Summer Reading?

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine

I'm about to set off on a journey of several thousand miles. As a fundamentally restless person, I find myself constantly drawn to travel. There is something intangibly satisfying about the simple act of moving, about the slick spine of the highway just beneath you, about the landscape yielding then slowly receding as you pass. All of my life I have felt the desire to see new things, to find and explore places I have only read about on the pages of the books that have for so long been my imaginative companions. I began to travel with my family as a child tagging along as my father crisscrossed the country as a baseball scout. My father's soul is not dissimilar to my own, he too seemed to be constantly pulled to explore, to travel, to see, to read, if you will, the pages of book to which St. Augustine is referring. I remember clearly sitting in the back of the family station wagon watching silos jut into the clear sky above the Appalachian mountains, peering through a rain-soaked  window at the jagged skyline of cities that seemed to rise miraculously from the landscape, and spending countless hours reading signs that helped me count the miles to the South Carolina state line.  As you might imagine, some of my siblings were less thrilled with our time confined in the car but I loved the fact that you could start your day in a crowded suburb where people drank soda and wore sneakers and by the time you laid your head on the pillow be in a place where people drank pop and wore tennis shoes. I found myself fascinated by the way a few hundred miles changed not only the scenery but the language and the people.
Once you crossed the Mason-Dixon line life seemed to yield to heat, the people moved more slowly and smiled more.
Despite all the travel I have remained a Jersey girl at heart. One of the things I have always loved about New Jersey is that it a place that is, indeed, many places. There are all kinds of people here from city slickers to farmers and the landscape is similarly diverse. I can get in my car and drive a short distance in one direction and find myself lost on winding country roads and then turn my car  around and drive an hour or two and be in country's biggest city. The faces that surround me daily come in various shades and are arrayed in anything from jeans and a tee-shirt to a traditional abaya. I love to travel to the various corners of my own state and discover its hidden treasures but it's summer and my rambling soul is itching to explore places unknown.
Seven years ago I made a New Year's resolution to see at least one place I'd never seen before each year for the rest of my life and thus far I have kept that promise to myself. I've traveled up and down the east coast and even once made it as far into the west as Las Vegas. My trip to Nevada, however, was made on a plane and so my 'view' of the American West was very limited and Vegas, being what it is, offered only the most commercial of Western culture. This year, I am packing up my car, picking up my best travel buddy and heading to Santa Fe. Together we will trek across several states and make our way into the west.
I've just finished reading On the Road, I've got my Route 66 travel guide and next week, we're off.
So what of St. Augustine's book? I hope that mile by mile I will be turning the pages of my own story, unraveling the plot and characters of my own life by looking both at the scenery and souls who populate the roads I will be traveling. I also hope to find a few minutes each day to blog about the people and things I've seen as I press through the country into the region so full of the rich culture of the indigenous people of the country I love. This will be my summer reading, reading the lines of the landscape, the paragraphs spread across the faces of people I will meet along the way. I am expecting this to be the best book I've ever read.

Dress Drama?

Last weekend my town was hit with its second tragedy in less than a month when another of its teens was killed in tragic accident. Two families have had to bury sons they were expecting to watch graduate in a few weeks. Instead of graduation caps and arranging parties for the sons whose lives were only just beginning they have had to choose coffins and arrange funerals. I cannot even begin to imagine what that feels like but I am certain it is the hardest thing that either family has ever done. The first death, that of Michael Rosado, happened over Spring break and resulted in a flurry of death threats to the driver who survived. Emotions run high in times like these and the impulse to channel emotion toward the person we see as responsible is, if not acceptable, at least understandable. It didn't help his case that he went on a social networking site and posted questionable updates about partying and pornography when his friend was barely buried. That said, he is a child whose judgment is not fully developed and so I suppose allowances must be afforded.
The most recent death, that of James Volpe, has resulted in something of a circus sideshow centered around a prom dress and a reality television show boutique. It seems Volpe's girlfriend, Jacqueline Genovese, tried to return her $1200 prom dress in an effort to help his family defray the cost of his funeral. It is not clear if the family needed the money but that is not the point. The girl, in an act of what seems to be generosity, wanted to accomplish two things 1) to get rid of a reminder of dreams that will not come to fruition and 2) make an offering to the family that in some tangible way shows how much she valued her boyfriend. For a teenage girl a prom dress is far more valuable than whatever the price tag reads. It is a symbol of all the Cinderellaesque dreams that have been nurtured in her from the time she first watched Disney movies. For better or worse, ours is a culture that rears girls to see dressing up like a princess to be, in many ways, the pinnacle of their young lives. American girls play dress up from the time they are toddlers, stores are replete with faux-glass slippers, tiaras, glitter makeup, you name it, miniature glamor is a staple of little girls toy chests across the country. What's the message? Well, that's debatable but at the very least, one message is beauty is magic so is it really so hard to understand how a sixteen year old could see this dress (or the money spent on it) as the biggest gift she can give to a grieving family?
Enter the 'wicked witch' who, through circumstance and incredibly questionable business sense, becomes the focus of all the emotion attached to losing a young person with so much potential. In this story the villian will be played by Diane Scali, owner of Diane & Co, a high end dress shop featured on the Oxygen network's show Jersey Couture. Scali, in what appears to be one of the worst business decisions ever, initially refused to refund Genovese's money citing the store's no refund policy. In a move that can only be called assanine she and her daughters chose to go on the news and call the mother and daughter insincere and Diane even asked if people would cry when her shop went out of business. Perhaps one of the worst public relations moves in history. Let's, for a moment, indulge Scali's niece's assertion on a public website that Genovese's mother is "Psycho bitch", if this were indeed the truth, what, exactly is to be gained by digging in your heels? Now the child has lost her boyfriend of two years, your store has decimated its own reputation and a grieving family has become subject to a media frenzy that interrupts their grieving process. Remember the Volpes, the actual victims here? It is probably safe to say that a national controversy involving flashy reality stars is not helpful in their grieving process. Somehow, in all the brouhaha about a dress their son's life has been eclipsed. I agree that Diane & Co is a company that no one should set foot in as it has exhibited a stunning lack of concern for this community but I question whether all the vitriol on the Boycott Diane & Co facebook page hasn't caused us to lose sight of the real tragedy here, a promising young man is gone.
There are cultural questions here as well. What, exactly does it say about us, that in an economic recession, it is not uncommon for parents to spend $1200 on dress that will be worn for all of a few hours. What does it say about us that at least some of our daughters have so much invested in embodying the fairy tale princesses we reared them on? I, too, am guilty of this, my daughter watched these movies, many Halloweens she dressed as a Disney princess, she owned makeup kits, attended princess-themed parties, and I am eagerly looking forward to taking prom pictures in only a year or two. I remember my own prom with relish and I still enjoy an occasion that affords me the opportunity to buy a fancy dress. Diane Scali didn't become famous for being a nice person, she became famous for running a shop that was all about image. She has made her living helping women alter their appearance going so far as to call herself the 'boobologist' for her ability to create the illusion of larger breasts. She and her family have been successful in selling America exactly what it wanted, external beauty. They only seem to have run into difficulty when the audience changed what it wanted. When we wanted inner beauty, generosity, empathy, and tolerance they seem to have fallen short.
Don't get me wrong, there is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to be beautiful but when your culture has devolved into surgical intervention, vacuous reality stars who value image and money over decency, when the death of a young man takes a backseat to dress drama, it's time to ask ourselves if we've lost focus.

Preparation

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
 -Dwight D. Eisenhower

 

I've spent the weekend firmly planted in front of my television screen watching the tragedy in Japan unfold. Like many across the world, I've been grieving for the people on the coast of Japan who, despite having one of the best records of earthquake preparedness, have come face to face with a force for which there is no adequate amount of preparation.  I sit at a very comfortable distance from the monstrous wave that washed across the coast and swept six miles inland before finally retreating. Somehow even the broadcast images of that black, debris-filled tsunami are terrifying and despite the numerous times the news broadcasts replay the image I am never truly prepared for the devastation I am witnessing. 

In the wake of tragedy there are always those who step up to the microphone to critique a nation's preparedness and to offer advice on how to be ready should a similar tragedy befall you, the viewer. Various networks have paraded survivors of the Indonesian tsunami out to help us understand the terror first hand. They've brought in geologists, nuclear physicists, and any number of related experts to help us understand the processes by which the earthquake occurred, the measures being taken to ward off meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, and the psychological effects of such devastation. The information that has most captured my imagination, however, is the fact that this earthquake has altered the earth's axis by approximately four inches. Somewhere on the other side of the planet, deep beneath the sea, an invisible pressure created a chain reaction that literally changed the world. How exactly does one prepare for that? 

When I was young I distinctly remember my father telling me that there was no such thing as luck, that luck was simply the nexus of opportunity and preparation. The concept is both reassuring and disconcerting. The reassurance, of course, stems from the idea that if one prepares then all you have to do to succeed is seize opportunity when it arises. If this holds true then we are all 'lucky' and who doesn't want to see themselves as lucky? The disconcerting part comes in when things don't go your way. It's this logic that leads us to blame ourselves for car accidents, cancer, a loved one's bad decisions. If only I'd prepared for this I could have kept it from happening. Sometimes, however, there just isn't enough preparation in the world to ward off disaster. 

I have always been subject to over-thinking things, it's a trait that drove my mother crazy. I needed, almost neurotically, to know things. When introduced to a new concept or situation, I could never really rest until I'd run every possible scenario through my mind. A Plan B was never enough for me. I needed to plan all the way to Z. If she said she'd pick me up after school I'd have to imagine every possible outcome if she failed to show up. If I confided a secret in a friend almost immediately I'd run every imaginable response to possible betrayal. This sort of preparation comforted me. I could handle anything but surprise. I've often been accused of thinking too much but from where I stood thinking any less felt calamitous.  My parents still joke about this trait and every year they give me a calender called "Worst Case Scenario" which is chock full of information on how to prepare for any number of extraordinary events. For instance, despite the fact that I have never been skiing and avoid both heights and snow, I am prepared to survive an avalanche. Should I be buried alive in one I know to dig myself out a little hole and then spit on the wall of snow, whichever direction the spittle flows, I should dig the opposite way. Yeah gravity! I also know that when being captured by an alligator I should poke him in the eye. I also know that the advice to run away in a zig zag pattern is not the best advice, just run straight because alligators tire easily on land. I live in New Jersey, I have never seen an alligator outside of a zoo here. 

Mostly I'm prepared for things I will probably never face the one thing I'm still not prepared for however, is surprise. 

Surprise is just what I've gotten lately. In the past year my father-in-law was diagnosed with and succumbed to cancer within six weeks, my dear friend was killed in car accident, and most recently my eighteen year old son decided to leave high school early and move in with friends. I was not prepared for any of this. I had run countless scenarios about how my children would grow to maturity. I'd speculated in my head about graduation parties, college dorm rooms, wedding ceremonies, grandchildren. None of the scenarios I ran had my teenage son walking out the door and cutting ties with the family. I was woefully unprepared. 

When I began raising children I read countless books to guarantee I'd do it right. I learned various parenting techniques in an attempt to insure their self-esteem, their work ethic, their academic success. I made mistakes like all parents do but I avoided the major pitfalls. I talked to them, I apologized when I was wrong, I made them do chores and earn the money they needed for trips to the movies and cellphones. I tried to prepare them to make good decisions. It looks, at least for the moment, like I failed my eldest. When he walked out the door in late January my axis shifted and nearly two months later I am still adjusting to the aftershocks. As hard as we try to prepare ourselves for the unexpected, to plan for the battles, sometimes all that strategy cannot withstand chaos of circumstance. 

This year I've seen dear friends struggle with losses I cannot fathom, one with the loss of her husband and the other with the reality of having a multiply handicapped infant. How can one prepare for the emotional ramifications of widowhood? For the loss of dreams you had for a child? For the pressures that build silently below the surfaces of our lives until in one instant your world violently shifts off its axis and you are left to somehow figure out how to clean up the wreckage? 

Sitting in front of the television listening to experts talk about how Japan might have better prepared for this disaster, I cannot help but think of all those people on the other side of the world who have only just begun to pick up the pieces of their lives. Of those preparing to bury loved ones, those gathering shards of broken glass and salvaging family pictures, of mothers clinging to children and workers frantically trying to avoid meltdown, about how the world has already begun to assign blame by critiquing their preparedness. It is human nature to analyze and as humans we like to think of ourselves as rational, advanced creatures who have, more than any other creature, been able to tame nature. The truth, however, is much less reassuring. Sometimes there are forces beyond our control and no amount of planning, no engineering, no matter how sophisticated, will ever be enough to keep unseen forces from suddenly and irrevocably changing our paths forever. So where do we find reassurance? This is not the first disaster to adjust the planet's course, in fact many major earthquakes before it have done the same. So as the people of Japan begin to rebuild their lives in a country that has literally shifted position, they will not be the first to do so. Somehow, despite the sudden jarring, even catastrophic realignments can bring an opportunity to thrive. Perhaps in a few years, when Japan has rebuilt its infrastructure, when the debris has been cleared away, there will arise from disaster a kind of strength we can gained only from the things we cannot plan for.

 

Who are you? How do you know?

Tomorrow, I'll post this question on the board and ask my AP Seniors to answer it. If history serves, and I have been asking this questions for years, 8 out of 10 of them will give me their names and say something like "I know because it's on my birth certificate" or "that's what everyone calls me." I will then ask them how many of them chose their names and a room full of people will look at me like I've lost my mind. So why ask this obviously ridiculous question? To highlight the fact that so much of how we see ourselves is established through the eyes and minds of others. We are about to embark on a unit that focuses on establishing identity and I want them to ask themselves who and what they truly are. Inevitably, I end up asking myself the same question. Who am I? How do I know? The truth is in the six years I've been asking that question of others, my own answer has evolved. Six years ago I had a newly-minted MFA degree, I was a first year teacher, I had no teenage children. Nearly everything about me was changing. I felt a sort of kinship with the students in the room, all was potential, the future lay before me. In the six years since I first asked that question many things have changed. Some for the better, others for the worse.
So what is it in us that leads us to identify ourselves through the lens of other people? I'm a teacher, I know this, at least in part, because I show up every day at a school and introduce or reinforce material to students. I am a mother, I know this because much of my day revolves around meeting the needs of my teenage kids. Wife? Sister? Friend? All of these are relational definitions of myself. I am these things because of other people. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily but I cannot help but wonder who I would be if suddenly all this were removed. Who would you be?
I urge my students to define themselves, to push past what others have established as their identity and to find and hold onto whatever it is that they actually value. The book we center all this around? The Color Purple by Alice Walker. The novel is, in many ways, a harrowing look at a voiceless, abused woman who struggles to determine who she is in relation to a world that devalues both her gender and her race. Most of my students cannot relate to the life Celie (the narrator) lives, they are mostly white, upper-middle class, and well-educated. They have not lived under the boot of oppression or poverty but each and every one of them is, like Celie, in the process of discovering their own voice. What a thrilling thing it is for me to get a chance to observe this process, what a terrible inspiration it often is to try to redefine my own identity.
There's an old adage about living many lives in the course of your one life and the older I get the more truth this seems to hold. I have been many things over the course of only forty two (okay almost forty three) years and some of them are so different that it often seems their coexistence in a single person must be impossible. I struggled for ten years with an eating disorder that nearly cost me everything. I remember clearly rationing out 200 calories a day in meat and consuming nothing else but tea and broth for the rest of the day. I remember hip bones and ribs that protruded so far as to be my most prominent feature. I did not feel hunger for nearly 15 years though I know this sounds impossible. I was that person once, though I'd barely recognize her now.
I am a mother, both biological and adoptive. I remember clearly my daughter's birth and the separate arrivals of my two sons. I remember time out chairs, making homemade baby food, taking my sons to speech therapists, kindergarten, high school. I stayed home with them for years. I was stay-at-home-mom, maker of dinner, cleaner of toilets, babysitter. All of this was a world away from in-patient hospitals for eating disorders.
I am a college graduate, a woman who finished college while caring for three kids. I'm a success but I am also a failure. I have often failed to keep my temper, to keep the house clean, to attend to the ego of my husband. I failed to anticipate the needs of one child because I was so focused on the other. I have failed to keep confidences, appointments, promises. My failures are as much a part of me as my successes, maybe more.
Tomorrow when my students leave my room some of them will wonder if they really even know who they are. Hopefully they'll question why so much of their identity is defined by their roles in relation to others. Maybe one or two will begin to re-envision themselves, the really bright ones will know that the question I've asked is one they'll spend a lifetime answering, that in their lifetimes they will be many things, not all of them good but all of them things from which they can divine great wisdom. They must, however, be willing to ask the question many times and accept the fluctuations in their answers if they hope to establish any meaningful identity.
As for me I'll keep asking that same question year after year and getting slightly different answers ever time. There's freedom in that. So who am I? Am I the nurturing friend or the lonely isolationist? Am I the conservative mother or the liberal, free-spirited artist? Am I the teacher or the student? The truth is I am all these things. I am a paradox, a contradiction, a fluke, aren't we all? 

Only words?

A little over a year ago, at the not-so-young age of forty one I walked into a tattoo parlor in Portland, Maine and got my very first tattoo. I had always wanted a tattoo but two big fears kept me from sitting down and finally committing. First, my poor Catholic mother and her amazingly powerful 'I'm disappointed' face. She never made any secret of how she felt about indelibly marking your skin. She painted elaborate verbal pictures of a life in back alleys with lascivious men, of the shame the mother of someone like that would suffer. (I admit this was both a barrier and a draw at various times.) The second reason was the pain and the worry that what meant something to me at any given moment may not hold the same attraction years down the line. I am a restless soul, I change my mind frequently. I abandon hairstyles, shoes, cars. I admit I'm fickle with my favorites and so I wasn't convinced there was anything I felt strongly enough about to literally inscribe it into my skin.
In my late thirties that began to change. I had always loved writing. Truth be told I don't remember a time when I wasn't writing. As a child I rewrote nursery rhymes, in high school I wrote tortured teen love poems, and then as my life turned toward parenting I would still sneak off while my kids napped or sometimes late at night and wrote scraps of poetry because it made me feel whole. I knew the world was full of things I could not control but for those few moments I controlled language and I felt powerful. As I advanced through my thirties and into my forties I took myself more seriously as a writer and went back to college first for a Bachelor's in Literature and Creative Writing and then for an MFA in Poetry.
It was with one of my graduate school friends that I decided to walk into that tattoo parlor. By then I knew what I'd always want both on and below my skin, words.
On the inside of my right wrist I have a small tattoo of an inkwell and a quill and beneath the the Latin phrase 'vis in verbis' which, roughly translated, means 'power/strength in words'. I decided on this for purely personal reasons. I have always found my power in the written word, in my worst moments I have been able to keep myself afloat by writing. I have been consoled and injured by the words of others. I have retreated into the safety of novels, poems, and prose crafted by the minds and hands of others who understood the power that resides in words. There is unquestionably, at least for me, power there.
In the past few weeks exactly how much power words have has become the topic of national debate. With the shootings in Arizona of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and several of her constituents the conversation has turned quickly to the vitriolic rhetoric which has characterized our political environment for the past few years. As is our nature we have begun to seek to assign blame and through the assignment of blame to regain control over something too frightening to admit we cannot control. I suppose we can never really know what led Jared Lee Loughner to load his gun and head off to hunt innocent people but we can, and should, know that words matter. When television pundits compare politicians to Nazis, when they use the rhetoric of violence, we all suffer, not from the crazed, solitary shooter but from the corrosive effect on culture. Increasingly, over the past few years we have devolved into a culture of us vs. them. Of course the 'us' and 'them' change, sometimes it's liberals vs. conservatives, sometimes citizens vs. illegal immigrants, sometimes black vs. white. Somewhere along the line we've forsaken the language of cooperation almost completely in favor of that of warfare and division.
So what of the old schoolyard wisdom we all chanted as children, 'sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me'? Anyone who's lived long enough to have a secret betrayed, watched it spread to rumor, and then learned the awful truth about misplaced trust, anyone who's had a teacher or parent belittle them, anyone honest cannot say that words can never hurt them.
This week I sat in a room full of educated people and heard someone assert that those who live in subsidized housing don't care about what's right and wrong and so the only way to get them to turn in a cop killer is to offer a reward. It was painful to hear this kind of divisive rhetoric in a room of 'educated' people but the room was loaded with emotion because in the backdrop was the funeral of Officer Christopher Matlosz who had been shot execution style by a suspected gang member. I have also seen the families of the accused blame his behavior on persecution rather than expressing concern for the slain officer and his loved ones. It's a tragic truth that in times of great stress and uncertainty people retreat into generalizations, embrace the language of division and exclusion
and just when they need nothing more than to empathize and understand they allow their fear to isolate them. We had a moment in the wake of the Arizona shootings to take a step back and ask ourselves if we needed to change the tone, with Sarah Palin's recent appearances blaming liberals for villifying her while simultaneously doing the same to them and Congressman Steve Cohen's evoking the name of Joseph Goebbels while discussing conservatives, I fear our leaders have missed the moment. I hope, however, that we can turn off all the voices clamoring for a division that empowers them by weakening us and find our way back to sane exchanges and respectful dissention, and who knows even stake out some common ground.
In a culture saturated in talk, one that seeks not only rumor and innuendo but also sermon and edification, it can be difficult to distinguish how words matter. Words are sneaky little things that seem, initially, to slide over the skin and off into the unknown but the truth is they seep in unrecognized and implant just below the surface. As human beings we need to acknowledge their power and the fact that they can blossom into beauty or they can fester into division and destruction.

The Many Prophets of Education

"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't." -Anatole France

It's a tough time to be a teacher. Everywhere I turn someone else has appointed themselves the messiah of public education. There is no shortage of would-be saviors: politicians, talk show hosts, news reporters, those throwing their hat in the proverbial ring come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Many of these contenders has a seemingly-simple solution: abolish tenure, begin using vouchers, bring prayer back into school, establish more charter schools, make the school day and/or year longer. The list of 'simple' solutions seems endless. The only thing contending with its length is its lack of a clear understanding of just how complex an issue this really is.
There is a concept in literature called deus ex machina or 'god from the machine'. The term refers to the practice in ancient Greek and Roman drama of lowering a god onto the stage who would then decide the final outcome. The term has evolved and now is understood to be a person or thing that is brought in suddenly and unexpectedly to provide an overly-simplified solution to a seemingly unsolvable problem. In modern writing it is generally considered a failure of a writer's imagination. The easy solution is, in many ways, bad art. Nevertheless many people like these kinds of endings. Have a dying girl and a sister who sues to avoid being used as a source of spare parts? Bring on the car accident. Invest an entire season of your television show traveling a fruitless route? Oops, it was all a dream.
While these sorts of ending offer a solution, it is seldom satisfying and always lacks the verisimilitude (or realism) that most modern readers and viewers desire.
These types of endings make us happy. The feel-good solution is appealing particularly because it is so rarely found in real life. We like the underdog winning the championship, the long suffering worker winning the lottery, the love-conquers-all ending simply because it is so elusive in our daily lives. How else would we make it through our favorite team's defeats if it weren't for the hope, no matter how remote, that some ethereal inspiration might result in a sudden victory? Just today, my dear friend who is a personal finance adviser expressed dismay because one of her clients shells out one hundred and fifty dollars a week on lottery tickets and stubbornly refuses to see the wisdom in taking that money and investing it. We don't want the long-term, logical solution, we want the magic numbers, the winning ticket, the instant fix.
The problem is, the odds are against us. The truth is hitting the lottery does solve many winner's personal finance issues in the short term but without counseling on how to manage money many of these same winners end up in worse situations than they started in. It's the same with many of the proposals being offered for education reform. While many of them may provide short-term results, they are doomed to failure or, at best, limited success because they do not address the tangle of causes that lead to the problems in the first place.
This desire to overlook the complexity of the issue is hitting close to home for me.I live in a state with a governor who has compared teachers to drug dealers. He seems to have come into office with guns blazing ready to go to war with the teacher's union. He has, at every turn, sought to vilify teachers via their union. He has castigated both individual teacher at town hall meetings and the union that represents their interests. However,under his guidance, New Jersey's Education Commissioner botched an application that cost the state millions in federal educational funding. Imagine my surprise when he shows up on The Oprah Winfrey show firmly cast in the role of educational messiah. Chris Christie, the governor I have heard call teachers selfish, arrogant, and greedy gets to tout himself as a trailblazer because of a gift given to the Newark public schools by a wealthy entrepreneur but never once is he asked about his administration's botched Race to the Top application. No mention is made of his vitriolic rhetoric about the very people on the front lines of this battle to educate America's youth. I cannot help but feel this kind of blind praise is fundamentally misleading.
It would be equally disingenuous of me to blindly praise teachers. Every teacher knows that there are those in our ranks who ought not to be there. We, like every other profession, have our share of incompetence, but I can honestly say that in my experience they are the vast minority. The teachers I know and respect struggle every day to find ways to connect themselves to their students, their students to the material, and the material to the 'real' world lives of these students. The job is challenging but those with a passion for teaching meet those challenges daily.
I think one thing many of these would-be saviors fail to factor in is that education is nothing like most businesses. The people who decide to teach rarely do so for the money, most of them are, at least initially,idealist. Teaching is the type of job that draws those who feel they can make a difference not those seeking to make a fortune. I was drawn to teaching because it felt like something that mattered and I received advice from my father (himself a former teacher) that I have never forgotten. He told me to always remember that I do not teach the subject, I teach the child. What this means has become clearer to me with each passing year. This is a job that changes daily. There is no preparing for things like a student's anger spilling over on you because they have issues at home, a child who didn't do their homework because their mother has cancer and they had to take care of her all night. What of the child whose home was raided by police at two in the morning and then falls asleep in your classroom as a result? The variables in education are often incalculable and that makes finding a solution far more difficult than it may appear.
One of the many panaceas being touted is charter schools. While these schools may
be,ostensibly, more successful than open enrollment public schools, they have the luxury of turning some students away. These schools start on a completely different playing field than normal public schools because they have motivated parents who are required to participate and students who benefit from smaller student/teacher ratios. Smaller classes give teachers more time to interact individually with students which gives them a leg up from the outset. If public schools had similar ratios and a student body that was made up exclusively of motivated students and parents I have no doubt they could deliver similar results. Public schools, however, do not have the luxury of turning away students and therefore cannot stack the deck in their favor. Even if they could, when, exactly, did education become a competitive sport in which we would all benefit from cutting under-performing players?
The concept of merit-pay seems to hope to foster a competition among teachers. Those whose students perform the best will be rewarded monetarily. Despite proof that merit pay doesn't actually lead to improved scores the idea continues to gain steam. But what happens to schools if we turn education into a competition between educators? We risk creating the type of environment that pits one teacher against another and in its pursuit to 'reward' the few undermines the school community as a whole. How does this play out for teachers who are assigned under-performing or special needs students? Do they stand a chance of receiving merit pay? What about physical education teachers? How will we determine their merit? Are we going to start weighing students as a means of determining if the importance of physical fitness is being appropriately emphasized? Do people who teach honors students make more because they are given students with greater ability? Will this lead to competition for these classes and an abandonment of those with special needs because it is as good as dooming yourself to lower pay to take them on? The questions are many and those touting this method provide trite, idiomatic answers that evade the fundamental difficulties. If you pit teacher against teacher in a race to get the students who will offer you the best chance of cashing in then morale will suffer and you will have created an environment that is actually counter-productive.
What so many of those running for the position of educational messiah seem to miss is that education is as much about the overall environment of the school as it is about the individual teacher. Offering bonuses to teachers whose students perform well on standardized tests will only encourage the teaching of test-taking skills. There will be less time to develop a students' critical thinking skills, the skills they will actually need in order to become contributing citizens of these United States. If the goal of education is to produce students who are excellent test takers then the vision is dangerously narrow. Not every student is going to be a great test-taker and boiling down a lifetime of education to a single test or a short series of tests is just plain foolish.
Standardized tests are a snapshot of intelligence at best. They tell you what that child knew that day, they do not factor in the intangibles like the affects of distractions like breaking up with a boyfriend, having a fight with your mom, illness, fatigue, you name it countless factors can alter test scores. How many of us would be willing to have our intellectual life boiled down to one or two days of standardized testing? We do need to assess student achievement but standardized tests should only be one tool of many.
One of the things that seems to be getting only minor play in the battle to save education is the role of the home and the community. We forget that teachers see students for only a few hours a day and that the main influence in their lives is their parents. As a parent, I would be insulted if a teacher took sole credit for my child's accomplishments. I take pride in their victories but I also feel the weight of their failures. We, as parents, have to be active participants in our child's education and refuse to enable them to shirk responsibility. In the most troubled schools family life is often a huge factor in limiting a child's success. Any educational reform that fails to develop a plan to address these factors is doomed to fail no matter how many bonuses you offer teachers.
My message to all the would-be messiahs of education? As much as we'd all like one, there is no easy answer. Any educational reform must address the tangled web of causes or it simply will not work long term. I love my job. I feel blessed to have the opportunity to help shape the lives of my students and though I refuse to pretend that I have all the answers that does not mean that I won't keep looking for them. I wish our governor, Chris Christie, would stop seeking a deus ex machina, tone down his rhetoric and amp up his efforts to work with those of us on the front lines. There is no silver bullet here and until we are willing to see all the complexities contributing to the problem, we stand little chance of actually solving it.

Victims, Voyeurs and the New Reality

For the last three days I've been consumed with the story of Tyler Clementi, the young college freshman whose roomate, unbeknowst to him, streamed live video of Tyler's most intimate moments onto the internet for all the world to see. Though I don't suppose it is possible to know all of the factors that drove Tyler Clementi to jump off the George Washington Bridge, I think it is fair to say that the voyeuristic bullying of his roommate and all those who logged on to watch was the straw that broke the camel's back. It is tempting to see his roommate, Dharun Ravi and Ravi's friend Molly Wei as evil bullies with no redeeming qualities. It would be comforting to me, and probably many others, if they were one-dimensional villains. I could believe then that locking them away would be remove the danger they represent from my corner of the world. It is an easy, but I believe,erroneous assumption. It's not that I don't think these two should face criminal consequences, I absolutely do, but I see them as one malignant growth in a much larger cancer growing in our culture.
In America we love consumerism. I love consumerism. What do I do when I'm stressed? One of two things usually, I eat or I shop. There is something about the act of consumption that soothes me. I know I am not alone in this. Over the last several years we, as a culture, have had to start facing the consequences of all this conspicuous consumption. Our love affair with stuff; designer handbags, fancy cars, big houses, and our penchant for buy now, pay later have left us in one of the biggest financial messes in nearly a century. Our devotion to both fine dining and fast food, big portions, easy and tasty fatty foods has turned us into one of the most obese countries in the world. Undoubtedly our love of consumption has taken a turn for the worse.
So what does any of this have to do with the tragic case of an 18 year old boy's humiliation and subsequent suicide? Truth is, I'm not sure, but in the days since this case broke I've been asking myself and others how two apparently intelligent, reportedly good, young people could become so desensitized to the feelings of another that it never occurred to them that broadcasting his most private moments would cause him extreme emotional duress. As a teacher and a mother I have come to realize that good kids commit both stupid and bad deeds all the time. I have seen good students, honorable young men make colossally bad decisions that have sometimes ended their lives. I have seen 'bad' kids commit acts of kindness that have brought tears to my eyes. Life is not as simple as many people would have us believe. The kid who cursed out his teacher may have been beaten last night by his stepfather. The girl who never brings her homework in may be practically raising her siblings while her mother works two jobs. On the other hand the charming athlete with all the right grades may be addicted to pain pills or drinking himself into oblivion every Saturday night.

So, if it isn't that these two young people and all the others who watched this video feed are just 'bad' people, what could it be? There is no end to the factors that may have contributed. Community, parenting, a sense of entitlement, all these things seem like reasonable avenues to explore. But exploration shouldn't be simply a quest to assign blame. Blame is easy. Blame is tidy. It's the parent's fault, the teacher's fault, the fault of media, the list goes on and on. I just keep trying to understand what may have led these two teens and the others who sat watching to fail to realize they didn't have any right to do so?

I can't help but wonder if there is something about who we are as a culture that leads people to feel entitled to consume the lives of others as a part of seeking their own pleasure. I looked in the mirror first. I, too, have subscribed to this kind of consumption. Over the past few years I've developed a penchant for reality television. For me it started with the first season of Survivor. When Susan gave her famous rat and snake speech at the final tribal council of the first season, I, like many Americans, was hanging on every incendiary word. I remember clearly the phenomena it was at the time, newscasters interviewed people who had filled bars and friends living rooms to view the show together. The success of Survivor opened something of a Pandora's box back in 2000. Since then American viewers have been able to watch women and men compete for love, for money, to lose weight, you name it there's a reality show streaming right into our living rooms that not only allows, but encourages us to entertain ourselves with the experiences of others.

It seems the emotional and sexual ante is upped every year. In the past year we've seen ex-rock stars parade girl after girl into their bed and we've stood by the proverbial door with a subtitled ear to the door. It's not only dating shows, shows like 'Big Brother', I Love Money and Jersey Shore have used night vision cameras to give us a front row seat to the most intimate moments of strangers. Of course all of these people consented, each and every one of them signed some sort of release that opened the door for all our most voyeuristic tendencies. Tyler Clementi signed no such agreement. He did not ask for, nor did he want, for his most personal moments to be offered up for the entertainment of his peers.

So why do so many of us keep watching these 'reality' shows? I have often heard, and just as often said, that part of the appeal of watching these shows is that is makes me feel better about my life. At least I'm not that messed up. I may not be perfect but at least I'm not willing to throw myself at a man who is dating 20 other women at the same time he's dating me. I don't get drunk out of my mind and have fist fights with other women. I know, unlike Snooki, that the pilgrims predate the 1920's. It's almost pathetic how willing we are to build our self-esteem on the wreckage of other people's lives. Anytime I want to I can instantly access the lives of strangers. If I don't happen to be near a television, I can pull up youtube on my cellphone. I watch them fall off bikes, propose marriage, try to construct sheds. A whole new world has opened up for me over these past few years. This unprecedented access into stranger's lives is new to me.

It isn't however, new to everyone. Those of us who matured before the early 90's
have lived in a world where "It's none of your business" had some real, practical meaning. Those of us born after that probably never have. This generation of teens has never lived in a world without reality television. Even before Survivor, MTV's Real World put the lives of 'real' people on display. For someone born in 1992, reality television has always existed. It has always been socially acceptable, even envogue, to entertain yourself by watching the trials and tribulations of others. Privacy has been dying a long and painful death for years now. It seems to me that personal boundaries have been blurred beyond recognition for many people. Young people can post their every thought on social media sites, they can anonymously harass each other on sites like Formspring, they regularly send inappropriate photos of themselves via text messages. No wonder some of them can't quite figure out that the rest of the world does not exist solely for their entertainment.

Did Dharun Ravi target Tyler Clementi because he was gay? Perhaps we'll find out, perhaps not. Whether this was a full blown bias crime or just a couple of teenagers so wrapped up in their own desire for fun that it never occurred to them that they didn't have a right to turn his private life in their own reality show bespeaks a moral bankruptcy that can only come from years of splurging on their own desires. They laid bare the life of one young man for public consumption and in doing so left him feeling completely void of hope.

I don't know if years of cultural voyeurism had anything to do with what happened to this young man or not. I still have many questions about how young people could be so void of empathy that they failed to foresee the damage they were doing. This situation shows me just how little I know. There is one thing I can predict with a great deal of certainty though. As I write this, someone, somewhere is uncovering all Mr. Ravi and Ms. Wei's secrets, interviewing anyone they know who is willing to talk, scouring webpages, yearbooks, anything they can get their hands on in order to prepare for our consumption a feast of information about their families, their friends, their accomplishments and their shortcomings. Both these young people are about to learn just what it feels like to have your life offered up for the consumption of the curious.