READING

June 7, 2019 / janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

These days, Ruby objects strongly to having her photo taken.

We took our granddaughter to her first literary reading on Monday. However, our adventure began with dinner. It had been a long time since we took her for Thai. She barely remembered—maybe she did not remember at all. She chose yakisoba from the menu because she knew the word from a report she did on Japan. She was efficient with chopsticks, eating all the tofu, the broccoli, and most of the noodles.

From there, we headed for the Powell’s Book Store on Hawthorne.

A Girl’s Guide to the Wild: Be an Adventure-Seeking Outdoor Explorer!

Ruby McConnell’s A Girl’s Guide to the Wild: Be an Adventure-Seeking Outdoor Explorer! (Little Bigfoot) is the definitive guide to getting outside – for girls ages 9-12! In addition to basic outdoor skills, McConnell’s entertaining guidebook includes easy camping recipes, outdoor projects including science experiments and crafts, fun activity suggestions, and inspiring stories of diverse historical and contemporary outdoorswomen. The goal is to improve the quality of girls’ outdoor time by increasing participation and independence, making them feel comfortable and safe, and giving them essential skills and knowledge. Charming and approachable, A Girl’s Guide to the Wild will encourage both reluctant campers and budding naturalists to go wild and embrace the outdoors.

I admit that one of the reasons this reading had caught my eye was the author’s first name. This Ruby was a wonderful presenter with obvious experience as a presenter to middle school and other audiences. She had herself been a camp counselor with a summer camp name and I recognized the songs she sang from my sons’ time at camp. I recognized her energy and enthusiasm for family camping trips, the sincerity of her promotion of the outdoors. I have lived with that.

Ruby McConnell wants girls to overcome fear, find their courage and their community. She said it again and again, that bravery. She was also very funny and our Ruby giggled and laughed and people smiled to hear it. The Rubys got on well, and our Ruby was assured that people with her name were special, but she would not stand for a photo with the author, much as she enjoyed the evening. When she got home she read several pages to her dad. Her other grandmother sent the photo, taken while Ruby was having too much fun to notice. In her right hand might be the little bookmark made by our neighbor Tammy.

LUCKY ESCAPE

June 6, 2019June 6, 2019 / janpriddyoregon / 1 Comment

Last week, a sign on the highway at Silver Point said “EEK” instead of warning of “Elk” crossing.

If the weather had been better 75 years ago, yesterday would have been the anniversary of D-Day. [The D stands for “day.”] Instead, it was the Golden Anniversary of my husband flunking his draft physical. He did nothing to deserve this, but each year he celebrates his fortune in being spared Vietnam.

This is not about to become a blasting of veterans. Many of my favorite people—my father, Aunt Marcie, Jim Fukano—are veterans. Jim even served in that war that Gary escaped and remains in touch with the men he served with. Most of his older relatives spent WW2 in concentration camps right here in the U.S. Like my father he died not talk much about his wartime experiences. Despite humorous tales of K-rations and long marches, I know my father saw horrible things. My mother said the war, as it inevitably does for any soldier seeing combat, damaged him. My father, if he was within hearing when she said such things, would say he would never have found his wife, married, had the life he enjoyed if not for the war. There would be a moment of standoff. “Art—” my mother would begin.

Gary says “there is a certain amount of [both] happiness and guilt associated with my celebration.” Neither of us heard glamorous stories about the war, but our parents met as result of service to their country. That generation was irrevocably changed by the experiences growing up in the Great Depression and living through the war.

We have Ernie Pyle’s books recording the war in the house. My father, like many servicemen, admired Pyle who reported from Europe and then from Japan. The New York Times has a feature today about the war reporter who, according the Truman, “told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told.”

“Until D-Day, war had largely been an exhilarating experience for Pyle, terrible but often uplifting. Ten days after the landings, the awfulness of all the death he was witnessing in the ‘thousands of little skirmishes’ in the hedgerow country of Normandy was carving away at his mental state. He reported having knots in his stomach from ‘constant tenseness and lack of sleep.’ In a letter back home, he confided that he had to ‘continually fight an inner depression over the ghastliness of it all.’ ‘Sometimes,’ he wrote to Miller on June 29, ‘I get so obsessed with the tragedy and horror of seeing dead men that I can hardly stand it. But I guess there’s nothing to do but keep going.’ “

We found glass on the shore yesterday morning, then hung house-letters to distinguish each of our tenants’ front door as well as our own doorbell. Someday I will address the awkwardness of entering our house through the garage to the atrium and then to the front door. Some day.

We had friends, Becky and Mark, over for dinner, a late dinner for us because they are both working and could not get here till going on seven. Clams and huckleberry cake were the highlights in food, but the talk nourished, our shared hopes and dreams. Food for the heart.

Then this morning, an email overview of top stories in TNYT, “Their Fathers Never Spoke of the War, Their Children Want to Know Why”:

“Less than 3 percent of the 16 million American veterans of the [Second World War] are still alive, and all are in their 90s or beyond. Now their relatives are often turning to experts to help them decipher billions of pages of military records to piece those stories together.

” ‘Sometimes they start to cry on the phone about how much they loved their dad, and how he had horrible nightmares, but would never talk about it,’ one researcher said.”

Ernie Pyle. My father looked a little like this. So did my father-in-law. Most of those who served in his war had that serious, lean look. America came out of the Depression during the war. Pyle did not survive but was struck in the head and killed by enemy fire in Japan.

My father would be 94 this November. That seems remarkably old, but members of his family mostly did live into their nineties. If lung cancer had not taken him in his sixties, he might well be alive today.

I meant this post to be cheerful, but the truth is that contemplating war always brings tears. I write with the morning chorus of birds outside my window, a celebration of another key. I cry for the waste, the suffering and misguided determination that does not end, for the 20,000 attacks on Yemen by Saudi Arabia in the last few years (mostly using planes and bombs from the U.S. and Britain), for anger that pushes us from principle to spite, for determined vengeance and retribution, and for pursuit of power that so often perverts and perpetuates this monstrous suffering.

I wonder when we might learn to settle differences some other way that does not give nightmares.

TEAM SPORTS

June 2, 2019June 2, 2019 / janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment

kigoa football on green grass during daytime

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The young man was doing summer landscape maintenance at a local public playing field. That is, he was mowing a huge patch of grass. He shut off his machine before coming over and say hello. I was taking a summer course in a nearby building. I was charmed that he remembered his English teacher from a few years before.

He talked about how a fall sports injury kept him out of play most of his senior year, how hard that was to be sidelined, and how he had tried to talk to his coach about helping him with post-high school plans. And then abruptly, he looked down, was silent, and seemed almost to shiver. “Coach didn’t have time for me. He didn’t care about me except as a player.” He looked at me. “I just realized that . . . and it . . . it makes me so angry.”

A review of literature has led a physician to declare that playing team sports may protect players from future depression. She found: “Among those with ACEs [physical and sexual abuse, emotional neglect, parental alcohol misuse, parental incarceration, and living with a single parent], team sports participation during adolescence was significantly associated with lower odds of receiving a diagnosis of depression (unadjusted rate, 16.8% vs 22.0%).” Dr. Eaasterlin describes one barrier to participation as the monetary cost of playing, another not considered might be inconvenience. Easterlin assumes that playing team sports teaches teamwork and that this is the reason adults who have played sports are less depressed in their 20s. There are a few leaps in her reasoning, but perhaps she is right. She further argues that pay-to-play (the costs associated with school team sports) interferes with the potential positive outcomes of team sports. It is well to recall that team sports require more than money. They also require traveling and a great deal of time.

Is teamwork really the key and is that key derived only from sport? Her study didn’t find a benefit from other activities. Can we assume that money keeps kids out of sport or that money is not itself an key issue? Despite measures taken to ensure a balance, can we assume that these self-reported measures are representative or even accurate? What else is at play here: privilege, money, family support, time free from family obligations and work, social status in the school, coach and teacher bias? Time?

When I was teaching, I saw my students for no more than five or six hours a week. Coaches of some sports, such as football, worked with players for up to twenty. Students were always excused from academic subjects to attend sporting events, even as spectators. While students were required to be teaching at least most of their classes to play, teachers were routinely called upon to rearrange academic obligations to permit extracurricular involvement. Administrators will always say that academics come first, but in practice this is almost never the case. Involvement is emphasized even over studying from the time students enter high school. Teachers and classroom aides are hired because they can coach, and coaches were ferociously protective of their access to players.

As an example: Football players in my yearbook class were forbidden to miss practice in order to attend a mid-week day-long yearbook conference and workshop. One boy said, “Don’t worry, I’ll go.” But hadn’t his coach refused to play him on Friday if he missed a mid-week practice? The senior smiled. “Coach will play me, he has to play me.” That strong varsity player was right. What lesson did he learn?

Many studies on the impact of childhood participation in team sports suggest the impact of youth sports programs is not entirely positive. Participation in team sports do not lead to healthier adult behavior, according to a broad study by UC Berkeley. Only individual sports such as running, tennis, and swimming predict physically active adult behavior. For some players, team sports lead to disastrous experiences of bullying and and even physical injury—I well recall, in the small rural high school, the summer when four boys had broken bones from three weeks of pre-season play. Every year I had students who required surgery to repair sports injuries. There is also a well-documented pattern of abusive domestic behavior on the part of varsity high school and college athletes (especially football and basketball), and an unfortunate assumption of privilege on the part of some players.

As to team work. Maybe. But that notion of team sports building teamwork was used to marginalize women’s participation in many professions and careers in the days before Title IX. Imagine our surprise when objective studies found that woman overall tend to be better at teamwork regardless of sport experiences. Creating a mixed-gender engineering team, for example, led to stronger overall performance because women on the team advocated for collaboration and cooperation and, you might say, team work. This had nothing to do with sport.

Choir, drama, orchestra, gaming, and yearbook and newspaper classes—all these can teach teamwork, too. Over the years, many enthusiastic teen athletes have tried to prove that their sport was necessary to success in life in their research papers. It’s not true. Choir, drama, orchestra, gaming, and yearbook and newspaper classes are not necessary either, but like athletics, sometimes they help. Participants want very much to believe that their great experience is necessary and necessarily good.

Sports teach competition. They teach about winning and losing. For many young people, they provide much-needed incentive to be physically active and cooperative. They often provide access to coaches providing a stable and supportive adult influence. But they are not an unmixed blessing. For all the good they do, they also provide opportunities for distraction from education, injury, and both bullying and elitism.

This doctor found what she wanted to find. She may not be wrong about the impact of sports, but my own forty-year experience in education and a great many studies suggest she may not be entirely right.