Author: janpriddyoregon

WHAT I KNOW ABOUT GUNS

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On NPR, a high school senior talked about how his “support for the 2nd amendment” had not changed after the death of his sister at the hands of a gunman a year before. I wondered about that capacity for changing my mind. My personal experience suggests that people are foolish to place faith in guns to protect themselves. But even I have changed my mind about some aspects of gun ownership.

My father fought in the Second World War. He never bragged about his experiences in France and Germany. He did not, as a rule, talk about them at all. At a Father-Daughter Banquet when I was in high school, the father of a friend was bragging about what a great time he’d had selling on the black market in San Diego during the war. Other fathers compared their wartime experiences. I saw the pulse beating in my father’s temple but he said nothing until we had left the building. “Men who talk about war that way—they did not experience the war I experienced.” [He is not alone in this observation. The pretty, glamorous, and heroic version of soldiering shorts the reality.]  

There were at least four guns in my house while I was growing up: two handguns and a target pistol and a rifle. They were kept unloaded and partially disassembled and in a locked storeroom. I held each one under the supervision of my father, knew enough to determine whether it was loaded and to load and unload, and I was taught absolutely and positively never to point any sort of weapon, not even a toy, at another person. My brother and I were seriously dressed down for playing games with my brother’s toy cap pistols. “Aim at the ground. Never at a person,” he told us, the blood pulsing in his temple. 

In high school I had classmates, wealthy classmates, who hunted all over the world, bringing home trophy heads. The way they talked about their kills was all brags and ugly.   

My brother, aged fifteen and angry that a neighbor’s dog kept wandering into our back yard and sometimes chased our cats, threatened to shoot the dog if it trespassed again. He had our father’s target pistol in his hands. He pointed it. The police arrived, but my brother was not arrested. 

(He was arrested years later for an assault on his wife requiring medical attention, but even though his mental illness and anger issues are pretty well documented, he claims to have a permit to carry a concealed weapon. He says “carrying” makes him feel safer.)

My high school Chemistry teacher separated from his wife and walked to the edge of Interstate Highway 5 and shot himself fatally in the head. 

My brother’s high school Spanish teacher held up a bank. 

While I was in college, two young men barely in their twenties and in entirely unrelated accidents became paraplegics. In each case, Scott and Dan had attended a party out of town—and in small towns only a few miles apart in SW Washington—where someone else found a hidden gun and it went off in their hands. The guns were pointed down, the bullets passed through the second story floor, and into the spines of Scott and Dan. These young men never knew one another. 

A few years after that, a woman I knew was traveling alone and camping in northern California. She had a handgun for safety, and one night waved it around after having had a too much to drink. Nearby campers were alarmed and called for help. An officer arrived, Ingrid’s gun went off, and the officer shot her through the spine. Another paraplegic. 

More recently, a convicted violent felon was unable to purchase a gun legally in Oregon so his friend bought one and gave it to him. He got drunk one night and attempted to kill his former girlfriend’s mother. (He thought the mother was the reason his girlfriend broke up with him.) He shot at the mom through her kitchen window. No one was injured but Tim went back to prison. 

A friend walked her three-year-old across the street for a playdate, and that other toddler walked out of the garage with a pistol dangling from his hands. He was barely able to hold it, but he managed. 

When I moved to a rural community and taught students who filled their freezers with a buck or bull elk each year, I changed my mind about what I had considered the evils of hunting. These hunters are not hunting just for sport, they are also feeding their families. I respect that. 

I did not change my mind about arming school teachers. I liked my colleagues, but there isn’t one I would trust with a gun. Even highly trained police officers most often miss their target during a violent incident. And because the likelihood that they would find a rational use for it before some kid found it. And because my brother was a teacher for fifteen years. And because most of us at one time or another exercise bad judgement. 

I do not know anyone who avoided being murdered in their bed by drug-crazed home invaders. I hear that story—usually about their neighbor’s uncle’s friend—but I do not know anyone personally to whom it has happened. Statistically it is not reflective of the reality that the person most likely to be injured by a gun is the owner, and my personal experience suggest that the statistics about gun injuries and death are trustworthy. I know paraplegics, convicted felons, and dead people. I am tired of people misquoting the Bill of Rights. Nothing in the Constitution guarantees the right to own what my neighbor has in his closet. 

The Second Amendment to the Constitution states: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” It was written at a time when the United States had no standing army, when “arms” included swords and bows and arrows and muzzle-loaders, and citizens were expected to stand with their neighbors to protect our nation. For most of U.S. history the Second Amendment was not interpreted as protecting individuals from bad government, but as a way to support their country. The emphasis was on “well regulated” as much as “keep and bear Arms.” 

Like most Americans I do not want all guns “taken away” but regulated. I do not want my neighbor to have a Howitzer or a military-style weapon—few people would. I believe that this American obsession with “gun rights” has become dangerous and even foolish. Scary/ People who do not know another word from our Constitution can quote just those dozen words about their right to bear Arms. Quick! Recite the First Amendment, the one the founders put first. 

I’ve read a great deal about gun violence during my life. I know that forty thousand Americans die from gunshots each year, mostly as suicides. I know people who keep an entire arsenal in their attics—these are not the people who butcher a deer each year. I know that every week a toddler finds a gun and shoots someone by accident. Toddlers shoot more people than terrorists in the United States (truth). Sometimes a toddler kills someone else, a sibling or parent. Most often the toddler shoots him or herself, and about half the time that precious child dies.

How I would live with that if my child found my gun and shot himself and died? 

I feel bad for Scott and Ingrid and Dan and their families and friends, not to mention my old Chemistry teacher and the neighbor whose dog was threatened. But I also feel bad for the two people who picked up weapons not knowing they were loaded. I feel for the officer who crippled a woman in the course of doing his duty. How must he feel about that incident for the rest of his life? I feel for people forced to participate in entirely unnecessary violence. We forget sometimes that, as most soldiers who have seen action will tell you, it is not easy to kill someone, not because the death is hard to achieve but because it is not easy to live with having done it. 

This is what I know. 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. (Buying a gun in the United States is easier than almost anywhere in the world.)

Near the end of his life, my father changed his opinion about gun registration. “I think they should be regulated.” We had debated this for a decade—debated many things all my life—and this was the first time he changed his mind. 

The rest of the country is mostly on board. According to The New York Times editorial: “Gun makers will face a jury. But it’s the play-soldier subculture they’ve promoted that’s being judged.” Like the rest of us, the gun industry is about to be held responsible for its products and for the way it has promoted them.

It is time.

Abortion is not a dirty word and Planned Parenthood isn’t a McDonald’s and the GOP can go F**K itself

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From my favorite opinionated “Margaret and Helen”: via Abortion is not a dirty word and Planned Parenthood isn’t a McDonald’s and the GOP can go F**K itself

PIE DAY

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She said she’d gotten into the program because she was from a Brahmin family and had gone to Scripps. “He’s sorry now,” she told me. “I’m not what he expected, and now he won’t even talk to me.” The young woman had relocated thousands of miles from home for the program, but realized all too soon that she was a disappointment to her thesis advisor. Only one of the graduate students was allowed to call their department chair by his first name. This young woman felt like a failure at twenty-two.

I worked with a woman at the University Book Store who had made a mistake too. Florence had a job during the war as an engineer, and then the war ended and so did her job, her parents were ill, and she spent most of the rest of her life caring for them. By the time I met Flo, she was in her 60s or 70s, her hair still dyed red, working close to minimum wage because she’s lost most of the middle of her life. I met two sisters, in the 80s in Iowa. They too had cared for ailing parents, had never worked, and were too proud to accept pubic assistance. Those three women had led good lives and were aging into desperate poverty.

Just now, a great many students who struggled to achieve their educational goals are reevaluating everything they have been taught about hard work and persistence and earning their way. Richer parents bought their children admission to college.

The world is not fair. We hear that all the time. Yet many well-off people cannot seem to overcome the belief (a Puritan belief) that financial life success indicates human merit.

We do not live in a meritocracy where each person earns their place. Most Americans build on what is handed to them. The Horatio Alger story of rags-to-riches is a myth. Almost not one does that. People born rich become richer. People who claim they were born “middle class” went to private schools and do better, sometimes than their parents. Most often in American today, being born poor predicts a life of poverty. Merit has almost nothing to do with it. Good people who are kind to small animals and children, attend regular religious services, do favors without even being asked, and pay their taxes, are poor in the United States.

I figured this out a long time ago. We cannot be whatever we want to be—not all of it and not all at once. It’s another of the great lies that if we tried we could have anything we want.

In our lives we will make hard choices about family or career, risky job or safe choice, more money or more interesting co-workers? Sometimes we might even make the wrong choice, but more often there will be the details of accident that make all the difference. Our parents’ marriage or divorce or choice to have neither; the randomness of who interviewed just before us turning the mood in the room sour; the moment we paused and turned right instead of left. And that is not all.

Unless we have the money for the private education—forget charter schools, we are competing with schools demanding the tuition of a private university—and test prep and parents who can afford to bride their way in, not to mention the legacies who gain them a few extra points on that entrance calculation—there is no level playing field.

“And if you’re a high school senior lucky enough to have won this genetic and demographic lottery yourself and thus improved your admissions odds some, keep this in mind: You may have earned the grades and the scores to put you in the running, but you are also the beneficiary of enormous, unearned economic privilege.”—TNYT

Over the years, I have written recommendations for students who went on to graduate from high-prestige schools such as Yale, Brandeis, Brown, Reed, Stanford, Duke, University of Chicago, and Pepperdine, not to mention the Naval Academy and Quantico. They are painters and doctors, nurses, engineers, college professors, “drug pushers” for Merck, private pilots for famous New York Senators, and Department Heads for major city governments. They have died of cancer in their 30s and in car accidents and by suicide, and some survived those catastrophes. They have married both badly and well. Some of them came from families below the poverty line, and some others from considerably above it. Three were Gates Millennial Scholars, several won Ford Fellowships, and perhaps a few graduated without any college debt at all. Some of them are so widely admired for their general goodness that no one would question their right to good lives. And some have lied snd cheated right along and still found happiness.

Nothing in life, and certainly not in American society, is certain.

The students from well-off families have an easier time. I know we are supposed to pretend that everyone has problems. Even Cheryl Strayed warns not to assume other people’s lives are easier than our own. How about the other way around?

Truly, if that student’s parents are addicted to drugs, he is from a single-parent family struggling to get by on a minimum wage job, or a parent or sibling dies while she was in high school? There is suicide or rape or life-changing illness? I think it’s only right to assume that student had a harder time than I did.

I went without dental care for some of my childhood. We had powered milk and Kool-Aide and margarine, only rarely real milk, and never soda or butter growing up. Sometimes my parents borrowed a couple of hundred dollars from my grandmother to get by through an emergency, sometimes my mom hid from the paper boy because she did not have the few dollars she owed him that week. I never had a steady allowance as a child, never took lessons after school like most of my friends, and never took the Ski Bus because there was no money for things like that.

My family was not poor. After all, I had a grandmother who could load us $200, but we were close enough to poverty that I could guess about it, and my husband comes from generational poverty. Most of my life with Gary and working with students has been an education in inequity.

It is a splendid splinter of optimism to tell a child they “can be anything you want.” The back side of that promise is the bleeding when it’s plucked—the sense of failure when they do not measure up to “anything they want.” Many of my students have lived lives that warned them about dreaming too high.

But while I argue that “anything” is unrealistic, most of my students underestimate their power. They can be more, have more, achieve more.

We are a country, a society eager to punish failure. We are less happy to help correct mistakes than we are to see them penalized.

Just every now and again—compassion, empathy, understanding. Being rich might mean a great deal of hard work, earned success. But poverty is not personal failure. It might just be a misstep, a life devoted to care. It might want no more than not judging. Success is more than affluence. A meaningful life is not judged by paychecks and net worth.

And then Swedish Greta Thunberg has been nominated for her activism regarding climate change, a 16 year old with Aspergers. She might do anything.

Next month there will be rhubarb, but I think I have berries in the freezer. It’s Pi Day, 3/14. I’m going to bake a pie. [It’s blackberry, not cast in stone, and we each want our slice.]

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What we are mostly looking for during our beach walks is sea glass (see top) and what we mostly find is trash. But today, Gary found a wedge of stone “like a piece of pie. And it’s Pi Day!”

“REVERSE RACISM”

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Photos from 1997 at The Flight of the Mind—a poetry class taught by Janice Gould (top and upper left). I put it here because The Flight of the Mind was a writing retreat for women, and it made me a writer, and because I did not understand until I attended the first time how important it was to be a woman and a writer, to hear only women’s voices for a week.

When white people complain about “reverse racism”, it’s generally because they have been badly treated by a person of color.

“I’m not arguing that racism doesn’t exist, it’s more obvious than ever now. My statement is regarding reverse racism, which some people argue doesn’t exist.”—on Facebook

I would agree with those “some people.” Set aside bigotry and bad manners. This theory of “racism” is that it exists only where it benefits one group over another. In America, even if someone is rude to me because I am white (because of my race) I might feel rotten, and the mean person might feel triumphant, but that mean behavior gains them absolutely no material advantage. On the other hand, the only time I have been followed by security at Nordstrom was when I took in a tote big enough to hold a car with merchandise to return. It doesn’t work that way for people of color in the US. Send a black child into Nordstrom on any errand and they are likely to be tailed.

White people make more money, white men make more than that, attractive white men fare best of all. But just because a guy is white, male, and good looking doesn’t mean everyone is nice to him.

There are enough mean people in the world, people who are not normally mean but are having a bad day and people who are easily triggered that we experience unpleasant interactions now and again. The white woman I know had such an experience and claimed she was the victim of reverse racism.

I understand. And I was hoping to explain another perspective, another point of view, and the reason some say “reverse racism” does not exist, can not exist. Racism might merely be prejudice. I say mere, not because prejudice or rude behavior is a small thing, but because racism is a powerful thing—beyond bias or preference and unreasonable dislike, racism is the power to cause damage.

Racism, then, is the advantaging of one group at the expense of another.

The term “racist” applies specifically to those who do benefit under the system that promotes and supports it. That’s true for white people in the U.S. today. Doing absolutely nothing to earn or maintain their privilege, white people have advantage in our society. This is not to say that a white person has no problems. Any American may suffer from poverty or other disadvantage, but on top of that, a person of color (most colors in the U.S.) also suffers from their race, a disadvantage that, unlike education or language or even sexual orientation, cannot be escaped or denied.

Is it possible for a person of color to arbitrarily and unfairly dislike a white person? Sure. It’s unkind and wrong and bigoted. However, by definition, this still isn’t “racism” because that person of color does not benefit from their bigotry. He or she already suffers in a racist system and has no personal power to overcome it. The term “reverse racism” is thus itself considered racist, representing only a white perspective. It perpetuates an us vs. them mindset, which I don’t think most of us want.

The very word is loaded. Using the term “racist” is so loaded with anger and resentment on all sides it is difficult to talk about. But here I am trying.

Winter Term, 1971, I was singing “Amazing Grace” just after 7am while waiting for the beginning of my second Drawing course. I was just eighteen and the vast studio space made my voice sound better than it was. Two black women walked through the room, complaining loud enough for me to hear about white people taking their songs. It was unjust since the author, a white Scot, belonged as much to me as them, but I stopped singing. I knew that. But I also heard them. I heard.

They did not say that to hurt me, and it was not reverse racism. They were protecting their own narrow space in the world.

When white people complain about reverse racism, it’s generally because they have been badly treated by a person of color who calls out their race as the reason, or who merely notes their race in passing.

When a person of color talks about racism it’s generally because our entire social structure is biased against them.

Peggy McIntosh first explained to me what “white privilege” means in her 1990 essay. (If you don’t know the essay, click the link to the pdf. It’s pretty mind-blowing.)

I don’t do anything to earn or maintain my privilege as a white person. It is just there, and too often I take it for granted. As an old woman now I recognize how much else I have taken for granted because English is my first language, because when I was young I was pretty, because I was intelligent and well educated, and because my parents taught me to value information and a solid argument.

Racism only counts when the general culture is there to back it up.

There really is a difference here. Years ago, my son’s orthodontist told me, “Well, you know it’s our sons who suffer from all this talk.” A well-respected professional in those days, he went on to complain about his son not getting into dental school, how that was all the fault of “reverse discrimination” and completely unfair. I politely disagreed until, as I was walking out of his office I sent my teenaged son ahead and went back to less politely disagree.

[Our fair-haired sons had plenty of advantages and were perfectly capable of finding their way without whining about a tiny boost given to other kids. I already knew that one likely reason his son did not get into dental school was a drug conviction. What I did not know until much later was that this “orthodontist” was unqualified for his position, and would eventually be forced out of his practice for incompetence.]

We all hit bumps in our road through life. In high school I heartily resented the after-school jobs of friends who pushed papers and swept floors of their fathers’ offices for double the pay I received working at Taco Bell. I worked minimum in college too while my brother gained a workstudy job at the University that also paid double what I earned in the music department of the University Book Store. He was the second child in college, and even though our parents didn’t contribute a dime toward either of our educations, he was judged the more needy. And then again, maybe it was because he was a boy.

So I say this now, all these years later, though I never did at the time, and the upshot is that I would not have wanted my brother’s job. I learned a lot about music selling records. A graduate student played “Syrinx” by Debussy just for me before going off to study with Rampal. That happened because I asked what was in his case, because I begged to see his flute, because I begged him to play. Because he chose one of my favorite pieces, standing there on the other side of the counter in the music department of the University Book Store.

Over the years, I overcame bad teeth, poverty, social awkwardness, and gender. On top of all that, I did not experience racism. It was purely my luck. I did nothing to earn it. I was a member of the dominant race in my country. When people described me, they did not bother to say I was a white girl. That was taken for granted.

Only those two painters commented on my race. It had never happened to me before. All these years later I have wondered if one of those women remembers me from that day. Many years later she became a friend when we both attended a writing workshop together. I have sometimes thought of asking if she remembers. But no. It is enough to know her for herself.

A little humility. Gratitude. Acceptance. It is enough.

 

SLEEPING IN THE DARK

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According to a 2018 map from Wikipedia, the blue shows DST in the northern hemisphere, and orange DST in the southern. Most of the rest of the world, the gray areas, ignore it. The dark gray indicates nations that once used DST, but gave it up.

People are arguing again about DSL. They are talking about it in Congress.

We went to bed late on Sunday night, hoping to trick our bodies into more quickly accepting the time shift to Daylight Saving Time. I had set my watch forward before going to bed on Saturday and Gary was still correcting the clocks the next morning. The clock in the kitchen resets itself, which results in it going a little crazy twice a year. The hands spin around the hours a couple of times, maybe wind backwards and eventually settle on what the nation insists is the correct time.

I feel a little bit like that clock myself.

The last two nights I woke once in the night and then again in the too-early morning, On Sunday I tried to convince myself that 5:33 was really the time I might normally wake. It felt like 4:33. The sun would not be up for another three hours. With my laptop in bed, I waited for light and considered that for the next week before Spring Break I will not be getting up in the dark and leaving for school in the dark and arriving at school… in the dark. That’s only because I fully retired the other day.

DST doesn’t give me more daylight. The best it can do is give me more daylight at the end of my day while stealing it from my mornings. Maybe that works for some people. They go for hikes or something after work. I used to run before going to school and DST messed that up. At the end of a nine or ten hour workday I never feel like going out for that run or otherwise enjoying daylight recreation. The best I might manage at the end of a long day is a few minutes at my loom or a glass of wine on the deck. I’d like the sun to be setting about then, along with my energy.

In 1895, a New Zealander who collected insects in his spare time, wanted to shift his work schedule so that he would have more daylight hours after work to collect his bugs. Eventually, beginning at the outbreak of WW1, most of the world would adopt the plan (the blue and orange areas on the map above), and while many countries have more recently abandoned the practice (the dark gray areas), still more than half the world’s population shifts their clocks forward in the spring and back in the fall.

When America first adopted the policy in 1918, it was so unpopular that it went away 7 months later, after the war. But “War Time” was reinstituted in 1942 by FDR. Nixon signed the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act of 1973 and even then it wasn’t consistent throughout the U.S. DST was extended in 2005 under the second Bush’s watch, beginning a week earlier in the spring and ending later in the fall, which is out of sync with most of the rest of the world. Not everyone is happy about all of this. Some U.S. states still refuse to shift their clocks forward and back.

The stated goal for DST is to save fuel and thus money, but with modern heating and cooling and the use of electric lighting and so forth, the practice probably does not save a dime, and several studies have shown that DST actually costs the U.S. as much as billions of dollars each year. Worse, its affect on sleeping patterns may be damaging our health and safety.

Ask anyone with small children what it’s like to turn those clocks forward in the spring. The following week is a mess for children who did lose an hour of sleep and often must wait for busses in the dark. Among high school students I see only negative results. They are driving to school in the dark, which can’t be a good thing. Though teenagers often fail to get the sleep they need and have erratic sleep patterns, they respond badly to the shift to DST and we teachers gear up for short tempers and impatience among our students, not to mention ourselves. We are all adjusting to one hour of lost sleep.

This adjustment to change in our internal clock can take only a few days for up to a week and some scientists blame the difficulty of this shift for a national increase in accidents, heart attacks, and suicides during the week following the spring shift to DST. This surge in deaths and near-deaths doesn’t happen in the fall. Apparently getting an extra hour of sleep doesn’t do anyone much harm.

They are arguing in Washington DC again about DSL. There are proposals to make Daylight Saving Time permanent or to eliminate it altogether. Though their interests were often cited when I was a girl, farmers generally don’t like losing morning light. Some business interests such as “the golf industry and the barbecue industry have been big promoters” of DST because there might be profit at stake. The PTA is more worried about children’s disrupted sleep and the danger of darkness on their way to school. I automatically side with children over profit.

By 7:30 on this morning, I felt like getting up. There was, finally, light in the sky, light I was used to seeing an hour earlier, according to the clock. I am normally an early riser—the result of living most of my life with a husband who is a morning person. I like to tease about how I “trained him” but the truth is he’s trained me too. I like the morning and I like having daylight to start my day.

I don’t like getting up in the dark. I don’t need time after work to collect bugs or golf. If, like me, you’re feeling a little tired or out of sorts this week, blame Daylight Saving Time.

This is one problem with a clear cause and a clearly negative effect. Unless you are selling barbecues.

I don’t know. Turn on the porch light and have your BBQ burgers anyway?

DESIRE & PANIC

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The author had my attention from the hilarious introduction to his memoir, Between Panic and Desire. I recognize the world he describes. Unlike his parents, my father never left; it was my grandparents who all divorced, some remarrying, some not. But while he was not yet 6 years old during the Bay of Pigs, I was already 8. I remember. My parents were fierce supporters of JFK, and Boeing Field was just down the road. However, living on the West coast, in the suburbs of Seattle, my life was never at risk during those tense days. The bombs could not reach so far. The eventual fallout, WW3, escalating tensions? I recognized those risks even as a child.

Fifty years ago, shortly before midnight on 16 April 1961, a group of some 1,500 Cuban exiles trained and financed by the CIA launched an ill-fated invasion of Cuba from the sea in the Bay of Pigs.—BBC

Dinty W. Moore recalls the period of our shared youth and I recall all the events he does—the international crises and threats, Squeaky Fromme, the assassinations, the same presidents, the same falling Towers. All the events that haunt his childhood memories. He yearns for his absent father, and goes looking everywhere for a replacement.

Moore was about 12 when Fromme joined the Manson “family”; I was not quite 15. I had to look that up because I never found her the least bit interesting. I remember Martin Luther King Jr.’s death as vividly as JFK’s. The balcony. The black horse, my mother explained, was “spirited because our president was spirited.” I never considered any of the presidents to be father figures, and I got over southern accents with LBJ. Happily, I met the person I would marry (whom I also mistakenly assumed on first sight was otherwise connected) at the age of 16, so I was spared Dinty Moore’s years of lonely drug abuse. My husband was not a user. However, Dinty Moore and I did not experience the 60s in the same way. My memory has a great deal more music and fewer cars. Many of my friends died. Peace marches. Feminism. Later, the AIDs epidemic. Identification as a visual artist. A long period of yearning for a country life. Moore had other concerns. I still do not consider that our failure to develop a strategic response to terrorism might have been a serious oversight. I wanted then to address the cause: ongoing imperialism. The corroding root.

When Dinty W. Moore lost his father, I was worrying about the world population explosion. By junior high school, my best friend was African American. Perhaps this is because I lived on the other side of the continent. I still do. I met the Dinty Moore in 2002, while attending a novel writing workshop with Bret Lott in Milledgeville, Georgia. He and Bret sat on a wide porch smoking cigars in the dark. (Perhaps only Brett smoked—I could be wrong about that.) Dinty will not remember me. I was the one typing on my laptop about twenty feet away, the Mac logo glowing.

While I was in Georgia that week, my mother drove the few blocks to her local Post Office and found she could not get out of the car. She drove home, crawled into her house, and called for help. My husband called me in Georgia on a landline and had to leave a message. I borrowed a phone to call him back. I wanted to fly home immediately, but this was the start of Memorial Day weekend and there were no flights available. The workshop organizers made no effort to help. Still, I got home on Monday, in time to sit in the waiting room while Mom had back surgery. Her surgeon promised immediate improvement. There was none.

This did not go well, I realize now, because she’d already been taking Fosamax for years and that bone-building medication actually interferes with the healing of bone. There was research suggesting that even then, but no one considered it for my mother. She was eventually placed on a deadly combination of opioids and benzodiazepines, failed to drink enough water, and was mostly housebound or hospitalized for the remaining five years of her life. Many, many trips to the ER. Broken bones. Slow healing. Pain. There is probably a way to make this a funny story, but I do not have the gift Moore does.

I have quit teaching, but the third essay in this collection, “Double Vision”, has a masterful structure, and I immediately and inevitably considered how I would use it as a model for student essays. There is no self-pity but considerable humor concerning his diplopia. He nails the short form. Well, what would I expect?

The award-winning memoir is elegant in structure and voice. These are very funny stories, a masterful and unique memoir of absent fathers, drug abuse, and eventual insight. Now I shall have to find a copy of The Accidental Buddhist.

LETTING GO

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In preparation for the move to a brand new campus in the next couple of years, the Library has been downsizing. Books that had not been actually checked out recently were disposed of, some were pulped. (Yes, I find this distressing.)

The other day a relative posted a meme with hideous and clearly inaccurate images and information. Further investigation revealed the creator of the meme was a Danish neo-Nazi spouting appalling anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant and other hate messages. I can’t help wondering if his profile is a fake Russian bot spreading discord and disinformation. As a good researcher, I am distressed to witness such careless disregard for truth.

On Tuesday morning, while I was administering a final exam, two women burst through the door to set up for their own presentation. When most of my students had left, believing I was overstaying on their room reservation, I invited them in. They bustled about the room, chatting while they set out snacks and handouts. I had allowed students to work long in order to finish, but eventually I asked the women what time they expected their people to arrive. It came out that they were two hours ahead of their time, that their presentation was scheduled for the afternoon. I asked them to note that students were testing and they stopped calling to one another across the large room. A very polite student confided he had made the decision to drop my class the next term. Teenagers often decide to coast their last term. I understand this.

I should let all this go, I know I should. There have been a great many disconcerting things. This day was it. The tiny proverbial straws that broke the camel.

As a result, though these are not legitimate reasons, not reasons at all, not the real ones, I made two key decisions despite how much I love reading what people are up to on Facebook, and even despite my genuine affection for my current students.

Last week, I went off Facebook, at least for a while.

Yesterday, I quit my job teaching.

The English Department Chair immediately accepted my decision. I told the Pacifica Project Director I would not be creating the program this year, participating in rehearsals, or scoring the presentations themselves—that nearly brought tears. (Mike and I have a long shared history of commitment to public service.) I told the person in charge of the bulletin to take Open Library off the schedule “for now” as I was asked to do, and informed the Library Aide the same thing. I touched base with a couple of people to let them know I was leaving. I returned my key to the college.

Breaking my contract means no more than a dozen students might need to rearrange their Spring Term school schedules (only 8 showed for the scheduled WR122 meeting that afternoon). I have made a problem and I am sorry for letting them down. After speaking directly to students who expected me to teach next term, I also sent an email to everyone in the class just ending, CCing a copy to admin. As I always do, I offered to provide editing and references later and to share with them the materials I would have taught them in that class. I am honored when they take me up on it.

Perhaps the school will find someone else to teach these classes. It is time for me to step away.

It is done.

Once my late student hands in a final essay, I may enter grades for Winter term. I will be able to do that after next week.

I love teaching. Everyone must know I do.

Way back to the beginning of the Pacifica Projects, a service-learning project required of all seniors, we hoped to challenge students in a grand manner. Among our prime goals was to allow students to put the full range of their skills learned throughout their education to use. Other aspects of the program include a public presentation and a persuasive essay. The goal of the paper was to allow them to achieve excellence, to demand excellence, and to support them in getting to that level. Students are almost never required to produce excellence. Some do, of course, but that is on them. We almost never demand it of them and support them through a lengthy process to that achievement. The Senior Research Paper was intended to be like that—a completed work so strong that students were impressed with themselves for having made something excellent. Not genuine perfection, perhaps, but something close enough to that ideal from a teenager, a work standing in witness to their persistence and power.

That was always my goal, to drive and challenge students, to reveal to them their own strength.

Well, now I am pretty much ranting. I am not angry or even particularly upset. Tired. Fighting the tail-end of a cold. More than a little sad. Glad to have decided. Wishing they had tried earnestly, if fruitlessly, to talk me out of my decision to leave (they didn’t and never have) or shook my hand or something. I am resigned that, at least, they may let me go without much fuss. A concern seemed to be that I might tell students something unpleasant about my decision. Even if I had something unkind to say (I don’t), how would that serve anyone?

I know I have served my students well in the past, and believe I might have gone on teaching for years, as I planned. I am sorry to stop. Sorry to miss future students. Most often I am appreciated, eventually, and I continue to treasure the relationships I have built with students over the years.

So why leave? I might come up with a list, but these would all be trivial complaints. I recognize this. No one really wants that list, least of all me. None of what really matters is lost, but lately I have sometimes felt more concerned about the trivial than teaching, and that is not right.

I will move on and do something different, something productive and not because I am broken.

This camel might write a book.

 

IF YOU’RE SO SMART WHY ARE YOU STILL TEACHING?

/ janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

My first teaching job was at Forest Ridge a school of the Sacred Heart, an elite Catholic girls’ prep school in Bellevue, Washington. Sr. Bunny Flick hired me in 1976 to teach 6-12th grade Art part-time. She was eager to see her students both challenged and supported in their education. At the same time, she never seemed quite comfortable in her role as a school administrator, but she was kind to me. Midway through my time at the school, Bunny left for a new job and, though she might not even remember me, I still check in on her online from time to time. She is a generous, good-hearted woman committed to education. I wish I could let her know that I think of her patience and guidance, and I’ve continued to grow. I’m a better teacher now than when she hired me.

My last principal was also committed as an educator and as a supporter of educators. I mention this because I am about to criticize administrators, and I want to make clear that my concerns do not apply to all administrators and they certainly do not apply to my favorites.

I have written elsewhere defending teachers. I chose to become a teacher because I realized that I was good at it, and that teaching was a role I had been committing to at every opportunity since I was young. I have worked at the profession for a long time and I think I’m mostly a good teacher.

Bad teachers are rare, I contend, because they usually don’t last very long in the profession. Shortly after I posted an essay about this, a student came to me, having read it, and asked if I really believed bad teachers were rare. Well, yes, I do. I think most teachers are doing the best they can and most of them are doing a good job. There are exceptions, but here’s another problem: There are bad and indifferent administrators.

This matters to teaching because, other than the teachers themselves, only administrators have the position and power to improve teaching.

This is where I admit there are bad teachers, and it’s true that some teachers are mean and some have unrealistic expectations or absurdly high (or worse: pathetically low) standards. These aren’t necessarily the bad ones. Even mean teachers take the choir to State and prepare teenagers for independent thought and college. Students learn to let the meanness roll off their back. “Unrealistic” can become reality in about two flicks and then students are doing stuff no one else thought they were capable of. Students survive the high standards, and sometimes they even thrive because of them. So for now, let’s set aside the “mean” and expectant ones.

Let’s look at the teachers who wish they were doing something else—something else in particular or anything else. These are the teachers who really wanted to go on playing high school sports for the rest of their lives, or who thought teaching would be an easy job, or that working with children would be good practice for being a mom, or that they would have weekends and holidays off. There are teachers who don’t really care much about their subject. The ones who fell into the job and never really wanted to teach to begin with. The ones who think they have chosen a 40-hour-a-week job. The ones who don’t like students. The ones who don’t want to work that hard. And the ones who discover they simply don’t like teaching.

Most teachers who are unsuited to the profession don’t last. In fact, teaching has among the highest attrition rates of any profession in the United States. Studies find various results, but up to 50% of teachers leave the profession within five years. Imagine if, after five years of training and with less than five years of work, half the plumbers, electricians, and lawyers chose another profession. (That this is not true for teachers in some other countries might give us pause. In Finland, for example, teachers are not paid differently but the job has more respect and time. Top college students in Finland flock to teaching, and they stick.)

What do teachers who leave the profession do instead? Tend bar, start a small business, sell real estate, join the family business, study law. I’ve considered some of those jobs and others, but I am forever becoming a teacher.

Some teachers become administrators. My observations suggest that, like the reasons for entering education to begin with, there are a few less productive reasons for studying administration. Some would-be administrators are bad teachers who don’t want to choose another field. Some are looking for a job where they don’t have to work so closely with students. Some are looking for more money. Some want power. Status. Some see administration as a natural advancement, like becoming the manager of a retail store. Some want more respect from their community, more autonomy in how they spend their days, or less face time with children. These are all good reasons, I suppose, but not one of them concerns wanting a meaningful roll in improving education and in supporting the educational process with teachers, students, families, and communities, which are better reasons for becoming an administrator.

Administrators work hard. Most of them work hours as long as mine and for another month out of the year. They, like me, are never quite off the clock and always engaged with educational concerns, even during down time, though most have more flexibility.

But some administrators are not skilled at their jobs. Some can’t manage the thousand discrete and sometimes competing demands of community, teachers, students, and finances. Some were well-intentioned but bad teachers and perform no more effectively with peers than they did with students. Some cannot imagine how to get from where they are to where they need to go. They have no vision. Some see the world in black and white and cannot cope with an occupation that is many shadings. Some do not actually like or feel comfortable around students or their parents. Some do not even like children. Some do not respect the choice of others to continue teaching instead of seeking a “promotion” to administration. I’d like to believe these issues are all pretty rare. I see this in other occupations too—electricians, dentist, doctors, small business owners who wish they were doing something (anything) else.

Years ago The Oregonian published an Op-Ed about the disrespect that teachers face every day, including the disrespect from administrators with the attitude that if teachers were really smart, why are they still teaching? I get that a lot. Teachers are sometimes treated as if they were their students. For eleven years I was a substitute teacher in my district and there were principals who treated their teachers like the children they taught. This was especially grating when I subbed at an elementary school where the principal treated teachers like young children. (And if you’ve never worked all day with a room of 26 nine-year-olds, you really do not know what exhaustion is.) Because I teach children does not make me a child myself.

I’ve also been patronized and ignored by college professors, including people who teach Writing and Lit. at community colleges, who have never published anything of significance, and who have barely been alive as long as I have been teaching. I merely taught high school for close to 30 years. Now with a decade of college level teach, I suspect my experience, concerns, and observations still matter less than theirs. Perhaps I did not matter at all.

Elsewhere I have complained about the expectation of some people that everyone must commit to teaching as if it were a sacred vocation rather than a job. Sr. Bunny Flick is a nun. I am not even Catholic. I loved my job, though it is not a sacred obligation, it’s something I choose. But there is some whiff of truth in that expectation of commitment. No one does this job to get rich, but it is an occupation that should suit the practitioner, one they will do their best for even in the moments when it’s hard and unrewarding. They should be paid decently for their expertise and responsibility. (No teacher expects to get rich, but securely middle class is not an unreasonable expectation after a minimum of 5-6 years university education.) I also think it’s a reasonable expectation that if teachers do their job well they should be treated with the respect due to anyone in a skilled profession.

Teaching first graders is not easier than teaching college Physics.

Teaching is not easier than acting as an administrator.

We all work hard in education and administrators and the public can make things easier for everyone. Or not.

TWO MOVIES

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Friends tend to express surprise that we still receive DVDs from Netflix. Perhaps “surprise” is not the word I mean. Shocked? Dismayed?

Nevertheless (a favorite word), we enjoy movies, the local theater is chilly and has sticky floors, and some films never get here. And then we find them on DVD, sometimes long after they were released. Wonderful, surprising, important films no one we know is talking about. They are not nominated for Oscars, their stars were not the thing that year, and yet, these are the ones we loved, these odd films we find entirely outside the general rush.

Last year we found Wind River (2017). Last night it was The Bookshop (also 2017).

Wind River is not an easy film to watch but it’s beautiful. I might wish this were not another film starring a white person but really about people of color. Even so, there is respect. There is a great story here. There is genuine honor.

During a winter season in Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, expert tracker and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent Cory Lambert discovers the frozen body of 18-year-old Natalie Hanson who was barefoot, without proper winter attire, miles from any building, and had a blood-stained groin. FBI special agent Jane Banner arrives to investigate a possible homicide. The next day, Jane learns from Natalie’s father, Martin, that his daughter was dating a new boyfriend, but he does not know the man’s name or whereabouts. The autopsy shows blunt trauma and sexual violence and confirms Cory’s deduction that the girl died from exposure, specifically pulmonary hemorrhage caused by rapid inhalation of sub-zero air.  …statistics are kept for every group of missing people except native American women. Nobody knows how many are missing.—IMDB, rated R

The Bookshop is a sweeter, sadder film. Have patience for this one. I got a kiss from my husband for this movie filmed in Northern Ireland (outside) and Catalonia (inside).

England, 1959. Free-spirited widow Florence Green (Emily Mortimer) risks everything to open a bookshop in a conservative East Anglian coastal town. While bringing about a surprising cultural awakening through works by Ray Bradbury and Vladimir Nabokov, she earns the polite but ruthless opposition of a local grand dame (Patricia Clarkson) and the support and affection of a reclusive book loving widower (Bill Nighy). As Florence’s obstacles amass and bear suspicious signs of a local power struggle, she is forced to ask: is there a place for a bookshop in a town that may not want one? Based on Penelope Fitzgerald’s acclaimed novel and directed by Isabel Coixet (Learning to Drive), The Bookshop is an elegant yet incisive rendering of personal resolve, tested in the battle for the soul of a community.—IMDB, rated PG

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“Smile, you’re beautiful.”

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from 19 April 2013 in The Humanist

This afternoon a student passed me, grinning. She’d just visited the eastern-most toilet stall in the “senior” bathroom. The room is decrepit, the soap dispenser is often empty, and the stall doors don’t latch. But on the inside of one door is a hand-written message: “Smile, you’re beautiful.”

I’ll admit that part of the reason I smile when I read this is because it’s spelled and punctuated correctly. But there’s more to it—a student wrote that note. It’s something to think about.

I have always loved teaching. I love sharing what I know. I love seeing the glow when a student gets it and realizes they can achieve excellence. I love watching worlds open up. I love being around young people on the cusp of life—fully aware and capable of thinking and questioning and growing. Their lives flutter with possibility.

But there are days when it’s hard to smile. As a fellow teacher posited to me: “It shouldn’t be this hard to be a kid.” A student discovers she will be homeless this weekend, and the boy across the room hasn’t had a full meal since his free lunch ticket expired two weeks ago—his mother is too embarrassed to fill out the forms. Another girl couldn’t go home last night because the crack dealer next door burned out the entire apartment building, and the boy beside her couldn’t go home for other reasons. One boy sees violence as an inevitable solution because it’s the only one he’s ever seen garner results. Another won’t listen to facts if they favor a viewpoint other than his own.

I’ve often been told that teenagers think they’re immortal. They don’t. They behave like cocky animals and they talk big and they take risks and make stupid choices because they know they’re going to die. They’re terrified and worry their lives will end before they can make a difference in the world.

“What does Egypt look like?” a female student asks during a class discussion about protests around the world, including the strategies of Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. “Is it sandy like in the desert? Are there buildings like in India with goats in the streets?” I talk about Cairo’s 17 million people and modern hotels, adding, “but yes, there is sand.”

“What do they want?” she asks. “Why are they in the streets?”

I tell her I can’t say for sure, but that they probably want the same things she does. They want a free country, they want some power over their lives.

I’m intrigued by her questions. This student has been practically nowhere and seen almost nothing. Usually shy, she stares off, perhaps imagining camels and traffic jams. “I want to go and see it,” she says.

Not one student in three classes has ever heard of Thoreau before today. A few recognize the name of Gandhi. “Mahatma,” one boy suggests.

“That means  ‘great soul,’” I inform them.

One girl knows he went on a hunger strike to protest British rule in India. But no one has ever heard of how American men and women sat down at luncheon counters to order a cup of coffee and were abused, spat upon, beaten, and finally arrested merely because they were black. My students are shocked. I hope they’re equally impressed by the courage of those sitters who took abuse to call attention to injustice, and were incarcerated in order to publicize their goals. They have their place in making the world a better place. We talk about that.

The goal in school is to get an education, but for some students the overwhelming goal is survival. They are hungry, homeless, embarrassed by their clothing, their transportation, and by their families. They have no quiet place to study and no one at home to encourage them. They have undiagnosed and untreated health and emotional issues. They deserve so much more than they have. They deserve someone to expect more from them. All of them—every one—wants to be successful, but only rarely do they have a personal, practical, or emotionally satisfying image of what success looks like.

“Make a list of things you want to do before you’re old,” I tell them.  “A bucket list,” they say back. They want to graduate and make money. They want to make their parents proud. Some say they want to buy their mom a house. Or go to Egypt. One wants to dance in the street in Chelsea. It’s good that they dream. They need these grand and beautiful dreams.

Too often high school culture concerns nothing much beyond sports and clothing, grades and money. Earning a living is necessary, but money by itself is a sterile goal. They worry too much about prom—it’s unlikely they’ll ever get to dress that way again—and not enough about mathematics. They read all their friends’ posts on Facebook and not nearly enough novels or history books. They use technology without mastering it. They know how to slip through the system without understanding that it’s here to serve their future. They earn grades without gaining an education. They worry about the wrong experiences of high school.

I can’t say who is at fault. Parents tell them the great lie: this is the best time of your life. I warn them that it shouldn’t be true. Life doesn’t go downhill after age eighteen. “It’ll get better,” I tell them. There is so much more.

Teachers try to provide incentives and rewards. I see possibility spread out before my students, waiting for them to find their way. I try to throw doors open to the world, but find students are too busy keeping on their feet to venture out. I see the world wide open to them, but they fear electric fencing. They fear failure. They fear the future. And because of these fears, some of my students will remain right where they are all their lives, turning in ever smaller circles, wearing a hole in their own tiny scrap of rug. I’d like them to fly. Get on a magic carpet and out the door. I’d like them to know the world.

Smile, you’re beautiful. Who wrote it? I wonder. All these students who walk the halls of my school—the future is still open and some of them will make beautiful lives despite bumps along the way, and they’ll return one day to tell about it. And even on a day like today when too many children are moving in frightened circles, I smile. They’re beautiful.