EDUCATION

COLLEGE DEBT

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Never trust memes. Verify.

My mother first explained “where the money went” to me when I was about eight years old. “Here is how much your father earns each month . . . ” She wrote out mortgage payments, utilities, food . . .

The budget of Trevor Klee is making people hysterical. Where does some 25-year-old get off paying $825 a month in rent? There are all sorts of cruel comments all over the internet. How can he do this? A sample:

This is ABSURD.
A) how many 25 yr olds make that much?
2) where’s the student loan payment?
3) $615 for donations? 🤣🤣🤣🤣 I don’t know any 25 yr olds that do that, because they’re spending all their money on rent and student loans.
4) $20 for internet?? Since when??
5) $825 for rent?? If they make that sort of money, and only spend $130 on transport, they live in big city, big city = big rent. That amount would get you a closet in NYC if you were lucky.
So many more issues, just… wow.

“How dare he earn $100k/year! How dare he pay only $825/month in rent!” How? The answers are simple. He tutored while in college and recognized he was good at it. He worked for an exam-prep company in Singapore after graduating from Princeton before starting his own company. Though he could afford to pay more for a studio of his own, he chooses to share a house with four other people. His rent is $4125, split five ways. His actual income varies because he runs his own business so he budgets for his low monthly income. The people freaking out about this meme would know all that if they read his story. The people who made this meme know the facts because they would have had to read the article in order to compile their outraged pie chart.

So he earns a lot more than me. So?

Klee worked while he was in college and likely had grants that paid his tuition. He got into Princeton. Maybe he has rich parents, maybe not. Princeton will pay the entire difference between what students can afford and their actual costs. Many notable private universities do that. If you can get in to Stanford or Harvard or Brown and you come from a low-income family, the university will ensure you can afford to attend. That doesn’t mean students don’t go into debt.

On the Princeton website: “Students admitted to the Class of 2022 who applied for aid with family incomes up to $160,000 typically pay no tuition.”

A former student of mine who had no help whatsoever from his family. worked three jobs while he attended a private university out of state. That was nothing new. He’d done that all the way through high school. When he graduated from college six years later, he went to work for a large company and could afford the payment on a condo on Copley Square. Be very, very impressed. I am. Did he graduate without loans? I never asked, but he might have. In hard and harder times, with and without parental help, some people manage to do that. Some do not.

Even when I was in college in the ’70s and tuition at the University of Washington was a fraction of what it is today, I knew plenty of people who were paying off student loans for many years after they graduated. A friend went to Hawaii during Spring Break one year and had student loans she was paying off a decade later. When she complained about her debt, I shrugged. Hawaii must be nice, but I never went.

I graduated without loans because:

  • I attended the local public university and lived at home for two years
  • my husband and I managed a really trashy apartment building near the UW and that covered most of our rent
  • we did not smoke, drink, or party
  • no coffee
  • no car unless we borrowed one from our parents. Instead we walked most days, including to the grocery store, and took the bus once a week
  • no vacations
  • entertainment was the $1 movie night at the Movie House, where we walked
  • dinner out was the 2-for-one coupon dinner once or twice a term
  • no help from our parents (other than the rare use of a car)
  • our only expensive activity was getting an education

Even then, graduating without debt was unusual. I knew people who lived in dorms because their parents were helping with their expenses. They borrowed. We lived like paupers and did not mind because we knew it was temporary. We both worked part time year around. Gary worked full time in summers and during Rush at the book store. I worked in a record store and sold my art work.

I knew a woman whose monthly food allowance for two people was $30 a month. I budgeted more than that for our food, and we were still bickering about who ate the last slice of bread or drank more than their share of the milk. But my friend was more impressive than that in her spending. She donated $100 a month to charities. At the time, I could not imagine how she and her husband could do that. My family did not give to charities, perhaps because both my mother and father came from single-parent households in the Depression? But I thought about what my friends was doing and I began giving too. I started with $5/month to Public Television because I watched that channel so often in college.

This month we gave $200 to Partners In Health, $100 to Southern Poverty Law Center, $100 to Wikipedia, and $100 to Amnesty International. I can’t afford to do that every month, but during the rest of the year I donate to projects and people I believe in.

As best I can recall, my mother wrote out her monthly budget in order to prove to her young daughter that we could not afford for me to keep a horse in the backyard. I had read a British horsecare book that detailed the expenses of farrier and feed. I knew keeping a horse was expensive. Even if we’d owned the field behind our tiny ranch house, we could not afford oats. Many years later when I mentioned how early exposure to budgeting had made me conscious of the need to be responsible, Mom confessed she’d lied about the family income. Never mind. It was true: We could not afford a horse.

At age 25, Trevor Klee gives over $600/month to charities. He does it because he can afford to do it, even in the leaner months he brings in $3000. He is careful about his money, but he is also generous. He chooses to share.

Why don’t people scream about that?

 

 

THE ODYSSEY

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51INarXj18L._SX327_BO1,204,203,200_.jpgTranslations are a bitch.

If readers—especially those with no great interest in other cultures or mythology—want a fast-moving, understandable fantasy tale, this might be just the ticket.

I want history and truth and anthropology. I want art. This translation is modestly literate and probably relatively accurate. Despite imposition of semi-iambic pentameter and use of modern expressions, it does nothing fancy or self-promoting. It is easy to read. Is it an accurate translation of this ancient poem?

I used to explain the challenge of translating poetry to my students this way: You have the form (the structure of a poem in rhythm and rhyme), the meaning, and the music. In translation, there may not be a simple word meaning exactly in English what it means in the original. Wilson is concerned that prose versions become longer. She’s right about that, prose does tend to become wordier. However, making the lines shorter than the original defies my understanding. When is it ever possible to consistently and accurately translate in fewer words than the original language? Thus, reading back and forth between translations, I found information missing from Wilson. To maintain her line-by-line translation she was forced to leave things out.

Plus all words gather baggage through cultural connection and acquired connotation. (The young woman in the beautiful long white dress—is she a bride, an unmarried young woman, or in mourning for her father? Is the story American, Vietnamese, or Chinese?) If something must be sacrificed, do you choose form, meaning, or music?

I would give 2 stars for music (maybe only 1), 3 stars for meaning (maybe 4, maybe only 2), and 2 stars for form. Also mostly 4 stars for her introduction, though even there . . .

I wanted to love this translation—I expected to love it. It is the first translation by a woman. I prepared and took notes. I read the introductions to several translations in preparation, beginning last year. Once I had Wilson’s translation in hand, and began reading I felt I was missing details and worked back and forth between her translation and Penguin’s Rieu translation, which is wordier prose but includes line numbers on the side. Each has its flaws.

What I liked about the new one: Wilson provides a lengthy introduction that includes how the poem has been viewed in the past, when and how it might have been composed and first written down, and how other translators have approached the work. In this introduction she points out specific misunderstandings and provides critical cultural context. References to dogs, for example, especially in relation to the actions and appearance of women, do not have the same connotation they would in modern English. A dog-like face is not ugly, but suggests something else (perhaps devotion, or a need for attention). Wilson has her doubts that anyone named Homer existed. She provides some evidence that the epic is much older than usually assumed. She works hard to provide a poem-like translation. Wilson points out that prose translations inevitably become longer than the original. This attempt to provide a straight-forward translation in iambic pentameter cuts length and makes for fast reading.

What I did not like: The attempted iambic pentameter. Most of this translation is in 10-beat lines but some is not, and much of it is not in iams at all. The challenge of fully conveying meaning in fewer syllables than the original was beyond this translator. (Homer’s dactylic hexameter, which I do not claim to understand, has a longer beat line.) With the aid of an actual poet, she might have managed it, but I am convinced meaning would have been distorted in the effort. Wilson also claims, and so do other introductions (I read four) that no one person could have composed and memorized twelve thousand lines. That is a foolish assumption since many oral societies, even within historical times, have managed just that. And her effort to use terms familiar to modern audiences includes “scot-free” among other colloquialisms that seemed out of place in such a setting, not to mention I would guess many young readers would not understand them all, thus undermining the attempt to make the text more “relatable”. In her introduction, she also dismisses the possibility of the composer having been a woman.

While she is likely correct that the composer was a man, I found part of her argument against a female bard short-sighted. A woman, she asserts, would not have adequate knowledge of the battlefield to support the detail found in the poem. But I find nothing in her translation (or any other) of battle scenes that could not have been pieced together from post-battle remains, guesswork, and survivors’ accounts or tradition, by a woman or a blind man. She also fails to note the ordinary household details, meticulously described, which would have been equally inaccessible to a male poet and far less likely to have been preserved by men. In the end, I argued with her assumptions about gender. She inadvertently, reopened the question for me. Would any man go on and on about household textiles spun, dyed, woven, and cared for exclusively by women? [NOTE: Robert Graves assumed the epics were written by two people, The Odyssey by a woman. His novel Homer’s Daughter, based on this assumption, was not particularly successful, imo, but there you are. A woman should have written it. He missed most of the more convoking details that would have convinced me.]

No introduction I read focussed adequately on how several “inconsistencies” support the elite quality of the actors in this story. The men eat only meat and drink mostly wine except under severe hardship. Though there is frequent mention of gardens and orchards, the characters do not eat fruits and vegetables. The faces of significant characters, men and women and even including some suiters, are described as “god-like.” Men are bathed and their skin oiled, their clothing is wool, fine-spun, and frequently purple. In fact, though many dyes would have been available, purple is the only color mentioned. Men may wear mantels of purple, sleep under blankets of purple, and women spin purple-dyed fleece. If that last is accurate, that the fleece was dyed before spinning, then it was first washed before dying. It would have been oiled before it could be spun and there is a passage that references oil dripping from a weaving, a detail translated differently in each version I checked. Some translations specify olive oil, others do not. Use of precious olive oil to spin the wool is unlikely, but intended, perhaps, to convey the elite status of the characters. Failure to appreciate how people lived and spent their time results in shallow understanding and translation. The purple dye comes from a Mediterranean shellfish, tyrex, the “royal purple” first discovered during the Bronze Age when this story is set. The displays of wealth in use of meat and oil and purple dye and descriptors using the term god-like all promote the stature of the cast. These are not ordinary people, but people of rank.

A swineherd is addressed directly by the narrator, “You, Eumaeus” and he becomes one of Odysseus’ three supporters in the slaying of the suitors, a rare character who is named, but not an aristocrat or of immortal family. More important, I suspect, he first greets Odysseus on his return, treating him with the proper care and respect, though he does not recognize his master. He does what is right and proper and due to a stranger. The Penguin translation claims the composer so loved his creation, he honored him in this way. I would argue that here is a commoner, a slave and swineherd, who is important to the story. The rare use of direct address acknowledges this.

Every introduction I have read has emphasized the oral roots of the poem. Wilson writes that The Odyssey may have been composed from an oral tradition, how and when it came to be written, and how the text version might have altered any previous spoken version. Yet, not enough is said about the nature of the oral tradition. Every high school English teacher will tell you that iambic pentameter aids the actor in memorization. I have heard actors in Ashland, Oregon, describe how memorization was much more challenging when they worked on a modern play after Shakespeare.

But poetic rhythm is also an aid to the listener. Just as the form aids the performer, so form and repetition aid the listener who can predict and appreciate sound when it is held in a poetic form. While the reader might reread, turn back a page, as I frequently did while studying these translations, the listener must grasp the story in the moment it is told. Homer (whoever that person or persons might be) tells and then reviews the telling, caps each character with a descriptor of his or her heroic trait. Penelope is prudent, Odysseus is cunning, for example. These words preface their names over and over again regardless of how the characters behave in the scene. Most translators vary these words but also frequently leave them out entirely. On the page, they seem redundant. To the ear, they are a formal reminder of the characters we are hearing about: ultimately, even if he is foolish in leaving his starving men with the cattle, Odysseus is a cunning hero.

The Penguin edition also speaks of how the story was composed, assuming it is fiction. Even Wilson likes to comment on characters as creations. From a modern perspective, this is sensible, but tradition is always based in fact. Everyone assumes these are very ancient stories, likely already old before The Odyssey was first spoken or written. Yet many details remain in question, despite what seems to me to be obvious. Penelope, for example, is the subject of a great deal of speculation. When does she recognize her husband returned after 20 years? Does she recognize him early on and keep this to herself? Even Wilson describes her actions as confusing. Telemachus is frequently described as immature.

Here is my teasing out of the story from a broader (Penelope’s) perspective: Odysseus was about to go to war. Before he leaves, he tells his wife he hopes to see her again, but if he dies, she must raise their infant son to manhood and then remarry. This backstory is a part of what we find in The Odyssey. After 17 years, suitors for perhaps-widowed Penelope begin to arrive, her son is not yet a man, and she concocts the deception involving weaving a shroud for her husband’s aging father. She weaves by day, unweaves by torchlight in the night. After three years, she is caught out, betrayed by a slave. Over a hundred suitors arrive and would like to have her and the kingdom she has managed through this long absence. Telemachus as an unprotected minor is at risk. The disguised goddess Athene sends the boy off to visit other survivors of Troy, and this accomplishes two things: it introduces the young man to his peers who are then in a position to support his claims, and it keeps him out of the clutches of men who would kill him and take his inheritance. Their avaricious intentions are clear because, we are told repeatedly, taking his wealth is what they are already doing by eating and drinking the wealth of the household. They plan to murder Telemachus. Though she is described as beautiful, marrying Penelope is primarily a political tactic.

Penelope hides herself from the men when she can, but also keeps each one dangling with messages when she cannot hide. Her position is precarious. Eventually she must either choose a new husband or abandon her son to the ambitions of these men. Either way, stalling remains her best option. When Telemachus returns from his travels, she announces she will marry the man who can do what her husband once did, string his massive bow and thread an arrow through the handles of a dozen axes. None is able to string Odysseus’ bow, much less use it, though his own son comes closest to accomplishing the feat. Does she hope all will fail and thus she will buy more time for the son who is stronger than her suiters, nearly as strong as he will ever be? Or does she recognize Odysseus? It is worth noting that when men lie in this story, this deception is immediately called out in the poem. If Penelope were lying, the poet would have told us. Instead, Penelope has been stalling from the beginning as she protects her son in his childhood, but now she must fulfill the second part of her obligation to her presumed-dead husband. There is no mystery here. Penelope is a dutiful wife. As a widow, she must remarry. Does she love her absent husband and mourn for him? Absolutely. Everyone, everyone cries in this story. Men cry from fear and loneliness and loss. Penelope cries for her absent husband. Her sincerity in grief is never in question. She has done her best to fulfill her husband’s directions.

I have not found any gloss or introduction that deals with these issues.

A recent The New York Times review of Robert Alter’s 3-volume translation of the Hebrew Bible by Avi Steinberg, describes how Alter manages to both respect the poetry of the original and honor the meaning of the original as none has done before. In part, he does this by breaking convention:

Alter told me about his decision to reject one of the oldest traditions in English translation and remove the word “soul” from the text. That word, which translates the Hebrew word nefesh, has been a favorite in English-language Bibles since the 1611 King James Version. But consider the Book of Jonah 2:6 in which Jonah, caught in the depths of a giant fish’s gut, sings about the terror of near-death by water. According to the King James Version, Jonah says that the Mediterranean waters “compassed me about, even to the soul” — or nefesh. The problem with this “soul,” for Alter, is its Christian connotations of an incorporeal and immortal being, the dualism of the soul apart from the body. Nefesh, to the contrary, suggests the material, mortal parts, the things that make us alive on this earth. The body.

“Well,” Alter said, speaking in the unrushed, amused tone of a veteran footnoter. “That Hebrew word, nefesh, can mean many things. It can be ‘breath’ or ‘life-breath.’ It can mean ‘throat’ or ‘neck’ or ‘gullet.’ Sometimes it can suggest ‘blood.’ It can mean ‘person’ or even a ‘dead person,’ ‘corpse.’ Or it can be ‘appetite’ or something more general: ‘life’ or even ‘the essential self.’ But it’s not quite ‘soul.’ ”

But, I asked Alter, doesn’t “soul” help dramatize the scene’s intense emotion? I mentioned another instance of the word nefesh, the terrifyingly evocative line from the King James’ translation of Psalm 69: “For the waters are come in unto my soul.”

“Oh, yes,” Alter said, with a smile. “That one does have a certain emotional resonance to it. But it’s not what the poet had in mind. And, I would add that the line ‘for the waters have come up to my neck’ … is also rather dramatic.”

. . .

Alter regularly composes phrases that sound strange in English, in part because they carry hints of ancient Hebrew within them. The translation theorist Lawrence Venuti, whom Alter has cited, describes translations that “foreignize,” or openly signal that a translated text was originally written in another language, and those that “domesticate,” or render invisible the original language. According to Venuti, a “foreignized” translation “seeks to register linguistic and cultural differences.” Alter maintains that his translation of the Bible borrows from the idea of “foreignizing,” and this approach generates unexpected and even radical urgency, particularly in passages that might seem familiar.

It is this sense of an ancient text that I miss in Wilson’s translation. She has so thoroughly domesticated Homer that he is entirely lost.

What did I want? What do I want? Perhaps a three-part text: the original Greek, a translation, and footnotes on the side, on the same double-page spread. This modern nonsense of endnotes where I must flip to the back to find comments and then not find an explanation of a term of history when I do look is exasperating. I want literal translation as well as poetic translation. I want consistency. If names have literal meaning, either choose to translate or footnote (Wilson endnotes one time, translates another—give me both but in parallel). If “his face drained of color” makes more sense to readers because it is the conventional phrase used today, I still want a side note explaining that the literal translation of the Greek means his skin turns “yellowish green” because I have seen that. I have seen death.

Or perhaps I want something more straight forward and difficult: I want art. I want poetry.

Someone, please, do for Homer what has been done for Shakespeare or, more precisely, what Robert Alter has done for his Bible. It is a lot to ask. I know.

The cover art is gorgeous—one of my favorite Minoan mural paintings, but from a period and culture completely unrelated to the story. Like this translation itself, it is an attractive choice and it is wrong.

TIME OFF

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IMG_3640We went away for the weekend.

Such a simple thing to do though rare for us because for all of our marriage until recently, we had the animals to consider. There were dogs, usually five or six of them. There were the cats, only one at a time. Zora bit. Leakey pined. This recent trip was easy too because the friends we stayed with took us to an island without internet, a quiet place. And they spoiled us completely. Fed us and entertained us and managed our travel. The silence was dream-like and I dreamt so clearly and with such authenticity that that I was certain it was real.

Perhaps that was because the silence and beauty overwhelmed imagination.

Backing up, late afternoon on Thursday my new computer arrived. I can never get Apple to accept a password or change it or manage it at all, but my Time Machine transferred all data. The next challenge was passwords because my old computer knew them all and this new one does not, but must be taught. [Eventually Apple allowed me to change my password, after at least nine years of receiving the message “This action cannot be completed at this time”, but then I had to reteach the new computer website passwords again.] I opened the newer version of Pages and searched for features hidden in different places. But already this new Pages is old, and I have been prompted to download the newest version, free, but another adjustment.

I was perfectly content with how things worked with my old version. On the plus side, this new laptop weighs two and a half pounds less that my last. The trade-off is that it is smaller and no quicker, but the battery is spry. As I type this, I have been on the internet, Pages, and email for over two hours and used 13% of the battery. I did not even remember to turn down the backlighting of keys.

In any event, I left my new laptop at home and we have only a flip-phone, nothing smart at all, so for three days we avoided news and I was spared word-processing. I walked beaches with such a foreign assortment of pebbles and gravel and stones that I hardly knew what to look for. On our beach, the rocks lining the beach are basalt with occasional sandstone or agates, shells, feathers, and trash. We gather trash. I confess I gathered trash on the beaches in the San Juans too. Impossible to ignore the habit. Plastic and styrofoam, but no beach toys.

I am overwhelmed by the hospitality we received over the weekend.

I brought back a fistful of what I term “pinkies”—tiny pinkish pebbles. I found as many as I already had found, though what I already had was collected over months and years in a narrow stretch of beach. On the island, I found agates the size of a five-year-old’s fist and one in the shape of a heart. I found a beautiful granite egg.

Monday morning I completed my NaNo officially, but I was not done at 52k words. I wanted at least 8k more, preferably 70k, which has been my minimal goal with novels in the past two years.

Today and for the foreseeable future I will be struggling with Apple. Everything was fine on this new laptop, at first. There were the normal struggles to locate information and actions that I was used to finding in another place, but I could access my files, the internet, and email. Now I cannot access my email—the old messages show, but I cannot send or receive new messages. This has something to do with the iCloud and two-part authentication, a level of security I do not even want.

I am near throwing this little laptop through a window. Of course we have double panes . . .

RELATIVE

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IMG_3580

This young seagull was peeping for its parent, but that adult flew away.

When my husband was young, sometimes he would sit on the back steps in a parched Arizona payday waiting for his dad to get home with groceries. Another family of four children was left alone for the weekend that turned into a week or maybe two. The woman who told me about her childhood was not sure, only that even the mustard was scraped out of the jar by the time Child Services showed up.

My own childhood was not so deprived. I went without dental care and my mother mixed powdered milk and when I first tasted a real butter pat, it was like candy to me. In kindergarten, I had two skirts and three short-sleeved Orlon sweaters. For Easter, I had a new cotton dress. It is odd the things you remember. But we were never hungry, and my father’s mother and aunt had enough money put by that it was safe to assume we could borrow money if things got desperate, which they did on occasion.

This is to say, I was not raised poor. Raised poor is hunger and no one to turn to who is better off. “Poor” is so bad that we make up euphemisms like “economically challenged” or my students say a person is “not very rich.” No, poor is not having enough money to pay bills even though you live cheap. Poor is embarrassed because even when everyone in the household is working hard to earn money, money is still “tight” and bills are sometimes late. Poor is being blamed in our country.

And that isn’t fair. Innumerable studies show the sort of income necessary to pay for housing in different parts of the country. Recent studies are equally clear that poor children almost never receive the quality of education wealthier parents give their children. Their health care isn’t as good. What they suffer damage in childhood that their ability to improve their lives, quite permanently.

The truth is that wages have not kept up with inflation—they have been falling behind for decades. Telling someone that if they want to earn money, they should get a better job is like telling a person waiting in a wheelchair to run to the head of the line, like telling the five year old to reach something down from the top shelf, like asking someone who is starving in a third world country: “Well, for heaven’s sake, go to the store and buy some food!”

Sometimes we simply fail to pay attention.

Poverty is lousy circumstance, not a character defect.

I am reading Adrienne Rich’s essays in her new collection, Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert. Rich was a force of nature, a woman who found compassion for others when she granted it to herself. She reminds me that compassion is necessary, that affluence is not a free pass to righteousness, that everyone faces difficulties in life and it’s a good thing to remember that sorrow and trouble come to each of us.

Here is the first poem I ever read of hers:

https://player.vimeo.com/video/39836802?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0

Prospective Immigrants Please Note

Prospective Immigrants Please Note
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself makes no promises.
It is only a door.

Thoughts from Adrienne Rich

I believe that poetry is asking us to consider the quality of life. And it is reflecting on what makes it possible for us to continue as human. Under the barrage of brute violence, numbing indifference, trivialization, shallowness, that we endure.

Even when I was very young, I was reading poetry, looking for what it could tell me about how to live. For me, poetry has never, ever been just an escape from the world, an escape from history.

I think in this poem, what I am talking about is the choice that we can make, to move deeper into things, or simply to live worthily, maintain your attitudes, hold your position, even die bravely, but not to see what might have been seen. Not to grasp what might have been grasped. And that is a choice, for us all, whether in poetry or in life.

Our country has many truths, but certainly one of them has to be that this was never a democracy. That this was a hope of democracy, an enormous, an enormous hope for true democracy, and that it failed many people from the outset and it’s failing more people now.

I think that more and more people feel uncared for, feel that their lives are not only unvalued, but meaningless. Feel that though they may care for their lives, no one else will. Feel that the only way that they can protect their survival and their interests is by the gun. I’m afraid that many people feel an enormous desperation which plays into the propaganda of hate.

I think that poetry speaks beyond that, to something different. And that’s why it can bring those parts of us together, that are both in dread, and which have the surviving sense of a possible happiness, and a possible collectivity, a possible community, a loss of isolation.

These reflections are excerpted from an interview Bill Moyers did with Adrienne Rich in 1995 as part of The Language of Life series. Rich died in 2012 at the age of 82. You can read the transcript of her entire interview with Bill in our archive and read more of her poems at Poetry Foundation website.

‘When something like this happens . . . ‘

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Many people are finding it emotionally challenging to watch the news these days. They do not feel connected to events, to politics, to the ebb and flow of our national debate. I understand that.

Just last week I was thinking over my personal experiences with accidental shootings leading to lost use of legs, to murders, and to suicides—yes, plural for each. I have known no one who was killed by a serial killer or terrorist, but people I know have been crippled and murdered, and all were the victims of white men. There is nothing unusual about that. In my country, most murderers and terrorists have been white, male, and Christian, even when the majority of citizens were not.

I love and would trust with my life, most every white male I know personally. They would not harm anyone based on color, religion, or politics. They are joined to one another through their communities and by love and respect.

So then, the past few days.

Things happen. Terrible things happen to everyone. A father commits suicide in the driveway while his daughter desperately beats on the locked car doors and windows to stop him—something similar happened to more than one of my students. A girl slept on the dirt floor of a shed, determined to stay with her homeless mother who was mentally ill and drug-addicted. A father returned from Iraq with no visible wounds but still changed beyond recognition. A student hospitalized, not for the first time, in a mental facility. Mothers and fathers died. A student drowned. Students died in car wrecks. Students killed themselves.

Ask any teacher in a weak moment and they will share their stories.

Then there was the student who slammed a school desk into a wall, the one who threw a chair, a padlock. The ones who did not want me to know what bothered them. The cruel parent, the near fatal overdose, the guilty confession of keeping score of girls, the marks on my board to count off the days without drinking.

I do not know how to adequately respond to cries for help. I have done my best as a mandatory reporter. I have offered comfort, I have listened. I have tried to be what my students needed from me, and often I have failed.

What leadership and decency look like:

“When Rabbi Joseph Miller learned of the Squirrel Hill massacre, less than a mile from his own pulpit, he ordered the doors of his synagogue locked,” Franklin Foer writes. “Despite his congregants’ terror that they would be next, they recited the mi sheberach. They didn’t pray for their own protection; they prayed for the healing of others.”

A dear friend has just managed to let those of us who were concerned know through social media that she is well, despite hospitalization with a terrible health crisis. She begs people will vote in lieu of flowers.

There is no point trying to avoid the pain. It comes and it comes. We can deny our responsibility or face what comes with compassion and care. The best we can do is take steady, honest steps toward healing our beleaguered nation.

 

RANDOM FACTS

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Years ago, long before non-GMO became a common label on foods, before Safeway even had an “Organics” section, and before “gluten-free” became a thing, a junior came to class with an idea for her research paper. “It sounds interesting. They are altering the genes of food,” she said about the NPR broadcast she’d listened to on her way to school. ”

“What do you think about it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I want to find out.”

Her eventual essay included the word “Frankenfoods” in the title, so we can see where that led.

Over the years, students rarely choose to write about topics they begin by knowing little about, but those papers are most often the best. Writing a research paper should be as much about finding out truth as proving it.

Changing our mind is probably one of the greatest struggles any of us have. We get an idea in our head and simply cannot move. For a teenager to research a topic with an idea already clear in their head about what they want to say is pretty typical. For a reversal to occur is rare indeed.

Recently, a junior was writing about forcing sports teams to change what some perceived were racist logos. She argued this would be unnecessarily costly and inconvenient, would destroy honored traditions and history, and anyway, “racism” was not the intent and probably not even effect of these logos. She got through two drafts, and then the day before the next draft was due, the one that was supposed to be done other than minor word-smithing, she came to see me after class.

“I have a problem,” she said. “My thesis is wrong, or anyway I disagree with my thesis. I made a mistake and now I don’t know what to do.” She had, the night before, read an opinion piece about the damage racist stereotypes, including the images used as sports logos, do to young people living on reservations. Such images preserve and inflate prejudices and contribute to a sense of exclusion and hopelessness for children already living in poverty and on the margins of society. “I’ve seen that,” she said. “It’s true.” She had worked as a volunteer on a reservation.

“Change your thesis,” I said.

“But I don’t have time to start over.” She sounded surprisingly reasonable, given her sense of her dilemma. This had to feel like a disaster in her world and she was struggling to maintain her calm. She began to rattle off all the arguments that supported her original thesis.

“But one article convinced you that you were wrong.”

She nodded.

“So use everything you already have, and then show me how you were convinced. Concede everything—inconvenience, costs, fan outrage—and show me how there is something more important at stake. It convinced you; convince me as a reader.”

She did it too. Changed her hook, reversed her thesis, fiddled her body paragraphs, and concluded with a bang. Her argument was logical and emotional, reasonable and persuasive.

It can be done. We can change our minds.

Long ago, another junior showed up before class, the day before a draft of the same assignment was due. She was in tears. “They have to shoot them,” she wailed. “They have to do it as a symbol, and the sea lions aren’t even the real problem.” She had been writing a paper to argue against killing the sea lions that were eating salmon at the base of a dam spillway. She could prove that the sea lions were not the cause of dwindling wild salmon populations, but she also came to understand that the issue was not as simple as she’d hoped.

Another student, in his senior research paper (SRP) was struggling to prove his thesis, that welfare recipients should be drug tested as a condition of receiving public assistance. Why should people on public assistance be allowed to abused those funds? The trouble was that drug-testing had been tried and had proven that few people do abuse drugs and it cost a great deal more to test for drug abuse than was gained by cutting such people off from public services. Ten or twenty times more. There were also issues related to privacy and other forms of public assistance and contracts that he did not even want to address. He had not changed his world view, but he did change his point of view on this particular policy.

Students have proposed legislation that was eventually adopted (hat off to you, Russell for advocating pleasure boat pilot licenses), as well as the use of artificial turf, graphite bats, and golf carts during tournaments. I read about forty essays on allowing or banning abortion, most of them on both sides rather hysterical and unconvincing, before I banned the topic altogether. One senior cried so hard every time she tried to work on her pit bull essay that I chose to put that topic, too, on the banned list.

Religious arguments? Mostly banned. When a student used Thomas Jefferson’s faith as part of his proof that we are a Christian nation, I suggested he had better read the work of our third President. When his mother argued that no Christian ever owned slaves, I gave up trying to reason with her. In order to use a faith-based argument, you would first have to convert your audience. I was teaching in a public school.

I readily confessed the obvious. I have opinions. I am opinionated, but I am more interested in the writing. I have been convinced by students, and even when I am not convinced, my purpose is to evaluate their skill, not to make them agree with me. One of my all-time favorite essays, one I still recall vividly and with respect, was written to support preserving “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. It was a hot topic one year because of a California lawsuit. Three students wrote supporting restoration of the original form of the Pledge. Two wrote supporting the current form. One of those last was brilliant. I still don’t say “under God” because my mother taught me not to, but I respect and honor that student’s essay. Her exploration of the history and implications of the Pledge were more complete than anyone else. She won me over.

It is one of the side gifts of teaching researched persuasive essays: I learn a lot. Sometimes I find I know random facts I cannot even explain. I have no reason for knowing about water rights and road-building, statistics about rape and fishing, the costs of medical insurance and how many student athletes are injured by sport. Part of scoring their papers involves reviewing their research, verifying their claims, checking for additional overlooked aspects of a problem. I read a great deal.

And as determined as students are to avoid interviews, talking to the right person will yield solid facts and details available no other way. Even so, the right questions of the right person are critical. A student asked an engineer working with nuclear power via email what health risks were associated with nuclear power? The man emailed back that he was “unaware of any health risks.” The student quoted this as proof that nuclear power was non-polluting and harmless. I had to break it to the student that “he may be joking.” An engineer would not be the right person to ask about health issues, and he needed to research nuclear accidents. Plus, you know, the long term effects of The Manhattan Project . . . “Look it up.”

I am a good researcher, and with the internet and experience evaluating sources, it is surprising even to me what I can find out if I look hard enough. The key is a willingness to look beyond what supports my prejudice.

Skepticism is a good thing, I have found. Finding multiple sources to confirm the same information is important. Avoiding the crazies. Doing the math. Recognizing that a minority opinion is not necessarily wrong. But it isn’t necessarily right either. What’s worth arguing is never simple.

In the face of personal experience, we might alter our perspective. In the face of evidence and logic, we must be willing to consider other perspectives.

 

READING OUT OF THE SHELL

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The student working on the research paper was well and truly stuck. He walked from the back table to where I sat at the front and asked me for help. “I am really far behind,” he said as if this were a permanent condition. He had the research. He had an idea of what he would say. He told me about what he knew and showed me the research. When I asked him questions about supporting information and about complications, about the opposition to him claims, he was able to answer.He had nothing written down. I helped him create a simple graphic of pros and cons. Then I gave him chocolate and 20 minutes and when I came back his page was completely blank. Time had passed and his fear stared him down.

Last year, when I suggested to a friend that reading for 10-15 minutes a day would result in reading a complete book every 3-4 weeks, she commented wryly, “You could say that about a lot of things.”

Well, yes, I could.

Let me put this another way. If you stayed off Facebook and your cell phone for 10-15 minutes a day, you would have time to exercise, write an actual letter, do some yoga, meditate, cook oatmeal for breakfast, make a salad . . . or read.

Making time is not so hard. It is impossible. Time is not created, it merely passes. How we pass with that time is choice. Recently I binged an Australian television series, walked the beach, played Scrabble with a friend, and laid awake worrying about family in the middle of the night. I wrote blog posts and helped a student with Geometry while volunteering in the local high school library and yesterday I helped a student with his Senior Research Paper. I made bread of bananas just in time, and each morning I read the news. I read novels and nonfiction. Just now there are two books on the shelf behind me.

I never begin a book I do not hope to love. Sometimes I am disappointed. More often I am amazed. Reading transports, instructs, teaches—if I am willing to allow that to happen, if I am willing to stretch and learn, to participate in a process. I am willing to invest the time to read.

A new post on the Brevity blog discusses time for change. The author and her husband have sold their house and are moving to a much smaller house in another state. It is a thoughtful essay about movement, both exterior movement and interior movement, about simplification and change, about making those choices to be somewhere and perhaps even someone new.

My sense is that significant change is almost entirely interior, that large or small house, New Mexico or Florida, and perhaps even near family or far away, we carry ourselves along as the primary baggage. Our capacity for becoming, for changing our lives, breaks down to our willingness to use time in new ways. That is less about external than internal geography.

No matter where we go, there we are.

In the mean time, I have avoided knitting and weaving and a story because I fear I will do projects badly. I have a plan but things are not looking promising. Last night while giving good advice and deadlines to a student, time passed. I experimented with point of view (tried third person thanks to Ursula) in fiction. He eventually had a list of paragraphs to be written and a start. That student had an introductory paragraph, I had 500 new words of a story. Like the student in the library, I had stared too long at my blank page, certain I was doomed.

I was not doomed, I was trying to wait out time. Time merely passes.

As he was leaving, the student said, “I have a month to finish it.” But he doesn’t have a month. He had that evening for an hour, and he needs to use an hour each day until he’s done. If he thinks of the month, he will wait to begin. He will slide along without progressing because there is a month, then three weeks, then less and less time left as he allows it to pass. Thinking like that will land him in the same spot he started yesterday evening, a blank page before him—the way we all end up staring at the same spot because we have an hour to start the work or a lifetime to begin a new life.

It is always there for the start.

 

VIOLATION

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The rape scene is explicit. I taught The Bluest Eye for 25 years. It is an extraordinary novel told from multiple perspectives. A little girl is ruined, driven insane and lost. The language is stunning, beautiful, masterful. I introduced the novel with an early event where a narrator describes being sick and feeling her mother’s anger. This anger is not toward her daughter, but toward the sickness, which the narrator eventually understands: “Love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup . . . welled up in that house”

The first pages tell the story. I always warned my students about the graphic description of the rapes so that they could skip those pages if they wished. Sometimes they asked to read another book, which I offered. I reread the novel every year with my students, but truthfully, I did not reread those pages myself every year. They are brilliant. Brutal paradox  is set up immediately in the book when Claudia McTeer describes how her vomit sticks to itself “so neat and nasty at the same time.” Ultimately about love, the eloquent revelation of pain never lets up. It is sharp and bloodying. Toni Morrison claims there is no understanding the why of her Pecola’s father violating his 11 year old child, of a community destroying her. We must be content with how.

Morrison accomplishes more than that, in my opinion. I always told students they might understand why Cholly Breedlove rapes his little girl, but that Morrison does not require us to forgive him. We are not asked to forgive him. We understand, but even so his actions are not forgivable.

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The rape scene before me was explicit. I stood up and walked out of the room. My thoughts fluttered. Why? Generally, I am a determined viewer. I do not watch porn, but I do not enjoy scenes of sex in books or movies. Nudity does not bother me a bit, but violence with sex makes me cringe. Rape drives me out of the theater, off the page.

For most of my adult life, I struggled to understand why I reacted so badly to rape scenes in films and avoided them in books. I was never raped. I was never violated. It made no sense that I had such a visceral reaction to violation in fiction.

I wondered if I had suffered some trauma I had repressed? I raked through my memories for truth. Nothing. All through this, I was aware of an ugly experience from the age of 7 or 8. I knew it had happened, but my understanding of that event minimalized my experience. It was not so bad, I would think for many years after. After all, much worse things happened to others. Much, much worse things happened all the time.

“It isn’t necessary to minimize one group’s pain and suffering in order to legitimize another’s,” a former student posted on my Facebook page.

I think enormous stigma and shame is what all survivors share. Insistence that some suffer more than others—while certainly true in a general way—serves to separate us and undermine our shared felt reaction.

There is a reason that even today only a tiny fraction of rape victims of either sex report the crime. Recently, I have posted elsewhere that I was molested on the playground by a group of boys who held me still. I never told anyone at the time and did not even admit it as an act of molestation to myself or characterize the experience as a sexual assault for almost 50 years.

As a young teenager, men exposed themselves to me and I did not tell.

The one time I tried as a college freshman to report an event, I was treated very poorly. And I knew this was my fault. I had no words to describe it as anything else by mine. I had been told in an infinite number of ways from the sex education I received at home and at school to the general attitude of my culture, that if I was victimized, if something “nasty” happened to me, I had done something to “ask for it.” My fault.

Are we not still in that terrible place?

Being loud, insistent, bombastic even, seems to convince some people. When it comes from a man. Tears. Denial. The silence or the soft (female) voice is refuted. Why not talk about it immediately? Why talk about it at all. What did you do?

Society weaves a thick blanket of blame and certainty over who I was then. That absolute judgement that what happened to me, if it happened at all, did not matter. That, I knew.

And now I unweave this memory. I examine it. I consider the glee in the faces of those boys. Those boys who never had paid me the slightest attention in the past, a wonder to me, approaching me with grins on their faces. I was small, small for my age, and youngest in the class.

I could not tell you the boys’ names or the date it happened. I could describe the light, their faces, the buzz cut of the boy who violated me. I know where I was standing on the playground. I remember the weeds I ran through after running from the blacktop playground. I was surprised to have escaped. My arms had been pinned, boys all around me. Perhaps my passivity, my well-trained smile, left them unprepared for my explosion. I escaped, but they had already gained what they wanted. Hadn’t they? They were done with me. They let me go.

It felt like escape at the time. I had not escaped. They were through.

The story of that day never left me. I simply ignored the warning.

If, as a victim, I could not admit even to myself the trauma of those boys surrounding me on the playground, holding on to my body, and one boy thrusting his hand into panties, my abrupt realization of what he was doing, and my scream and abrupt break. Running away. My tears. I told not a single soul. I did not, in 1960, even have words to describe what those boys and that boy had done. I pushed the memory away. I told myself it was a minor event.

So many people have suffered so much worse.

PARING DOWN and going out

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In our continuing effort to tidy the house, I am following an online series of articles on how to edit and tidy my home. Fifteen days of advice on how to eliminate clutter, and basically sort “stuff” into giveaway, toss, and keep-but-put-away.

The process began by suggesting that I have a “monster pile” someplace in my home. It was true. I had a pile that was a couple of feet high and three by six feet. By the time I’d cleared other areas of my house my monster had grown to four times that size. Even made tidy into straight lines and contained by boxes, it filled the center of my workspace. My online article told me to remove three items from the pile and find a place for them or scoot them out of the house. The next day it gave me a different area to tackle, but then reminded me to take three things out of the pile. That’s mostly how it’s been ever since.

A junk drawer is not necessary only in my kitchen, I was told, there should be one in each room. That made me laugh. I had already sorted out my sewing “junk drawer” but kept the little plastic bin of miscellaneous stuff that needed to be somewhere but did not belong in the baskets with thread, the drawer with scissors, or any other particular place. I have an orderly junk drawer in my kitchen and one in the bathroom vanity. The dressing table in my bedroom contains scarves and miscellaneous “junk” too. All this has been sorted recently, but each day I try to turn the home-tidying advice into practice.

Yesterday, I was told to edit my freezer, fridge, and pantry with specific attention to outdated items or foods I had tried but did not like. While I was upstairs reading these instructions on my computer, my husband was downstairs actually emptying one shelf at a time in—you guessed it—the freezer, fridge, and pantry. He sorted. That afternoon I went through his piles as a second reviewer. Trash, giveaway, and keep. He cleaned the shelves too. The resulting order went well beyond what had been suggested, and even though I didn’t do most of the work, I felt accomplished!

I have been advised to spend a limited time sorting one specific area each day. I did the entire linen closet. I was advised to remove three items from the “monster pile” and sometimes I eliminated an entire cardboard box from the room.

I spent some extra time with my monster pile after dinner, choosing not three items but a mini-pile or box to sort, several days in a row, while the television played something in English where I did not have to read subtitles. My monster is mostly gone, though it seems to be rebuilding.

However, the attic is completely empty. I still have space on my book shelves. (I ruthlessly sorted books again this summer, but there are still eleven bookcases upstairs and more than that downstairs.) We took a small painting to be framed in a wooden frame that came out of the attic. On Friday we hope to take a tiny print up to be placed in another frame from the attic. I gently oiled, sanded, and waxed the beautiful walnut veneer.

Over the past summer, I painted the entire upstairs, ceiling included.

There is still work to be done. Next summer we need to move all the furniture out of the living and dining rooms and varnish the floors. The kitchen, too. The entry and hall floors have a different finish on them and I plan to paint over it. I suspect I missed the weather window for floor paint, so that will likely wait till next year. I sorted through everything in the lower half of my grandmother’s secretary, but there is still the top half.

The Christmas ornaments are at home in a downstairs closet. I have completed most of my Christmas shopping. There is paper and tissue and green velvet ribbon waiting for me to wrap.

I have put a warp on my loom for a pair of scarves and begun knitting a third. These are straight forward, simple projects I can do without thinking much. But I also have less than five weeks to knit my granddaughter a sweater with a cat on it for her birthday.

My laptop is getting a little creaky, but I have been putting off buying a new one. This morning it abruptly turned itself off, screen went black. Later it was fine. Not a very good sign, though. My older son told me before I replaced my last one (after nine years) that laptops have a half-life of about 18 months. The one I am using now is going on six years and unlikely to last much longer, I fear. I want a lighter laptop. I enjoy the screen on my 15″ MacBookPro, but it weighs four and a half pounds. How about two pounds? I am thinking a tiny screen and two pounds, but I have a couple of bills to pay first. In the mean time, I am backing things up.

I made a ginger plumcake the day before yesterday, which we had for breakfast and then broccoli for lunch.

It is also Wednesday and I am sitting in the high school library for Open Library. Three sophomores were working on Chemistry lab write-ups, but they’ve left. Last week I helped a freshman with his Geometry. I’m not sure he finally had the correct answer to the last problem. He’d done it wrong the first time and I did my best to steer him in the right direction. Next week I am promised a few frantic juniors working on the infamous Reading for Writers. I would rather have customers than not.

I have committed to NaNoWriMo this year, and begun notes on an SF novel. That cat sweater has to be done. Maybe that is something I should start tomorrow?

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PURSUIT OF FLYING

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Linking to an article about “lawnmower parents” triggered an interesting discussion on my Facebook page. Some were defensive about “rescuing” or failing to “rescue” children. Others pointed out that some children genuinely need more guidance than others due to disabilities and disadvantages that may not even be visible.

As a private and public school teacher, I saw how it worked both ways. Most parents are doing the best they can, and doing fine, I think, but I saw this over-correction now and again all the years I was teaching. I saw it among privileged kids in the prep school where I first taught, and I saw it among local elite teaching in a public school, especially athletes, whose parents and school officials placed the ability to play above every other consideration. Perfectly capable students would not contact me, but sent their parents in to ask for favors. Parents would defend a students who had deliberately abused the system. Parents did their students’ work for them. Other students had no advocacy at all.

The article defends support for students with genuine needs, which may be entirely invisible. For example, friends thought it was ridiculous that a young woman was afraid to take the bus downtown alone. When I found out she’d been in the foster system all her life, it made sense to me. She may have aged out of the system, but she likely had little support at any point of her life. My brother-in-law is schizophrenic and could not complete his paperwork even though he was halfway through high school at the time. Such young people need guidance and support more than most, and often longer than might seem necessary to the casual observer.

On another note, one reader described arriving at college and finding herself incapable. “I did not have parents [who over-protected me] but I still had the reaction described after my first difficult college class at 18: ‘Begin planning for the inevitable destruction of their college career/future; Assume they failed because they’re stupid; Collapse in on themselves and give up completely and stop trying.’ ” She could not handle the experience and left college after her freshman year.

Many very bright and capable students arrive at college without the skills they need to thrive, and this may have little to do with parenting. My brother began college without the academic skills necessary to manage the major he was pursuing. As a teacher, he was determined to challenge his students in ways that allowed them to do well later on. My own experience was almost the reverse. I was extremely well prepared for my major and when I began teaching I was determined that my students would feel the same confidence I enjoyed in college. Resilience in both my brother’s and my own case was based less on our self-confidence than on genuine, earned capability.

I had the added disadvantage of being female. And women are given confusing signals about behavior. To be successful in any endeavor demands skill and a modicum of self-confidence. Some situations demand diplomacy and tact, while others demands assertiveness. Women receive a mash of conflicting messages pretty much from the moment they were born. No one ever lifted Sojourner Truth over any mud puddle, but she was expected to project the same retiring and gentle femininity as a white woman expected to spend all her days tatting lace without distressing the menfolk.

The recent flap over Serena Williams behavior during a tennis tournament and the response of a referee is a case in point. In the opinion of many observers, Williams was clearly being targeted, and the penalties were out of line compared to responses to male players exhibiting the same behavior.

Of course, what do I know?

I know that when we protect too much in the classroom, when our response to children facing difficult challenge is always to make the work “easier” we teach them that they are incapable. Telling a class day after day that work is easy (whether this is true or not) leads them to assume that the scarier reality of struggle means they are “stupid” instead of simply learning.

My goal in the classroom is to make difficult concepts as managable as possible. I do not pretnd that what I am asking from students in “easy.” It is not easy, it is very hard. My job is to make the work managable, to break it down, support growth, and promote self-confidence through acheivment of earned skill. Students must have the skills they need to be confident in school. They should be encouraged to do more than is entirely comfortable. They should be inspired to sustain their purpose and goals even in the face of fear. They need to be taught that they can overcome obstacles and that struggle is someone everyone deals with every day.

Many activities human beings actively pursue are very hard and very scary—many sports, bungee jumping, mountain climbing—yet somehow that high does not transfer well to education. There is a rush of adrenalin from pursuing a complex idea that we cannot quite wrap our mind around, just as there is when pursuing a sport. Maybe that mental rush is something we would all do well to pursue.

Do better because you can.