How I Got Screwed By The Tooth Fairy

Noah needed some oral surgery. This fact alone made my wife, Paige, and me feel terribly guilty. What had we done wrong? Too many sugared snacks? Not enough brushing? A sign of some more fundamental flaw in our parenting? We met with our great surgeon and he confided that his own son had needed the same surgery when he’d been in dental school. That made us feel better. Still, the whole event felt deeply unfair in every way for everyone concerned (except for the dentist who’d be making a few grand from the surgery and the anesthesiologist who charged $600 an hour). The injustice of it all served as the launching point for what would turn into something of an emotional journey, and I think I wanted to stay there on the dock, only mildly irritated, rather than let myself sail off into genuine fear.

The night before Noah went in for his oral surgery, Paige and I realized that neither of us have ever been put under for any medical procedure. She didn't tell me she was worried, so I didn't tell her, for fear I'd cause her concern. That was ridiculous. Paige is a worrier. I should have assumed she was concerned. Instead, I stayed up long after both if them were asleep, wrestling with my fears alone. I kept myself occupied with my normal late night insomniac pastimes; reading the op-ed pages of a digital handful of newspapers, listening to podcasts, opening just one more can of caffeinated soda and expecting to curse myself for going to bed with it half full, then cursing myself for finishing it. When I finally lied down I went into full-freak-out mode, allowing the worst kind of fantasies to play themselves out as waking nightmares in the darkness.

The next morning, we brought Noah in to the oral surgeon’s, after a forty-five minute drive from our small town to the slightly larger town up the highway. We were escorted into a little room and Noah sat on my lap while the anesthesiologist deftly gave him a shot before he knew what was going on. I held him and asked him to read the names of cities on a map of the U.S. on the wall, but in less than a minute his eyes glazed and his head lolled. He looked amusingly confused, but wasn't quite asleep when I laid him on the chair and left for the waiting room.

I couldn't sit still there for long. I stepped outside to grab some air, and I called my mom. When I confessed that I was nervous, she told me that Paige had posted a status update about her nervousness on her Facebook page before we'd left the house that morning. In a way, that made me feel better. My anxiety was validated, but it also gave me a job. It's my roll to be the one who says, "I'm sure it will be fine." Paige handles the worrying. Now I could focus on actively feigning confidence. I'm not sure how better poker players view bluffing, but for me a large part of bluffing involves not turning my brain off (which might appear different) but really turning it on and using the focus to make sure I don't do anything out if the ordinary. I did tell Paige about the call, and that I knew about her nervousness. Part of me wanted to let her know just how much I shared the feeling, in order to let her know she wasn't alone, as I'd felt the night before. I split the difference, telling her I was also nervous, but betraying nothing more about my anxieties with my voice or gestures.

To pass the time, I tried to shift my nervous energy to anger and disdain for Reader's Digest. I noticed a cover article about "The 100 Reasons Why We Love America". I flipped to the article, expecting a piece of piss-poor journalism. List articles are notoriously lazy. Also, I thought the theme of the piece would dictate something either painfully schmatzy or infuriatingly jingoistic. It tended toward the former, but it didn't disappoint in the piss-poor journalism department. I took notes to rail about it later on my blog, but when I told Paige about it she said it just sounded cruel. Which it was. But I still stand by my disdain for Reader's Digest.

Unfortunately, with the air drained out of my anger balloon, and with all the gears whirring in my head, I found myself contemplating the most horrid possibilities, outcomes so terrible I can't bring myself to describe them fully here. I wouldn't go so far as to say this was some kind of preemptive grieving. Instead, I imagined my own inability to participate in that kind of grief. It was like an extended trailer for an epic film about catatonia.

Then, Noah had the gall to draw things out further. The surgeon came out to tell us all had gone well, but Noah was choosing to take his sweet time in waking up. He came out a few more times to give us updates on Noah's continued unconsciousness. At this point I'd stopped worrying, but my anxiousness to see my boy grew and grew. It reminded me of those nights before my family would go to Disneyland when I was a kid; I'd lie in bed and remind myself that I needed to sleep to maximize my fun the next day, but I'd also be aware that every passing second of consciousness brought me closer to that moment when I'd see the Matterhorn rising above the skyline of Anaheim. Noah, half awake and wanting to be held by his daddy: That was my Matterhorn now.

Eventually the surgeon told us that, though most kids take about twenty minutes to wake up, in some cases it could be much longer, and the anesthesiologist had even called a colleague who told her about a case where the kid slept for seven hours. Noah didn’t break any records, but he slept for 900 more dollars of the anesthesiologist’s time.

After putting four grand in his mouth, Paige and I now had to calculate how much the tooth fairy would leave under his pillow that night for the teeth we’d paid to have removed. My next task is going to be haggling with my dental and medical insurance companies to convince them that they should take on some of these costs. So far they’ve covered $1500 (the $4000 is beyond that) of the surgery and refused to touch the anesthesiologist’s bill, on the grounds that it was elective, as though a five year old would have sat still under local anesthetic while a couple of his teeth were removed. I think, in the name of justice, the insurance companies should not only pay for the surgery and anesthetic, but because of their initial refusal, the time it will take to argue with them, and the stress at having our savings entirely depleted, if and when they finally relent they should have to hire someone to break into my house in the night (with any costs of damage added to the total) and silently slip a check under my pillow. That would really be the only fair way for the story to end.

Peak Oil vs. Peak Terrorism

I love the Political Gabfest, Slate Magazine's weekly political podcast. But I do have a small quibble with a point I heard on the last episode.

Slate's chief editor David Plotz made the point that we need oil to power our carbon based economy, so, rather than ban drilling on our own coasts just to buy oil from elsewhere, we need to accept a certain degree of risk and get on with it. He's made this argument in relation to terrorism before, and I found that far more persuasive.

When it comes to terrorism, we cannot possibly stop every nutcase without accepting a police state that's so invasive it's worse than the threat posed by the terrorists themselves. We fight terrorism as best we can, but we tolerate a degree of risk. That argument makes a lot of sense to me.

Now, if we are going to remain on a carbon based economy, with gasoline dependent infrastructure, I think Plotz is right to point out that the risk will always exist, and the notion that we can't drill on our shores is similar to sending our garbage to third world countries; we're exporting the risk of environmental disaster instead of the material itself, but its morally equivalent. It's also equivalent to the regular refrain about nuclear power plants and, to a lesser degree, coal fired ones: We want the power, but we don't want the potentially dangerous or immediately polluting plant in our own back yards. On these grounds, I'd be in with the "Drill baby drill" crowd.

But I'm not. Because oil is different than nuclear power, and it's certainly different than terrorism. Nuclear power, despite its (minimal) risk and the (significant) problem of nuclear waste, is a far more efficient and less environmentally hazardous source of power. We should be shifting to it until we can create the infrastructure for cost-effective solar and wind power. So, in the case of nuclear power, we should encourage people to tolerate the risk because we want to incentivize the behavior.

In the case of terrorism, homicidal crazy people are a depressingly renewable resource. Encouraging people to tolerate risk in regards to terrorism does not encourage terrorists or eliminate them; they will exist regardless. Instead, some tolerance of risk might actually disempower terrorist. The people out on Times Square the day after the failed bombing last week showed this. A terrorist is someone who has given up on winning through attrition or conquest, and can only win by generating fear. Encouraging people to tolerate some risk diminishes that fear to some degree.

Our dependence on oil, on the other hand, is a behavior we want to stop precisely because its supply can't hope to last as long as our supply of homicidal nutjobs. Since we will inevitably hit peak oil and the price will cripple the market, fear of the dangers of pumping oil might increase the price, which then encourages investment in solar and wind by creating economies of scale. It's true that always looking for oil somewhere else is irrational (and incredibly expensive, in blood and treasure, when one considers the unstable and evil regimes propped up by oil and the wars fought over it), but this irrationality does serve to elevate the price, which is far too low. If we want to ween ourselves from oil rather than going cold turkey when peak oil hits, we should be looking for every means to raise the price incrementally. Fear of pollution causing increased production and transportation costs is a crummy way to increase the price. A tax would certainly be better. Unfortunately, it's political suicide for any politician who proposes it. There are two times when higher gas taxes will be opposed: during an economic expansion (which could be threatened by higher gasoline prices) and during an economic contraction (which could be prolonged by higher gasoline prices). So we're stuck with gas prices that don't keep up with inflation and no tax dividend to spend on creating the infrastructure to move beyond oil. Higher prices caused by searching for oil beyond our shores might help push us toward a less dependent economy. Also, when we do hit peak oil, we'll then have a reservoir of gold under our continental shelf. Even when we drive electric cars powered by solar panels and wind farms, we'll still need plastic. Why burn up all of the precious resource to keep prices artificially low, when we could benefit from higher prices and save the resource until it's far more valuable?

So, be afraid of the massive oil slick in the gulf coast. Refuse to allow another rig to be built off our shores. And if the price at the pump continues to rise, be grateful (as best you can), knowing it will make solar and wind power cost effective that much sooner.

The Myth of the Evil Teacher Union, Part VI

6. Teachers unions are in bed with the Democratic Party.

As myths about teachers unions go, in my experience this one is the most likely to be accepted by teachers themselves. My colleagues who are loyal Republicans resent the fact that a portion of their check is taken out every month just so that a portion of that can be given to Democratic candidates (or used is ads supporting them). I get that. If I’d had some of my check taken out to support politicians whose policies I don’t approve of, I would resent it. Oh, wait. I did. That portion is called taxes, and some of my money goes to support policies I don’t approve of. I would resent it even more if a second line item went to one political party, and that party wasn’t the one I (often reluctantly, while holding my nose) support.

But here’s the rub: The national umbrella of the teachers unions, the NEA, tends to support Democratic candidates precisely because those candidates court the teacher’s unions. Similarly, each election cycle our state branch asks candidates of both parties to come and speak to the membership of the union, and make their case. Sometimes we support the Republican candidates, though generally we end up supporting the Democratic ones. That’s not because the NEA, or our state branch, the OEA, or our local branch, the CEA, is in bed with the Democratic Party. It’s because the party wants our votes more and is willing to side with us in order to garner those votes. We’re not in bed together. The union is single and dating, and he Dems keep asking us out.

If Republicans (or Green Party Members, or Libertarians, or members of any other party) resent the fact that teachers unions tend to support candidates from the Democratic Party, there are two questions they should be asking themselves. One: Why are the Dems willing to offer more concessions to woo teachers? And Two: Why isn’t my party more actively courting this constituency?

There are approximately 6.8 million teachers in the United States. Beyond that, there are support staff, the spouses of educators, the parents and children of educators, etc. For comparison purposes, there are 4 million members of the NRA, and about 5 million Jews. I choose those groups because they are of similar size, and because, like teachers, NRA members and people who are either ethnically Jewish or of the Jewish faith do not vote homogeneously. However, consider the lengths political parties go to court those two groups. Democratic candidates make fools of themselves trying to convince gun owners that they are not opposed to 2nd amendment rights, and both parties try to one-up one another in their vocal support of Israel (as though that alone will bring the Jewish-American vote). Republican candidates do not make the same kind of noise about supporting public school teachers.

This partisanship does not benefit teachers. We would be better off if both parties were courting our votes, just as gun owners have a huge advantage over anti-gun advocates, and the pro-Israel lobby has a huge advantage over, for example, the pro-Palestinian lobby. One noteworthy downside of this one party voting is that, much like African Americans on the left or conservative Evangelicals on the right, teachers’ concerns are often taken for granted by politicians who consider them a reliable voting block. So why won’t the parties fight for so many votes?

I am not a senior Republican strategist, so I can’t give the answer definitively. Perhaps they think we’re a lost cause; that so many of us are registered Democrats that we can’t be swayed. I find that unpersuasive, though. Other groups which are almost uniformly affiliated with one party or the other, like African Americans, Jews, or gun owners, are still courted by both parties. If I were a Republican teacher who resented the way my union dues were being spent, I’d want to examine this question a little further.

Appealing to gun owners or people of specific ethnic or religious backgrounds who traditionally vote for the other party has very little down-side. A politician might peal off a few votes, but no one in the base will resent the effort. This hasn’t always been the case. You didn’t find a lot of Dixiecrats in the South trying to reach out and garner the Jewish vote or the African American vote during segregation, or many Republicans doing it during the active use of Nixon and Reagan’s “Southern Strategy”. Why not? Because there was a numerical down-side. For every vote a politician might have peeled off by offering concessions to Jews or African Americans in the South, that politician would lose an even greater number of racist, anti-Semitic white voters. Every time I see a white, Christian, conservative politician actively courting the black vote in Alabama or the Jewish vote in Florida, I feel a little bit more proud of my country; it’s one thing for a party to reach out to a disenfranchised group. That could be ideological, or it could be a political calculation (for different Democrats it’s been both). But when the other side does it, it’s very real measure that racism and anti-Semitism, though still with us, have been properly relegated to the lunatic fringe and are shameful to the general public. Though there have always been Republicans who opposed racism on ideological and moral grounds (the party began in Wisconsin as an anti-slavery party in 1854, after all), this shift from the infamous “Southern Strategy” means the calculation has changed on this issue.

And that brings us back to education. Though some Republican candidates show up to court the teachers unions on the local level, the fact that it’s not part of the strategy of the national candidates signals to me that the political calculus doesn’t support it, in the same way that addressing the concerns of African American voters wouldn’t have helped a Republican or a Dixiecrat in the South once upon a time, and supporting anti-gun legislation wouldn’t help a Democrat now. Someone at the Republican National Committee headquarters has run the numbers, and they don’t work. For every teacher vote garnered by appealing to the teachers unions, more votes would be lost in the base. And it behooves a Republican teacher, and any American concerned about our education system specifically and the state of education generally, to ask, “Why?”

Why has one of the major political parties in the country decided that supporting public school teachers is a losing bet for them? Part of this is ideological. Died-in-the-wool libertarians who want to limit the scope of government, as much as possible, to national defense are philosophically consistent if they believe that the government has no place providing public education. No politician would speak this aloud (except maybe Ron Paul. Can anybody tell me if he came out specifically on this issue?) but in order to keep libertarians in the big tent, Republicans have to stand against the “public” part of public education in some way. For religious conservatives, the hitch with public education relates the its inherently secular nature; public schools don’t advocate for any specific religious belief system. Worse, since they are not obligated to promote a religious belief system, if they teach content deemed to be religiously neutral, like science or history, but which actually posits truth-claims that contradict certain religious teachings, they can actually run counter to the interests of various religious sects. Want to keep religious conservatives in your big tent? Run against public schools. Republicans, going back all the way to their anti-slavery days, have been the party of private businesses. Want to support for-profit schools? Run against public schools. Worst of all, want to appeal to the “working class” through offensive and condescending displays of your folksiness? Use language that implies you are uneducated, and then when someone in the media calls you on it, run against the media as part of the intellectual elite. This is a mechanism to tie intellectualism to education in an effort to run against both.

This brings us to a chicken-or-egg dilemma. Why has higher academia generally leaned left? Is it because the ideology that would support academic freedom and the benefits of knowledge for all coincides with other leftist beliefs about utopianism, communalism, and social equality? Or is it because those who have benefited most from public education (i.e. those raised out of poverty through education) are loyal to the institution that made their social mobility possible, and thus choose the ideology that reinforces those values? It’s probably a bit of both. Regardless, the highest echelons of academia are predominated by liberals. That’s not to say that Republicans don’t attend Harvard or earn Ph.Ds. In fact, the conservative revolution of William F. Buckley Jr. centered around an intellectual flourishing through the establishment of conservative think tanks and the support of conservative intellectuals. But that intellectual underpinning has been intentionally hidden. Those very think tanks full of Ivy League grads with Ph.Ds put out talking points on Fox News decrying Democratic candidates as “Ivy League Elites”. Just as the chicken-or-egg problem emerges when trying to explain why intellectuals tend to be on the Left, a similar problem develops on the Right. Is anti-intellectualism a position Republicans have taken for political reasons, which then breeds a resentment of education, or do enough Republicans resent education and thus gin up anti-intellectual rhetoric? Again, it’s probably a bit of both, and the longer it remains politically expedient, the harder it will be to trace the origin of that anti-intellectualism.

So the party has decided to keep these disparate elements in one tent: The anti-intellectuals, the intellectual anti-government libertarians, the religious anti-secularists, and the pro-business anti-public sector crowd. So, where does this leave the Republican public school teacher? Resentful of their own union. Beyond that, I can’t say with any authority, because it’s something I genuinely don’t understand. Are Republican teachers working against their own political self-interest by working in the public schools and financially supporting a union that generally favors the other party, or are they working against their own professional self-interest by supporting an institution, through their labor, the very existence of which is in conflict with the platform of the party they support? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I hope that any Republican teacher has given it some serious thought and has an answer handy. For many, I expect that they are issue voters, who might not like the anti-education path their party has chosen but vote on some other issue. I think that’s defensible. I hold my nose on certain Democratic positions, too. But I would hope that any Republican teacher really wrestles with the question, and I would encourage them to push back within their own party. Get your candidate to vie for the support of teachers. Make them publicly state their support for public education. And if your candidate won’t, ask yourself, if this person doesn’t believe in what you do, either because it’s a government funded school, a secular school, or a stepping stone toward elite academia, do you really believe in public schools, and, if so, why associate with a party that doesn’t?

Any other myths about teachers unions that I should rant about? Leave them in the comments below.

The Myth of the Evil Teacher Union, Part V

5. Teachers unions prevent effective merit pay systems from being put in place.

This one is half true, which makes it completely false. Teachers unions have actively worked to prevent merit pay systems from being put in place. That’s because merit pay systems, at least all the ones I’ve ever read about, will not be effective at improving teacher performance or student performance. Worse than that, I don’t honestly believe they are designed to do so.



As pointed out above, merit pay systems complicate the dynamic between teachers and students. Unless students have a reason to try hard on standardized tests, merit pay sytems offer them a vehicle to punish their teachers without consequences. We saw this dynamic play itself out when there was no perverse incentive for the students at all; for years our state tests were used only to measure teachers and schools, but had no bearing on a student's grades, gradation, or acceptance to colleges. Consequently, students just didn't care. This year has been the first year when passing the tests has become a graduation requirement. Suddenly (suprise!) student effort on the tests has increased dramatically. To tie teacher pay to student performance might undermine this effort in a way: Students who have "met" could graduate without trying to "exceed", thereby hurting specific teachers they don't like. Also, students who do like their teachers and want to please them would face even more guilt if they failed. I prefer to have my students doing their best for their own benefit, not trying to hurt me or feeling bad if they take money out of my pocket.

[Lest I forget to mention it, let’s not forget what was pointed out in the book Freakonomics: Merit pay systems encourage teachers to cheat.]

There are different models for merit pay, but most rely on test scores. Ignoring the fact that No Child Left Behind leaves testing up to states, which has encouraged states to create easier and easier tests each year in order to show fictional improvement, the tests are still shoddy measures of teacher performance. In most states (Oregon included) students are not tested against their own previous performance, but at specific grade levels, with their scores compared to previous students taking similar tests, or against other students in the state taking the same test. In other words, as we norm the test we hold the students up against other kids. That’s not a means to test a student. It’s a means to test a school. Even then, it’s a poor measure because the school has no control over who comes through the door. We are not factories trying to make machines out of identical widgets. Regardless of the condition our “widgets” come in, we are not allowed to turn them away. Nor are our students like customers, who can be enticed by better products or lower prices. The idea that schools should be run like businesses doesn’t apply, which is why charter schools keep under-performing on state tests when compared to public schools. They are private businesses, which inclines them to want to import business models onto education. And that causes them to fail.

Despite this knowledge or the limits of their utility (and tests are NOT all bad. Despite what some critics might tell you, they do have a place) merit pay systems use test scores, generally as the be all and end all. They either grade teachers based on the improvement of different students within the district, year after year, or based on over-all passing rates in the state. From there, they do one of two things. Either they identify the “best” teachers and pay them more, or identify the “best” schools and pay all their teachers a bonus.

I’m not sure which model is worse. The first, in my opinion, is a blatant union busting move. To use a sports analogy, it’s locker-room poison. If teachers were rewarded based on the over-all passing rates of their students, some teachers would get a bonus every year, while the teachers (like those who teach our special ed populations) would never get one. How long before that would cause dissension within the ranks? On the other hand, if we measured by student improvement, high performers would be missed. The tests only identify students as meeting standards or exceeding them. I’d love to take all the credit for my kids’ successes, but in my honors classes the kids have been exceeding every year since they were in elementary school. There is no room for improvement, according to the state tests. So I would never get a bonus check based on my honors classes, while those working with what we call the “bubble kids”, those right on the cusp, would see the most dramatic gains every year. And again, those working with our developmentally disabled children would be penalized every year. I also work with second language learners. They often show the most dramatic improvement, but because they are so many years behind their peers in English language acquisition, they almost never meet the state standards. How would we account for that?

I can’t see a way of making an individual merit pay system fair without completely un-doing the system of specialization we have in place, which is one of the things our schools do really well. We should be reinforcing the fact that some teachers have special training and ability when it comes to teaching special populations, like special ed. students, second language learners, and gifted students. To give every teacher an equal chance at a yearly merit bonus, we’d have to give every teacher and equal distribution of students. That would rob the kids of the teachers best bale to serve their specialized needs.

The model of rewarding entire schools rather than individual students seems to be an appealing work-around for this problem. Its advantage is that it encourages teachers to collaborate to bring test scores up school wide. That’s good. But it can’t account for the fact that schools serve different populations, so schools that are behind will have less incentive with which to acquire and retain good teachers, thus falling further behind. In that system whole schools would face the challenge faced by individual teachers in the first model: Schools with disproportionately advantaged students (i.e. schools in wealthy areas) would either succeed every year in meeting benchmarks, or fail every year to show dramatic growth. Schools serving disproportionately challenged populations (high poverty, high non-English speaking populations, etc.) would also be winners or losers depending on whether we measure meeting state standards or measure improvement. In both cases, the success would be largely out of teacher’s control, thus eliminating the chief aim of merit pay, which is to motivate teachers.

At its heart, the problem of merit pay systems is that they are based on an incorrect assumption; that students are failing in school because their teachers are unmotivated. If teachers were primarily motivated by pay …THEY WOULDN’T BE TEACHERS! We don’t do this to get rich. We would like fair pay. I think that any merit pay system that doesn’t recognize this will read like a slap in the face, because that’s exactly what it is. If a pay scheme were to be devised which attempted to deal with all the variables mentioned above, it should still be preceded by a general pay increase. That would show teachers that the scheme isn’t based, first and foremost, on an insulting presupposition, but really is a means to reward the best performers among a group of already respected professionals.

Tomorrow, Myth #6: The Teachers Unions are in bed with the Democratic Party.

The Myth of the Evil Teacher Union, Part IV

4. Teachers stand in the way of school reform.

Bunk. You tell me there’s a book I can read that will make me a better teacher; I’ll read it. You tell me there’s a conference (during my summer “vacation”) and you’ll send me there, without paying me, because it will make me a better teacher? I’ll go. I want school reform. I’m desperate for it. Just one caveat: You have to be as serious about improving the education of my students as I am, because your kids are precious, their time is precious, and my time is… well, you buy my time cheap, but the point stands.

So far, most efforts labeled “school reform” simply aren’t serious.

If we really wanted to improve student performance, we wouldn’t give kids three months to forget what they’ve learned followed by a month to review what they’d forgotten in each calendar year.

We wouldn’t delude ourselves that measuring one tenth grader’s test score against another tenth grader’s test score tells us anything of value about an individual tenth grader. Testing would measure improvement of an individual student over time, and the students would have access not just to a numeric score, but to the answers they got right and wrong, so they could actually learn from the testing experience. If we’re more concerned about protecting the property rights of the multi-million dollar test making corporations than we are about kids’ learning, we aren’t serious about school reform.

We would stop using A,B,C,D, and F as measures of student performance. They are ridiculous. They’re arbitrary, inconsistent, and subject to inflation. Worse, a D means a student has not mastered the content to a satisfactory level, but we’re sending him on to the next grade anyway. Today’s D is tomorrow’s F. Why do we use this terrible, cruel system? Because when a school tries to switch, two things happen: Parents want any description of their child’s performance translated back into a letter grade they can understand, and colleges want a GPA for admissions purposes. If we’re more interested in satisfying parents with meaningless letters and with providing colleges with fuzzy data than we are in accurately describing what an individual kid can accomplish, we aren’t really serious.

We would stop funding school by localities. It’s absolutely backwards. The kids who live in the largest houses, with the best educated parents, get to go to schools with the largest budgets. The kids who don’t have enough food to eat and may not have a single book in their home go to schools with the least means to support them. School reform initiatives that don’t address this aren’t serious.

We would give up on the stupid idea of local control. I have yet to hear a single good argument for the benefit of local control of schools. Sure, there’s the hysterical paranoid notion that the evil federal government is going to make all our kids into communist robots. Um, that falls squarely in the “not serious” column. Let’s look at the reality: Local control means a school board of elected officials who may not know a thing about education are chosen from a given community to determine what kids should learn. Despite all their good intentions, they have to spend a massive amount of their time and energy trying to keep their schools in good standing with state and federal law, and with the requirements of universities, who don’t care about what small town their students come from. In exchange for all this work, school boards can’t possibly identify a single bit of knowledge that students from our small town need in order to be successful in the working work which isn’t also essential for kids from the next small town, or the nearest metropolis. Can you imagine a major chain retailer designing itself with a CEO, a CFO, a complete board of directors, a human resources department, and an independent product line in every town where it intended to compete? I want my small town restaurants to have a unique flavor, and my small town bookstore to have a proprietor who really loves books rather than a Walmart stock-boy working on his GED, but my school does not need to provide students with different facts than any other school in this country. Can somebody please explain the merits of “local control” to me, beyond paranoid dystopic fantasy? Please?

I could go on and on about the ways our reform efforts have been piecemeal, cosmetic, political posturing, or blatant union busting maneuvers, but the one thing they haven’t been is serious, comprehensive efforts to make our schools truly competitive with our international competitors. I remind my kids every year that India has a billion people, and that their kids work harder in school, study more at night, have a longer school year, and read and write better in English than we do. Oh, and they’re multilingual. Then I ask my students, if they owned a company and could choose between an employee from India who would work for half as much, or the kid sitting next to them in my class, who would they hire? Without fail, they say they would hire the Indian student. But we continue to complain about jobs going overseas. We aren’t serious.

Education is investment. Teachers, underpaid and underutilized, have already proven themselves willing to make sacrifices for our children’s, and our nation’s, future. Complaining about unions is a means to avoid talking about the realities of the challenges we face. It’s a pathetic blame-game, and that’s a posture for people and nations who lose.

Tomorrow, Myth #5: Teachers unions prevent effective merit pay systems from being put in place.

The Myth of the Evil Teacher Union, Part III

3. Teachers get lots and lots of vacation.

If you had a friend who lost his job at a factory, would you tell him he’s lucky because he now has lots and lots of vacation? If so, you’re a jerk.

“Vacation” implies that one has a period of time in which they are not working, but are being paid by their employer. Teachers may have extended times during the year when they are not working, but we are not paid during those periods.

Do you know how many days I can choose to take off and still get paid? Two. Do you know what I would do if I chose to take those “personal days” off? I would grade the piles of essays sitting on my desk. Now, I do get bank holidays. I have no complaint about those. And I love my Winter, Spring, and Summer breaks. But I don’t get paid during those breaks, so they aren’t “vacation”. They are regular periods of unemployment. In fact, we are given contracts in the Spring so that we cannot file for unemployment compensation in the summer. We have jobs, just without pay. Your pal who got laid off from the factory might get unemployment. So who’s getting “vacation”? Personally, I would love shorter summers. They would make our students more competitive with their peers over seas, who have shorter summer breaks (or none at all), and they would mean I could work a lot more of the year. I think many parents would love it, as they wouldn’t have to pay for so much childcare during the summer. In all the talk of school reform, how much do you hear about lengthening the school year, one of the guaranteed and proven ways to improve student performance? Not much. Because you’d have to pay teachers. Reformers don’t want to do that. So quit saying I get lots of vacation, and worse, that the union is to blame, when I’m asking you to let me work more.

Tomorrow, Myth #4: Teachers stand in the way of school reform.

Myth of the Evil Teacher Union, Part II

2. Teachers are overpaid.

Critics of teacher’s unions like to claim we’re overpaid. This is a convenient claim, because it’s impossible to refute exactly without a clear sense of what we’re worth. They aren’t lying if they think we’re essentially worthless, which many of them seem to do. I suspect these kinds of critics have very little sense of what we do each day, and I would love to change jobs with one of them for just one day and see how they succeed with my 170 students. Unfortunately, because these vague claims about our compensation are repeated so often, many rational people who value education and educators come to believe we are overpaid, while filtering that notion through their own conception of fair payment.

One of my best friends was working as a tax attorney for a private firm in Portland, and overheard his boss complaining about how little teachers are paid. “They only pay them eighty thousand dollars a year,” the boss informed everyone. My friend, whose wife is a public school teacher, bit his tongue. The boss was trying to argue for teachers, but had no idea that we make far, far less than that. Starting pay, on average, is in the low thirties. In places like Oregon, it tops out in the mid sixties. This is slightly on the low end for national averages. California’s average is $64,424, while South Dakota has the bottom spot with an average of $36,674. This wouldn’t be so bad, if one could get a job teaching right out of high school, but many of us have masters degrees we’ve refinanced for thirty years so that we can still pay the rent. That means we are making student loan payments for, in many cases, our entire careers. This particular boss, a lawyer, probably paid a hefty sum in student loans for his education. For that large amount he received one more year of education than I have (unless he went on for an LLM). As a consequence of that education, he made so much money that he considered that mythical $80,000 a year teacher paycheck laughable.

Critics often bring up our benefits. It’s true, we’ve accepted salary reductions in exchange for the security of fixed retirement plans (usually provided by our states) and better medical plans. But I can tell you that all the school districts I’ve taught for try to chip away at these with higher out-of-pocket expenses and co-pays every time our contracts are renegotiated. Without our unions, we’d be working for our health care coverage alone.

Some point out that teachers earn more, per hour, than many other white collar jobs. That’s true. So, how can teachers earn more per hour when we earn less per year? Because, even though we work vastly more hours than we’re paid for, technically we’re unemployed for months out of every year. More on that tomorrow.

Now, one can certainly argue that all things are relative. Compared to a teacher’s salary in, say central Africa, I’m rolling in dough. But compared to most Americans with a similar level of education, I’m a shmuck if pay is the measure of success. I tell my students I do my job because I enjoy it and think it’s important, not for the paycheck, and that’s true. But every time someone implies that my paycheck is too large, I admit I enjoy my job just a little bit less.

Tomorrow, Myth #3: Teachers get lots and lots of vacation.

The Myth of the Evil Teacher Union, Part I

Last night, as I lay in bed, I found myself itemizing some of the most pernicious lies people accept about the teaching profession and the teacher’s unions in particular. Then, when I came into work, I received this great cartoon from a colleague (and my former student teacher) and felt compelled to put it all down on paper (so to speak).



We'll get to merit pay in a few days. As I began to hammer out this list, it quickly became too long for a single post, so I'll put them up in serial form. Here's lie #1:

1. Teachers unions are responsible for keeping bad teachers in the classroom.

I can’t speak for every school district nationwide, but if my district is any guide, this is flat-out wrong. I’m not saying we don’t have any bad teachers teaching in our district. But the union does not protect them. Our contract, like many, creates a three year window at the beginning of a teacher’s time in the district (regardless of how many years he/she has taught elsewhere) in which a teacher can be fired for no reason whatsoever. The union does not prevent these people from being fired, but in my years as a teacher, the district has not exercised this ability once. Not once. Teachers have been let go due to budget cutbacks (Reductions in Force, or RIFs), and a couple of teachers have been let go because of inappropriate behavior which came to the attention of the state’s Teachers and Standards Commission (TSPC), but new teachers, even if they are really struggling, aren’t fired. That’s not the union’s fault. In fact, the representatives who serve on union committees are all teachers, and we don’t like it when a bad teacher makes us look bad. But getting teachers fired isn’t our job. We play our role, trying to fight for fair and consistent working conditions, and we privately wish that administrators would do their jobs and take care of certain teachers.

Now, once a teacher has survived that three year probationary period, they CAN still be fired. At that point, it gets a bit more difficult because the school district would have to find a reason. But they have a lot of discretion in this area. They would simply have to do some classroom observations, put someone on a dreaded “plan of assistance” (the threat of which can often send a teacher into early retirement or in search of another school), and then show that the teacher was not making adequate progress on that plan. The union does try to make sure that this is done fairly, that the school district isn’t running someone out for political reasons or creating some unfair and impossible plan of assistance as retaliation for union activity, but if a teacher is performing below par, they could certainly be let go and the union couldn’t do a thing about it.

Unions don’t keep bad teachers in the profession. School districts that are frightened of consequences, or loathe to do the extra legwork, allow those teachers to stay in the classroom. Or they try to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings by promoting the bad teachers into (sometimes made-up and completely unnecessary) administrative positions. Some administrators were great teachers. And some are great at their current jobs. But the Peter Principle is alive and well in public schools, and that's not the union's fault. We don't make hiring decisions for teachers or administrators.

So if your kid's teacher stinks, don't blame the union. Look up the chain of command. But don't be totally shocked if you find yourself talking with someone who wasn't all that hot as a teacher once upon a time.

Tomorrow, Myth #2: Teachers are overpaid.

How To Train You Dragon, Avatar, or Native American

We went to see How To Train Your Dragon this weekend. Short version: We all loved it, and I think I may have enjoyed it more than Noah or Paige, though it was a close contest. The sensation of flying on a dragon's back was captured just as magically, if not more so, in HTTYD as it was in Avatar, the characters were more likable, the dialogue vastly improved, and the action just as engaging, though it didn't have the immersive quality of Pandora's jungles.

Here's the thing, though; the story is almost exactly the same. Sure, there are dragons and Vikings, but Avatar had its Na'vi and Marines, Dances With Wolves had its Native Americans and Union Soldiers, The Last Samurai had its Samurai and Union Soldiers, Last of the Mohicans had its Native Americans and colonists... you get the idea. This is not a new story.

But two of these stories in such close proximity, and both enjoying such wild critical and box office success, has me wondering about the zeitgeist. What does this say about us? I wonder if the marines references in Avatar obscured the point, to some extent. Sure, these can be read as a critique of U.S. foreign policy. They can be dismissed as the normal liberal PC apologies from Hollywood. As David Brooks pointed out, the "White Messiah" fable is both a racial pat on the back and more than a bit racist when it's about human beings, so dragons are a bit safer in that way.

But I wonder if there's more to this coincedence.

Zygmunt Bauman, in this interesting piece, posits that we are living in an "interregnum", a period between the traditional power structure of the nation-state and a period where the next order, of some new and as-of-yet undefined nature, takes hold. I'm skeptical of these pieces. Part of me wonders if they are the academic version of a guy standing on a street corner with a sign that says, "The End Is Nigh!" (For that matter, Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of The Great Powers was published in 1987. Every time I read someone say he was just a bit ahead of his time, I wonder how long we can stretch out that "bit".) Still, Bauman makes an interesting case, comparing the way multinational corporations, international criminal organizations, terrorist groups, and individual "non-state-actors" can all circumvent the traditional model of national sovereignty. Could films that tell us to reexamine some of our presuppositions about our friends and enemies be tapping into our collective discomfort? Perhaps this goes well beyond our disenchantment with US foreign policy. We should all have felt some unease going back long before the "War on Terror" to our involvement with the Contras, supporting Saddam, the internment of the Japanese, ignoring the plight of the Jews at the beginning of WWII, and on and on. A critical eye toward the actions of the US government at home and abroad is both healthy and patriotic. But, in the context of this interregnum (if that's truly what we're experiencing) I wonder if these kinds of films can also tap into a queasy feeling in our stomachs related not to seeing our government's warts, but instead caused by a world that is genuinely shifting under our feet.

Maybe we just want to fly with dragons and have sex with giant blue people. Fine. I have no problem with either of those. Zoe Saldana is super hot, even when digitally remastered, and I've been into dragons since I was a little kid. Maybe it's just a coincidence. But if I was going to go into a Hollywood pitch meeting tomorrow, I'd want to sell a story about one of US joining up with THEM, only to discover that THEY are cool and WE need to learn to understand THEM. We want to believe this story right now, because we know the world is changing, and though we're not sure who exactly THEY are, we hope they turn out to be friendly.

Please submit your suggestions for the wildest versions of THEM and US. Because I have a sneaking suspicion that it wouldn't really matter.

Mom the Early Adopter

I just posted a comment on the first post of my mother's blog. She's blogging as a marketing tool for her new business (she's a life coach). If you're interested, you can find the blog here.

My mom is something of an early adopter. We had a personal computer, complete with a black and orange monitor and that paper with the edges that had to be neatly trimmed off, before most folks in our income bracket. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on it. I'm pretty sure my dad typed his on his type writer.

I'm not sure which of us discovered email first. I know I'm more addicted to it (I check it hourly, and worry about it during camping trips). Mom had a cell phone first. I resisted, based on the idea that I would be giving up my freedom and privacy. Now I can't remember how I lived before my phone. My wife and I call each other from opposite sides of a Target in order to meet up.

I do know Mom beat me to Facebook. I resisted that one, too, on the grounds that it would be as lame as MySpace. I beat Mom there, but that's nothing to brag about. It's like saying "I discovered that farts smell bad before you did. So there."

I certainly wasn't on the cutting edge of blogging, and I still enter into it fully cognizant of the narcissism inherent in the medium. But that's where I think Mom has me beat once again: I blog for no justifiable reason. Mom blogs for her work. Point for her.

I have beaten Mom to Twitter, which has all the drawbacks of blogging and only one discernible benefit. It's an education in brevity. And, speaking as a teacher, I can say for certain that an education does not necessarily lead to an educated student. But I've put that too succinctly to make my point. Let me drone on about that for a bit... Oh, nevermind.

My latest salvo in the early-adopter war with Mom is my itouch. This is, frankly, the coolest thing I own. I love it, and it's a portal to another medium I've discovered: the podcast. My mom has an itouch, but, for the first time, approaches the technology like your grandma did the VCR. She claims it's too complex, that she can't keep it charged, that she can;t figure out how to adjust the setting so that it will update the podcasts she might be interested in.

I am going to enjoy this slight edge for as long as I can, because I expect that she'll soon realize that she can not only market her business with a blog, but also with a podcast, at which point she'll be creating with a purpose while I dink around pointlessly.

Thank you for reading this post which argues against its own existence. Again, here's my mom's.

Is the Internet like Edward Scissorhands?

If you haven't seen the new video for the OK Go song "This Too Shall Pass", you've short changed yourself. If you missed their last viral hit, for the song “Here It Goes Again”, well, I'm not sure what you do with your time on line, but you either work too hard or don't know how this Internet thing works.

As I watched the video for "This Too Shall Pass", I caught the little Easter Egg of the smashed TV showing the Video for “Here It Goes Again” and remembered lead singer Damian Kulash's op-ed for the New York Times. He describes the way his record label, EMI, shot themselves in the foot by trying to maintain ownership of the video and keep it from going viral. He tries to empathize with their old-world view of property rights but explains how they stood in the way of democratization at their own economic expense.

Watching the new video (backed by their new label, Paracadute Recordings) I'm reminded of the kind of quality appearing online. Without the gatekeepers (or in spite of the efforts of gatekeepers like EMI) the quality of work on the Internet seems to be bifurcating. On the one hand, we have artists like OK Go and, arguably, Lady Gaga, have come to the attention of mass audiences because they work so well in the medium of video and thus benefit the most from YouTube. That’s not to say that OK Go and Lady Gaga aren’t talented musicians (I have three OK Go songs on my ipod right now) but their videos are better, and I don’t think that’s any knock against them. They are masters of a medium, in very different ways. That particular medium, the music video, has been well served by the rise of the Internet. But all other media have been affected as well (I’m struggling to think of one that has remained largely unchanged. Opera, maybe?) and that got me wondering: has the loss of gatekeepers been good in other media, as it has for music videos, or bad, as it has for music?

When I say music has been adversely affected, I don’t mean that people aren’t listening to music. Thanks to iTunes, which essentially saved the industry from Napster and the like, we’re still even willing to pay for some of it. But pop music, as a whole, has been diminished. Artists used to be able to think in terms of an album, if they so chose. Top forty radio could then turn audiences on to a track from an album, but the album itself retained that cohesion. Now, the concept album is dead. The Decemberists, a band with a loyal following who could risk a concept album, came out with one just last year, called The Hazards of Love. I listened to the tiny samples of songs on iTunes and bought one song I love. It just seemed too expensive to buy the whole thing knowing some songs wouldn’t really work while on “shuffle”. Goodbye, concept album.

Worse than that, many songs are written not to stand alone (no shame in that) but to be even more fragmentary, as ring tones. Some of the most cynical science fiction authors predicted that our musical tastes would one day come to resemble advertising jingles. Tada.

While the music industry seems to have been generally negatively affected by the rise of the Internet, something far more interesting is happening with Television, Film, and Novels. To me, it seems all three of these media are bifurcating as their gatekeepers disappear. As a greater quantity gets through, we’re seeing a lot more bad, but also more good work. It’s too soon to tell the degree to which this will affect publishing. People love to sound the death knell, as they did for your local movie theater when the VCR became popular, but sales of novels are up. Are we seeing better books? Not yet (as a feminist, don’t get me started on the terrible message the Twilight series sends to teenage girls). But ask any agent and publisher, and they’ll tell you that social networking, viral marketing, and the sheer ease of email have sped up the business to a fever pitch. The effect: We can burn through the dreadful tail-ends of trends much faster (Don’t start writing that teen vampire novel now. Too late. Wait a decade.) and rush to brave new ideas more quickly. Also, I am hopeful that the explosion of YA Lit will rejuvenate a generation of readers who will want more from their books as adults, improving both YA (the best writing being done today) and “Literary Fiction” (which could use a shot in the arm).

When it comes to television, the bifurcation of quality is even more dramatic. On the one hand, TV fans like me are living in a Golden Age. Shows like The Sopranos and Lost have opened the doors to some of the highest quality TV ever, in terms of the writing (I know. I know. I need to watch The Wire.), the acting, the production values, and more. The stigma about working on the small screen has essentially vanished for big name actors, and rightfully so; good TV beats bad movies any day of the week (literally). On the other hand, the successes of so many cable shows has brought cable to the forefront, which has produced so many new slots in the schedule that need to be filled, and with diminished ad revenue thanks to TiVo, so networks have turned to Reality TV, arguably the worst art you’ve ever voluntarily let into your home. Maybe this shift has nothing to do with the Internet. Maybe the rise of the high quality pay channel series simply happened to coincide with the rise in Internet use. But I doubt it. The Internet may not magically get you HBO (though, with some tricky finagling, it can be done) but it does allow your “friends” on Facebook to turn you on to a new show, and then it allows Netflix to send you the DVDs right to your house (Confession: This makes Netflix a more important friend to me than a few of the people on my Facebook friend list).

Similarly, it seems movies are simultaneously getting better and worse. Thanks to vastly improved, inexpensive technology, many more people can make high quality Indie movies. And with the help of the Internet, you and I can find out about them without the massive marketing machines of the big studios, and can see them without the going to the local Cineplex (thanks again, Netflix!). The gatekeepers aren’t gone, but they are playing a very different role, capitalizing on directors and actors who’ve already shown their brilliance in the Indie scene rather than taking such big gambles while deciding who will get through the studio gate. Talented directors, actors, editors, light and costume designers, etc., will now get through. Movies that wouldn’t have made a good pitch will now get made. Imagine: “It’s about an old man and a young boy who go for a ride to South America in a house lifted by balloons. It’s animated, but adults will probably enjoy it more than kids. And it probably won’t sell many toys. And there’s not really any way to make a sequel. Can I have $175 million dollars?” Yes, I know Up was made by Pixar, which is now owned by Disney, a major studio, but Pixar began as a small firm making animated short films. Who watches animated shorts? Everybody. Thank you, Internet.

But are all movies getting better? Certainly not. Name your top ten favorite comedies, and if more than half come from the last decade, I'd bet good money you're under twenty years old. And in the horror genre, for all the buzz created by the viral marketing campaign, Paranormal ended up being a universal let-down, while The Shining and Jacob's Ladder will still freak you out twenty and thirty years later. Movies, like TV, are getting better and worse.

This leads me to Edward Scissorhands, not as an example of an Indie film, but as a metaphor. I teach Edward Scissorhands as part of the school adopted ninth grade language arts curriculum, which has a whole unit on reading film as text (I know! How cool!). If you missed it back in 1991, it really was a wonderfully made movie on many levels, and worthy of the kind of close reading my students give it each year. Spoiler: It’s a fairytale about an unfinished android with scissors for hands who comes down from a creepy mansion to an exaggerated, stylized suburb. There, he’s the subject of fascination, until the community turns on him for being too different, and he’s exiled back to the mansion.

Before Edward leaves, he changes the community. First, the changes are superficial. He trims the hedges. Then grooms the dogs. Then cuts the women’s hair. But the changes become more and more substantive. He humiliates the community’s vile cougar by rejecting her. He earns the love of Kim, the girl of his dreams. He turns Kim’s boyfriend from a small-time crook and consummate d-bag into a homicidal maniac. He turns everyone in town into a torch-wielding mob. And we know these changes leave a lasting impact, because the whole fairy-tale is presented as a bedtime story Kim tells to her grand-daughter generations later.

So, is the Internet like Edward? At first, our art changed, but only superficially. Now, it can never go back. Similarly, our politics have changed. As Paul Krugman pointed out, the regime in Iran could not hide their violent suppression of dissent from the Iranian people in the same way the Chinese government was able to hide the Tienanmen Square Massacre. Like Edward’s foray into the suburb, the Internet made Dean a candidate in 2004 (and sunk him, too), but made Obama a phenomenon, and, arguably, President, in 2008. It’s also unleashed some of the most despicable vitriol in the protection of the anonymity of message boards, and that level of anger contributes to a kind of partisanship we haven’t seen in the U.S. in over a hundred years. In fact, the “War on Terror”, in many ways resembles the battle between the old gatekeepers of war, nation states, and the Internet warrior, the “non-state actor”, and that’s no coincidence, as global jihadists use the Internet as one of their main tools. Like Edward’s story, the story of the Internet is one of ever deepening effects on our lives.

But Edward isn’t the Internet. Edward is us. As we watch the quality of our TV, our movies, and our politics bifurcate, we can’t blame the technology. The Internet is just Edward’s trip down the hill. We, the boring, controlled community of little houses made of ticky-tacky, are being confronted by ourselves, a screaming, whispering, beautiful, ugly humanity which is, like Edward, incomplete. The gatekeepers didn’t necessarily make our media better, but they kept the rabble out, and made the arts more palatable and digestible. Now we can see what our entire species really looks like through a screen, and it’s not too far from Tim Burton’s vision back in the early days of the Internet; a lonely teenager who can create beautiful things, who desperately wants to be loved and accepted, and who is very dangerous to himself and others.

Why Reading Literature Is Essential

One of my colleagues (and, I'm proud to say, my former student teacher) Sam Cornelius has given me a homework assignment. He found this piece by Nancy Atwell, "A Case for Literature" and assignment to weigh in. Atwell's concern is that the powerful forces pushing for national curriculum changes do not recognize the merits of reading literature because it does not satisfy their interests in profiting from more expensive curricula, more expensive testing, etc. She cites some research that shows that independent reading literature, and lots of it, not only increases reading proficiency, but is one of the best predictors of over-all academic success. At first glance, this is preaching to the choir, and I don't know how I'm going to satisfy Sam's assignment.

Luckily, the very first commenter on the comment page, Tomliamlynch, after claiming to agree with Atwell, writes, "English education has never had a convincing rationale for teaching literature; thank heaven for writing, as at least a teacher knows when a student does it! Literature has always been--and continues to be--use-less: it doesn't have a clear use that translates into a value for non-literature-teachers... Teachers don't know if and when students really read. They can't know; reading is wonderfully private."

Oh boy.

First of all, we don't teach literature for its own sake. Literature, on one level, is entertainment, just like films or music or any other art. We wouldn't expose a student to a famous painting just so they can say they've seen it. Similarly, when I teach a book (or a film, or a short story) my focus is always beyond the text itself. Now, that work of art can do many things, and I'm hesitant to tier them because they're all important, so these are not in a particular order.

Literature, like any art, teaches its appreciators how to participate in that art in the future. Tomliamlynch alludes to this by making a connection to writing, and that's certainly one part of the value. Reading makes students better writers. But if that were the limit, that a piece of literature might allow a student to become a professional novelist someday, we would be devoting far too much time to prepare such a tiny fraction of the population that we would be criminally negligent. But reading literature not only allows a student to participate in the art form as a creator, but as a different kind of consumer. Beyond simple comprehension (essential, but merely foundational) a reader or literature learns to make connections between a work and other works in that medium, in other media, in their own lives, in their culture, and across cultures. A bad reader can understand that Jack and Jill go up the hill to fetch a pail of water. A good reader asks why these two children are going up to get a resource that's usually found a lower elevation, what the task says about their socio-economic level, what the pairing might imply about a familial or romantic relationship, what the language might tell us about the time frame, how this might be different in another country, culture, or time, and what this might relate to in the reader's own life. These processes might be private if the student is reading at home, and eventually I want my students to be able to do this on their own, but as a teacher it is my role to make sure these processes are public, conscious, and intentional.

These skills are not useful in some tiny, compartmentalized way. Last night I was sitting with a couple dear friends arguing about the TV show Lost. All of the language we were using came directly from specific and targeted instruction provided by out English teachers. But these skills don't just allow us to interpret other art. They allow us to interpret Narrative with a capital "N". Whether I'm trying to follow the story of the debacle of the health care bill making its way through the Congress, or studying the way The Big Bang produces a singularity, then energy and time, then later matter, or the process by which the used car salesman evaluates his costs and benefits as he negotiates with me over the price of a '91 Isuzu, I need to be able to interpret a narrative.

Which brings us to the greatest virtue of literature (I know I said I wouldn't tier these, but I lied): We are stories. In fact, we are stories within stories within stories all the way down. If I can't understand the arc of a plot, the influence of a character, the consequence of a choice, the vagaries of fate or coincidence, then I cannot understand my self, my family, my faith, my community, my culture, my country, my world, or my universe. Try teaching history without narrative. Every discipline has a history. For that matter, try successfully teaching science without narrative (imagine teaching the water cycle without sequence). The skills one acquires when learning how to interpret literature cross over into every other field. In fact, if there is some kind of brain injury or developmental disorder which prevents a person from understanding all stories, I would bet that person also cannot be successful in any other field. (Somebody do some research on this for me.)

It should also come as no surprise, consequently, that people who do not know the same stories have trouble relating. Our culture is a composition of our stories. On the surface it just might seem like a person can't get the clever jokes on The Simpsons, or some off-hand Biblical allusion tossed out in a conversation. But it goes far deeper: if a person doesn't know the same stories, they can't understand another person, validate (or even fully respect) their decisions, or work effectively with them toward a common goal. Find two people in a crisis situation working toward some shared goal at the base of Maslow's hierarchy (a subsistence farmer in a third world country and the Peace Corps volunteer who's come to help provide emergency relief) and I'll bet you'll find two people telling each other stories. They are interpreting each other's literature, because if they don't they will only understand even the most basic needs from their own cultural contexts, and will not be able to make larger plans or connections.

This sounds hyperbolic, but without narrative we cannot make meaning of our life experience. In short, without stories, life is meaningless. The more stories we are exposed to, and the more skilled we become at interpreting those stories, the more meaning we can make.

Education without literature (on paper, encoded digitally, filmed, etc.) is not only diminished; it's pointless.

Who's More Condescending, Liberals or Conservatives?

Gerard Alexander, an associate professor at University of Virginia, is sure to get lots of play with his piece in today's Washington Post, "Why are liberals so condescending?". I really hoped he could shed some light on why conservatives are far more reasonable than they appear to liberals. Instead, he makes one of weakest logical arguments I've ever heard, so much so that conservatives who cite it will be condescending to liberals and participating in a parody of themselves. I'm not sure if Alexander is in on his own joke, though.

I have great respect for my conservative friends who make reasoned arguments. More than once I've had to backtrack or concede points to them, much to my chagrin. But Alexander's arguments betray these intellectually honest conservatives by playing at the lowest kind of ad hominem exchange: "You call me a doodey-head? Well you're a bigger doodey-head!"

He goes to great lengths to show that liberals have often criticized conservatives for not being interested in evidence, then fails to provide anything but the most selective anecdotal data. He even goes so far as to say, "I doubt it would take long to design a survey questionnaire that revealed strange, ill-informed and paranoid beliefs among average Democrats." If it would be such an easy task, why doesn't he do it?

I would argue that measuring condescension isn't easy at all. Where is the line between claiming that an opponents views are incorrect and condescending to him? Ironically, one of the consistent conservative attacks against liberals is that we are too PC, too willing to see both sides of an issue, while conservatives claim he mantle of the people who can easily identify right and wrong and call it as they see it. Apparently, when they do this, it's folksy, while when liberals do it it's condescending.

Alexander even brings up Nixon and Reagan's "Southern Strategy", and subtly acknowledges that conservatives played on racial fears to get elected, but then says "survey research has shown a dramatic decline in prejudiced attitudes among white Americans in the intervening decades." This does not necessarily mean conservatives have abandoned the strategy entirely, though it certainly argues that they should. It might merely explain why Senator Trent Lot lost his job for claiming a segregationist would have been been a great president, while Senator Harry Reid gets off for complimenting a black president for weaving in and out of a "negro dialect". Conservatives called this a double standard. Is it possible that they have more ground to cover to earn back the trust of black voters than Democrats? I think it would be a more fair criticism of the Democratic Party to point out that they only did the bare minimum to position themselves as the party that was sightly friendly-er to African Americans to reel in that large voting block without doing enough to show their allegiance to them. But then, I'm an ideological liberal, not a politician who needs to get re-elected.

And that's the central problem with Alexander's piece: Without the survey data he claims would be so easy to acquire, he can make no distinction between liberal voters and liberal politicians. Politicians are in the game of persuading people, and it isn't persuasive to say the opposition is probably correct. Of course both sides claim the other is incorrect. Alexander points out criticism of "ideologically driven views from sympathetic media such as the Fox News Channel", but forgets the conservative punching bag of the so-called "liberal media". In fact, he even forgets the fact that a concerted effort was made to make the term "liberal" a slur, and that Republican strategist went out of their way to try to re-brand the Democratic Party as the Democrat Party, which they found to be more derisive.

Now, I'm not arguing that conservatives are more condescending. I don't think a good poll on this would be so easy to come by (and the little, non-scientific poll on the Washington Post page is a good example of a bad way to measure it), and I'm not qualified or resourced to conduct one. But if we're going to follow Alexander's entirely reasonable advice at the end of the piece, to think twice and listen to one another, then starting the process with a selective history of partisan name-calling seems to me like a really bad way to get that discussion going.

But maybe that just sounds like more condescension coming from this liberal.

Response to Jen Widrig's Truth-Telling

Jen Widrig, my friend from college (and fellow teacher, and a writer, and a parent) has just posted a good piece about telling kids the truth on her blog here. I thought I'd share a similar (but less fraught) incidence of some truth-telling tonight.

Tonight, while we re-watched an episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender (great show, by the way), Noah asked why the camera cut away from a fight scene right in the middle just because the protagonist flew away.

"Well," I said, "because this is third person limited narration."

Paige burst out laughing. "Noah, your dad is such an English teacher."

"What I mean," I explained, "is that this episode is Appa's story, so when Appa leaves we follow him."

"Oh."

"Can you say 'Third person limited narration'?" I asked.

"'Third person limited narration'," he said.

"There. Now you know something that I teach to 9th graders, and you're only five. Not bad, eh?"

He nodded. "Not bad."

Pat Robertson's Service to the World

I expect that everyone has now heard about Pat Robertson's comments about the earthquake in Haiti. If you missed it, he claimed it was a punishment from God for a pact the Haitians made with the Devil to free their country from France.

Here's what he said: "And you know Christy, something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, uh, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said we will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French. True story, and so the Devil said OK it’s a deal. And they kicked the French out."

Well, this complete myth about Haitians sacrificing to the Devil supposedly happened in 1791 (and whatever). That's four years before Napoleon III was born (true story), and, if you believe the myth, they gifted the nation to Satan for two hundred years, which means Satan's lease ran out in 1991. (Thanks to Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver for pointing this out on The Bugle.) But why quibble over details when the man's logic is so sound?

I had a little insight about Pat Robertson I'd like to share.

Now, this is no defense of the man, mind you. But I've tried to be charitable and imagine why he might say something so thoroughly awful. And here's my guess. I think Pat Robertson sees a genuine tragedy and wants us to take our minds off it. He's not doing this to gain attention for himself. That would be selfish douchebaggery. No, he sees our pain and wants to help us. He realizes we feel a sense of helplessness in the face of such horror, and is concerned that we'll blame God. As a man of the cloth, he has to do his part to defend the Big Guy, so he tries to redirect our hatred towards himself.

Pat Robertson's logic, in a nutshell: Hate the giant earthquake that just caused such devastation? Well, maybe I can make you hate me even more.

Remember what he said about 9/11?
Jerry Falwell: "I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America...I point the finger in their face and say you helped this happen."
Pat Robertson: "I totally concur, and the problem is we've adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government."

See, it's Pat Robertson logic again (with the help of Jerry Falwell): Think 9/11 was a bad thing? I can try to do worse.

Like I said, I'm not defending the guy. He's essentially said we should worship a God who would cause things like 9/11 and devastating earthquakes. Way to evangelize, Pat.

Still, I give him points for effort. I think 9/11 and the Haitian earthquake are, on balance, worse than Pat Robertson. But you have to admit, he is competitive. It's hard to hate something as abstract as the shifting of tectonic plates. But hating the host of The 700 Club? Easy.

Thanks for replacing my sadness and despair with revulsion and anger. Heckuva' job, Pat.

Pitch for Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest

I'm going to enter the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest. They ask for a 300 word itch. Here's my 297, with some very good feedback I've received on the list-serve on Amazon for exactly that purpose. Please feel free to add your two cents. Nickles and dimes are better. Feel free to hammer it (how much change would that be?).

Pitch:

On her knees, hands tied behind her back, Portia looks up at the two government agents who will torture her before killing her. Why would she give her life for the boy who showed up at school halfway through the year? Sure, he's special. But Portia doesn't care about politics. So why is she helping Calum escape from their boarding school? After all, he's not interested in her. He's dating her roommate and former best friend. As one of the agents touches the knife to her skin, Portia acknowledges the sad fact; she's broken her strict rules. She's fallen in love with Calum.

Portia’s Broken Rules tells the story of Portia, the consummate popular girl who knows all the tricks for getting the right boy, handling herself at the party, and staying in the spotlight. It also tells the story of Calum, the lower-class guy who finds himself at the elite prep school. And the story of Jenea, Portia’s mousy best friend who finds herself in a relationship with Calum. So what if Portia has secretly fallen for Calum, despite all her rules? It’s the most innocent love triangle in the world.

Except…

Except that world is the most elite prep school in Phalangium, a country where the upper class maintains control through The Subjugation, the ritual Highs use to take control of the bodies of their servants; to humiliate, to punish, to kill. Calum, a Low, could destroy the strict caste system if he can’t be assimilated, because he knows how to perform The Subjugation. If Calum steps out of line he’ll have to be killed, along with anyone foolish enough to get too close to him. There is no innocence in Phalangium. But in the midst of so much pain, can there be any real love?


Comments so far:

Barbara J. Angstadt says:
Benjamin -
I really like your pitch; it starts out sounding like a fairly routine boarding-school novel (except the government agents bit, a teaser to the final paragraph) and then it adds the twist at the end. Personally, I'd love to read your book. It sounds original and edgy. Good luck in the contest! :-)

Sheryl Dunn (SWOOP) says:
Benjamin, don't use any wording similar to "tells the story of" in the pitch. That's telling. Just show us what the story is about with the emphasis on your main character.

Kieth Massey says:
Hi Benjamin,
I wonder if you shouldn't bring in a description of the alternate world/country where this happens a bit earlier, perhaps even highlight it as a fusion of a fantasy world with elements of a typical teen's existence. For me, I was reading this as our world/country, albeit one in which a young person is facing down an intelligence officer, so when the final description came, it seemed intrusive to me, kinda like, oh, all the above was taking place in Phalangium, etc.
My two cents.

Vivian Davenport says:
Benjamin,
The story starts out sounding like Portia's story but the last paragraph makes it sound like Calum's story. It's difficult to critique the pitch without knowing whose story it is.
We should know the sci-fi/fantasy aspects of this in the first paragraph, not the last.
If this is Portia's story...
The first paragraph has way too much detail about Portia. The first two sentences are real grabbers, and I think you should answer the question right away, not wait until the last sentence. You could combine two things like: [She loves him, and she loves him more than her country's strict caste system.] Then start the next paragraph with info about the Highs and Lows and The Subjugation.
If this is Calum's story...
Don't start off with Portia.
Now why is a lower-class guy attending an elite prep school? Is he attending there under false pretenses?
Capitalize the title.
Drop the 'finds him/herself'. They weren't dropped from a plane, were they?
Good luck!

Any other suggestions out there?

Experimenting with Twitter

I've never been quite the early adopter I want to be. I reluctantly bought a cell phone long after everyone else, not wanting to give up that much of my personal space-time. Now I can't imagine how my wife and I found one another from opposite sides of a Target without them. I got into Facebook when my wife told me she'd just friended my mother. Yes, Mom beat me to Facebook. Now, while watching two football games, a basketball game, and the two hour season premier of Chuck, I have some time on my hands and think I'll experiment with this Twitter phenomenon.

Here's the big question: Can I manage to express even the simplest idea in only 140 characters?

So, I'm at teachergorman

We'll see how this goes.

The Princess Bride on American Politics: "The End of History" or the Rise of the Paranoid Right?

There's an interesting juxtaposition on the op-ed page of today's (technically, tomorrow's) NYTimes. Ross Douthat, in "Life After the End of History", argues that we should examine the fall of the Berlin Wall through the context of what neo-conservative Francis Fukuyama called "The End of History", in the sense that we no longer had a real existential threat to democracy and free market economics, in that both Fascism and Soviet Totalitarianism had failed to eradicate our political paradigm. Then Douthat goes on to speculate that we might be hesitant to celebrate the 9th of November as a kind of super, global Independence Day because we cling to the notion that empires do fail, specifically as a consequence of their own decadence, and that we need, on some level, a threat from the outside to... well, here he's less clear. To stave off perpetual decadence? To prevent permanent decline? Anyway, without something bad to motivate us, we're stuck in our current position, and that position is unassailable, and that's bad somehow.

But the other column on the page articulates a danger. Perhaps this is just what Douthat is describing, a function of the impulse to find an existential bogeyman. But I find Paul Krugman's bogeyman to be quite scary. In "Paranoia Strikes Deep", he describes the movement of the Republican party from the center-right to the far-right as a generational replacement in which the lunatic fringe, previously used but ignored by the party, have now become the ones in power. He warns of the danger of America becoming Californiafied (not to be confused with The Red Hot Chili Peppers' notion of Californication) which he describes this way: "In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster."

Could this be the existential bogeyman we need to keep ourselves on the right track after the end of history? Doubtful. Instead, this idea will have to battle, head to head, with the worldview of the far-right, which holds that government is fundamentally evil, our president unfit for office, and the will of the majority on both policy and social issues is a product of a liberal conspiracy determined to strip America of its values. Hence, as a liberal I might find the irrationality of the far-right to be a danger, precisely because of the fervent zeal with which they see me as a danger. They are certain that liberals like me are destroying the country. I am frightened that people with that much certainty (about just about anything) are destroying the country.

As Vizzini said in The Princess Bride, "...then we are at an impasse."

To which The Man In Black proposed an elegant solution. Iocaine powder, anyone?

And now, one can deduce, Fukayama's "End of History" will produce the "Reboot of History" once we figure out where the poison truly lies.

"The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right and who is dead."

The Grave of Mark Wright

Each year, on Halloween, I take a break from my curriculum to turn out the lights in my creative writing class, shine a flashlight on my face, and read Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven". Cheezy, I know, but I enjoy it (a bit more than the students, but too stinkin' bad). Well, this year I'll be reading two poems, to prepare them for a unit in which they will have to re-write a poem of their choice. The first will be Poe's "Raven", because, thanks to my friend Tim Hornor, I can now read them this gem afterward. Please, if you dare, turn off all the lights, perhaps light a candle or two, and read yourself The Grave of Mark Wright by John Faga.

Bwa-Ha-Ha-Ha!

A Conversation with Noah

Here's a conversation I had with my son, Noah (age 5), today while we grabbed a bite to eat and Momma shopped for clothes. I submit to you, compelling evidence that xenophobia is ingrained, but love of humanity is too:

N: "I think you and Momma are the best mom and dad in the whole world."

B: "You're probably right. I don't know, though. I think my mom and dad, your grandma and grandpa, are the best. They're pretty great, huh?"

N: "Yeah. I think everyone in the world is the best."

B: "You like everyone in the whole world?"

N: "Yeah. But the people from other planets aren't so good."

B: "I agree. Can't be trusted."

N: "Yeah."

Monster Mash

Paige made this of our family, complete with the cats.

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

Knock Knock

This isn't new, but I know a lot of kids who could identify. For my students who won't relate from personal experience, it will at least help them to recognize the power of poetry.

No Ideas vs. No Guts

The Washington Post has two thought provoking pieces on the state of the conservative movement. Steven F. Hayward's "Is Conservatism Brain Dead?" asks if the movement has lost the equilibrium between populist rabble-rousers and intellectuals. Stephen Stromberg, in his PostPartisan Blog post "Palin 'Catastrophic' for GOP?", (besides making a compelling case that Palin is exactly that) references a Micheal Gerson piece which conceded that many Republicans are hostile "to the very idea of ideas". These are conservatives saying these things, mind you (well, I don't know about Stromberg, but he doesn't seem excited about a Republican self-immolation). One the other hand, I'm watching the Democrats cow-tow to this notion that this is a center-right nation. Um, didn't we elect a liberal to the White House? Isn't that a pretty reliable poll of political opinion? Obama certainly isn't as liberal as the far right would like to make him out to be (or as liberals like me would like him to be), but he's center-left. Why can't the Dems, when confronted by an opposition party that acknowledges its own intellectual bankruptcy, behave like they have a mandate to enact the changes the majority of Americans want? I have to think it's due to a lack of courage. So that's where we're at: No Ideas vs. No Guts.

Hayward recounts G.K. Chesterton's line about how "it is the business of progressives to go on making mistakes, while it is the business of conservatives to prevent the mistakes from being corrected." As a liberal, I'm perfectly willing to admit that the risk of progressivism is that a willingness to embrace change includes a willingness to make mistakes. The more dramatic the change, the more frightening the possibility that the change is a dangerous error. But we believe that the alternative, an aversion to change and a kind of conscious mythologizing of the past, leads to an even more dangerous regressivism. This is a genuine debate, with people of intelligence and goodwill on both sides, and liberals and conservatives have to continually weigh not only specific policies, but how much change they are willing to fight for, and how much they are willing to fight against.

But it seems both this country's political parties are actively avoiding this debate. It makes me wonder, how does fomenting outrage help the cause of conservatism, in the long run? In the short run, it gets ratings for your show on Fox News or AM radio, and it may even get you on the cover of Time Magazine, but people who've been whipped into a frothing rage about the state of the country generally won't appreciate the central drive of conservatism: To conserve the status quo. I think one of the reasons President Carter's latest remarks about the recism directed at President Obama struck such a cord was not because the prominent voices in conservatism are racists, but because those very leaders have good cause to be worried about their strategy: If you tell people the lie that we need to go backwards to the halcyon days of "family values", beyond the sound bite there's not a lot of substance. Go back to the days when a man could get away with beating his wife and children? Go back to the days when a woman couldn't vote? Go back to the days when taxes were higher (like they were under Reagan)? Go back to the days when politicians observed more civility than Joe Wilson? What past are they directing us to? I think those leaders, regardless of their own mixed feelings about the mechanisms we've put in place to achieve full civil rights for ethnic minorities, have reason to be concerned that too many conservatives might fill in the blanks by saying we should go back to the days when white men had first crack at jobs, more authority in their own households, more faces on TV, etc. Conservatives don't want to hold on to this present, when they are out of power and people are disenchanted. But how can they be conservatives without clearly articulating what to conserve?

On the flip side, liberals in the Democratic party are loathe to encourage real change because, let's face it, they're doing pretty well sitting right where they are. Why risk the presidency and two houses of Congress by enacting real change? What if you get it wrong? What if you create a situation where conservatives can say "let's go back to the moment before that blunder". The status quo, that of the majority desiring to change the status quo, serves the party identified with changing the status quo. As long as they don't actually do it. Of course, it's even easier to be a status-quo-maintaining faux-progressive when the conservatives are intellectually bankrupt.

Political pundits like to talk about the benefits of "gridlock". I think the term is misleading. There are benefits to "gridiron", as in the situation when conservatives and liberals put on their helmets, line up, and play some smash-mouth political football. Progressives move the ball while their ideas are good, but they are slowed down, made more calculating and deliberate. And if they err too greatly they turn the ball over and we move back down the field a bit. The political arc of this supposedly "center-right" nation has been liberal in the long-term. The progressives keep scoring (abolition, women's suffrage, civil rights). But "gridiron" politics has made the game exciting, and almost always kept the teams on the field. What we have now really is "gridlock", in the sense of traffic: Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have clogged the freeway and slowed each other to a near standstill, but they are headed in the same direction. I fear this freeway does not head to the best of our past or the promise of our future, but to something worse. I don't want to be an alarmist or some prophet of doom, but whether the American experiment ends tomorrow or in a hundred years, and whether it ends in fire or ice, the current concoction of gridlock is a recipe for disaster.

Of course, as a liberal, first and foremost I want the Democrats to gird their loins, grit their teeth, and make some change. But I also want the Republicans to identify the values they want to preserve and pick coherent and productive strategies to defend the best of our past. I've never been so concerned with the health of the opposition before, but I'm realizing just how essential real conservatism is for the health of the country. And to progress.