seventh book. It is as good or better this time around. Aubrey and Maturan deserve a full shelf all to themselves and they have one.

CHANCE. I don’t remember how I found some of the books on my shelves, the ones that stay. I saw Dorianne Laux’s chapbook What We Carry at Powell’s turned out on the shelf and bought it after reading the title poem. I picked up Black Swan Green and Wicked for their covers.

RE-VISION. I change my mind. The first time I read Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior I gave up less than halfway through. Four years later, I picked up a different edition and loved it. It was not until I arrived at the exact page where I had previously abandoned the book that I remembered how disappointing I’d found it the first time and somehow it became brilliant in th years since. I read but failed to be particularly impressed the first time I read Alice Munro’s “Meneseteung” in Best American Short Stories. A few years later, in a class exercise involving reading short stories, a student picked it out as her favorite. It won over the entire class and more than a decade later I wrote my critical essay for my MFA on that story.

The ones that fail to stay?

  • Did I enjoy reading this book?
  • Did it teach me something?
  • Do I remember the story?
  • Will I reread it?
  • Do I know someone else who will enjoy it?

It’s always about choosing.