EDUCATION

WORTHWHILE

/ janpriddyoregon / 1 Comment

“… it is utterly impossible for over-worked teachers to preserve an instinctive liking for children; they are bound to come to feel towards them as the proverbial confectioner’s apprentice does towards macaroons. I do not think that education ought to be anyone’s whole profession: it should be undertaken for at most two hours a day by people whose remaining hours are spent away from children.”—Bertrand Russell from Education and Discipline

I didn’t want to get there. I have explored options and considered alternatives.

It was the end of Winter Term and the beginning of my last spring as a full time teacher. A former student who wanted to write and perhaps also to teach, asked me if I would enter the teaching profession again? Did I have regrets? I suppose the easiest answer would be to suggest posts about teaching on my blog. Without denying the challenges, it was been a great career. I loved teaching and I am deeply grateful for the opportunities teaching has given me to develop writing skills, to work with students, and to contribute meaningfully to the world.

My former student acknowledged that “education is something that’s extremely important and I think that high school is the most crucial age to reach out to students.”

Yes, I feel that. I feel commitment and love for my students. I recall all too vividly what and who I was in high school, and the common lie about it being the “best time of life” when for me it was lonely and frightening, and I am fortunate to have survived. Unlike most of the teachers at my school, I did not love sport and I did not turn to teaching as a way of prolonging my own student experience. I came to teaching out of compassion for those terrible years of becoming.

I have no regrets. I have loved teaching. I enjoyed the challenges to my intelligence, innovation, and certainty. I made many mistakes on my way to wisdom.

But I did not begin wisely. I entered teaching with the same foolish notions shared by many others.

  • I thought I was a natural at teaching. (not a chance)
  • I thought it would be easy. (oh dear)
  • I was a visual artist and thought teaching would leave me time to create. (ha!)
  • Vacations and summers off! (ha!)
  • The pay for my area is good. (not so much)
  • Job security, good pension, sabbatical. (gone)

Fortunately, I outgrew these notions, accepted my mistakes, and loved my job before I became too discouraged to continue.

Would I enter teaching now? She asked me this as I struggled to carve out a week of space in the Spring Term for the new achievement test designed to rank students, teachers, and their schools. Fortunately, these tests would be phased in over the next three years—that is, there were alternative paths for students seeking to graduate other than passing that test. No administrator I knew fought this or even talked publicly against it. I suspect they all hoped, as did most teachers, that the test would go away. Perhaps its replacements will. But thus far, despite my skepticism about the accuracy of test score, I am sorry to discover my former school has lost ranking.

In the mean time, while I was there, required testing limited what I could do with juniors that spring. It stole time and energy and attention. It caused distress, and in the end it proved almost nothing. Even if students do well on the test, no matter if they failed, more than a hundred years of experience with high stakes testing via the SAT reveals what any sensible person knows: Teachers still do a better job of evaluating accomplishment and predicting future success than any test. What I recorded in my grade book was a more accurate evaluation.

Nevertheless, we have lost faith in teachers. The pension system is somewhat gutted, but then this is the trend across our nation as unions have been axed and the middle class attacked. There was a golden period, and had I been teaching while my sons were little I might have retired with a pension that more closely reflected my current earnings. Or I could have been a university football coach, the one The Oregonian likes to cite when attacking my pension. The newest pension system, the one teachers now have, is even weaker than mine was when I started. I could not begin to retire with twenty-five years with only the current pension system. I am not sure I could ever afford to retire. The pension was something I looked forward to during bad days when I was scaling by: At least I had my pension  As a person inclined to worry about money, I do have fears about being alone and destitute at the age of eighty, when the funds from my more recent pension will run out.

Would I have entered teaching if the education landscape looked like what it does today? Perhaps. I would have been wiser to choose another career path. I was good at the job, I think, and I loved it. But about half of the people who enter teaching—even before the recent changes to pension, job security, and testing—leave within a few years. This doesn’t happen in other nations. In most nations teachers leave teaching about as often as plumbers leave plumbing or lawyers leave the law. Education here is tougher: American students are poorer, our school days are longer, the total student load (the number of students seen each day by a teacher) is higher. Job security and a strong pension are gone. Other perks of the profession disappeared early in my teaching career—tenure and sabbaticals are a memory in my state. All of that make education more challenging for students and teachers. 

My term teaching as a student, my practicum, was completed under Field Advisor Hazel Koenig and Lynn Gray as my Field Teacher. Two extraordinary women helped me to grow and also to find my first job as an Art teacher. fifteen years later, I took a lot of classroom management workshops and graduate classes once I was hired as an English teacher and thus shifted subject areas. 

It was lucky for me in terms of personal growth, not so fortunate in other ways.

The energy to create my own art—whether that was visual or written—and to work with students seems to come from a similar place. John Gardner warns beginning writers about this in On Becoming a Novelist. More recently, in the first chapter of her newest collection of essays, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, Ann Patchett writes about this too. By the time she’d spent a week working with students on their writing she had no energy left for her own so she tried to wait tables, also exhausting. Finally she chose journalism and in that profession she learned both to write to order and to let go of words.

Nevertheless, the way I came to think of myself as a writer came through teaching writing. I have written several novels and I have managed to publish fiction, poems, and nonfiction while also teaching full time. This is, shall we say, an unusual accomplishment. And it has likely been achieved at the expense of doing my best in any area. 

Most summers—for all but three in the last years I spent in the classroom—I was in school and planning curriculum and often working part time as well during those ten weeks “off.” For the other three summers I was merely planning curriculum. I woke at five in the morning and was frequently still answering emails from students until I shut my laptop down at around nine in the evening. I regularly received requests from graduates to forward class materials on MLA form and résumés and to edit graduate school applications  or all three inside a week). I am not complaining. On the contrary, I am pleased that former students still think of me at all.

It has never been easy and I wasn’t good at my job for the first years’ teaching. I had bad days and failures. There were many days when I think of myself and my life as a teacher and I am profoundly grateful. Sometimes I think of myself as a writer, but perhaps that will change. Most things have. 

But I liked my students, and I liked them right through to the end of my career.

BEING SMART & HIDDEN

/ janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

IMG_5019.jpeg

The student stopped me in the hall one Fall day to tell me another teacher thought she was stupid, had told her she was stupid. I did not entirely believe her.

And then a few days later, that teacher she’d complained of also stopped me in the hall, in almost the same spot, and told me that student was misplaced in Honors classes and not capable of doing the work I demanded in my college writing and lit classes. “There might be three in my Honors class who can do the work.” His upper lip fairly curled. He mentioned the girl by name and said she was stupid to think she could keep up.

I knew better. I had taught her the year before and found her highly capable, perhaps smarter than her transcript suggested. She had participated in discussion and demonstrated skill in reasoning and composition, and I had spoken to her outside of class. Her mother was a mess and this girl was protective of her family. I suspected she was heavily disguised because being known as smart had not served her well in school or life.

I’d seen it before, but it was hard for me to believe that a teacher would miss how smart she was, how insightful and kind, that he would be so unkind as to allow a student to see he disrespected her. He later apologized for being rude about students to me, though he had not altered his opinion about students. Perhaps there were “four students capable of the work.”

Soon after, test results came out, and though I have limited faith in State testing, this girl’s scores were right up there, top of her class. It was, despite his opinion, a highly capable class overall. I noticed the previous year.

But this one girl. She was not the first to hide her intelligence. I’ve had others—students smart enough not to want most people to know they are smart or even to fully appreciate it themselves.

Sometimes they set a bar so high for their work they cannot reach it. They are smart enough to see how high the bar can be set but not yet experienced enough to leap that high. One girl at sixteen had never passed an English class. She did the work but never believed it was good enough to hand in. Gradebooks showed strings of zeroes for her work beginning in Sixth or Seventh Grade. Her friend and I staged an intervention: “You have to hand in an essay that is really, really bad. It can not be a good essay or even okay,” we told her. “It has to be bad.” We cajoled and even, I confess, we bullied. We all three of us laughed and laughed. But she handed in her story. (It was not bad. We teased her about that: “You’ll have to write worse than that.”)

Gina became my model of the Sixty-Percenter, a student who will do precisely 60% of what is asked, just enough to pass. She might answer six of ten questions perfectly and leave the remaining questions blank. She might complete just enough of a writing assignment to squeak by. Her skill at pinpointing that passing level was astounding. My response was to ask more and more of her, because whether the work was “easy” or “hard” she would always perform at that 60% level—better to do passing level work in a harder class than an easy one, I figured. I could not fool her.

Kevin was another Sixty-Percenter, but he was too stoned most of the time to gauge his own progress. He was the only student I ever routinely lied to. He needed to pass and would check with me about his grade. If he knew he was passing my class he would disappear for a few days. I learned to tell him that he was almost passing at 58%, but “if you’re in class for activities during the next two days, by Friday you should be back to passing.” That got him to the weekend. Sometimes he actually had a B average, never less than a C. Like the first student I mentioned, he tested in the 99%tile but in nearly every subject.

In fact many of my troubled students were gifted. I say many, but I taught for thirty years. I can recall a dozen or so of the thousands of students I taught who were highly gifted to the degree that they were hiding extraordinary brilliance in plain sight.

There was the boy who doodled on the sides of his pages and liked to express opinions that he knew would wind me up. He was absolutely the smartest person in the building for the four years he attended the high school where I taught, but the only one among his circle of friends who refused to take the SATs and who never went on to college. He went to work in the woods and when he later realized that in order to survey forest he needed advanced math skills he had avoided in school, he found a textbook at the GoodWill and taught himself.

I have personal experiences as well.

I recall vividly when in Seventh Grade I was outed by my homeroom teacher as the top performing student in my class. I was surprised when the teacher made this announcement and so were my classmates. I was not so smart as the dozen or so of my most gifted students, but like them I did not come from an affluent home. I did not go on skiing vacations or take special classes or play piano or take dance or have braces. And like some of them, I was not deliberately hiding my intelligence, I was hardly aware of it. My peers barely noticed my existence. I only knew that I needed to keep a low profile.

My older son was identified as disabled by his Second Grade teacher. He was tested by hearing, speech, academic, and learning specialists and tested as perfectly normal, though highly gifted in math. The lasting result was his insecurity that something was wrong with him. And then, when his brother was of concern from another Second Grade teacher, the district psychologist urged me to allow testing to “get them off his back.” Yes, crazy-smart.

In her landmark essay, “Small Poppies: Highly Gifted Children in the Early Years” (1999), Miraca Gross describes how extraordinary intelligence can lead to dysfunctional children and tragically lost adults. Despite the popular and thoroughly debunked belief that intelligence leads to or is caused by insanity, gifted children often learn to hide because what they understand and care about is out of step with both peers and teachers. (See above & below.)

[Insanity has no connection to intelligence (though a slight connection to creativity. It is a very popular notion but many studies debunk it. People of average or even above average intelligence are determined that geniuses are bat-shit crazy. No. It’s only that we do not follow them. Pretend for a moment that IQ tests, all tests, have more reliability than they actually do. That’s what a psychologist did in order to explain why highly gifted children are at risk. A person with an IQ of 150 has no more in common with the capacity of an average person with and IQ or 100 than a person with an IQ of 50. (Look up what an IQ of 50 means for real world function.)]

Smart children are generally out of step with peers and teachers, but most smart children learn to navigate a world hostile to their capabilities just fine. I was smart in school and always felt out of step. I was smart enough to manage, to find my way without getting lost. But I was not so smart as the children Gross is worried about. These are not merely gifted children, who will muddle along as I did.

The exceptionally brilliant child is more at risk because the way they think is so far beyond the average person’s abilities that as children they cannot find a way to accommodate to expectations of teachers and peers. They offend their teachers who do not grasp ideas and processes this child takes for granted. Yes, these children are too smart for their own good. They are less knowledgable and less skilled than their teachers, but far more intelligent. I’ve seen it too often. Once is too often. Teachers can be offended by a student asking questions too advanced for the teacher to answer or too complex for the teacher to even understand. Some teachers pick on such students, ridicule and bully because they are frightened by superior intelligence. How sad is that?

When a student asked me a question I had to admit I could not answer, the most common response from the student was an apology. They were so very sorry to have asked a question the puzzled me. They had been taught to be sorry for their curiosity!

Every public school today provides protections and special support for students with learning disabilities. It is in federal law. All children must be guaranteed an “appropriate education” even if that means being given more detailed step=by-step instruction, more time or easier work, one-on-one support and coaching, and continued help in reaching graduation for years past age eighteen.

Support for gifted children, children with special needs because they are exceptionally intelligent or otherwise academically or creatively gifted, varies from state to state. My state says there should be support for gifted students (those in the top 3% in performance or capacity according to tests) but offers no funding to pay for it or to more effectively identify children who need, really need support. Indeed, my own experience is that administrators and teachers often resent any sort of support for gifted students. “It should be easy for them.”

Often, this is not at all the case. Smart children are teased by peers, resented by teachers, and often ignored. They are alone in a way that most of us never experience.

Some students are singled out for TAG (Talented and Gifted) programs based on early verbal skills which were too often derived from social advantage rather than innate skill. Wealthy or influential parents pushed their kids into TAG. In the mean time, genuinely brilliant children are sometimes told they are stupid or come to believe they are, or learn to perform at a minimal level or in other ways to hide their abilities.

We fail to give them an appropriate education.

Smart children are not meaner or “crazier” or necessarily more dysfunctional, but they do have potential to master great problems. The cliché I hear all the time that “children are our future” applies to all of them too. It is an absolute and cruel loss to society when we allow the brightest among us to languish in pain, when we exclude them from their own potential. Because we are scared? Because we are jealous? Or only because we fail to recognize our shared obligation to identify the issues and ease the way of each child according to their individual need.

*Miraca Una Murdoch Gross AM is an Australian author and scholar recognised as an authority on the academic, social and emotional needs of gifted children. Born and trained in Scotland but spending a large part of her life in Australia, Gross is currently Professor of Gifted Education at the University of New South Wales School of Education and the director of Gifted Education, Research, Resource and Information Centre.

 

WET

/ janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

IMG_4967.jpg

Yesterday there were deer tracks at the base of our path to the beach. This morning a coyote had passed by. We went out a bit late, and I did not put up my hair or even put on a hat because it wasn’t cold or windy, just cooler and damp the way we like it. I unzipped my jacket on the way north because the rising breeze hit my back and I was warm. By the time I thought I should put up my hood, it was already wet inside. I figured that was okay. I hadn’t worn the jacket to keep warm but because it was wet.

As a rule, we do not mind the wet. If we minded we would live someplace else.

We walked for an hour, north and then back south. On our way north, Gary mostly followed the tracks of the coyote on the sand, and I mostly walked in the basalt rubble lining the shore. The tide came right up over the sand and several feet into the rocks last night. I found plastic bits and bobs and leftovers from fireworks, a piece of quartz, a crumb of sand-buffed green glass, and a shell. On the way home, we walked with Tammy. She was dressed for weather—hood, rubber boots—though she’d decided it wasn’t worth digging out her rainproof pants. Like my hair, her pants were drenched by then.

IMG_4966.jpgRecently, juvenile gulls have been following me. One trailed me up and down the sand and over the rocks for a quarter mile the other day. I told him that was not wise. Humans are not to be trusted, and I would not feed him even if I had anything in my pockets he could eat. Yesterday, one came quite close, stood no more than four feet away and waited for a long time for me to do something. What?

There are too many dead birds on the beach, it seems to me. We always see one or two when we walk a few miles. This time of year the new seabirds who have failed to learn their survival skills start showing up, juveniles who have starved or done something stupid. Fully grown juveniles hunker down and call weep-weep at their mothers, who are done feeding them. After the first big storm or a crazy tide, youngsters are swept off Castle Rock and wash up onshore. This morning we saw a dead bird every five to fifteen yards, and that is not typical for late September or really at any time. We haven’t had a storm and many of the dead are adults. Three banded birds in as many yards—a seagull and two cormorants. Gary says the banding may have been enough to stress them, and there is no typical, no normal anymore.

Climate change has killed billions of birds, and millions of species are already lost or threatened.

But this morning we came home dripping and I sat comfortably watching the pale sky dissolve into pale sea. The osprey was fishing, the tide rushed in, waves swept across the sand, which has not begun moving back out into offshore bars.

IMG_4969I have finished a third quilt earlier than I expected (the last four rows of stitching completed Tuesday evening instead of Friday). Late next week I will carry it to Linda, or whenever she’s finished the two I pieced in August.

Yesterday I cleared out my work space, sweeping my work table, sorting colors into warm and cool and black&white bins, and finding storage for miscellaneous sewing and knitting tools and notions. The floor seems oddly empty without fabric spread out in patterns. The scraps from stitching and trimming—trimmed threads and bits of fabric less than an inch wide—made a heap on my work table. I dug through the little pile once more and then tossed it into a waste basket. I hope Gary might pluck out bits and pieces to save for birds’ nest-building in the spring. If we composted, they could go in as “carbon” I think.

The season is changing, weather and focus. There was Open House at the high school last evening, but we were at a restaurant visiting with mostly-retired school employees. Are you enjoying retirement? Some confess to having a hard time, missing students and the work. Some are simply relieved to stop. A friend in the former group is in the hospital. After decades of deep involvement and commitment to teaching, the way we are let go can seem rather heartless. And the way those with social connections are privileged and allowed to continue on their own terms can seem unfair. Six months out, I am still uncertain where I stand.

My kitchen floor is cleaner than it’s been in almost thirty years.

Change is inevitable. Not all of it is good. Not all bad.

 

FREE ADMISSION

/ janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments

IMG_3616.jpg

When we were children the zoo in Seattle was free. There were no tickets, no guarded gates. You could walk in the main gate or by the elephant exhibit or from Lower Woodland or over by the rose garden on the south side. The Seattle Art Museum (then at Volunteer Park on Capital Hill) was free. I have photos of my brother and me on the backs of stone camels. The Seattle Aquarium was privately owned, but for a time my family had free passes because my dad worked for the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries and he knew the owner.

Writer Sandra Cisneros spoke about visiting the museum on the free day in Chicago as a girl. Access to such cultural sites without paying admission was a critical aspect of her childhood. Mine too. These places were beautiful and free.

It was what her family and mine could afford.

The Asian exhibit on Capital Hill is still perfectly clear in my mind’s eyes though I have not been there in over forty years. The elephant walking across clouds carved into pale jade. That spectacular collection has been undergoing renovation and will reopen next year. It will not be cheap to visit. Nearby is the brick tower I climbed in my teens and a conservatory where I recall the overarching tropical foliage, volcanic rock just inside the door to the right of the entrance, the cactus and rows of potted flowers. That glass house costs money to enter, a relatively modest $8 for the two of us if we went today because we are seniors. By contrast, The Burke Museum on the University of Washington campus, a place we used to wander in and out of without a thought, would cost us $40. The Museum of History and Industry, which was a favorite haunt in my childhood would cost about $36. The Pacific Science Center would cost us $48 for entrance but another $70 if we wanted to see everything. There are free days, usually once a month, for many exhibits, though not that one.

If we drove to Seattle (which Gary absolutely resists doing), the museums (some of them free one day a month) and conservatory (except on the first and third Saturday) will cost admission. The zoo has been on lockdown since Gary worked there in the 1970s. It was free when he started as a volunteer in the aviary, but admission was added while he worked in the commissary. This was particularly controversial at the time since admission fees did not go to maintain the zoo but into the general funds for the City. It costs $42 for a pair of seniors to visit today. Cheaper than the Pacific Science Center, more than the Burke. I don’t know where the funds go for all these attractions. I use Seattle as my example only because we once knew the city so well.

IMG_3624.jpgMore recently, when passes were on sale, we bought a family pass to the Portland Japanese Garden. We took our oldest granddaughter to these gardens several times when she was little, and she loved the “big fish” though she says she doesn’t remember anymore.

IMG_2021The gardens are crowded when we drive by, as we sometimes do on our way into town. For $110, we can purchase a senior family ticket to the Japanese Garden, and after concentrating on our house for the past couple of years, perhaps we will. Though it seems expensive, we can afford admission. Many families cannot.

I understand that people object to taxes and to paying for venues they never visit . . . and I think about the billions allocated for sports arenas, which are all about profits and competition and ritualized violence. And I think about the gilded screen with dozens of crows I saw as a child in Seattle, the science experiments, the wave machine, the Tiffany window—all those shared human cultural experiences I enjoyed as a child.

Public parks and museums should be free to the public, not restricted to those who can afford to pay. I wish everyone, every child, could experience what I did through public access. Very few can.

 

TONI MORRISON too

/ janpriddyoregon / 10 Comments
Toni-Morrison.jpg

Toni Morrison died yesterday at the age of 88. “Rest in power.”

When I began teaching English, I was already a great fan of Toni Morrison. I photocopied her entire first novel, The Bluest Eye, to use for one class and later was able to order classroom sets. A student came up to me after class and asked where he could find her poems. She doesn’t write poetry, I said. I mean that poem you read in class. He was talking about this:

Nuns go by as quiet as lust, and drunken men and sober eyes sing in the lobby of the Greek hotel. Rosemary Villanucci, our next-door friend who lives above her father’s cafe, sits in a 1939 Buick eating bread and butter. She rolls down the window to tell my sister Frieda and me that we can’t come in. We stare at her, wanting her bread, but more than that wanting to poke the arrogance out of her eyes and smash the pride of ownership that curls her chewing mouth.

The story is of Pecola Breedlove who will be raped by her father and utterly ruined. This is no spoiler. Morrison tells readers this on the very first page. Her concern is not what happens but how. She writes that why is difficult, but this is a novel about love and it is the how of love that she reveals in The Bluest Eye. Pecola’s brutal father destroys her. The narrator Claudia’s loving father protects her. Parents all seem harsh: “Adults do not talk to us—they give us directions. They issue orders without providing information. When we trip and fall down they glance at us; if we cut or bruise ourselves, they ask us are we crazy. When we catch colds, they shake their heads in disgust at our lack of consideration. How, they ask us, do you expect anybody to get anything done if you all are sick? We cannot answer them.”

The scene begins in iambic pentameter and ends a couple of pages later—

But was it really like that? As painful as I remember? Only mildly. Or rather, it was a productive and fructifying pain. Love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup, eased up into that cracked window. I could smell it—taste it—sweet, musty, with an edge of wintergreen in its base—everywhere in that house. It stuck, along with my tongue, to the frosted windowpanes. It coated my chest, along with the salve, and when the flannel came undone in my sleep, the clear, sharp curves of air outlined its presence on my throat. And in the night, when my coughing was dry and tough, feet padded into the room, hands repinned the flannel, readjusted the quilt, and rested a moment on my forehead. So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die.

There is enormous wisdom in these pages. It is not the most popular Morrison novel but one of the shortest. It shows up in standardized test questions and college courses. Many students have written essays about the novel in order to get into college. More have emailed me from college to thank me for introducing them to her work.

I taught Toni Morrison’s first novel for most of twenty-five years and assigned that opening passage every year I taught. It was one of the few disappointments of my MFA program that not a single person recommended her novels or referenced her work in a craft talk. Seriously. Not one.

Perhaps it was judged too high for graduate students to aspire to? In my own teaching, I always aimed above what my students thought they could do. Morrison always aimed high. The only path to excellence is to aim higher than our reach, to point the way to better than what we think we are capable of. Sometimes we surprise ourselves. I think many of my students were astonished at their own accomplishments. I hope they were.

Underestimating our capacity as a nation is equally problematic. When we assume that the United States deserves no better than a bully for a president, when we assume that it is too soon for a black or gay or woman president, we doom ourselves. We deserve better. It is the ideal upon which our country was founded. We deserve to strive and push beyond our comfortable complaisance into greatness. Isn’t greatness what the Founders had in mind?

Those eighteenth century wealthy white men aimed for a nation where people are judged by the content of their character rather than by their birth. Wasn’t that an amazing goal for such entitled folk who had all been raised to accept the divine right of kings? Of course they would not be comfortable in our society today, where a man dismissed as “white trash” can become president. (I am not talking about Trump who sits on a gilded toilet.) Their ideals far outstripped their capacity for justice.

Our ideals should always frighten us a little. I did my best as a teacher to break down complex tasks into clear and manageable steps. We must continue doing that as a nation. As Toni Morrison did in her novels: push the envelope, they say. Step out into our own idealistic world.

Step out.

“Toni Morrison, 88, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature and the 1988 Pulitzer for fiction, died on Monday night at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York. Robert Gottlieb, Morrison’s longtime editor at Knopf, said in statement, ‘She was a great woman and a great writer, and I don’t know which I will miss more.’ Sonny Mehta, chairman of Knopf, said: ‘Toni Morrison’s working life was spent in the service of literature: writing books, reading books, editing books, teaching books. I can think of few writers in American letters who wrote with more humanity or with more love for language than Toni. Her narratives and mesmerizing prose have made an indelible mark on our culture. Her novels command and demand our attention. They are canonical works, and more importantly, they are books that remain beloved by readers.’ ”

“One of her most provocative public commentaries came during what she saw as the persecution of President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In a polarizing New Yorker magazine essay, she observed that Clinton, his ‘white skin notwithstanding,’ was ‘our first black President.’

” ‘Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime,’ Ms. Morrison wrote in that article, published in 1998, a decade before Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother, occupied the White House. ‘After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.’ ”

She thought we would not be ready for an actual black president in her lifetime. Thank goodness she was wrong about that.

And I was wrong about Toni Morrison writing poetry. Here are five.

“In short, this is a full novel — rich, slow enough to impress itself upon us like a love affair or a sickness — not the two-hour penny dreadful which is again in vogue nor one of the airless cat’s cradles custom-woven for the delight and job-assistance of graduate students of all ages.”—from Reynolds Price’s review of Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977)

FAIR PLAY/FAIR PAY

/ janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment
Photo_51_x-ray_diffraction_image.jpg

Photo 51, showing x-ray diffraction pattern of DNA. Photo 51 is the nickname given to an X-ray diffraction image of crystallized DNA taken under the supervision of chemist Dr. Rosalind Franklin. It was critical evidence in identifying the structure of DNA. Dr. Franklin was not credited for this work by two men who later won the Nobel.—Wikipedia

“Our science can only benefit the whole of society if it’s done by the whole of society. And that’s not currently the case.

—Dr. Jessica Wade, a British physicist who has added 670 profiles of women and people of color in the sciences to Wikipedia since 2017

Women and people of color are underrepresented throughout Wikipedia, which is an issue Wade and others hope to repair. Dr. Franklin is there, but for many years her pioneering work, and especially her contributions to the discovery the the double-helix in DNA, was not properly acknowledged.

As a girl in the 50s and 60s, I was fortunate to be aware that women had made scientific contributions.

My father cited a UK researcher who had published as a young woman, then later under her husbands’ names, and how he wished she’d stuck with a professional name so that her work was not scattered all over his library.

 

I learned two lessons from that brief story: women are scientists and a public name need not indicate a private identity. I used to tell that story when students asked me why my last name was not the same as my husband. (On a good day, I could cite eight or nine reasons I kept my name.)

TEAM SPORTS

/ janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment
kigoa football on green grass during daytime

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How have we come to “trade the fiddle for the drum”?

/ janpriddyoregon / 5 Comments

xclouds.jpg

Fiddle and the Drum

And so once again,
My dear Johnny, my dear friend,
And so once again you are fighting us all,
And when I ask you why,

You raise your sticks and cry, and I fall,
Oh, my friend,
How did you come,
To trade the fiddle for the drum.

You say I have turned,
Like the enemies you’ve earned,
But I can remember,
All the good things you are,

And so I ask you please,
Can I help you find the peace and the star?
Oh, my friend,
What time is this,
To trade the handshake for the fist.

And so once again,
Oh, America my friend,
And so once again,
You are fighting us all,

And when we ask you why,
You raise your sticks and cry and we fall,
Oh, my friend,
How did you come,
To trade the fiddle for the drum.

You say we have turned,
Like the enemies you’ve earned,
But we can remember,
All the good things you are.

And so I ask you please,
Can I help you find the peace and the star?
Oh, my friend,
We have all come,
To fear the beating of your drum.

by Joni Mitchell

.

Years ago, I transcribed the lyric from this song (from her 1969 album Clouds) for use in my Honors Junior English class during the six weeks we spent on poetry in the spring. I had to play it several times because I am such a slow typist. My husband confessed he had never listened to the words before. He is a guitarist and had skipped this song since it is sung a cappella. New respect.

As poetry, it is one of her simpler pieces but timely.

IMPRINT EACH DAY

/ janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment
IMG_4160

Whimbrel imprints in the sand.

We walk nearly every morning and some days, when the wind drives onshore, we fill our bags with trash. Other days, like this morning, there was hardly a thing cast ashore. Most trash comes from the ocean.

All of Gary’s Mother’s Day wish is gone this morning. I thought the sand dollars had been swept away, but Gary points to the busy pattern of footprints even above the high tide line. Someone has gone out late yesterday evening and collected them. We do not mind. Take more, we say aloud. Take the other shells left as an offering on the edge of our path. Take the garden clippings Gary will not burn unless the weather turns damp and the wind blows off-shore.

We hope it was a neighbor’s child who took the sand dollars, a child not enrolled in school and not being home schooled, whatever might be the excuse. Her parents have told her that in the fall she will start at the local private school—a strong producer of entitled local youngsters, a few of them independent and charming people, but too many who think they are more important than the rest of the world. Nevermind. The little girl’s parents cannot afford to pay for trash pickup. Private school?

In the mean time I wonder: Is this something I must report? Since I am retired, am I still a mandatory reporter? Do I think this is neglect? I have known many mandatory reporters—teachers, doctors, counselors—who failed to report. My mother was still driving when she could barely walk. Where was the mandatory reporter then? No one ever thanks you for doing this duty. I have known both parents and students who never forgave me. That’s why it is mandatory, that is why I do not need to be sure. I need to have doubt.

Still.

 

Maggie Rue Hess

A HOUSEKEEPER’S VILLANELLE

I learned the beauty of futility, and now I know its sorrow
from cleaning rooms at the Holiday Inn;
what you tidy today will need you again tomorrow.
There’s a satisfaction in work whose effort you can show,
soothing to proper corners what is chaos when you begin.
I learned the beauty of futility, and now I know its sorrow,
because there is no end to the process. You must borrow
time, must accept that the struggle is the win:
what you tidy today will need you again tomorrow.
Is it never done? How do you live when you must go
through the same back-bending motions day out and day in?
I learned the beauty of futility, and now I know its sorrow.
Remember that it’s not just about hotel rooms, though;
it’s just as true for hate, failure, pain, or sin.
What you tidy today will need you again tomorrow.
The good work never sleeps: a housekeeper would know.
We clock in and clean up again and again.
And I—I’ve learned the beauty of futility as well as its sorrow—
what I tidy today will need me again tomorrow.

 

—from Rattle #63, Spring 2019
Tribute to Persona Poem

NEXT?

/ janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments

IMG_2882

Yesterday morning ravens came to eat the stale bread we threw out. An eagle flew low over our heads, and we found the pile of abandoned “treasures” dumped from some child’s bucket. It must have looked like food. Only two gulls stood in the stream. The sky was bright blue all day.That afternoon I counted twenty-eight whimbrels.

There are even more this morning and we are walking out as this goes post goes live. I like thinking someone will read this while we are a couple of miles north on the sand.

To prepare for today’s post I checked back four years ago to the first time I (almost) retired.

I entered a classroom as a teacher-in-training in 1975, had my first job later that next year at a private girls’ prep school. After moving home to Oregon I worked as a substitute teacher for a long time in the English Department, but I quit teaching altogether this past March. I taught high school for over thirty years, and I substitute taught for another decade.

Each April morning between about four and about seven, I spent writing. I do this sitting up in bed. Some days I went right on writing for the rest of the day. It was a busy, reckless month. We went away for two nights. More recently, windows have been open sometimes this week. The ocean is always calling. Today we will get our longer morning walk.

Another retired teacher asked me recently what I would do now that I am retired? It is a good question for which I have no answer. Will I do something new, or merely divvy up my time in a slightly different way? I suspect the later.

What I miss is community. During the past month, various workshops, and my MFA program, I found that writing group I feel I needed. . . . At least for a month or couple of years or a few days at a time, but not regularly. What I have are a few people who will, if I ask not too often, read my work.

My original writing group was twenty years ago and it was only me and one student. B was the first sophomore we skipped over Sophomore English into the most rigorous junior class. This was pretty much necessary since she was, in skill and ability, far beyond her peers. She needed the challenge. She was the one junior in my senior class as well, and one day I walked out of the Faculty Room and there she was coming out of the Library. “Do you want to write together this summer?” I said. She agreed. We thought we would try writing a novella, just for the challenge because it is longer than a story and neither of us had written anything long. We weren’t even sure what a novella was, so while I was busy ending the year in yearbook, B researched.

After school ended in mid-June, we began writing and meeting weekly to share and respond to each others’ work. Neither of us wanted to look bad to the other. We worked hard. The manuscripts forged ahead, the stories growing beyond what we’d expected from ourselves, beyond our early goal of seventy pages or so of a novella. I discovered what a messy process I have, and B discovered she could do anything.

By August we each had a full length novel. Since I had a publishing connection, our books were read by HarperCollins. They liked B’s quite a lot. It was far the better of the two. (A senior editor wanted to see more, but HC was about to undergo a transformation and this went by unexplored by B.)

B has published since—poetry and academic writing, books, magazine and journal articles. She is a professor of English and much in demand. I have had publications too.

Later, I nominated a student for a writing award, which she didn’t win. But she went on to an MFA in fiction.

A third student was for a time a respected slam poet. And a fourth student completed an MFA in poetry from a program that rejected me twice.

Many of the students I had the pleasure of working with for a term or the better part of a year, have gone on to careers in education, the military, the government, and various professions and occupations in the private sector. Many of them earn more than I ever have. Many are smarter and more talented than I am. They are good in their various fields.

Someday they will retire too.

I receive emails about submission opportunities almost every day, but I rarely send out fiction anymore. I don’t know what I will do about writing. Duotrope shows many fiction submission in the past 12 months, but these were nearly all agent queries about the most recent novel, and now that is completely rewritten. I am not sure what to do about that. I have other work to submit, but that will take some organization. The poems too. I keep thinking I should print them all off and see what I have. There is a warp on the loom, waiting to be completed. Two quilts fight in my head. I have worked on a pattern for a grandchild’s cardigan.

Several times I have joined writing groups in the past twenty-odd years. More than one fizzled. Another decided fiction was too much trouble. Another turned out to be social, and I did not want to drink wine and smoke dope. (That word, “dope.”) I don’t know what  new thing will be that I pass on to.

That word “passing.” We pass tests, pass by, pass it on, pass Go, pass through, pass as something we’re not, pass out, pass under or around, pass over, pass away. Time Passes. So many ways to leave the building.