The Case of Wall Street Journal Vs. To Kill a Mockinbird

The next case before the court; Wall Street Journal vs. To Kill a Mockingbird.

In this piece in last Thursday's Wall Street Journal, Allen Barra takes on the pressing journalistic task of attacking a 50 year old book. Critiquing literature considered to be sacrosanct isn't so much the job of journalists as it is of undergrad lit. majors, but let's put that aside and take the piece on its merits. The thrust of Barra's critique is that the book is juvenile because the points it makes are obvious. "There is no ambiguity in 'To Kill a Mockingbird'; at the end of the book, we know exactly what we knew at the beginning: that Atticus Finch is a good man, that Tom Robinson was an innocent victim of racism, and that lynching is bad." In contrast, Barra praises books which contain "...some quality of moral ambiguity, some potentially controversial element that keeps the book from being easily grasped or explained. One hundred years from now, critics will still be arguing about the real nature of the relationship between Tom and Huck, or why Gatsby gazed at that green light at the end of the dock across the harbor."

I teach Mockingbird, and will continue doing so despite Barra's dismissal. For one thing, I teach the book to 9th graders. Not to insult the intelligence of my students, but they are learning to read literature, and what a more experienced reader calls "moral ambiguity", a younger reader often calls "confusing". It's wonderful when a class can really get into a rip-roaring debate about why Gatzby fixated on the green light, what it symbolized, and how their interpretations changed their reading experience, but contemporary students lose interest not just in the story they are reading when faced with such ambiguities, but may also lose interest in reading literature all together. Books like "Mockingbird" give them a foundational positive reading experience which they can fall back on when they want to dismiss all literature as a waste of time; it produces a fond memory of a book they understood and enjoyed. Moreover, the book is not easy. In the first chapter, Lee uses words like "taciturn". Students may not wrestle with moral ambiguity in the book, but they do have to struggle with comprehension, so that when they understand the text they feel they've earned something, and that confidence follows them into more intellectually demanding books.

Clearly Barra isn't a teacher, and doesn't make claims about when the book might be developmentally appropriate. Instead, one gets the sense that he finds the book so lacking in value that it should be shelved all together. First of all, good luck with that. Does he think public schools can afford to buy more books? I'm sure he would dismiss that concern as more "bloodless liberal humanism [which] is sadly dated". In education, we call that reality.

But his critique is fundamentally flawed. The notion that the injustices presented in the book are too obvious ignores the way literature often works. Symbols are often obvious, but gain their power from the fact that they represent signified which can be incredibly complex. When this is done poorly, it's reductive. It can make the reader feel like solutions are simple because the symbols are transparent. But Mockingbird does nothing of the kind. When we recognize the injustice done to Tom Robinson, this does not immediately translate into justice for him. When we recognize Atticus' virtue, this does not provide him with success or happiness. This incongruity produces complex questions just as challenging and far more relevant than Gatsby's green light. Why, when we know something is unjust, can't we simply make it right? Why does virtue not produce success? Why doesn't goodness necessarily lead to happiness? If the morals of the story are easy enough for ninth graders, I would challenge any adult of any age, any level of education, or any position with any newspaper of any reputation, to provide answers to these questions that aren't replete with ambiguity.

Beyond this literary analysis question, I doubt Barra's central assumption that the ideas he dismisses as overly obvious are so straightforward to all readers. Perhaps he's unaware of some facts:

Our country, over the last decade, has repeatedly taken innocent people from their homes here in the U.S. and abroad, prevented them from having legitimate trials wherein they could prove that innocence, tortured them (using the same techniques we deemed to be torture when prosecuting those who did the same things to our solders during WWII), and in a few cases killing them. If lynching is bad, a kangaroo court producing a ridiculous verdict is bad, Tom Robinson getting shot while ostensibly escaping from jail is bad, and we all find these to be so obvious, why do we allow the terror policies of our government to remain?

During the last election some students at George Fox University (where, full disclosure, I received my Masters-in-Teaching) hung an effigy of Barack Obama from a tree. If it's obvious that lynching is bad, why didn't they know better?

In the state of California, in the next few days or weeks, a judge may allow the voters of that state to strip legally married individuals of the social contract conferred in their marriage licenses because of the voters' prejudice against them. If it's so obvious that Tom Robinson is an innocent victim of racism, and if we should teach superior literature which contains more moral ambiguity, wouldn't we assume that adults possess the skills necessary to abstract from one straight forward symbol to a similar instance of injustice?

I will concede to my dated, liberal humanist beliefs, but they aren't bloodless. In fact, it gets my blood pumping pretty fast when anyone implies that we don't need to keep on hearing lessons we've still failed to grasp.

Oregon Writing Project: What Color Are You? Poem

As I do my homework to prepare for the Summer Institute of the Oregon Writing Project at Willamette University, I thought I'd post my attempts here. I'm pretty pleased with this one. Today's prompt:

Assignment #12
What color are you? Write a poem using similes and metaphors to compare you to colors.

What Color Am I?

“The thoroughly well-informed man--that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.”

-Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray


There is a small bookshop in my town,
Where tall shelves, eight feet high
Stand shoulder to shoulder, leaning over thin aisles
And each is nine months and two weeks pregnant with books.

Used, tattered, their spines lined from over-reading
Pages dog-eared, dust jackets missing,
Cardboard peeking through the corners of the covers
Or paperbacks, bent by back pockets
Their artwork lined and faded.

In this shop a book is hiding.
From some Paleozoic era before glossy jackets
It’s covered in fabric.
Most was once bright red, now sickly pink
But the spine was gray, is gray, shall be gray.
The pages were once white, now yellowed.

Outside, I am the colors of that book
Pale pink and yellowed-white and gray
But inside, in the darkness of the closed cover
I am monsters and romance and heroes and tragedy
Or a biography of a forgotten poet,
Or do-it-yourself carpentry projects,
Or a collection of essays on semiotics and post-modernism.
Perhaps there are full color photographs.

A cover does not know the colors of its pages
And when I think I am black and white
Symbols ordered into words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters
I fear
A rainbow of Greek and Sanskrit
Straining to describe colors that have not been named.

Michelle Kerr's "The Right Way To Assess Teachers' Performance"

A shout-out to a fellow pink-slip recipient!

Having written a bit about my support for teacher's unions here, I was intrigued to find that I agreed so much with this piece in the Washington Post by a teacher who declares herself to be "not a union fan". She lays out four plainly reasonable conditions by which teachers could be assessed using student test scores (something I argued against here). Moreover, she acknowledges that, "I suspect that my conditions will go nowhere, precisely because they are reasonable." She's right about that, too, unfortunately. Her conditions are:

(1) Teachers be assessed based on only those students with 90 percent or higher attendance.

(2) Teachers be allowed to remove disruptive students from their classroom on a day-to-day basis.

(3) Students who don't achieve "basic" proficiency in a state test be prohibited from moving forward to the next class in the progression.

(4) That teachers be assessed on student improvement, not an absolute standard -- the so-called value-added assessment.

She explains all these well, though I think the first three, at least, don't need much explanation. After reading her piece, I wonder why she doesn't like the unions, and I have to suspect that it has something to do with issues unrelated to teacher assessment, because I'm inclined to believe that the unions would be far more amenable to the use of student test scores in assessment if these conditions were met. In fact, if these conditions were set down in black and white language and enforced consistently, I would go so far as to say that unions would accept somewhat aggressive merit pay systems. Speaking only for myself, I would love to see critics of unions try to call the unions' bluff by implementing these reasonable policies. These reformers would also need to pony up the money to hire the teachers needed to teach all the remedial classes her third concession would require. They would also have to guarantee that teachers not be prevented from implementing the second by threats of dinging them in their annual reviews for kicking out disruptive students. If union-bashers would make these concessions, and unions still refused to allow student data to drive the assessment of teachers, I might side with Miss Kerr in her "not a union fan" position. But I think that's just about as likely as the possibility that these reasonable concessions will be implemented.

Oregon Writing Project: Brainstorm about Nicknames

As I do my homework to prepare for the Summer Institute of the Oregon Writing Project at Willamette University, I thought I'd post my attempts here. Today's prompt:

Brainstorm- a list of all the nicknames you’ve ever had, thinking back to childhood, camp, sports and family get-togethers. Try for a baker’s dozen or so and word process the list. Any patterns revealed? Focus on a particular nickname that you loved or hated. When you say it, where does it carry you?

Ben
Benjamin Douglas Gorman (when in trouble)
Benji
Ben Kenobi
Benedict Arnold
Gorman
Ninjaben
Moby-Wan
Pelón

I’m not sure if it’s something intrinsic to my name, or to my personality, but based on the list of nicknames I can remember, it seems I don’t earn many. The story of how I shot down “Benji” as a young child has become a legend in my family; though I don’t remember the incident I have heard it recounted many times. Some older person in my mother’s congregation in a small town in Michigan called me Benji during the coffee hour one Sunday morning, and I spun on the person and shouted “Benji’s for dogs!” The nickname wasn’t used again, and I guess I decided this strategy might work for other things, because the next time I was served re-fried beans (which I hate) I shouted, “Beans are for dogs!” and wasn’t forced to eat them again. Missing from the story is the fact that my parents must have laid down the law about these outbursts at some point after that. Otherwise, I’d be going around yelling that my pet-peeves are “for dogs” and wondering why that doesn’t make them go away.

Ben Kenobi and Benedict Arnold were attempts at insults when I was in the early years of elementary school. Of course, no one really knew who Benedict Arnold was, and as a Star Wars geek I probably wasn’t properly offended by the Ben Kenobi reference, so they didn’t stick.

My favorite of the bunch was coined by my wife. Back in college, my now-wife, then-girlfriend Paige would often come over and hang out in my dorm room, where a group would gather to watch TV, eat Ramen noodles, and even occasionally do homework. I have a tendency to hover. Rather than simply sitting down, I pace when on the phone, and sometimes I prefer to stand behind the couch to watch TV. I also move quietly, especially when barefoot. Once, while watching TV, Paige looked up and found me standing behind her, watching over her shoulder. I startled her pretty badly, and she shouted that I was like a “Ninjaben”. That stuck, and she still calls me that sometimes out of nowhere.

The next on the list was an attempt at an insult which failed marvelously. While walking across the courtyard at Newberg High School, where I worked as an Ed. Assistant before becoming a teacher, a student I didn’t know shouted it at me. I think it was an attempt to make fun of me for being bald by associating me with the singer Moby, but I was instantly reminded of the kids in first grade trying to get a rise out of me by calling me Ben Kenobi, and my face lit up with delight. The student didn’t know that my first name was Ben (even the students in our classes rarely know we have first names) so his joke was more clever than he could imagine. I beamed at him and told him I liked that one, and he looked crushed. After that I used it as a password for my email for a while.

To some extent, the same thing happened with Pelón. My Spanish speakers called me that, first sheepishly, waiting to see if I’d be offended. I had to ask around to find out that it means “baldy” and is slightly derogatory, but I like the sound of it. Unlike “baldy”, the strong emphasis on the accented last syllable makes it sound like a particularly powerful title, like the nickname people might be forced to use for a mustachioed South American dictator to express feigned affection. I loved introducing myself as Pelón on parent-teacher conference nights; the parents would be shocked that their kids called me that, and when I told them that I didn’t mind it immediately made them more comfortable with me, since, despite the sound to my gringo ears, it made me less of an authority figure. After introducing myself as “Mr. Gorman, the one your kids call Pelón,” to a room full of parents, most were instantly on my side, though a few did come up to me and tell me I should not let them call me that, as it isn’t respectful enough. I’d then tell them that their particular child didn’t actually use that nickname for me, as he or she had obviously been raised better, and those parents would like me, too.

I heard my full name a lot, as a kid, when I’d misbehave. Apparently that didn’t work, because, in college, my then-girlfriend (now-wife) would use it the same way when I’d cross the line and say something tactless in public. As I do that a lot, my friends heard it all the time. One friend, Phil, confided in me that I was the only person in the whole school whose middle name he knew, for precisely that reason.

Ultimately, I suppose that makes my full name the nickname that suits me best. Ninjaben might sound cooler, Pelón might be useful, and Moby-Wan might be the most clever, but I have to concede that my full name is the one most often demanded by my words and actions. So when I inevitably cross the line and make some crass joke, feel free to scowl and hiss, “Benjamin Douglas Gorman!”

But don’t call me Benji. Benji is for dogs.

Oregon Writing Project: Song

As I do my homework to prepare for the Summer Institute of the Oregon Writing Project at Willamette University, I thought I'd post my attempts here. Today's prompt:

Song: Choose a song that has your name in it and tell the story of how it was written for you, or make up a song with your name in it.

(With apologies to Layli, Neil, Teri, Mariko, Jim, and Mari who have the misfortune to happen to be in the class for which this is written.)

How Do You Write a Song About Benjamin?

(Sung to the tune of (How Do You Solve a Problem Like) "Maria" from The Sound of Music)

The emphasis is on the first,
It has syllables three.
Try to find it in lyrics on Google,
And you will quickly see
No one writes songs about Benjamin.
I guess it will have to be me.
I have a feeling this will come out badly!

It doesn’t sound like English.
We don’t mix our “n” and “j”.
Try to think of some examples
You’ll ponder it all day
Shoe-horning it into a chorus?
I don’t think there’s a way.
I have a feeling this will come out badly!

I’m not trying to be cynical.
My detachment is clinical… oh!

How do you write a song about Benjamin?
The name doesn’t fit in any rhyme.
How do you write a song about Benjamin?
And who would think that it was worth the time?

Many a name you know would fit in better.
Many a name could fit into a song.
Try Layli or Neil or Teri
Mariko or Jim or Mari
But Benjamin will always come out wrong.

How do you write a song about Benjamin?
This Sound of Music rip-off is so long!

And the man with such a name?
He is not the one to blame.
Nor are his parents who thought for the best
But their son takes on this job
And comes off like a snob
He’s a show-off, and a braggart, and a pest.

He knows what folks will think
It makes him want to drink
When he thinks of the way this song will bore us.
But he likes this prompt a day
His wife says, “No F---ing way.”
She thinks he’s crazy. Oh no! Not the chorus!

How do you write a song about Benjamin?
The name doesn’t fit in any rhyme.
How do you write a song about Benjamin?
And who would think that it was worth the time?

Many a name you know would fit in better.
Many a name could fit into a song.
Try Layli or Neil or Teri
Mariko or Jim or Mari
But Benjamin will always come out wrong.

How do you write a song about Benjamin?
This Sound of Music rip-off is so long!

Oregon Writing Project: One Sentence Story

As I do my homework to prepare for the Summer Institute of the Oregon Writing Project at Willamette University, I thought I'd post my attempts here. Today's prompt:

One Sentence Story: Write a one sentence story that describes who you are. Include some alliteration with your name.

In a blundered attempt to brighten the bored expressions on the faces of his bucolic students, Ben bounced lightly on the balls of his feet as he bloviated about the benefits of the best British books.

Oregon Writing Project: "I am the one who..." poem

As I do my homework to prepare for the Summer Institute of the Oregon Writing Project at Willamette University, I thought I'd post my attempts here. This one is a bit long, but I like the way it coalesces. Let me know what you think! Today's Prompt: I am the one who…: make a list that portrays the details of your likes and dislikes, idiosyncrasies and crotchets, beginning each line with “I am the one who…”

I Am the One Who Is Trying to Be Better About That

I am the guy who considers Ritz crackers and Tillamook extra sharp cheddar cheese a meal.
I am the guy who sometimes forgets to eat for two days straight.
I am the guy who drinks too much Mountain Dew and has the triglyceride count to prove it.
I am the guy who hasn’t heard a clever or original bald joke in a long time.
I am the guy who doesn’t like the way he looks, but is too lazy to work out.
I am the one who’s trying to be better about that.

I am the son who wishes my family lived closer. But not too close.
I am the husband who buys a new song and listens to it over and over until my wife hates it.
I am the husband who says he will do the dishes, forgets, and then says, “I was going to do those.”
I am the father who Noah is allowed to punch in the chest but not the face or the crotch.
I am the father who gave Noah that awesome Mohawk haircut when he was into reciting Mr. T quotes.
I am the father who cuts Noah’s hair, and always wants to cut it a little shorter around the ears.
I am the father who has cut Noah’s ear with the clippers. Twice.
I am the one who’s trying to be better about that.

I am the teacher who likes to be in front of his students more than behind his desk.
I am the teacher who likes books better than movies, but watches more movies for sheer expedience.
I am the teacher who keeps a jar of creamy peanut butter in my desk and eats a spoonful during third period to keep my energy level up.
I am the teacher who, on bad days, wonders if I should have gone to law school.
I am the teacher who shaves less and less frequently as the school year goes on.
I am the one who’s trying to be better about that.

I am the guy who actively wishes ill for douche-bags like Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck.
I am the guy who does not romanticize ages past when men beat their wives, whites lynched blacks, gays were considered mentally ill, and books had to be written by hand or typed on typewriters.
I am the guy who used to be religious and is now a reluctant agnostic who misses the certainty.
I am the guy who often can’t understand the Red State point of view.
I am the one who’s trying to be better about that.

I am the writer who tries to set aside at least one night a week to write until dawn.
I am the writer who smokes a pipe because I’m an addict and I enjoy it, not because I’m professorial, contemplative, or cerebral.
I am the writer who overwrites. Who has to add just one more idea. Which should be edited out. But isn’t.
I am the writer who posts political rants online and delude myself that somebody out there gives a rat’s ass what I think.
I am the writer who powerfully, passionately, solemnly, resolutely hates the overuse of adverbs. Especially in dialogue attribution, I might add laconically, ungrammatically, and unnecessarily.
I am the writer who writes novels but gives up on each one after only a handful of rejected query letters.
I am the one who’s trying to be better about that.

I am the guy who does not handle embarrassment well.
I am the guy who stopped feeling guilty about watching good TV shows.
I am the guy who is embarrassed to admit how much I love singing karaoke.
I am the guy who is still self conscious about the length of my pants because kids made fun of me for wearing “highwaters” one day more than twenty years ago.
I am the guy who is always wearing two clashing shades of black.
I am the guy who assumes strangers are laughing at me.
I am the guy who still imagines what my NBA career will be like, despite the fact that I’m too short, too slow, can’t jump high, can’t shoot the ball well, almost never play, and am now getting near retirement age.
I am the guy who wishes he lived in New York City, and wishes he could afford to.
I am the guy who is never happy where I am.
I am the one who’s trying to be better about that.

Oregon Writing Project: Fabulous Autobiography

As I do my homework to prepare for the Summer Institute of the Oregon Writing Project at Willamette University, I thought I'd post my attempts here. Today's Prompt: "Fabulous Autobiography: create a one paragraph autobiography of the life you could dream of living if you weren’t so busy living this life. Be imaginative and tell your untrue autobiography." I couldn't quite stick to the one paragraph limit (Surprise!). Let me know what you think:


…and, strange as it may sound, at that moment I was reminded of one of my favorite quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. “All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.” He’d said that to a group of striking garbage men. In a way, that was precisely my vocation. It caused me to reflect on the life I might have lived, had I made other choices. What if I’d married my girlfriend in college, Paige, the one with the quick wit and the large brown eyes? Might we have had a child together? Would he have had her eyes, or mine? And what job might I have had? Would I, perhaps, have taken a job as a high school English teacher, and in that position taught that very quote to students somewhere, as a way to motivate them to focus on their work in the classroom and their own occupations in the future?

I shook my head. Clearly, though she looked to all the world like a woman who was merely sleeping, the creature before me was tricking me, using her powers to encourage my mind wander from my present task so she could buy precious minutes until sunset. No, the trash had to be taken out.

I carefully set the point of the wooden stake in its place on her chest. She didn’t stir as it dimpled her skin. Then I raised the mallet and struck it. The stake pierced the soft flesh, then the cartilage and bone of her sternum, then the un-beating heart. She thrashed and tried to rise up, but I held onto the stake and pushed her down. Leaning her head back, she screamed. The sound echoed off the walls of the mausoleum, bouncing through the door, across the graveyard of the small Coptic church, and up between the high crags of Eastern Anatolia, where the Pontus and Taurus mountain ranges meet. The haunting, inhuman sound reverberated off the mountains, and persisted longer than any human’s could.

“Oh, shut up,” I said, more irritated than frightened, since I’d heard that sound a hundred times before. I raised the machete to finish the job. The first cut sank all the way through her neck and stuck in the base of the coffin below, but, as is often the case when I slice a tomato in my kitchen back in London, some bit of flesh held on, and this was enough to keep her alive, allowing the nearly severed head to continue screaming. I pried the machete free, raised it again, and finished the day’s work, watching her body dissolve into dust in a matter of seconds.

As I climbed out of the mausoleum, I thought of her last gambit, her desperate attempt to hold on to her half-life, and I admit I doubted the dignity of my chosen profession.

The Oregon Writing Project: Acrostic Poem

As I do my homework to prepare for the Summer Institute of the Oregon Writing Project at Willamette University, I thought I'd post my attempts here. Our first assignments all relate to our names. Here's my first whack at an acrostic poem:

The Sound more than the History

Beginning with Hebrew
Even though I’m not Jewish
Never bothered me.
Jealous of that tradition, really.
Ancestors did wander in the desert
Millennia ago.
I feel I missed out on something
Not being counted among the Chosen.

Descending from Scotland, too.
Our ancestors wore kilts.
Undeniably ostentatious.
Guess I have to admit to some of that.
Listing my middle name here
Advertises some deep-seated need to show off,
-----though not confident enough to wear
Skirts.

Got here from Ireland, as well.*
Over the Atlantic with my other ancestors, the blood
Running together: ancestors traveling from
-----Poland, Romania, England, Germany, Portugal...*
Makes one think
About all the struggles and sacrifices,
-----scrambling and scratching and surviving.
Name should sound a lot stronger, but…

-----I’ve grown to fit the sound more than the history.



(Note on 6/14/10
*#1 This line read, "Got here from Ireland, too." Switched to "as well" because I just noticed I had "too" twice.
*#2 This line was edited after my Uncle Doug, for whom I received my middle name, wrote to inform me that the original line was inaccurate. It read: "Running together: Hungarian, Polish, German, English, Portuguese..." It turns out that, though some relatives came from Poland, they were not ethnically Polish, but Ashkenazi Jews. Similarly, the Hungarians referenced were not Hungarian, but also Ashkenazi Jews. Only it turns out they probably didn't live in Hungary, but in Romania. Hence the new line. Frankly, I think the line is a bit clunkier now. Before the blood ran together and made one think. I like that. Now the blood runs together (need to use the "r" after all) but it's the ancestors traveling which makes one think. Ironic that I'm sacrificing a bit of the sound of the poem to get the history correct, considering the poem's last line.)

A Defense of the Finale of Lost

During the last season of Lost, I've enjoyed reading the conversation between Chadwick Matlin, Jack Shafer, and Seth Stevenson after each episode on Slate. However, all three (including the show's biggest defender) have been bashing on the finale. Personally, I was satisfied. That may not sound like a ringing endorsement, but after reading some of the brutal commentary I think the episode needs some defending. And, unlike these three, the more I think about it, the more I like it.

Warning: Spoilers (at least one big un').

Seth Stevenson sums his dismissal up this way: "I've seen the idea posited that there are two kinds of Lost fans: 1) those who watch for the sci-fi twists and surprises, and 2) those who watch for the characters and relationships. If you watch for the mysteries, this theory holds, you were disappointed by the finale. If you watch for the characters and relationships, you were thrilled to wallow in those happy reunion hugs in that nondenominational spiritual venue."

This depends on a false distinction. It was the sci-fi twists that illuminated the characters and their relationships, and in the end, it was possibly the biggest twist of all which brought those relationships to some (schmaltzy, warm and fuzzy) closure. It fit the show perfectly.

I think a lot of folks are missing the element of the finale that was most successful: The show has always been about discovering that our assumptions about characters are wrong because we make those assumptions at a given point in time. Hence the flashbacks that opened our eyes to characters' choices in Season 1 hooked many of us in the first place. That's what sold me on the show at first; discovering that I was understanding what a character did in a previous episode only after learning about their life from a flashback. Then the flashes-forward served this function in a new and really cool way. Then the characters themselves were lost in time, so they were experiencing the same thing we had already grown accustomed to as viewers. The last season seemed to be plodding along, revealing all this information about the island in a more traditional, expositional way while doing the same in an alternate time-line caused by the A-bomb, but both time-lines, on their own, seemed straightforward. Admit it: How many times did you have that "Ah-ha" moment when some event in the parallel world told you something revelatory about the people (seemingly) still on the island? Never. We reveled in the cleverness of the parallel world, noticing the connections to the world we'd come to know, but we didn't gain new insight into the people on the island, as we had before. Only the flashbacks about Jacob/Smokey/Alpert seemed to have that "Oh, now that makes sense" phenomenon. By the end we were all hoping to see how the two stories would intersect because we'd all assumed they were parallel and had begun at the moment of the A-bomb.

And then, in the finale, we're given one of the biggest Ah-ha's yet. The parallel world didn't begin at the A-bomb explosion! It began where the island story ended! It wasn't a flash sideways at all! It was a flash forward that we all assumed was a flash sideways!

Just like in the first season, our assumptions were being exploited. Only this time our assumptions weren't small and limited to specific character's behaviors. Our Season 1 assumptions were small: We assumed "Kim is a jerk because of the way he treats his wife," only to discover that he really loved her and had essentially sold his soul to her father, only to have that blow up in his face and push her to cheat on him. Now his behavior made more sense (and made him more likable). But in the final season our assumption was huge: We'd assumed the A-bomb caused the rift, and someone (Desmond? Jack? Ben? Hurley?) would bring it all back together at the end. When the assumption was revealed to be false, instead of saying, "Oh, I was wrong about that particular guy", we had to reconcile the fact that we were wrong about half the season, and all the moments throughout which had seemed to be straightforward might have been revelatory about the characters on the island after all.

Admittedly, I didn't like the purgatory angle particularly (and I had a real moment of panic where I thought Christian Shepard was going to say it had ALL been purgatory and I would start to froth at the mouth and throw things at the TV) but I realize that my personal agnosticism shouldn't be any more piqued by a reference to purgatory than to ghosts or smoke monsters or magical islands. I'll bet lots of "haters" are frustrated because of the seeming religious (though insultingly vaguely religious) overtones of the finale. But let's face it: If we could accept the elements of the island as fiction, why can't we accept purgatory as part of that fictional universe? Once I can do that, then I see that the great twist of the flash-sideways becoming a flash-forward is not lazy or merely clever, but genuinely earned. This wasn't a deus ex machina ending, but a thematically consistent ending, since the show has always been about betraying our assumptions about its characters. Moreover, it's been about betraying our assumptions about characters to make us like them, or at least sympathize with them enough to care about them, despite our first impressions. So if the ending was schmaltzy (and, hoo boy was it) that fits, too.

If someone doesn't like that the show cleverly played with our assumptions, or that it did so to appeal to our sympathies, then I wonder why they have been watching it for the last six years.

Moment of Cynicism T-Shirts

At our school, teachers get to have a casual day each Friday. We call it "Spirit Day", and we have to wear the shirts that advertise for our school. I generally have no problem with this. I prefer a t-shirt to a button-up shirt and tie. But on those days when I'm feeling cynical, I wish I could choose some other shirt that expresses how I feel. In this fit of distemper, I made a shirt on cafepress.com that anybody can buy, and if I sell a few I'll be able to afford to buy one myself. So, my fellow high school teachers, if you're interested, here's my first design:





Available in all kinds of designs at:

http://www.cafepress.com/gorman_blog

Buy one for everybody on staff!

Will Cell Phone Etiquette Break Down Class Barriers?

Paige and I were just talking about cell phone etiquette, and I wondered about something: Because cell phones are becoming so ubiquitous, as we develop a common sense of propriety about the use of this technology, is it possible we'll see a divide that transcends class divisions? Historically, as manners have developed, they've done so across class lines. Words that were considered acceptable ("shit" as the common term for manure, for example) were rejected by people who sought to establish themselves as refined aristocrats. Aspiring middle class people tried to emulate the behavior of the wealthy. Lower class people were left with behavior and language deemed "trashy" precisely because it identified them as poor. However, when it comes to cell phones, I can easily see a different divide coming into play.

Wealthy, powerful people will divide amongst themselves between neo-luddites who crave more traditional human interaction and business elites who need to stay in constant contact with clients, need to manage investments, need to close deals, etc. Those who reject this plugged-in lifestyle will vary from the "off-the-grid" extremists to those who sneer at people who text in restaurants or talk on the phone in line at the grocery store, but they will share some common skepticism of the merits of the permanently plugged-in lifestyle.

The aspirational middle class might emulate both sets of behaviors in distinct camps. Amongst the poor, some might try to take ownership of their poverty by adopting a bohemian air and emulating the neo-luddite resistance to constant connectedness, while other poor people will see the wired world as a means to alleviate their poverty.

This could lead to cultural symptoms like shared language which transcend class barriers. For example, if a text catchphrase takes off among the constantly connected, it might be rejected by those who hold that dependence on connectedness in disdain. The same might be true of those who reject the constant connectedness, though they are less likely to adopt similar speech patters and behavioral ticks as quickly precisely because they reject the technology that makes such rapid communication so easy.

I don't foresee half the population tootling around in flying cars, whizzing past the other half in covered wagons and Amish fashions. Still, it will be interesting and possibly even socially transformative to divorce the idea of manners from the idea of wealth. Personally, I look forward to the day when a poor person will see a rich person talking on his phone during a dinner date and will call the behavior "trashy" without any thought about how much money is in the rude guy's bank account. I was raised to believe that good manners were unrelated to money (thanks to my grandparents who passed that lesson on to my parents), and maybe the common denominator of the cell phone will make good manners available to everyone, just as they are making bad cell phone etiquette a nearly universal phenomenon.

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.