QUIET MINDS

WE THINK WE KNOW

2012-02-10T21:45:00.000-08:00

Imagine how small is their experience and how little they know of the world. It's easy for adults to forget.

His research paper argues that high schools students should work while also going to school. He does not see this as a problem. His state assessment scores are passing, he has worked all the way through high school. Working, he insists, provides valuable jobs skills and does not interfere with his schoolwork. But this is his second time taking the class, and he is failing again.

She wants to prove in her research paper that watching violent movies and playing violent video games do not have any impact on the viewer or player. She is frustrated because she can't find any proof. All the research she can find shows that violent media do have an impact, but she insists her brother plays all these games all the time and he's not violent, so the researchers must all be wrong.

Each year I teach the dreaded assignments that requires students to precisely dot each i and cross each t.

MLA form is no more picky than any other manuscript form, but the details of citations, page layout, verb tense, and so forth are a struggle at first for anyone who is new to them. I'm sure it's true that sometimes students are lazy or stubborn, but the struggles I witness in my classroom seem to me more often a matter of habit—they simply don't see their mistakes because they have not yet trained their own eyes to notice.

It's my job to develop that eye and train those minds to reason, to overcome bad habits of thought, and to notice the larger world.

To my way of thinking, much of what I teach my English students I learned myself in Social Studies classrooms, but these days no one seems certain what Social Studies teachers should be teaching, with the result that most students are poorly prepared to function as citizens of the world. They more often want to prove their prejudices than to learn something new.

It isn't only that we don't know where the Baltic Sea is, it that we don't listen to every single point of view in order to understand what's true. We don't read the news at all when we should be reading it all. This makes us ill-prepared to make a smart decision. An uninformed electorate is a terrific advantage for powerful people who want to convince us to do what they want us to do. An uninformed electorate vote against their own interests.

A few years ago The Parade magazine conducted a pole finding that 20% of Americans believed they were in the top 2% of incomes. Another 20% believed they would soon be in the top 20%. Thus they all voted to favor that rarified group at the top of the food chain, because they mistakenly believed this served their own interests.

Today, most Americans seem to have a clearer image of their place on the economic position in society. Too many 50-somethings watched their retirement vaporize, too many people have lost their homes, their jobs, and their sense of security.

The answer? Watch the news with a skeptical eye. Don’t think conspiracy theories that involve assassinations and international plot. Just think. All it takes for the people in power to lose control is for the populace to understand more about their world. Notice that working thirty hours a week does impact success in school. Watching violence doesn’t make you a monster, but it does have impact.

I PLANNED PARENTHOOD

2012-02-08T19:38:00.000-08:00

When I was still a teenager in Washington State my boyfriend and I took two transfers and three buses to Planned Parenthood in central Seattle. There we were each counseled, separately and together. I was offered cautions and many choices, including, as I recall, abstinence. But I had already made up my mind. I wasn’t going to get carried away and have sex without protection, but I was old enough to look out for myself and my future. Planned Parenthood was there to help.

For my first job I trained a boy who started with pay a third again as much as I was being paid. Our boss explained this was because I was a girl and he didn’t believe girls should be paid what boys were paid. He had the right to do that in 1969. In those days even Planned Parenthood wasn't allowed to counsel about abortion, a husband’s permission was necessary before a woman could obtain certain forms of health care, and it was illegal to dispense birth control to anyone in some states. Later when I was earning $1.70/hour and working my way through college, the assistance offered by Planned Parenthood was essential to my success. Without health insurance I couldn’t afford to see a doctor, and the pills were more than I could afford.

This week, between the Komen debacle and the recent decision concerning birth control as a covered expense in medical insurance, family planning has been prominent in the news. Birth control is immoral in the eyes of some people. Catholic hospitals, for example, refuse to provide birth control information, but in a national system, they do not have the right to deny hospital workers—some of whom are paid very badly and are not Catholic—access to affordable birth control. No large organization should be allowed to decide for their employees what sort of pay or benefits are moral. Yesterday, David Brooks and Mark Shields discussed the decision on the part of the Obama administration’s Health and Human Service Department to deny an exemption to church-run schools, hospitals, and social service agencies—like other employers, they must provide birth control coverage under the Affordable Care Act. [You can find their discussion here.] Shields and Brooks call this a serious political mistake. To me it is the first absolute proof that Obama understands one of the terrible consequences of poverty in our country.

Over 22% of American children live in poverty, which impacts success in school, overall health, life expectancy, and lifelong opportunity and productivity. While there are men and women on both sides of this issue about access to birth control, this is primarily a women’s issue. I am appalled by the failure of both Brooks and Shields to understand why organizations must provide equal access. I understand why it’s problematic, but they should understand why basic health care for women can’t be denied because of the religious beliefs of employers. No one is required to use birth control, but coverage must exist, especially for the poor who otherwise might not be able to afford it. These two white male commentators are smart and interesting, but I feel their limited perspective on this issue reveals their underdrawers. They say they are at a loss to understand why the President “doesn't get it.” I feel precisely the same way about their analysis of women's health issues.

I have been married now to my first sexual partner for close to forty years. As partners we have never regarded family planning purely as a women’s issue—it’s been a family issue. We have been blessed by our children and grandchild, but we also had the blessing of choice. Forty years ago I was independent and mature enough to be responsible about sex, but I also knew I was not ready to raise a family at eighteen. Our children were not accidents. We raised them because we wanted them and loved them and we were willing to sacrifice for them. I respect the right of every American to choose how and when they have children, but I insist that the choice of when and whether children become part of a family is a deeply personal one. I doubt as a country we are willing to allow that decision to be made by our government, or a church, or a social agency, however well-intentioned. Children should not be an accident or regarded as punishment; they are a gift, a treasure.

ABOVE: Planned Parenthood volunteers help bring the fight for health insurance reform to the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

THE WAY THE SUN SETS

2012-02-05T23:14:00.000-08:00

Why is it all so beautiful?

Why can't we even begin to notice?

Here on earth.

E PLURIBUS UNUM

2012-02-05T08:04:00.000-08:00

btw, though the line "In God we trust" did not appear on paper money in the 1800s, it did appear on coin and this became the subject of considerable debate. Politicians on both sides of the aisle objected to the use of the motto. People found a connection between God and money highly inappropriate (given the many cautions against valuing money in the Bible), and the decision was the subject of considerable debate and humor—leading to jokersters' quips: "In gold we trust."

WHY MARTHA STEWART

2012-02-01T21:05:00.000-08:00

The other evening my husband offered to put a bread pudding into the oven for a company breakfast the next morning. I set the oven temperature, told him to preheat, then 45 minutes covered and 20 with the foil off. He got up at three and cooked it then, leaving it in the oven to keep warm. “Oh dear,” I said at six when I got up. If you are a baker you know that the lovely crusty top would go all soggy left in the oven. “Some day I’ll have to learn how to do all this,” my husband observed. “You need to read Martha Stewart Living,” I said. He was joking. I was not.

More than forty years ago I purchased the inaugural issue of Ms. Magazine. I mention this so that readers don’t misunderstand where I am coming from. I believe in equal pay for equal work; that marriage is an equal partnership, not a master-and servant relationship; that women and men are no more different that any two random strangers passing on the street. I do not believe that all men are football-watching, violent, insensitive slobs. I do not believe that all women are clothing-obsessed, weepy, overly-sensitive wimps. I think it’s important to appreciate that both men and women are capable of a wide range of accomplishments. In my family I am the cook and baker and my husband is the cleaner. I paint, he stacks wood. We have our mutually agreed-upon division of labor, and I do not believe that “women’s place is [only] in the home.”

But I still love Martha Stewart.

Granted, in person she’s probably tough and difficult and way too high profile to be a comfortable dinner guest. But she's also found a niche. It’s an important one.

More recently than Ms. I bought the inaugural issue of Martha Stewart Living because I’d loved her book, Entertaining—not to be confused with a newer edition by the same name. Over the years this magazine taught me to choose squash and yellow magnolias; how to make a bed, set up a room for guests, sew towels and woolen blankets; how to plan a meal inside an hour, bake icebox cookies and quinoa, roast a turkey, and design a feast for a family holiday; what to serve for Christmas and Passover and the Fourth of July; how to decorate for Halloween and use color to make my living room glow; how to plant a garden to look at or to eat, and what to do with all those flowers or that produce once it’s ripe; and she’s detailed many small tasks such as cleaning grout, storing clothing to be safe from moths, choosing essential household tools, and repairing everything from lamps to lampshades.

There was a time when the typical American would have learned all this from parents and grandparents. But this doesn’t seem to happen anymore. It isn’t only in poor families that young people have no idea how to repair a broken zipper, address an envelope, or design a menu. Most of my students have no practical living skills.

And forgive me for spouting a cliché, but “when I was a girl” everyone took shop and home economics classes beginning in seventh grade and learned how to use hand tools and the impact of overcooking peas. We sewed and repaired, and in Scouts or Blue Birds and public schools we developed skills that our parents had already begun to teach us about how to manage at home.

I wish it weren’t being left to school to correct all the inequities of society (which are mostly, in America, about socio-economic level), but I find it ironic that now, at the very moment in our history when almost no parent in American has the time—and sometimes not even the necessary skill—to teach their children how to cook, mend, repair, garden, and keep house—at this moment, the classes that used to teach those skills are virtually nonexistent. Students who take cooking mostly learn to cook professionally at my school, as if cooking for themselves were irrelevant. Metal shop is gone and there hasn’t been a sewing class for at least a decade. My students don’t know how to thread a needle, much less how to hem a pair of pants.

They don’t know how to bake a pie or make cookies “from scratch”—as if these were difficult things. My students don’t know how to use all the features of Microsoft Word, but they also don’t know how to properly write a letter, how to address an envelope, or buy a stamp. Thank you notes, letters—these basic communication skills are losing ground. Email is losing ground. My students can text, and increasingly i find tweek-speak invading the classroom. r u seeing it?

While other women's magazines fussed over waxing, botox, and "How to get your man and keep him," Stewart told us how to create a pretty and productive garden, a comfortable home, and a good meal. Her message isn't counter to my values as a feminist, and I don't have to do everything perfectly to appreciate that she's telling me how to do things I might not otherwise know how to do at all.

So, I say, forget about her personal life—what do I care that she was convicted of insider trading? Let the woman show me how to pit cherries and grow kale. Heck, let her show me how to arrange my spice cupboard and create party invitations for Halloween. Maybe she’s not the best role model around, but she’s got some game. And someone ought to be showing us how to live.

(Maybe even a few men might learn something useful.)

"PRETTY"

2012-01-27T18:36:00.000-08:00

A teenager told me the other day that he’d seen “an old yearbook picture” of me and that I “was pretty” in 2006. He was trying to be nice. I confess that I had several immediate and simultaneous impulses—to wish he’d seen me forty years ago, to go look up the picture in the yearbook, and to wish I didn’t care anymore how I look. Appearance, however, is the least of my problems today.

This morning on the front page of The Oregonian is an article about the number of students who graduated on schedule last year in Oregon schools. The average number is up, but the title of the article is “In High School Class of 2011, One-Third Left Without Diploma.” [You can find the online version HERE] The article begins: “Oregon high schools again failed…” Graduations went up, but we're still failing. Then, later in the day, a former student sent me a link to the page of a teacher who had originally been pretty gung ho for all the proposed education reform, but later came to realize it isn’t working. “A Teacher Story: Why I’m Leaving Public Education.” My former student wondered if I was thinking along the same lines; was I willing to comment; and if not, she understood.

I'm still here.

Mark Twain said there are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and statistics. There are statistics all over the place and they are used to "prove" all sorts of things that are not true or useful. Our education system is not failing, but our society is failing when 22% of our children live in poverty. American children living in economic security are doing very well in American schools. Poor American children are not, and that's not because the poor are lazy or stupid, it’s because they are too busy trying to survive. And whether their families are the victims of the recent economic troubles, or no one they know has ever risen out of poverty, they do not have a computer in their bedroom, a stable home life, or parents who can afford to help them with college. Without decent housing, reliable food or clothing or health care, is it any wonder that the children who are doing badly in school are poor? Only people who are too selfish or secure themselves to care would question that impact.

And, even as a dedicated teacher for many years, there isn't very much I can do to help those poor children. I can try to teach them better, but what they need is reliable food, a place to study, a house (not a shack), and decent medical care. No amount of money, no bonus, no threat is going to make me do a better job—I'm already dancing as fast as I can. Looking at places where educational systems have been improving (yes, we can all improve), it's clear that America under Bush and Obama is doing everything wrong. Some private companies will be getting rich off our current trajectory, but we aren't helping kids at all by testing, tearing apart our public school system with elite charter schools that fair no better than other public schools, and turning our schools inside out in competition with one another.

Years ago a teacher commented on the high achievement of the Lake Oswego School District: “You can’t fight genetics.” I was shocked at the time. These words came from a “good” and “respected” teacher who assumed that achievement is the result of inheritance. She suggested that poor people just weren’t as smart as rich people and all the smart kids lived in the rich district. Since then I've met plenty of people who think along those lines.

That’s not been my experience. Last year, for example, we had a perfect storm of hard-working juniors at my high school, and of over 300 high schools in Oregon, ours was one of three in the state ranked "Outstanding" on our Annual Report Card. We are a very poor, rural district, and to be perfectly honest, despite our hard work and SIOP training, the team meetings and careful planning, I don't know when, or even if, we will repeat the success. We look good just now, but appearances can be deceiving. Our community is increasingly impacted by the sluggish economy. Our students do their best, but that may not be judged good enough.

Certainly a lack of intelligence limits accomplishment in the short term, and ultimately life opportunities. But intelligence isn't the only factor at work (or not at work) here. Sometimes poverty just happens and it isn’t anyone's fault or caused by lack of individual skill or energy or an unwillingness to work hard.

This morning in the newspaper, the school districts with the highest graduation rates in the state were lined up with the schools districts with the lowest graduation rates. No one should be surprised that affluence influences success in schools. Recent studies confirm this. Finland has also proven that with an equitable school system, all children thrive.

In America, kids in solidly middle class and upper class areas do as well or better in public schools than students anywhere in the world. The reason our schools average out lower than we wish has a lot to do with 22% of America’s children living in poverty. A careful study of scholarship or some common sense would prove to anyone that it’s not our schools that are “failing”, it’s the American Dream, it’s poverty, it’s an unwillingness on the part of America to extend opportunity to all our children.

And there’s not a damn thing I can do to change that.

Six years ago I “was pretty.” Well, maybe so. I’ve earned the creases in my forehead and the lines around my eyes. Each year seems a little harder. My classes are larger and, as many businesses in my town go under and “for rent” signs show up, I can see the familiar signs of stress around the eyes of my students too. They deserve better.

ABOVE: That's a picture of my 40th high school reunion. I wasn't there and I only recognize about three people in the photo. We were all prettier in high school, but even then there were kids who struggled, kids whose parents beat them, kids who didn't have enough to eat or safe homes to return to, and some of them managed to get to college and prove that it wasn't genetics that had kept their families down—it was a lack of opportunity.

THE DRAGON YEAR

2012-01-21T13:57:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow, 23 January 2012, begins the Chinese year of the dragon, the water dragon, and I was born in the year of the water dragon sixty years ago—my birthday is in October. Chinese horoscope rotates through 12 animal symbols, so my year comes up every 12 years. The 60-year cycle also rotates through five elements of fire, earth, metal, water, and wood, so not every dragon year is a water dragon.

Twelve years ago, a metal dragon year, I imagined that the year of the dragon might bring me some sort of special success—fame and book advances that would allow me to retire early and pursue writing full time. Those things didn't happen, but other things have. I feel no great regrets about what didn’t happen, though I did suffer from some of the events that did. Still, I have my family. I write in my blog. I attend to my students. I read and think and talk and email and run, and this is where I am in life. I look for purpose. I look for ways to light a useful path as I go. I try to remember what matters.

I don’t think what matters is imbedded in money, and I trust that my students who do believe that money possesses meaning, will find one day—perhaps with a kind of shock and confusion and fear—that they are wrong. (They hope that money keeps score about who is winning, and they want so badly to win.) Perhaps my money-invested students will reevaluate and find their lives wanting despite all the bucks they’ve earned. When they understand, they will thrash and struggle to figure out what winning can possibly mean and what really does matter. I hope this will happen, that they will figure this out in time. It is the work of our lives to seek purpose and meaning.

They will search for something greater.

That is dharma. Dharma is what we must do, the responsibility of our situations. Child, student, worker, parent. We have work at each stage of our life. And then we age and find there is still work before us. We all must recognize who we are and the obligations that come with our position in life.

But none of this is fact. I am not a Hindu or Buddhist or Christian. I do not believe in horoscopes or fortune telling or even prayer as a solution to my needs and desires—though I do pray. It is not enough to rely on magic to fix my problems or the problems of our world. And some of those problems have nothing to do with what I see and hear and feel about me. I am seeking a greater meaning. And metaphor—that’s what I believe humans look for and invest with meaning—metaphor is a powerful thing. Metaphor is not literal truth, it is more than that. Metaphor is Truth, that ultimate clarity of truth. It is what we cannot touch or point to, but that which we most value and strive for. Such ideas are enormously powerful things. Like a dragon breathing fire, metaphor—the broken heart, the yearning soul, the questing spirit—burns up our lives to the last breath and in the process makes a flame for others to follow or merely charred remains.

This is 2012, the year of the water dragon, the year of my birth plus sixty, and here I sit on the hem of the Pacific Ocean thinking about meaning and metaphor and the future. I consider where this year might go, what light my own little fire might blow across the water of these coming days, and finally, I consider how I will someday go out and what I will leave behind—illumination and dust.

YELLOW RICE

2012-01-18T21:07:00.000-08:00

I know people who love the smell of cinnamon toast or frying chicken or Christmas cookies. Nothing is as provocative of memory as smell. I have a homemade cocoa mix with organic/fair trade cocoa and sugar with a pinch of ground chipotle. Lately I’ve been making it with almond milk, which is especially nice.

The smell of evergreens in the house, hot cider, baking bread, garlic, lanolin in wool yarn, the distinct smell of the ocean on a hot day when plankton and salt and seaweed combine to stink up the air in a way I’ve loved since childhood. These smells are all good enough to eat, even the sea.

But one of the very best odors I have ever experienced is “yellow rice,” which I’ve made myself. It’s a recipe I found back when I was in college. I had a friend who lived in an ashram and another who had traveled alone in the far east and was the first vegan cook I knew. I looked for cookbooks and began experimenting.

This recipe always turns out. I’m supposed to start by sautéing half a chopped onion in ghee, but I usually skip the onion and begin with the next step—sautéing brown basmati rice in goat butter. Then I add filtered water, a half teaspoon of ground turmeric, and three green cardamom pods. (A friend brought me back cardamom pods from India last year—I need only three for each pot of rice.) As the rice cooks, the entire house fills with the perfume of the lovely rich spices. It is a glorious, healthy, beautiful food.

If you’ve never eaten good basmati rice, you’re missing something special. Forget the white “jasmine rice” you’ve eaten in restaurants. Basmati is amazing. An American company patented the rice, which was at least wrong, if not downright immoral—it’s been grown in India forever.

My entire house smells warm, gently spicy. Rich. Home.

RECIPE: In a 2 quart saucepan, saute 1 1/2 cup basmati rice in two tablespoons (goat preferred) butter for 3-5 minutes, stirring constantly. Add 3 cups water, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder, and three cardamom pods, cover and lower heat to simmer for 45-60 minutes until all the water is absorbed. To make it fluffier: remove from heat, fluff with a fork, put a folded tea towel over the rice, replace the lid over that and allow to stand for 5 minutes. Serve.

GET INTO MY BOAT

2012-01-17T13:37:00.000-08:00

I got an email from a college professor this weekend: “I don’t know how you can stand all the anti-teacher rhetoric.”

Sometimes I wonder myself. But I’m not the only one getting nailed:

“[I] Would just like to take a moment to say that as a FEMA employee, I must personally apologize for my employer’s diabolical plans to take over the world with martial law and concentration camps. I understand that as a bored housewife, or chronically unemployed waiter, you have the utmost expertise on what I actually do at MY job without bothering to ask anything about it first, and must give my well meaning, yet misguided self a good scolding about what horrible people we emergency managers are and how you have ‘proof’ that we’re secretly working for an evil agency that will put everyone it proverbial chains, especially since your friend’s friend in another state saw it on the internet with their own eyes. Thank you so much for showing me the light instead of putting that energy into doing something productive, you paranoid, self absorbed... :D” [Kaite Rea, EMT-trained and FEMA since 2005, on Facebook, 23 December 2011]

Some people love taking others to task and will believe most anything, if they hear it often enough. This morning on Facebook I learned education is so bad that students are bound to be ________ [fill in the blank here—lazy, ignorant, dishonest, etc.]. It's those teachers not doing their jobs! People not only tell me how to teach—certain they could do it so much better—but they also find me pathetic for having chosen this field in which I am such a sorry player. None of my most competitive students will choose education as a career. Though they say they have benefited from being in my class, they want a job with more prestige and better pay. They don’t want my long hours. They don’t want to be part of a system that is so publicly blamed for everything that is going wrong.

Did education get bad because we failed to hire great teachers, those teachers are only looking for an easy job, and they’re in it for the money? Or is it something else?

Guess my answer.

There is abundant research and real life support for the success of students as a result of working with great teachers. There is abundant research and real life support for success through supporting teachers, paying them well, and allowing them to do their jobs. There is abundant research and real life support for the success without high-stakes testing, with added teacher responsibility, and focus on collaboration and equity. According to a Finnish education expert, "Accountability is what you have when you don't have responsibility." As in many other spheres of American life, we would rather punish error than teach people how to get it right—even when the latter is kinder and cheaper. And isn't that a pity?

There is little to no research evidence or real life support for success in education through setting universal curricular standards. There is little to no research evidence or real life support for success by applying a business model to education—education is not profit. There is little to no independent research evidence or real life support for success using the curriculum textbook companies want to sell—though they have done their own studies to "prove" that what they're selling is effective. There is little to no research evidence or real life support for success as a result of universally blaming teachers for the failure of students. There is little to no research evidence or real life support for successful education by punishing people for failure. There is little to no research evidence or real life support for success through offering cash incentives to excellent teachers—in fact, research shows motivation doesn't work that way at all.

Big surprise. I’m not holding back when I teach, folks. I’m teaching the best I know how. More money is always welcome, but it won’t make me a better teacher. I already work a 50 to 70-hour week and no amount of money will convince me to put in more time. I already want to do a good job. The major barrier to my success, beyond overloaded classrooms, is people telling me all the time how terrible education is in America. For example: I object to charter schools and other methods of eroding our system. Charter schools leach off the children from the most committed families, often asking that they compete for a space in schools with less accountability than ordinary public schools. And surprise! even then, charter schools fail to consistently outperform ordinary "terrible" public schools.

Maybe our education system is not so terrible. But if you hear a thing often enough—and you will hear that education is failing in American over and over—you begin to believe it. Teachers lose respect and citizens don’t want to spend their hard-earned money on a “failing system.” Those wealthy few who send their kids to elite schools don’t care much about how bad schools get—their kids are in private academies costing more than the yearly income of the families’ of most of my students. Business people who are so anxious to apply business principles to our public schools also expect to make a profit off the system. Public school can't be about paying the least possible for something we don’t need; it isn’t about making a profit. Public education should be about providing the best for those who are "our future." But pretty soon, after we hear this song about failure over and over, everyone is up in arms about our “failing educational system.”

Education isn’t failing here. Maybe it's not doing as well as it should in the richest country in the world, but we educate more of our people than many countries. It’s harder because for many of our jobs are being micro-managed—we are being told how to do every little thing. If I were new to my job, or bad at it, this might be reasonable. And I am always looking for ways to do it better, but I don’t need CEOs or textbook manufacturers telling me how to do my job. They haven’t taught. I have and do.

That said, the best way to improve education in America is not to ask the nation's mayors or business people, but to have a look at what actually works in a public education system. How about Finland? Didn’t we all learn way back in our own education that America is the “Land of Opportunity”? Finland set about changing their educational system with one goal: equity.

It's working.

For several years Finland’s schools have ranked at the top of the educational success measures, and it doesn’t matter how rich or poor or whether you attend a school in the south or north or in a poor district or wealthy one. Read about it HERE in The Atlantic. There are no private schools in Finland. Everyone has a genuine stake in making all schools great. There are also no TAG but much more special education support so that close to half of Finnish students receive some sort of specialized training at some point in their schooling. And while the emphasis in the classroom is collaboration, choosing teaching as a profession is more competitive than law or medicine. The best and brightest become teachers in Finland. Imagine! And this isn't because there are no other opportunities or because it's a smaller or more homogeneous nation than ours. Finland’s demographics are not noticeably different from other European countries, or most American states. The major difference between Finland’s demographics and America’s have to do with income: we have somewhat richer people here and six times greater percentage of children living in poverty. Competition has made some people very rich indeed and many children very poor. How can that be a good thing? America seems to have abandoned equity and collaboration, even in our public schools, for the business model that is all about competition.

The funny thing is that Finland and Finnish students are now more competitive than we are.

We are somewhere down low on the charts for the good stuff like health and upward mobility. We are second or first only in aspects of childhood distress: poverty, infant mortality… This isn’t the fault of our schools at all, but it might suggest where the fault lies. We are a wealthier nation than Finland, but more of our citizens are homeless, poor, without basics such as good food, housing, employment, and medical care. I don't think we are lazier than other countries, or more wicked, but we do seem to be more tolerant of inequities in our society. And I have comfortably middle class and afluent students who are okay with this. "Some kids have to drop out so there will be people to work at McDonalds," a student said to me just last year. He was trying to be funny, but he wasn't kidding. In his mind, life is about competition and since he is winning (thanks to his parents), he doesn’t want his boat to hold more people. Let other "loser" people scramble and suffer, so long as he gets what he wants. And that's exactly what's happening in America according to the UN.

Ah, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Didn't we have a dream about our nation where genuine hard work and determination and some talent can allow anyone to succeed? Or are we harking back to another century where the wealthy can perpetuate themselves by limiting opportunities for the rest of us with second rate chances? Do we want trained professionals to decide how our children should learn, or a corporation? If we want our teachers to be smarter, stronger, better trained, let's not look to people who know how to market widgets to show us how teaching is done.

Instead of taking the word of people with no actual classroom experience, look at what works. Instead of providing only a few with a chance for a healthy future, come to grips with a scary reality—this is not merely an island we’re sharing, but a boat. Sink or swim, it’s going to happen to us all together.

It seems to me that whether we want to share or not, we are all in the same boat together. We might want to look at the Finnish model, but unless we really want to live in the nightmare future described in distopian novels such as Atwood’s Oryx and Crate, where the wealthy few live huddled behind high walls and razor wire, we’d better welcome everyone onboard—we’d better ensure that access to education is equitable rather than competitive.

Get in the boat! I say. Everybody get on board and we'll make room.

ABOVE: That's a Finnish Pulling Boat, made in Minnesota in the good old U.S.A. Isn't she something?

THE FIVE-YEAR PLAN

2012-01-12T21:21:00.000-08:00

When I was very young, only just past a child, I used to look forward to the August issues of magazines with their fall fashions. Mademoiselle magazine was one of my favorites and used to feature college “coeds” who had won an opportunity to work in their New York offices. These young women later became poets Sandra Alcosser and Sylvia Plath, and other authors I admire today. But back in the day, I was interested in the clothes. I barely looked at these young women who were “class of ‘65” or “class of ‘66.”

The assumption was that undergraduate students would graduate in four years, and then move on. That isn’t what I did myself. I committed myself to a Fine Arts degree, which required five years, and then on top of that I added two more degrees in a sixth year. I started with Ceramic Art, went up the hill to complete another degree in the non-ferrous metal shop Metal Design, and finally earned a degree in education, by far the easiest of the three. All my friends had graduated by then, most of them with four-year degrees.

Today, this has changed and about half of college students need more than four years to complete their undergraduate education. An extra term or three can be expensive, but also necessary since few students know what they want to do with their lives when they head off to college, and many of those who know change their minds. For example, my older son wanted to study pure math, changed his sophomore year to art, graduated with a BA, and is now completing his third degree, a masters in software engineering.

College students are choosing a career. They will try many things. They will head off in one direction and then discover that their high school Trig teacher was right: They need more math. In high school they are supposed to be developing thinking skills, problem-solving, reasoning, and a foundation of baseline knowledge. Some kids manage this better than others.

And here’s the problem: Every year, we have a small group of students who enter the “five-year plan.” This isn’t because they changed majors or decided to pick up an extra degree. This is because they messed up in high school classes designed to challenge them while still making it possible for every single student to succeed. The work isn't too hard for them, we don't fail to help them—quite the contrary: We bend over backwards. They still fail. They "don't do school." They sit in class doing nothing, or they skip class, or they never hand in work. Whatever the process, the result is that they fail classes—not just one, but many classes. Students need 25 credits to graduate and if they pass all their classes, after four years they will have 30 credits. Somehow a few students manage to fail more than ten classes and find themselves “not on track for graduation.” But because of extreme measures on the part of faculty, none of us give up, these kids don’t give up, they chip away at their required classes and graduate after an extra term or two, or a year. Or sometimes they do not.

I have a colleague who is working with freshmen this year and just about tearing her hair out because so many sit in her class and fail to accomplish anything. In the mean time, I’m having the same problem with juniors. Students miss class, fail to complete homework, sit in class and ignore what the rest of us are doing. It isn’t most of them. But too many will be on the Five-Year Plan in another year.

It's hard sometimes, when you live in a poor community and no one in your family has ever been to college or had a job that paid decently, when the only jobs you can see waiting for you involve working in a restaurant or hotel or gas station, when you don't even have a family member who might set you up in a trade.

It may seem impossible when someone who hardly knows you tells you there is hope. But it's there.

FALLING IN LOVE

2012-01-07T07:19:00.000-08:00

I started Kindergarten at the age of four and the first thing I fell for was red hair. When it was my turn to paint at one of the class easels, I dipped my paintbrush into a tin can filled with bright red poster paint and drew extravagant swirls of curly red hair on portraits of red-haired girls. I can still recall the day when I looked up from my easel—I must have turned five by then—to study the only red-haired girl in my class. I don’t remember her name and she was not a particular friend of mine. I would already have begun to notice the differences between my classmates: who had prettier clothing and more carefully groomed hair. That day I noticed that her long, extravagantly curly red hair was not “red” like the paint on my brush. It was orangy brown. I wondered how to make that color on my page.

I was also passionate about horses. The following school year, while I was still five, I made a clay sculpture of a horse lying down. It had no ears, and my teacher insisted it needed ears and so she pinched little ears like a puppy onto the top of my horse's head. I brought it home to my mother and declared that it was no longer my horse. I had not made it.

In third grade, a couple years after we moved, I fell head over heels for the new boy in my class, Jim. He had very dark hair in a crew cut like my dad’s. He invited me to a pool party where he held hands with each of the girls while they ran into the slip-and-slide. He did not hold my hand. For Valentine’s Day I sacrificed to Jim one of the note cards my grandparents had given me with horse pictures. I wrote “I love you” inside and put it in Jim’s Valentine envelope at school. I did not receive many Valentines that year. My best friends had all been placed in the other third period class, and the teacher Miss Wara did not like me. (I thought for years that my teacher’s dislike was my imagination, but as an adult I learned that my parents had conferenced with her more than once about the way I was treated in her class.) When Jim opened my Valentine, he read it, waved it in the air, and made fun of me for my declaration. The whole class laughed.

By the time I got to Junior High School, even though Ann Dawson had always been the better artist, I was determined to be good at art. I tried everything: drawing, block printing, paper cutting, clay. I designed the spring music program covers in seventh grade. I developed a terrific crush, this time on a blue-eyed blond boy who was a year older than me, Jeff. Jeff was also a better artist than me. He and his friend Brian pointed at my unshaved legs and teased me. In the next year we created clay sculptures—his of a male figure rising out of a block of stone, mine of a hawk—which we coated with plaster and cast in wax, to which we attached flues and invested. We heated our molds in a kiln until the wax could be poured and burned away and then loaded the hot molds into the back of Mr. Hansen’s pickup truck and drove to a foundry where we watched them poured with glowing melted bronze. It took a day before they cooled enough to allow us to break the mixture of plaster and vermiculite away from the casting to reveal our bronze sculpture. It was not a perfect pour for either of us. Mine was a mess of flues and air pipes that needed to be cut off and smoothed and flaws—bubbles and voids—here and there. But Jeff’s casting had completely failed. There was nothing in his mold but a lump. “Let him be,” Mr. Hansen advised when Jeff stormed off after the loss of his sculpture. And I did, starting to work on the onerous task of cleaning and removing the “plumbing” from my cast hawk. And then I caught the flu and missed three days of school. When I returned I found that Mr. Hansen had given the task of completing my sculpture to Jeff. The excess metal was removed, the surfaces cleaned, and a dark patina had been applied. Jeff had also sharpened the beak of my bird, which Mr. Hansen had been after me to do since it was a clay model. Jeff saved me a great deal of physical labor, and though I still had a crush on him, I do not believe I was properly grateful. I gave the bronze to my mother.

In high school, I found myself behind Jeff in a lunch line. He turned to me, smiled, and said as if he’d noticed for the first time, “You’re beautiful.” I was seeing other boys in those days, doomed relationships. And I watched as Mary lusted for Doug who was in love with David who couldn’t get over Marion who missed seeing Mark who had been trying to get Linda to go out with him for two years. Love could mess you up. Love could make you crazy and stupid. High school was a time of heartache as contact sport.

In college after several years in the Fire Arts building I moved up the hill to work with goldsmith John Marshall. One day, trailed by his old friend Brian, Jeff appeared in the metal studio to ask me if I would be interested in going out with him? I’m afraid I laughed. I asked him why he hadn’t asked me out in high school? “You were always with that guy.” I can still see Jeff’s doomed figure struggling to rise out of stone, head bent, muscles straining, one fist pulling loose.

In college I was pursued by a Haitian graduate student in music, a painting grad student, and the owner of a dance studio who was a nephew of the man who was briefly President of Greece—each of whom eventually took no for an answer. But probably in high school, if Jeff had asked me out while we stood in line for soggy French fries and milk in paper cartons, I would have dumped whomever else I was seeing and jumped at the chance to go out with him.

But times had changed and I had grown. Fantasies or no, I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend anymore. By then I was looking for something else.

By then I was in love with handbuilding and enameling and cooking and classic Ghazni Afghan Hounds and Chinua Achebe and Syrinx by Debussy and walking and Mexican food and Knosses and architecture and Turnbull’s Bambuti pigmies and Gary C. Anderson. Relationships are hard, but I was committed. I knew a good thing when I had it, and I wasn’t letting go. Together, we make a life.

ABOVE: "Kestrel," my first bronze completed with help from Jeff Barnes when I was about 13 years old and a student at Cordell Junior High School—our school mascot was the Hawk.

'ANOTHER WAY TO BE'

2012-01-03T16:57:00.000-08:00

Ursula K. Le Guin has written from and about the NW for a long, long while. "...trust the story to take you where it is going. ...you have to let it take its own course."

"Producer Dmae Roberts presents an encore broadcast of her documentary profile of legendary author Ursula K. Le Guin. The author of 40 plus books, Le Guin is a much gifted and prolific writer loved by fans around the world. And in this half hour Oregon Treasures special on December 7th at 11am on KBOO 90.7 FM, Le Guin shares thoughts about her work and the Oregon landscapes that have inspired her. This show originally aired on November 2, 2010."

"Never afraid of a good argument," she talks with good humor about gender equity, sexual orientation, the possibilities of science fiction, Taoism, heroism, the NW landscape, not "writing what you know about," the breakdown of literary barriers, the difference between plot and story, and Bruce Springsteen. You can find the podcast and listen to it here.

Her newest book is a collaboration of her poetry with the photographs by Roger Dorband of the Steens Mountains area called Out Here.

GIVING UP CHEESE

2012-01-02T15:39:00.000-08:00

Years ago when our oldest son went through a pre-Kindergarten clinic, a nutritionist and I almost got into it. Alan's blood test showed his blood was healthy, and the nutritionist's printout based on Alan's diet showed he had over 100% of the recommended nutrient from food. This wasn't enough, according to the nutritionist: Could I cook eggs in a cast iron skillet? He has enough iron. How about fortified cereal? He gets a vitamin with his oatmeal. The nutritionist didn't like that. How was fortified cold cereal better than oatmeal with raisins and a vitamin? And that's another thing, the nutritionist said, he needs more protein. Really? Because the print off you made shows he's already getting 137% of what he needs. Right about the time we were starting about calcium (also over 100%) some older and wiser person broke us up and sent me on my way. People get pretty emotional about food.

Eating better is one of the most common New Years resolutions. But this year I think many people are putting a more specific spin on that particular goal and going vegan and gluten-free. I gave up meat in 1990, but I'm not a true vegetarian since I still consume butter, cheese, eggs, and seafood. But I am toying with going vegan. I don't miss the meat, but could I give up cheese?

The documentary, Forks Over Knives, is available on Netflix instantview (honest, Cathy, I just watched it and even went back to check). It's a bit exuberant, but the message is pretty powerful that our overeating of meat, processed foods, and sugars isn't doing us any good.

We keep thinking we know what's good for us, and then we don't. For example: A recent study showed that a certain amount of vitamin C was good for the heart, but a follow-up studies found that taking vitamin C in tablets didn't do a bit of good, but eating food containing vitamin C was what helped. It's like Michael Pollan says: Eat food, not too much, mostly vegetables.

Pollan’s In Defense of Food contends that humans thrive on an enormous range of diets, except for what Americans have been eating the last forty years or so. I loved that book, but it's only fair to remember that Pollan is no more qualified by formal training to talk about diet than I am. He's a smart man and a good writer, he's done his research and he fell into a sweet spot when he started writing about America's favorite addictions: food.

"You are what you eat." Do I want to be dead animal flesh? Well, no. People teased me for years about being a vegetarian: Don't you miss cheeseburgers? Do you cheat? No. I gave up eating red meat because I saw a few cattle feed lots up close; because I know more than I want to about what happens to animals in a slaughterhouse; because I am tenderhearted about my pets and it seems ethically inconsistent to participate in a system that was so cruel to other animals; because Americans eat way too much protein; and because producing animal protein is hard on our planet. They seemed like good enough reasons.

I don't cheat and I don't miss what I don't eat. So going vegan? I might miss grilled salmon and I would certainly miss butter, but it's the cheese I can't quite imagine doing without. So this month I'm giving up some foods—not forever, just for a little while. I'm going to see what it's like for me without dairy, without seafood, without so much sugar and oil. Just for a little while, to see. We'll see.

ABOVE: That's the corner vegetable market from Amelie. If I could have one thing from the movie for my very own it would be a corner vegetable market.

READINGS FROM JULY TO DECEMBER 2011

2012-01-01T06:27:00.000-08:00

I read 24 books from July 1st, 2011 through December.
• THE BOOK SHOP by Penelope Fitzgerald (1978) is a novel about a woman showing courage that comes to nought. I was profoundly sad at the end, because I love the humor and ordinary lives of the people in this story. Dry wit, insightful examination of people who do what they must, but cannot help, most of them, admiring someone willing to risk everything to make a change. I am already half through her next book OFFSHORE, a Booker Prize winner. That's my favorite prize.
• THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST by Ursula K. Le Guin (1972) has been on my to-read list for many years. As I recall it's one of my brother's favorite Le Guin novels. I have always been a fan of Le Guin's anthropological slant on science fiction, but I have not been a fan of her sexism, which was still in full rage while I was reading the classics back in the 70s. I read science fiction to find utopian options to the sexism I lived with. Le Guin didn't offer me a hopeful future. Neither does this novel, which presumes that women will arrive late to a colony world to be wives, mothers, and whores. Nevertheless, this novel in three perspectives is brilliant—told from the viewpoint of a brutal military man, Davidson; an anthropologist, Lyubov; and a "chreecie," Selver, indigenous person suffering under the yoke of colonial racism. There's more to this short book. I would love to teach it.
THE BOOK OF MERLYN BY T.H. White (1977), the author of The Once and Future King, was published posthumously, and a sly philosopher was dear old White, and a wise and charming book it is here. All that easy good and evil post-Christian theology is reexamined in this last chapter in the story of Arthur and Merlin.
• THE STEPSISTER SCHEME by Jim C. Hines (2009) is sword and sorcery fantasy with strong heroines. That last is why I ordered the book, but I didn't expect to like it once I had in in my hands. Sword and Sorcery. I'm not much into the genre, and Ian pointed out that the illustration on the cover showed the three archetypal characters: mage, warrior, and thief. One of the characters "giggled" too often; I thought it was intended for 12 year old readers, but then it clearly wasn't and somehow I couldn't put it aside. I kept reading. The fantasy was surprisingly complex and reasonable at the same time. And now I'm going to have to read the sequel.
• THE FUR PERSON by May Sarton (1957) tells the adventures of a Gentleman Cat finding a permanent home as a genuine Fur Person named Tom Jones. Poet, memoirist, and novelist May Sarton's fanciful nonfiction book ascribes some unlikely motivations to her feline, but is nevertheless charming. I am not a great fan of Sarton's, but this book was among my aunt's possessions and I enjoyed finally reading it.
• THE INVENTION OF HUGO CABRET by Brian Sezlnick (2007) is a delight. Though he does not have the skill of Chris van Allsburg, Selznick's 500+ page illustrated story has the magic of that author's work and a rich balance of pencil illustrations, archival images, and text. I was already familiar with the early films and filmmaker referred to in the story, such as Georges Méliès's "A Trip to the Moon", and that made it particularly entertaining to me. This is the source of the new film HUGO, out this week in 3D. I hope the film is as magical as this book.
• THINGS FALL APART by Chinua Achebe, still one of the great novels.
• BLACK SWAN GREEN and MACBETH, again.
• THE GIRL WITH GLASS FEET by Ali Shaw (2009) won the Demond Elliott Prize and I wanted to love it, but I didn't quite. The magical elements are wholely original and the characters are too. But somehow this fully realized world didn't quite materialize for me. Especially the transformation of Midas from autistic behavior into something other didn't work for me. In a matter of days (?) love and a fist fight provoke his inner manliness. I liked that he opened up. I didn't believe it could work that way, and without a speck of magic to urge it along. Still, despite the occasional slip, it's an interesting book, fairy tale, fable, fantasy. I did read it all.
• LET'S TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME by Gail Caldwell (2010) begins: "It's an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too." I picked it up when we were in Powells for the title and then I read that first line and smiled. A memoirist with some perspective, I thought. Gail found her best friend, Caroline Knapp (author of Pack of Two and Drinking: A Love Story), relatively late in life. They shared a ferocious independence, recovery from alcoholism, love of dogs, and competitive athleticism. In Boston they walked their dogs together and traded sports. Gail pushed Caroline, and more important, Caroline got Gail onto the river sculling. Caroline was the younger, but the first to die. Gail tells the story of their friendship and of her own survival of loss with passion, grace, and wisdom. She and Caroline had talked and talked throughout their relationship, a conversation that isn't quite over. "Grief is what tells you who you are when you are alone."
• Sandra Cisnero's The House on Mango Street. Incredible every time I read it.
• The BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2010 edited by Richard Russo is a variable installment in this great series. In fact, I haven’t been this disappointed in a BASS since Kingsolver's collection in 2001. There is, for example, a story set on a working/dude ranch in Montana. It's a great(or at least very good) story, good enough for me to forgive obvious evidence that the author didn't know much of anything about ranching or Montana winters. I didn't forgive the circus story--why are people who know nothing about circuses writing stories about them? Not even as good as the best seller, WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, which could have been better if the author actually knew anything about circus life. It’s as if writers think up a gimmick and then go ahead writing the story without doing the necessary homework. Two stories from McSweeney's special issue devoted to stories set in 2024 are an example of this. I loved the Dutch story—smart, believable, touching—and meticulously researched. The other one, the last one in the collection was just kind of awful--trite use of an old SF trope, unlikely and unresearched, and people I didn't give a darn about. Still, some great work, some good, just too many that as I finished, I immediately forgot. Two authors I admire also fell on opposite sides of some imaginary line of quality: Jennifer Egan’s story from The New Yorker about lives taking a dramatic turn on safari worked for me; Karen Russell’s story about a jealous younger brother and thieving seagulls—a delightful gimmick—just didn’t.
• MY MOTHER SHE KILLED ME, MY FATHER HE ATE ME: FORTY NEW FAIRY TALES edited by Kate Bernheimer (2010, 533 pages) is an interesting collection of stories by a number of very fine writers. Some rewrote fairy tales, some updated them, some found more modern and explicit renderings, some found new stories barely suggested by the classics. I liked most of them, was bored by a couple, offended by one, and adored a few. A second reading might help me sort out what these writers assume about fairy tales—what elements make it a fairy tale and not, for example, a simple fantasy? Molly Gloss divides what people sometimes like to call "speculative fiction" into two groups: SF are the ones you can get to from here; fantasy are the ones you really can't. Some of these fairy tales are ordinary realism, but a few a wonderful and you can't get there from here except in your dreams, or your nightmares.
STIRRING THE MIRROR by Christine Boyka Kluge (2007) is a collection of prose poems. I bought the book for the sake of "The Way Fire Talks to Wood" about an abusive man tormenting a women in a line. The metaphors, similes, and analogies are masterful—precise and heartbreaking. The book as a whole ranges from the exquisite to the highly decorative.
• THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT by Kim Stanley Robinson (2002) is an divergent history—instead of 30% of the population dying from the plague, virtually all of Europe is depopulated. Christianity is no longer a force in world events. It's gone, lost. The evolving powers include Islam, Buddhism, and Confucism. Power spreads, war and technology spread, centuries pass, the world changes. Here's the wrinkle: the characters, six of them, are reborn in generation after generation, working out their destiny, seeking to make the world better. I thought in three places that I might put it down—one place where a single religion was so demonized that I was offended, but this is merely the perspective of the characters in that life. There are 772 pages and I couldn't put it down. Checking online after I finished, I found many people who have reread this book. I'll likely be one of them.
• EMBASSYTOWN by China Miéville (2011) is my favorite read in a long while. It's SF at its best: a woman POV character, a fully realized reality, events and ideas that lap over into real life. How could I resist "Avice Benner Cho, a human colonist, has returned after years of deepspace adventure. She cannot speak the Ariekei tongue, but she is an indelible part of it, having long ago been made a figure of speech, a living simile in their language." How could I resist high adventure with Language and language thrown in? I cannot. A metaphor about metaphor. It's marvelous and I couldn't put it down!
• CAT'S CRADLE by Kurt Vonnegut (1963) is an SF classic, a satirical critique of the way life is, or was, going. I would have loved this book when I was in high school, maybe. By college I expected more from SF. I was looking for gender equity and Vonnegut's women are pretty 2D. My husband just reread this (my first go) and still laughed along the way. I found it mildly amusing and trivial. And the women and science were silly.
• SECOND NATURE by Cherry Wilder (1982) imagines humanity recreating civilization on another world. Wilder is a New Zealander and maybe that's one reason her imagined world is so completely foreign. The story was hard for me to follow—so much going on, so many characters (human and not) to track. I was never tempted to give up or skip pages however.
• EXCEPT BY NATURE by Sandra Alcosser (1998) won the James Laughlin Award. "Sisters climb in the bedroom window, lay themselves on the night table like pink fish, like negligees and soap slivers, diaphanous, pale veined."—Azaleas. "When the world is too sharp / I walk toward the canyon / past the bear bait, above / the cracked tectonics, until there's nothing / but glaze, clouds / of meringue and mackerel fat."—The Anatomy of Air. It just knocks me over and I need some time to get back up after each one. Poetry is hard work for me sometimes—I think it's because I try to eat them like cookies, and I should be eating each one like a hefty slice of pie with ice cream. Rhubarb or apple or mince meat and maybe that comes after grilled vegetables and salmon, pasta with butter and poppyseeds. I need to slow down for poems, savor the meal of each one. Slowing is a great gift of poetry to those of us always rushing about trying to accomplish too much. Alcosser's imagery, sound, rhythm, and ideas all settle around me like a rich meal, like a complication of flavors that I want to hold in my mouth for a good long time.
• THE CITY & THE CITY by China Miéville (2009) according to the LA Times, "If Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler's love child were raised by Franz Kafka, the writing that emerged might resemble... The City & The City." Lots of comparisons were made by admiring reviewers, and though Miéville writes better than Dick or Orwell, if you loved 1984, you will probably love this. For a comparison to another author, I'd choose Bruno Schulz's THE CINNAMON SHOPS (usually published in English as Street of Crocodiles), which provides the epigraph: "Deep inside the town there open up, so to speak, double streets, doppelganger streets, mendacious and delusive streets." Two cities share space, cohabitate—the way two simultaneous communities living in one city must manage is to "unsee" people, buildings, and events in the other. Enter a murder mystery, a crime thriller. Interesting characters, compelling story, smart, strong writing. It's heady stuff.
• BLOODCHILD AND OTHER STORIES, 2nd edition, by Octavia E. Butler (2005) is a collection of 5 older stories, 2 essays, and 2 newer stories added to this edition. I only realized this morning that Butler died in 2006—a terrible loss. I read her very first novel back in the day, impressed to find a black woman writing SF. I was familiar only with the title story in this collection, which is variable and mostly fantastic. I bought it for "Speech Sounds" which Molly Gloss referenced in her recent craft talk at the Pacific MFA residency, but I was also particularly struck by "The Evening and the Morning and the Night" about a genetic mutation. Each story has a brief afterward explaining what Butler was trying to work out. Marvelous.
• LIVE THROUGH THIS by Debra Gwartney (2009) is a memoir about runaway daughters over a ten year period. Gwartney leaves her husband, moves from Tucson to Eugene, takes on two jobs, and fails to notice that the two older of her four daughters are falling apart. This memoir explores the mother's feelings of guilt, embarrassment, anger, exhaustion, desperation, hopelessness, and fear when her adolescent and barely teenage daughters begin leaving home for a life on the streets. Though the girls clearly have issues, this memoir doesn't explore much about them; it's all about mom. Gwartney is a strong writer and shifts seamlessly from her main narration back through time. Her story is clear and compelling, but I wish she could offer more insight into the situation she created and eventually survives.
• THE MOONS OF JUPITER by Alice Munro (1982) is not one of the collections of short stories I referenced when writing my critical essay about Munro, but it is marvelous. Munro has a way of telling a story about almost nothing that dignifies the ordinary lives of ordinary people. She accomplishes something here I admire deeply, though I cannot emulate it—stories about marriage and children, about the hard turns we take into and out of love, of how love can not only define the direction our lives take, but also limit, compromise, and expand us as human beings.

CIRCLES WITHIN CIRCLES

2011-12-27T08:56:00.000-08:00

According to many sources, including the federal government, most people make New Years Resolutions about physical health (lose weight, quit smoking, eat better, drink less), relationships (have them), finances (save money, better job), self-improvement (gain more education, volunteer, reduce stress, get organized), and travel. I try not to make empty promises, but that’s pretty much what I promise myself each year without a lot of success. In fact, for several decades I promised to get back to 114 pounds—something I have actually accomplished as an adult exactly once.

Wikipedia has a resolutions list for 2012: be financially-savvy, read at least one book per month, eat properly, get enough sleep, and keep a journal of awesome moments.

I like this list a lot; I eat pretty well, though too much; I have been an advocate of 8 hours of sleep for most of my life; I used to read five books each month, and even though my reading is down below four books a month in the last half year, I think I have that reading one nailed; I keep a blog of awesome moments so I'm good there too; and I’d been doing pretty well financially until we started working on the house. If there were a competition for keeping these particular New Years Resolutions, I think I might be in the running for some kind of prize.

But there’s no prize for accomplishing your goals other than self-satisfaction. And isn’t that enough? So I'm thinking a lot about what would make me happy. I'm thinking that I can't make promises for other people, only for myself.

These past few days, I’ve been doing a lot of holiday baking. As a result I’ve been eating too much rich food, but I’d already promised myself a January 2012 four-week cleansing routine that I found on the blog of a former student, Kilee Johnson. It looks pretty reasonable, except for no dairy for two weeks. I'm going to see what I can do because I know from experience that eating lean for a time makes me both feel better and crave the bad stuff less. I’m giving it a shot.

We’d hoped to redo our kitchen in 2012, but that’s going to have to wait a few years until we’ve saved up for it. But if I can scrape together the money, we are going to begin hunting for a new stove with a working oven thermostat and a door not held together with duct tape and rubber bands. We’ll see how that one goes.

This morning Yeti and I went out in a gale, so I think the running will continue. Gary is having some pain, so I can’t speak for him, but we’ll both keep moving. I’d like to promise myself to lift weights, which I enjoy, but I don’t like to make promises I can’t keep and I’m not sure there’s time in my life for the gym.

I have specific things I want to do for my family: sit for Ruby, make her another book, and see her often; make stockings for everyone; and encourage Gary to do something he loves.

I want to keep weaving so today I need to wind a new warp.

I need to spend less, but one of my favorite yarn company is having this sale…

There are many promises I could make and break. Here are the ones I know I’ll keep: love my husband and my children and new granddaughter, admire the ocean, do the best I can for my students, and find a little time for myself to create, because I need to do more than survive—I need all these things to thrive.

ABOVE: I found this snowcat in my feed on Facebook. I think it lives in France.

GRATEFUL

2011-12-26T19:14:00.000-08:00

"Self-discipline is not about denial; it's about purpose."

There will be other things I recall later and will want to add in for this year. I ran all the way from my home to school on the morning of the first in-service day back in August—over 15 miles. And even though I bruised my foot and didn't run the Portland Half, I'm grateful I managed that. It’s been a year. My sister-in-law Sue died this past summer. I am grateful to have known her.

I am grateful for Gary’s retirement in June because now he spoils me something awful, and he’s cleaning house and taking care of tasks we have both neglected for years because we were “too busy.” People keep asking him if he’s bored, which he considers an absurd question. He's reading books and playing music. He figures he’ll be dug out from past-due tasks in a few months, several of which he rather enjoys, and then he plans to pick up some kind of volunteer work.

In a little over a year we have finally remodeled the downstairs bathroom with a clawfoot tub and tile floor; provided the cat with her own little room with a cat door; tried to fix the atrium, though it still leaks; and remodeled Ian’s old room and the “Harry Potter room” under the stairs so they are looking splendid. We spent twice what we’d budgeted, but I suppose that’s the way it always goes.

Ruby was born.

Last week we helped wrap presents at the Seaside Convention Center for over 700 local children who might otherwise have had Christmases like Gary’s childhood. We live in a kind community.

Both our sons and their families came to celebrate Christmas and we were glad to have Ian, Kerris, Ruby, Alan, and Emily all together here with us yesterday. This afternoon Ruby slept on my chest for an hour.

I published several poems and an essay this year, and I made a book for Ruby’s Christmas. I've written 128 posts for this blog this year, and while Hedgebrook did not grant me a residency to work on them in 2012, I figure that's my fault for failing to send them better examples. (I was just reading "Common Sense About Misogyny" and it's a great post, even if I do say so myself and though no one has written a comment about it.) I have read a few fine books and I have the privilege of teaching wonderful literature, which draws me back.

We did not go anywhere on vacation, and I have still not completed my cookbook, and I wonder now if I ever will. I keep adding. I have perfected my biscotti, so that's something done. The kitchen stove is still held together with duct tape and rubber bands (no joke). The temperature gauge doesn't work either, but I'm pretty good at guessing.

At school I’m glad to have one more year of teaching; the Senior Research Paper (SRP) is being restored to its former nightmarish rigor; I miss Chris Gilde since his retirement last spring, but Adrian Anderson has stepped in and is proving a worthy successor; and someone else is doing The Literary Sponge this year.

The ocean swells outside our windows, the SSHH! of the waves are always with us; rainfall makes another sort of shushing. The sky shifts from gray to blue and white back to gray. A day does not pass without I am mesmerized and grateful to be a witness to the sea. I don’t suppose there is anywhere else on this earth I would rather be.

CHRISTMAS EVE

2011-12-24T21:01:00.000-08:00

The cat is snuggled close in our bed.
We'd rather not wake with our nose full of hair.

The stocking hung by the chimney with care.
In the morning we'll discover what Santa has brought.

Tamales for dinner all steamy and hot.
Chocolate and cookies and cider and wine.

The sun slides low and soon it's a sign.
Time for feet up and our eyes to drift closed.

The tree sparkles, the presents pile up.

But this is why I love Christmas.

PRESENTS FOR CHILDREN

2011-12-22T09:46:00.000-08:00

The entire floor of the convention center was lined with tables, each piled with toys and clothing. The organizers announced at the end that we had collectively wrapped gifts for over 700 local children. Gary is not a wrapper, so I wrapped and he delivered and gathered—playing hunter-gatherer for a couple of hours. He was a little dazzled by the number of toys and by the generousity of our community, he admitted as we drove home at the end of the evening.

There is poor and there is poor. My parents sometimes couldn’t afford heating fuel and we went through a weekend until my dad was paid and we could order more. I didn’t see a dentist for a few years as a child. But when things were really tough, my parents borrowed money from their parents. We may have drunk powdered milk and eaten margarine and KoolAide and whatever was on sale at the market, but we were never hungry.

Real poverty is when the dog's water dish freezes solid during the night, there’s nothing to eat but moldy bread from the “day old” outlet and mustard scraped from the bottom of the jar, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing for Christmas. That’s what my husband can recall. It’s what too many of my students experience.

Yesterday we bought three cooked crabs so that I can make crab mac & cheese. The dish is an extravagance of cheese and expensive shellfish. This morning I cracked one and a half crabs and Gary watched because, he said, he’d never done it before. He’s doing his share of the cracking, but I don’t think he’s loving this messy job. Mind you, we’ve been married for going on 38 years and I have served crab many times before, but I was always the one who cracked the crab. Until we talked just now, I was unaware that he’d never cooked and eaten warm crab. This reminds me of why I have a soft spot for crab.

I would have been 5 or 6 or 7 years old, perhaps. Our grandparents Gaga and Papa, our parents, and my brother and I visited Seaside in the summertime. My brother and I played and ran for so long on the sand that our soles were rubbed sore and when we were told to come inside, the linoleum on the motel floor felt smooth and kind on my feet. For dinner the adults cooked crab and we all cracked and ate it on a picnic table outside within view of the ocean. Afterward my brother and I were tucked into bed on the sofa. We dozed, too tired to object to an early bedtime, while the adults played cards nearby and the sun went down slowly in the west, spilling her colors across the sea.

I just went down and helped crack the last couple of legs. Crab for dinner. This is a wealth of memory.

SELF KNOWLEDGE

2011-12-21T06:56:00.000-08:00

Many years ago when I was merely a participant (not a judge or other official) at a field trial in British Columbia, I shouted something clear across the field at another American and he ran the other way. “What’s that about?” I wondered aloud. My Canadian friends all laughed. “He’s scared of you,” they said. I was a young woman, in my twenties at that time, less than five foot three and weighing perhaps a hundred and twenty-thirty pounds. The guy was well over than six feet tall and older than me. “You can be—” and they went on laughing. I figured out from this that despite my size and gender I am intimidating. I honestly hadn’t appreciated that before, but I do try to keep it in mind now.

Later, when I served on a hiring committee at my school, one question asked of applicants was: “How do students see you?” One experienced applicant initially stumbled over this question. I had liked his knowledge, intelligence, determination, and creative ideas about how to improve student learning. But another committee member absolutely refused to consider him because he couldn’t respond promptly to that one question. “It’s ridiculous. He should know how others see him.” Oh, dear, I thought because I wasn’t certain how clearly I viewed myself. We hired someone else who lasted a year or two and then moved on.

I can’t really defend that lack of self-knowledge. I think about it. What do others see? I am sometimes surprised by others’ views of me.

As one example, some boys decided that my feminism means that I hate men. They complained of this to others and naturally, it got back to me and I was hurt. I’ve pretty much gotten over my wounded feelings. I think I understand that in my culturally-backwards community it’s possible for some boys to feel so entitled that it never occurs to them that a woman might be their equal. When I confront this view, they assume that I hate them. Well, I don’t. And I would flatter myself that I have plenty of male former students who never mistook intellectual challenge for dislike.

[Former students occasionally appear and apologize for their poor behavior in my classes. One young man has apologized on at least three separate occasions: “I wish I’d paid more attention in class.” He also said he must have been a nuisance. Well, I can only tell him that I too wish he’d paid more attention in class, but that he was interesting, not a nuisance at all.]

The students who frustrate me are the ones who are mean or lazy or stubborn.

The students who most thrill me are the ones capable of changing their minds in the face of evidence. The ones who learn.

Recently I worked with a student on an important paper required for graduation. His persuasive thesis was based on a sort of straw man. He had written ten pages without actually proving that the problem he was trying to solve existed, much less that his solution was practical and effective. I’d read other papers on the same subject, and between this prior experience and reviewing his research, it was obvious that the student’s thesis was incorrect.

However, changing our minds about something is very difficult, and most students begin writing a persuasive essay determined to prove something they already believe whether they actually know much about it or not. When they can’t find supporting proof, they sometimes become a little desperate, but they only rarely adjust their thesis to reflect reality. They are overwhelmed by their belief which comes from personal experience, family prejudice, or personal or family philosophy. And usually there’s little their research or I can do to sway them from their predetermined view. In these cases I do my best to ensure they write their biased papers as convincingly as possible.

Though he’s a star in math, this student was never particularly strong and certainly not flexible in my classes. I was not hopeful he could write a genuinely good paper with the thesis he'd chosen. Nevertheless, we plugged along and eventually the student managed it. He did this in an astonishing manner: he changed his thesis. Without altering his own world view, he was able to revise his research paper to reflect accurately both his own opinions and beliefs and the reality of the issue he had chosen. The solution to the problem was not so simple, he declared. Bravo!

I’d like to think that his experience rewriting his research paper taught him something about himself—that he is capable of being wrong, recognizing this, and changing his argument. I am hoping he didn’t change his thesis simply to get his paper done—but the latter possibility doesn't seem to be the case. I’ve watched others rewrite papers they believed themselves were a lie, in order to get them done. I like to think he learned something valuable about himself.

What do you suppose revising an opinion tells someone about themselves? What do you suppose writing a paper with a thesis you can prove instead of the one you believe reveals? How well do we know ourselves? How high can we fly?

ABOVE: That's me with Snowbird who was BOB at the very first field trial held in connection with the AHCA Specialty, in California not Canada. (I was pregnant at the time.)

HOW THEY FIND ME

2011-12-17T06:48:00.000-08:00

Many of my readers here are people who know me on Facebook—friends, classmates, former students. Sometimes people stumble on a post while looking for something else. I am grateful for readers however they arrive, but I fear some may be disappointed. This morning, for example, I had two hits from Norway resulting from searches for “drunk Einstein” on Google Images. It’s encouraging that two people looked (or perhaps one person twice?), but I don’t have a drunk picture of Einstein. I have a photo of Einstein laughing. I have a post called “Dirty Sex, Dirty Drunk” that is my most viewed post after Einstein, and I know this one attracts a lot of viewers who do not know me and probably are not looking for the sort of introspective post I deliver. A minute ago someone in Cambodia clicked on “Erotic” which isn’t an erotic post, but does argue that what gets labeled “erotic” most often isn’t.

A few months back, in one day I had over a hundred hits on a post called “Why You Don’t Want to Be a Teacher” that I can’t help thinking might have been an assigned reading for a college education class. I am a little sad that the follow-up post, “...And Why We Need You Anyway,” has never attracted the attention that first one continues to gather. A friend said she was going to quote from it in her retirement speech, and there are a number of reasons she might have chosen to do that, but in the end her love of the work overwhelmed her anger at how she was personally treated, and she abstained.

There are many people who will never read this blog that I have abstained from writing about, though the temptation is there. I know truly terrible stories about things done by people masquerading as upstanding members of their communities. I know many terrible stories about my students, and often these stories make a lot more sense when connected to the terrible stories about their parents.

The other day I sat in the office with a student who had been of concern to his resource room teacher because he'd been "dropping the ball" and failing to complete work. As tears rolled down his face, he told me his story. It seems his father had an acute health issue, then a recent relapse. His father's ex-girlfriend is still in the house and arguing with the dad all the time and the young man misses talking to his father and calling him (apparently phone conversations were important to them both) but the ex tossed his dad's phone and his mother was supposed to have him go home with that side of the family for Christmas but that doesn't look like it's going to happen. He could not stop crying. "I just want to get through one normal day... one normal period." So that was the problem. My principal sat with him after me, and I went to explain what has been going on to his teacher. By the end of the day he was making progress and smiling. I know this kid fairly well, I know he has a kindly heart and a good work ethic. He has been failed more than he has failed.

The week before Winter Break is always hard at my school. Students are excitable and irritable, vacillating between grins and worried frowns. Whether or not we actually had wonderful Christmases ourselves, or even celebrate this holiday, our culture impresses the notion that this is the most warm and wonderful season. It’s well to remember that when those expectations collide with a different reality—where we cannot be with family who are distant, estranged, or passed away—or where our holidays include hardship—illness, unemployment, separation—emotions can spin out of control. Before we know what’s happening we might be yelling or driving erratically, or crying in the office.

My advice: Tread lightly. Hum something comforting. Send a note or call or hug someone you like kind of a lot. Do something kind for someone you don’t even know. It will not be what anyone expected and it will be good.

SIMPLE

2011-12-15T23:13:00.000-08:00

Years ago I had a student who wrote his junior paper about what was still, then, a proposed doctor assisted suicide law. His father had been diagnosed with a painful and fatal disease when he was a little boy and would have investigated assisted suicide had it been legal at that time. Instead he lived another 7 or 8 years. Here's the twist: Had the father pursued assisted suicide, he'd have needed a second medical opinion and would have realized sooner that the first doctor was wrong and spared himself and his family a lot of suffering. The student supported doctor assisted suicide.

Simple.

He didn't want to die, didn't want his father to have died, but he could see the pathway, acknowledge his own pain as discovery. It seemed simple to him. There was reality before him. Terrible to see, it hurt, but it was simple.

There is nothing simple about this season of the year. Celebrate Christmas or ignore it, we find ourselves caught in a collision of childhood expectations and reality. It is well to go gentle, to recall that others have already gathered baggage of suffering in this time of year, that while the trees and stores show sparkling lights, the lives of people we know are sodden. A tragedy during a holiday is a loss we cannot ignore.

Walk softly, speak with patience and kindness. Recognize, that like you, we all hope to thrive. Recognize suffering and despair. Recognize pain. Let it go.

ANOTHER YEAR

2011-12-10T20:21:00.000-08:00

Sometimes a work of fiction nails what's true—the Truth—so powerfully that you cannot believe it.

We’ve been watching a movie, Mike Leigh's Another Year available from Netflix, and it is so precisely right and meaningful that we cannot quite believe it. There is nothing overly dramatic or clever about it, it’s just a story of ordinary people trying to find a path to meaning in their lives. “A married couple who have managed to remain blissfully happy into their autumn years, are surrounded over the course of the four seasons of one average year by friends, colleagues, and family who all seem to suffer some degree of unhappiness.” There's a great deal more than this.

Amazon reviews are all over the place with some customers loving it and others finding it "boring", but Rotten Tomatoes shows 92% critic approval. I would recommend it to anyone.

SHAVING MY LEGS

2011-12-08T18:01:00.000-08:00

A couple of nights ago my husband and I watched a documentary about the beginnings of the careers of teachers, The First Year. At one point a teacher shows a video about lesbian and gay relationships and a student is completely grossed out by a woman with unshaved armpits. I’d shaved mine that morning, but I was reminded that Europeans rarely shave, that shaving is a relatively new idea, that pubic hair is a secondary sex characteristic related to sexual maturity, that shaving hurts.

As early as high school I was (and still am) a feminist, but the reason I stopped shaving portions of my body when I was still 16 had less to do with politics than comfort. It hurt. I stopped shaving when I was a senior in high school because I didn’t have to take P.E. that year and no one would know but my boyfriend—and he didn’t care. It was me he loved, not my body hair, or lack of body hair. I stopped wearing a bra for the same reason. It was easier. It was more comfortable. I got through six years of undergraduate school and three degrees without shaving or wearing a bra.

And then I got a job. I bought a Coach bag. I revamped my wardrobe. I shaved. I bought bras. I entered the workforce and became a responsible teacher.

When I used to attend the Mommy and Me classes with my sons, a woman told me that she and her husband had a deal: He shaved his face and she shaved her legs every day. I thought: How is that fair? Her legs include a lot more surface area than his face! On the other hand, what business did I have developing an attitude about their private business? We were only chatting.

A neighbor gave me grief one afternoon when we ran into one another at the Post Office. “Getting kinda gray there!” he said and laughed. “Yeah, and you are going bald.” I can dye my hair, but I choose not to.

A couple of male students at the school where I teach once wrote an article that took female students to task for not being prettier, wearing nicer clothing and make-up, and failing to fix their hair in a more appealing manner. Oh, yeah? So who gave them the right to demand that others primp for their viewing pleasure?

I am also here to tell you that shaving armpits is about as easy and comfortable as a guy shaving his upper lip. Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. I’m talking to the guys now. Wearing a bra can be about comfort, but I’m guessing it’s usually in the range of wearing a jock strap? You wear one of those with jeans, do you?

Whether people choose to wear make-up, dress in style, shave, and so forth, is their personal business. Maybe they owe something to their significant others (I could tell you what my husband likes and doesn't like, but you know it's really none of anyone else's business); they don’t owe a thing to the judgemental fool on the street. This isn’t about social justice or gender equity, it’s about not judging others for details that are absolutely none of our concern.

How people dress and for whom is a personal decision.

No woman is obligated to shave her pits to please some punk in a freshman Humanities class she’ll never meet. That kid in the class moaning and groaning about the woman in the video with hairy arm pits was out of line. Basic cleanliness and neatness is a reasonable expectation, but I don't have the right to expect others to go out of their way to conform to my notions of attractiveness.

Get over it.

BE THE BUTTERFLY

2011-12-04T08:10:00.000-08:00

I do not usually write about writing. Though I am a writer, I avoid the cliché writer’s blog. Other people are already doing it better—and some worse. I try to keep the shamless self-promotion to a minimum. I write about running, knitting, weaving, teaching. I write about grief and finding purpose in life.

Grief is what got me started here more than two years ago. I began telling the story of my days, of my thinking, and my questions. Mortality had found me unprepared. Though I had anticipated turning forty while still in my teens, the fact of becoming old did not become real to me until I watched my mother’s slow decline in the last decade of her life. At first I was supportive, but eventually I found my own eventual ending overwhelmed my existence. I was blamed for things I couldn’t help. My mother died. I thrashed and struggled for the surface.

But life goes whether you’re traveling with it or dragging your feet. If we focus too much on ourselves we become a burden to our own existence, and to others. In the end, I didn’t allow myself to be left behind. I didn't drown or turn entirely inward. I kept moving. It is good to be committed to life. Teaching and my family are commitments that keep me healthy. I must and I am able to get by each day because people rely on me to do my work, to get through my days purposefully. I could wallow in bed and worry and complain—there are days when that seems a reasonable thing to do. Fortunately, I cannot afford to do that. Life makes demands, and because of those demands I am a better person. I make a choice to act.

Do the better thing, I think. Be the beautiful thing. Focus on the lovely, the kind, the dear and gentle. Give, because giving is best.

Even in a happy life there is pain and sorrow, disappointment, regret, embarrassment, confusion, anger, and loss. We can live with these and still do the best we can to know that there is also pleasure, joy, accomplishment, pride, trust, faith, gratitude, hope, and these are the wealth of spirit.

Since July I have been sending birthday messages on Facebook: "Pull your instant of peace down from the stratosphere—hum a song, take a breath, open your eyes, close them, think of nothing but the fact of being. You were born this day. Life began on earth." I wish I were writing fiction these days, and now I think that might happen for me again. Telling stories is one of the great human accomplishments. Telling stories is how we honor our experiences. It is how we make meaning of what happens. For now I write a blog, but maybe stories are coming. When done well enough language creates “the music of what happens.” Life goes on all the time, and I don’t want to miss it.

Celebrate. Don’t miss a thing.

NOTE: The photo above is "Be the Butterfly, Not the Turd" by Pat Cason, who told me to write this small.

"EROTIC"

2011-12-02T22:58:00.000-08:00

Years ago I took a class about writing sex. It’s not easy to do. It’s embarrassing and inappropriate. I don’t even usually like sex scenes in books or movies. On the other hand I do have pretty strong opinions about what works as sexy and what is simply humiliating. A lot of what is advertised as “erotic” is humiliating stuff done to women. I don’t have any use for that. Maybe when I was a girl, but I’m a woman who has lived, and sex is something private and glorious, not something I’d share.

A few years ago a class had a discussion about what qualifies as “erotic.” I contended that most media got eroticism wrong, that what was erotic wasn’t what I most often found with that label.

The Big Easy is erotic, but so is The Scent of Green Papayas. There’s no nudity in either of those movies and different as they are, both of them are about love. It’s not about what is shown that makes a film sexy, it’s about the sense of sexual closeness. It’s about desire and love and compassion and gentleness. Isn’t that what you wish sex were always all about?

The best sex-writing instructor I ever had was Charlotte Watson Sherman, from The Flight of the Mind. She gave our class a series of creative exercises that culminated in some pretty amazing writing.

I don’t write sex scenes, or at least I haven’t so far outside of classes. But I do think that sex is a natural expression of passion and love. I wouldn’t appreciate any expression of love that separated expression, passion, and love. Just sayin.

CARING

2011-11-29T22:42:00.000-08:00

"Sometimes we expect more from others because we know we would be willing to do that much for them."

We recently had a roof rebuilt. It's been a rocky endeavor with leaks fewer than before, but appearing in places we did not expect. Still we've supported efforts to correct the problem. It's good to see the old house functioning, but it's been an effort. Ours is a home here that has been in my family for 100 years. It's a heritage. It's about family.

I want to hold on. I want to make a difference in the world. It's hard for me to imagine that everyone does not wish this. I know people who do not feel any obligation to anyone but themselves. How impoverished are their lives?—to care only for money and no one but what they believe belongs to them. But I cannot imagine living that way. I cannot imagine how that could pass as morality.

Years ago a doctor deliberately ruined his practice and then killed his children in order to destroy his ex-wife. To this day, though I have written about it several times, including in fiction, I can’t imagine the selfishness of such a man.

I have a poem on Work Magazine about my first job. This too is about community. This too is about work and respecting our places in the world.

MY STASH

2011-11-27T20:59:00.000-08:00

Disclosure: I realize that “stash” conjures up all sorts of evil. If you clicked a link hoping to read about drug use or whatever, you’re probably going to be disappointed.

I am a weaver, knitter, and quilter. My weaving, knitting, and quilting readers will know what that means. My stash is a collection of raw materials. For a while I was in the running for The Person Who Died with the Most Yarn, Wins contest. But I had to drop out. I don’t have enough room for it all. I had to find ways to use it up and still, I have too much.

I have plastic tubs downstairs in what used to be my oldest son’s bedroom. I have more upstairs in the corner of the room where we watch TV, where the roof swoops too low to stand up in. I had another collection of tubs in the north attic. It’s this last group that we just pulled out because I needed a scrap of fabric for a Christmas stocking for our new granddaughter. It’s that collection I’ve pictured here. My stash out of the attic: 22 tubs of yarn, fabric, and quilt batts, saved baby clothing, baby quilts, blankets, and half-completed projects.

In the past, a wealthy person might have daily wear and special wear for celebrations, church, and holidays. Underwear wasn’t discussed, so don't ask. A wealthy 18th century man might have clean shirts, even sending them to France to be washed, starched, and ironed. No joke—all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to another continent. Fabrics were stronger then, fashions changed more slowly. The typical American had two sets of clothes, plus long underwear or flannel petticoats for cold winters. Elizabeth I of England never appeared publicly in garments more than once, but the decorations were stripped off and the garments sent them to be revised for use in the theatre. Ordinary mortals in her retinue had night clothes (necessary in badly heated England) and court clothing. Maybe when they were not at court they also had ordinary clothes. They had no closets; everything went into a chest.

A friend was designing a house for her in-laws a few years back and needed to include at least twenty feet of hanging for her mother-in-law’s wardrobe. I was envious of all that space. It’s not a good habit to gather so much stuff, I think, but it’s not evil. At least I hope not. Included in my plastic storage tubs are a half dozen garments I wore in college in the early 70s. They no longer fit, but I remain fond of them. An acrylic sweater in orange and plum has penguins and polar bears on it. I keep thinking I will make a pattern from it and knit myself a larger version. What are the chances?

In my dreams, I have a two foot closet with one dress, a pair of jeans, a pair of nice pants, three black t-shirts, four tank tops, a sweater or maybe two, six pairs of shoes (runners, boots, plain flats, clogs, sandals, Beans), socks, underwear, bras, a pair of tights. Perhaps a nightgown and robe hung on the back of the closet door? That’s it. The jacket and wool coat would be someplace else—no room in my tiny closet.

But that’s not what I have. I have a seven foot closet and too many clothes. Some garments I have been wearing for ten or twenty years. Some I haven’t worn in years. I should let most of it go. But I don’t. At best I stash the unworn in a plastic tub.

In those tubs recently out of the attic, I also have unfinished knitting projects: a blue sweater for my mother that needs sleeves, a single sleeve of bouclé yarn that I knit before deciding to use the yarn to make my mother an afghan instead (it was later stolen while Mom was in a nursing home after breaking her second hip), two sweaters for myself that need sleeves, a sweater I recently began for my husband that has only most of a front. Maybe I will weave this yarn instead?

A favorite fantasy of my husband’s and mine involves moving to a smaller space, and thus being forced to make the hard decisions about what to keep and what to let go. That’s the other reason the bins have come out of the attic, we’re trying to weed—or perhaps prune is the better word—our possessions. They seem to be possessing us. We don’t want to leave our children with the mess we inherited. Better to have less. Better to select the two or three items that matter than leave a household with no way for someone else to choose.

Years ago while dealing with the leavings of a beloved relative, I wrote a “will” that I still keep in my computer. Keep what you find interesting or beautiful or useful, I wrote. I mention a small desk that was my maternal grandmother’s, a gold watch from the other side of my family, two lengths of cloth woven by Genevieve who left me the house we live in. The rest can go, I said. If I were to update that document today, I would mention some of the dolls that belonged to family, a necklace that must go to my granddaughter. “The rest can go.”

The rest can go.

A FEW OF MY FAVORITE THINGS

2011-11-27T07:19:00.000-08:00

I’m thankful for family first. Always.

Second, I am thankful for creativity. Creating something new is a fundamental right and release for human beings. I know I could not survive without it. I make my own contributions, and I enjoy those of others.

Powells Book Store and all the smaller local bookstores carry the creative work of literary artists from around the world. I am thankful for words and thankful to stores that feed my reading addiction.

There are wonderful yarn stores in Portland that I love including The Yarn Garden, Knit~Purl, and Twisted. My favorite brands, because of their glorious colors, softness, and marvelous stories, are Koigu (Canada) and Malabrigo. Click on the Koigu link and you will be tempted to knit or weave something—or even find a skein just to stroke—they are that beautiful!

Twist is an exquisite store in Seattle and Portland that carries extraordinary and useful art—especially jewelry, but also tableware, scarves, objects. They now carry Heath and Rainbow Gate—opposite ends of tableware spectrum and I love them both. Heath is from an old California firm that's been around long enough that my mother received Heath ware for her wedding. Rainbow Gate is from Santa Fe with the saturated colors to prove it. Twist jewelry is from all over the world, but mostly the U.S. They have a stunning collection of work available through their online store, with prices from perfectly reasonable to wow-I-wish-I-could-afford-this (maybe-if-I-saved-for-a-year—which I do ;). I should also mention that I was in a wonderful store in Boston a few years ago and heard someone else in the store comment that the only better collection he'd seen was at Twist in Portland, Oregon. It's a small world!

Margaret Swanson-Vance makes tiny flying animals and I have been collecting them for longer than I can remember. My children played with them as babies and I already had several before our boys were born. That’s a Swanson-Vance tiger above, but her winged horses and cats and and bats and dogs and elephants and swans decorate our Christmas tree. (She is a busy person and has no website, but she ships: margosv@comcast.net)

Help artists continue to do their good work in the world this holiday season. Support beauty in the world. Buy art. Buy local.

ON YOOLIS NIGHT

2011-11-24T07:01:00.000-08:00

I wrote this three years ago and sent it out to friends. It was written for a different holiday, but today is Thanksgiving and I am thankful. My husband asleep beside me, my children and new granddaughter, friends and colleagues, the ocean murmuring, the cat and dog asleep, the sun promising to glide over the coast range any minute.

The Anonymous 4 are singing carols and motets. Today I have listened to Odetta, and Etta, and John Denver singing "What a newborn baby dreams is a mystery."

I am just home from a quick set of errands in Cannon Beach. Yeti went with me--her first car ride in a week. The mail brought a small package from Pat, a card from a high school friend of Gary's, the NetFlix movie that I hoped Gary and I might watch this evening because it has associations from early in our relationship. The west windows here are streaming rain and the wind has come up again, but no ice, no remaining hint of snow. East of us is another story. [Each of us is another story.] Our sons won't make it here for Christmas. So we are looking for ways to feel good about the holiday with only ourselves. It will be warm and pretty--the woodstove keeps the house toasty and the tree has blue lights and new rosebud garlands as it did many years ago. I strung the garlands in the evenings after Thanksgiving weekend and put each strand on the tree as I completed it. At dusk I'll light the candles.

For the first time in decades I have a loom in the house, a warp on it, and work. I was surprised that I remembered how to wind a warp and dress a loom. More surprising was how quickly I found the old rhythm, working steadily and completing a scarf this morning. My feet found the treadles and I passed the shuttles back and forth, hardly thinking about what I was doing except to admire the emerging cloth. There is enough warp for two scarves and as soon as I finished the one I began yesterday I began another.

So, this morning I wove, then put on music, then drove six miles to Cannon Beach to get the mail. I drove around to the seafood store and as I walked toward the street corner to cross I saw a dark purple Civic pass before me, driving south. Exactly like my mother's old car that Gary drives now. The woman in the car was short and wore her white hair as my mother did about ten years ago. She wore my mother's red plaid jacket and one of my mother's expressions on her face--the upper lip lifted in confusion, as if she were lost and didn't know where she meant to go. At the corner I crossed, turning to watch the Honda continue. She looked so much like my mother, I'd have called out to her, but good sense prevailed. She can't be driving her car home, she's dead. But I watched the purple Honda heading south on Spruce and stop at the foot of the hill where most cars take the free right. She stopped. I thought, if she heads up the hill toward her old house I will have to cry. The car did not turn on its blinker for the right turn and still stopped at the corner--no need to stop unless you mean to go straight up the hill. Finally, it crept forward and turned.

I bought crab meat at the seafood store, wished the owner Merry Christmas, though I don't know her, only the former students who often work there in the holidays. On the drive home I looked at the tangled blackberry vines, the blowing pines, felt the crackle of gravel under the tires, Odetta asking Mary what she was going to name her pretty little baby. The world is so rich and tangled up with beauty and inexplicable meaning, patterns I can't possibly weave on my loom. It is a wonder. It is easy to think that something smarter, wiser, more purposeful than myself is in charge and understands it all.

When I was a girl in high school, my favorite teacher Darlene Sherrick told me I was the "humane voice" in World History. In those days I dreamed of living on a farm—Five Acres and Independence was the book that spoke to my dreams. I wanted to be what Mrs. Sherrick said of me. Recently my friend Kitty told me I was generous. How can I see who I am to the world—I know my own ugly thoughts and petty quibbling. But at this moment I feel tender toward those youthful aspirations. Slow down. Slow down. Slow and slow. I like to remind my students that the sun comes up beautifully every day, whether we notice or not. I will notice.

Beyond the west windows, where the rain has eased and cleared my view, the ocean roils in silvered green and white foam. And the Anonymous 4 sing chants from nearly a thousand years ago, honoring a woman who gave birth to hope.

What a newborn baby dreams is a mystery.

MERIT PAY

2011-11-23T14:09:00.003-08:00

A former student posted to me on Facebook about PERS. This is the Oregon public teacher retirement program, and a retiree is getting $41,000 a month. He's a former athletic director at a state university.

From The Oregonian which reported the story about the top-paid retirees (none of whom are teachers): "That's less than 1 percent of the system's 105,000 retirees. But those big earners take home with an outsize share -- 3.4 percent -- of the system's annual $2.99 billion in benefits paid out."   

"There is sizeable chasm between the system's top earners and the rank and file. About 68 percent receive $3, 000 or less a month -- $36,000 or less a year. Only 17.6 percent earn more than $50,000 a year."   

If I retire in 8 years at age 67, for example, my yearly income will be less than $30,000. I've been a teacher since 1976, working in the my district since 1979, and as an English teacher since 1990. I have paid monthly into my pension. I didn't hire the coach, but I'd agree his pension is obscene—but then, so was his paycheck. I'm hoping your point isn't that I'm overpaid? Or that my pension is too high? I am the 99%.

My former student then posted that he wondered about my perspective about the pensions.

I told him I think some people will use this figure as an attack on ordinary mortals such as myself. I don't think that's fair. I believe I'm good at my job and I work hard at it. I didn't deserve to lose my retirement, which is pretty much what happened when they changed PERS a few years ago. But I have to say that among those top paid pensions is the chemistry professor who has continued doing his very skilled job without pay, and a number of medical specialists who probably would have been much better paid in the private sector. I don't begrudge them a comfortable retirement. I just wish I could look forward to one myself.

He suggested that I must support merit pay.

Well, I've blogged about this before, but here I am again...

Teaching isn't like most professions where an ambitious company can afford to hire the best. School districts hire people who are cheap. I'm sorry it's this way, but most school districts are hurting for money so they hire people with little experience because they are cheap. Right now that means my district can afford to to be pretty picky about who we hire for some positions because there are so few jobs available as districts cut back. If the new hires stay in the profession long enough to learn how to do their jobs, we're ahead. They might not. Chances are they will move on, since nearly half of teachers leave teaching within the first five years. Some reasons they give for leaving are: more money elsewhere, it's harder than they thought, the hours are too long.

In theory, all people should be paid based on merit. In education, I'm not sure how that could happen with the way things work in America. How do we even determine merit? One study which recently determined that teachers were overpaid based on the college class rank and the [low] rigor of teacher program is kind of the answer to my personal prayers—I graduated from college with three degrees, only one in education and with honors and Phi Beta Kappa. Although I have several years of graduate study, my graduate degree is in writing, not education. Does that mean I'm a better teacher and should be paid more? I wish it were true, but teacher education is something we already reward. Is my education enough of a guarantee I'm a good teacher? How about merit based on student test scores? We'd all be teaching to the test and nothing else in order to save our jobs. Based on student recommendations? Do we want a teenager deciding who is the best teacher? How about college admissions levels among our students? In that case, why would I stay in an economically disadvantaged district?

Merit pay has been tried as a motivation in Nashville, Chicago, New York City and other places and—surprise—merit pay didn't improve teacher performance one bit according to the measures used (test scores and so forth). I think that's because pretty much all teachera do the best they can regardless of how they're paid. If we were just looking for money, we'd have chosen another occupation.

On the other hand I don't appreciate people who tell me I should be content with lousy pay or a meager retirement because I am fulfilling an avocation. I should have chosen to do something else for more money and I should be grateful to have any job at all. I'm not a nun, I'm a teacher. Maybe I'm overqualified for my job but love it and I think I'm pretty good at it. Plenty of doctors and lawyers and carpenters and liquor store owners probably love their jobs. No one expects them to work for so little since, and frankly, they all take home more than I do even though I have as much or more education and experience.

You want better teachers? Find the money to hire the very best and reward them the way you do other professionals. Give them better working conditions with more support and fewer students to help. Then you can afford to be picky about the work they do. That's what has worked in other countries and in other lines of work.

In the mean time, I think you can expect things to get worse pretty soon. I know several young people with a few years in the profession who are seriously considering doing something else with their lives. They love teaching, but it's too hard, too much time, too little support for their efforts. I can't blame them if they move on. It's hard work and they are blamed for every problem children face and expected to be grateful to be working at all. It's sad to admit that you kind of have to have a hole in your head to choose education as a profession these days. Fortunately for many children and for our nation's future, some of us do indeed seem to have a hole in our heads instead of in our hearts.

I DARE YOU

2011-11-21T14:22:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine from high school committed suicide while we were all in college. He was smart and popular in high school, and I cared about him, though we were never close. After his death I had a dream about him, and then I've had a similar dream many times over the years. The dreams always begin well. We are glad to see one another and we smile and I share what I’ve been doing and things are fuzzy, but somehow I always end up screaming at him for dying. “Why did you do it?” I still want to know.

Some say suicide shows a failure of imagination. Others say it’s a coward’s way out. And some believe it takes courage to die. I guess I’d argue that it shouldn’t take courage to face life, though sometimes, I know it does.

I have great faith in courage. I believe in taking risks when the end result is something worth doing—that is why I learned to swim though I don’t like putting my face in the water because I’ve nearly drowned more than once and I want to be able to rescue myself. I also think it’s silly to dislike putting my face in the water. I talk in front of people every day, even though public speaking was my least favorite thing to do when I was a student. I’m a teacher. Talking in front of people is necessary to my job.

On the other hand, I don’t admire people who do scary things just for the sake of proving something. When I was a child, my dad told me, “Never take a dare—that person is just trying to force you to do something you don’t want to do, and they probably don’t want to do it either.” He explained that taking dare was falling prey to manipulation. Maybe that’s not the way he said it, but it gave me the courage to say no and it saved me from doing a number of really dangerous, stupid, and pointless things when I was a child.

Bungee jumping is not for me. Mountain climbing fails to attract my admiration. People who traipse across Antarctica just to win public acclaim do not impress me, which is why I find Ernest Shackleton’s failed journey to the South Pole a mixed bag. I can’t help appreciating that he eventually got everyone out alive, but then again I think he was a selfish egotist to have planned the trip to begin with. He had no purpose other than fame, and it wasn’t only his own life he risked, but the lives of his crew and the families of everyone who traveled with him and would have been left desolate had they failed to return. Even though they returned, am I the only one who wonders how the wives and children of these men were managing while they were gone nearly two years? Did the families have food and shelter? Did they mourn? Did they hold out hope when the Endurance was declared lost, or did they bury an empty coffin? How much courage must it take to be the ones to wait?

I readily admit my own failures, but I’m more willing to risk success, and sometimes that requires courage. Sometimes just getting out of bed seems to require courage I didn’t know I had. Other days I need courage to keep my mouth shut.

I’ve had few students who actually scared me, not even the convicted rapist, not the boy with FAS and a knife. My students need me to be brave in order to do my job, and I try very hard to find the courage to trust them.

Dorothy Parker quoted another Ernest, Ernest Hemingway, defining “guts” as “grace under pressure.” Maybe courage is grace with a purpose. Maybe grace demands more than mindless risk-taking—at least is does in my book. I don’t believe in using fear for the adrenalin rush—in squandering courage on manufactured fear. Life can be hard enough. Usually courage isn’t about survival, but when it is, when courage is necessary to maintain life, I want us all to think about what we are gaining and what others might lose before we climb the mountain or sail to Antarctica.

We do dangerous things for many reasons—out of fear, necessity, daring. I do admire courage for its own sake, but even more I believe in having a purpose before risking a life. It’s never just one life we risk.

WHAT WE HEAR

2011-11-21T06:12:00.000-08:00

Sometimes we hear only what we want to hear, what we expect, or what we disagree with, what we're afraid others might be saying, what they say that could offend us, what threatens and confuses and hurts.

Sometimes we miss the kindness, the complements, the conciliatory comments, the words meant to explain, the suffering others struggle to express, the gestures born of compassion and love and fear.

There can be pain and charm and lies, truth, despair, anger, resentment, and tenderness.

What we hear may not be what others said, or meant, or felt. What we hear may be something only our own minds can perceive or understand. Sometimes what we hear has little to do with the person talking.

Sometimes we're too loud inside our own heads.

Sometimes we don't hear.

Sometimes we don't listen.

Sometimes people think we aren't hearing when we really catch every shred of meaning—the words spoken and those only imagined.

_________________________
And though I love Gary Larson's Far Side, and I find these particular comics funny, he clearly hasn't spent enough time around dogs and cats. They get it all and only pretend. Sometimes they don't care... but often they do when we need them most. [But go buy Larson's books! You'll laugh for hours.]

THE ESTABLISHMENT

2011-11-20T07:41:00.000-08:00

These days I am pretty much a part of the establishment. I work long hours, receive a paycheck, attend to the needs of my family, vote in elections. I purchase necessary goods such as food, and unnecessary goods such as fashionable clothing (though not as often as I’d like). I follow traffic laws and pay my taxes. I believe that as a public school teacher I am obligated to set an example to my students and thus I do not use foul language in public or use illegal drugs. Of course I was never been much in favor of doing those things, so this hasn’t been a stretch for me.

I am a mother of two sons. I am the gray-haired grandmother of one precious jewel.

I believe in the rule of law and respect my good fortune in being an American.

Like I said: I am the establishment.

But at the same time I am a “femo-nazi, tree-hugging, g-d socialist, wild-eyed radical.” Or so I’ve been told. (As if those were bad things ;-) I have ideas about justice, fair play, civil rights, and the American Dream as something all Americans deserve. Shoot me for being an idealist. I haven't participated in the Occupy Wall Street movement. But I get it. Warts and all, I think it's a healthy sign that Americans care enough to demand change.

The best explanation of the Occupy Wall Street movement came to me from a Facebook repost by a friend who is a registered Republican (you read it here: I was registered Independent for over 20 years until Bush began destroying my country). Max Ugardo explains to a young “former Marine” the history behind where we are today. He writes respectfully of their differences. It’s a terrific letter, and Ugardo knows history. I can’t say it any better so I’m sharing it: I first read the repost HERE. You can find the original post HERE. Like Ugardo, I'd like to see us do better by this hard-working young man.

During the Vietnam war I was involved in many peaceful protests. After Kent State the establishment came pouring out of office buildings to join our call for an end to the killing. That day I had to work the evening shift and so I was trucking along near the front of the march. Strangers in the crowd were trying to trash the path in front of us, and the rest of us were picking back up the overturned trash cans. I believed at the time and I still believe today that those trashers were only there to deliberately make trouble for the marchers and not as part of the anti-war movement at all. But the business people who joined us in suits were sincere. The establishment.

I was shoved off the sidewalk and into traffic by Seattle Police officers in full riot gear during an earlier protest, but a couple of years later, a Seattle Police officer would demonstrate great compassion toward a young girl who’d had a mental breakdown. That was the establishment too.

It was a US General, President Eisenhower, who warned America against growth of the "military industrial complex", the danger of becoming reliant on war for economic health, and of imposing our power on the rest of the world. The richest man on earth at the moment, Bill Gates, has recently called for higher taxes on the wealthy.

As a member of the establishment, I am worried about where American has been headed in recent decades. I don’t think that money is more important than compassion and justice. I think people should be our power, not dollars. I trust more in human rights than military might. I don’t like America as the bully of the entire world. A few years back there was a call for a “kinder, gentler nation” and I’d call that a worthy goal for us all to establish.

BULLY PULPIT: DON’T LET IT SLIDE

2011-11-16T14:52:00.000-08:00

Last night on Glee, there was a lesson about bullying. It got me thinking.

In the second grade, I beat up a classmate, Pam Parsons. She was pretty, popular, smaller even than me and better dressed with neatly styled hair. I was jealous because people told me every day I was ugly, stupid, and unlikable. I had no best friend and I felt that keenly. So one day—I don't remember why that particular day—at recess I came up behind her as she stood at the chest high bar, placed my hands on the bar on either side of her and slammed my body into hers, smashing her into the bar. I might have done it once or three times. I don’t remember. She cried, I believe, because I hurt her and scared her. I know I scared myself and I cried too. I ran straight home from school and hid under my bed. And I have no memory of the repercussions of this action other than my own horror that I could do such a thing.

Several years later I refused to speak to a friend because of some minor slight I no longer recall. I gave Gwen Unger the cold shoulder for what seemed at the time like a long time, perhaps a few minutes, perhaps a half hour. She began crying and, with my back to her, I smiled. I knew I’d smiled because I recognized my own power, but again, the most vivid recollection I have of the event is my own horror that I could enjoy someone else’s suffering.

I was a bully. I’ve done it since. I know what it is to feel more powerful than others. What prevents me from making a habit of throwing my weight around is how filthy I feel about it afterwards. On occasions I have thrown weight around when I didn’t even know I had done it. When I figure it out in retrospect, I'm ashamed. As I should be.

I am not big enough or powerful enough to bully most people. And I’m not ruthless or self-assured enough to let myself deliberately do it when I am in power.

But I understand the dynamic because I’ve been on the receiving end plenty of times. I was bullied regularly in school and only realized recently that the reason I hated P.E. was because by junior high that's where I was most likely to be bullied by students and teachers. I was teased and told I was stupid and ugly and worthless, that I wasn’t good enough to participate in games, that friendship with me was a social liability. I was told I had ugly hands, hairy arms, a big nose, and bad hair. And a shop teacher hit me so hard I flew through the air. No one called out the people who said and did those things to me. Not once when I was in school did someone rush in to stop it. And the worst of it was that I believed every bad thing I was told about myself. I chose not to turn on others, but I was powerless to prevent others' attacks on myself. Someone else should have stepped in—someone taller, stronger, older, wiser. Someone should have stopped it.

There has to be a will to stop bullying. Adults have to notice and brave students have to notice and we all have to speak out against it. Some bullies don’t notice what they are doing—they don’t know their own strength. Some don’t even consider that throwing their weight around (quite literally—some have the weight to throw) is bullying, even when it's done with a smile, even when they direct their weight against someone they claim they “like” as a friend. Hogging class time is a kind of boorish behavior that might not be classed by most people as bullying, but it contributes to an unfriendly and even hostile environment. I’m seeing a lot of that these days. Losing my own temper doesn't help a bit since in my classroom, the bully boys think me losing my temper is “cool.”

My own children were bullied and the reaction from administrators was either that “some children invite abuse” or a failure to return phone calls. Maybe people who were stars or bullies themselves in school have no appreciation of what it’s like to be on the receiving end. Maybe they do not recognize the damage that is done to self confidence and pride, because it never happened to them.

Telling weaker kids to fight back is, in the end, useless. Fighting back doesn't help a bit since bullies cannot be stopped by the retaliation of their peers. Retaliation perpetuates the behavior. It validates the behavior. And if the bullies move off, they simply move on to a weaker target.

Bullies have learned to pick on others. Maybe you’d call it a defense mechanism. Maybe that’s true. But it is also the ultimate sense of entitlement. I shove you because I am stronger or bigger or older or richer or more popular. So I will. I do it because I can.

The bullied person doesn’t deserve it. The object of the bullying never deserves it. No amount of justification makes bullying okay.

I'll say it again: Bullies bully because they can, because they think they are entitled, because no one stronger puts a stop to it. Someone needs to put a stop to it. Maybe if someone talked to the bullies—at least this might work for a few—their own decency would prevent them from continuing to bully others. Or maybe it would take more than that to change them.

We need to stop pretending it doesn't happen here. We need to talk about the different ways that one person asserts power over another. We need to stop blaming victims. It’s not what the rape victim wore that caused the rape. It’s not being kind or gentle that causes bullying. Bullies are to blame for what they do. No one else. Someone needs to stop telling the bullied victims that it’s their job to prevent the bullying behavior and start talking to the bullies about theirs. Maybe that's the next plan—address bullying AS bullying by talking to bullies and see if their better nature is enough to make them stop themselves.

And if it isn’t enough to stop the behavior? Regroup and try something else.

[The bullying behavior in Glee took place during a game of dodgeball—which I recall with a kind of sinking feeling from my own high school years.] At the school where I teach, the P.E. classes play dodgeball with soft little sponge balls. In one class the boys throw and the girls are put in charge of protecting the pins the throwers are trying to knock over. It's another kind of assertion of power, a kind of bullying to always assume that boys and girls have specific, distinct, and different talents predetermined by gender. But there you are.

Gwen Unger? Pam Parsons? It's been fifty years, but I still feel sorry whenever I think of what I did.

MAKING THE BEST OF IT

2011-11-14T17:29:00.000-08:00

The other morning at the Saturday Farmers Market in Portland, there was a long lines, about 30 people, waiting at the biscuit stand. This is typical and it bothers me a little, that line. It makes me a little sad. Salvadore Molly’s is right next door to the biscuit stand and my husband and I love their cotilla cheese and artichoke tamales “with everything”. I don’t care how much you love gravy or jam—there’s no way those biscuits are as good as the tamales from Salvadore Molly’s. Why aren’t those people waiting in line for tamales?

Okay, you might say it’s a matter of taste, so let’s say you’re right. Let’s say the biscuits are as good as the tamales. I still have a quarrel with that line waiting for biscuits. A simple quarrel. It has to do with how biscuits are made.

In 30 minutes I can make, bake, and serve you up a plate of biscuits as good as any you can buy anywhere. Simple. Preheat the oven to 425°; cut good butter into unbleached organic flour, a little salt and baking soda; use a light hand to stir in buttermilk. Roll out and cut into pieces. Put them on a baking sheet and bake until lightly brown. Bang. On the table. I’ve got eight kinds of homemade jam on the shelf. (Sorry, no gravy.)

Tamales are another matter. Usually I make tamales a day or two before Christmas in honor of my great great grandmother Rosa Garcia who married into Texas. I use the best ingredients, including butter instead of lard, which I know is wrong, but I don’t eat lard. I like a movie playing on the TV while I work, and I’d really like a House marathon—something that plays all day, because that’s how long it will take to make a few dozen tamales. And even after soaking the corn husks, cutting up cheese, sautéing peppers, mixing masa, and few hours of forming, wrapping, and steaming, I suspect my homemade Christmas tamales are not any better than Salvadore Molly’s.

The biscuits dirty up a bowl and measuring cups. The tamales trash the entire kitchen.

So here is the problem—my problem with the biscuit line: Why pay to eat something so easy to make?

And, yes, I have an answer for that too.

Hardly anyone knows how to cook anything anymore. Most of my students can make toast. Some of them know perfectly well how to make biscuits and even tamales. But others, and a lot of twenty-somethings haven’t a clue how to put a meal on the table. Their parents never learned to cook either. We are raising whole generations incapable of managing ordinary household tasks.

That’s why Martha Stewart made a fortune Living. She provides step by step instructions on how to make beds, plant a flowerpot, scramble eggs.

My older son knows how to change a tire because he learned in Scouting. Students learn how to cook at my school in Foods or maybe because they have a grandmother. But sewing on a button, changing a light fixture, completing federal tax forms, negotiating a new car purchase, planning a budget, balancing a checkbook, reading a contract? Schools used to teach all these things, but we don’t have time for those practical activities anymore and neither do most parents. None of us seem to take time anymore.

But it’s not too late to learn and gain perspective. Make something good to eat.

Try biscuits. They’re easy after the first few tries that turn out like leaden lumps.

And if you want to know how to make tamales? Check YouTube. And then after you’ve trashed your kitchen, go down to the Saturday Farmers Market and be humbled.

__________________
Okay, I was wrong about the 30 minutes—try 20 minutes to get biscuits on the table. I could have cut them round, but I made fingers instead and they puffed up beautifully, all flaky and hot. Above before the first bite, split with butter and gooseberry jam. Below, the last bite with nectarine, berry, and ginger jam.

Honey would have been good. The honey guy at the Farmers Market has a lot of choices.

RUNNING INJURED

2011-11-11T08:43:00.000-08:00

One thing I have learned as a runner is that it never pays to push an injury. If my ankle hurts when I first go out, I will probably try running, but if the pain persists, I stop and walk home. If I feel a pull, I stop and stretch. If something is sore when I stop, I ice, and I put my legs up. If I have the sense that I’ve overdone it, I might do all of those things and also soak in a hot tub, just for good measure. Some days it's better to rest.

Some days I am proud of my job and of the job I do.

Other days are like most of my days recently. My classes are out of control, at least by my standards. Students are failing. I want to help them become mature readers and writers, but they seem more interested in remaining children. There are students in my classes who accomplish nothing. On the other hand students recently wrote personal essays with lines such as: “I’ve known these kids since they were weird.” And another about when a student was four his father deserted the family and “he wasn’t even around long enough for me to miss him… If I could I would stay home… [but my mother and stepfather] even talked about emancipating me at fifteen like a bird does to its chick.” It’s hard not to get all weepy and excited about stuff like that when you’re an English teacher.

What I can do in the classroom is sometimes overwhelmed by lives that are too often difficult, painful, impoverished. I teach in a small rural school rated as economically deprived. My students are deprived intellectually, too, by the limited materials they've been given to read. I find they are hungry for challenge, but it also frightens them. They think something is wrong with them or the book when they have to work at reading. So they look for something easier. They want to find the five-year-old's understanding of Winnie the Pooh, without considering that Milne was actually writing for adults. Even eager readers snatch at the most superficial meaning and resist the deeper message, the more complex concept.

When we look for the simplest messages in the simplest words we find only a simplistic world. The world isn't simple. It is wonderful in its complexity. I feel we do a disservice when we fail to show children that stories and essays can reveal this to them, when we fail to offer them "difficult" texts. They need to be reading over their heads.

Even worse, easy texts give them no reason to read further; we fail to give them a reason to struggle. How would we raise great musicians if we only allowed them to hear chopsticks, if we never allowed them to be overwhelmed by Mozart? Books offer us the world and my students choose to read, if they read at all, ridiculous, fat, poorly written pap about people like themselves. Or vampires.

There’s a story I have taught for years, “Wilshire Bus” by Hisaye Yamamoto (who died earlier this year), about a woman taking the Wilshire bus to visit her husband at the VA hospital. On the bus she witnesses someone bullying an Asian couple. Oddly, I’ve been in almost exactly that situation twice. The first time someone else stood up for the child being bullied. The second time it was me. I use it in class as an example of finding a situation in literature that we might one day face in life. The story contains at least 37 words in four pages that many of my students do not know. We talk the vocabulary through, but they get the main idea without much help. The story provides us with an opportunity to consider what we would do ourselves. What would be the right thing? How would we feel about it afterwards? We all face hard decisions in our lives. It is well to consider how we want to behave before faced with such dilemmas.

But what if we are hurt? What if life has injured us? Isn’t it better to read the easy stuff, the gentle stuff so as not to hurt more? Maybe. Sometimes. But hearts and souls are not like ankles, I think. Sometimes the only way to heal injury is to wake up to injuries beyond ourselves—which is why my students read the terrible thick books about teenagers doing ridiculous things with tragic consequences. “We read to know we are not alone.” We read to find the way out of our own misery. But sometimes, at least sometimes, we must read for glory, for hope and wisdom. We must read to grow, to find the whole wide world.

We are all injured. Not one of us gets out of life alive.

We have work to do here.

Books shouldn't only be comfort food—they should be a banquet including dishes made with fruits we've never heard of before. They should hand us not only our own stories, but the ones beyond our imagination.

The Yamamoto story I teach is not one of the ones usually taught out of her collected works. I don't know if Yamamoto's story is based on a real experience. I do know that her own life included suffering and joy. Her understanding of that mix of failure, remorse, and triumph is apparent in her work. Go look her up. The Wikipedia entry contains errors, especially about this story, but still...

READING UP A SWEAT

2011-11-08T10:48:00.000-08:00

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? ...we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.—Franz Kafka

Until recent decades and especially before the advent of NCLB, high school teachers didn’t spend much time teaching reading. Kids learned to read in grade school, and if they didn’t, they improved skills in the middle grades. By high school, so the reasoning once went, students should be focusing on more sophisticated literature and writing.

This changed as educators began to notice just how weak the reading skills of our students have become. Students can’t read or refuse to read—often because their skills are low. Even among students who can read, too many are “reluctant readers” who stop at the first word they do not know and refuse to go forward. Complicated ideas seem to run right over their heads—they want a simple storyline, a happy and predictable ending. And literary devices present their own challenges. They seem wholly unprepared for the rich language and richer vocabulary of good literature. While sarcasm and even facetiousness are humorous devices they recognize from television, analogy and allusion confuse them, and satire is completely beyond their understanding.

What happened?

As a high school English teacher I’ve puzzled over the decline of reading in America for years. I still have students who are enthusiastic readers, but this is now the exception. And even among the most practiced readers, I sometimes find that they latch onto the obvious and resist digging deeper into the story. They want tidy answers to the most basic questions. When they don’t find them the book is “confusing” or “stupid” or simply “wrong”.

Somewhere along the way I started hearing about the need for low level/high interest books. The thinking was that students needed to read a lot, and what they needed to be reading was books that were easy to read.

I spent a lot of time last Friday reading on line about plans that call for students to never read anything difficult. “Even one [unfamiliar] word in a hundred” might be too much for early readers and they should be sheltered from words they do not know or that cause them to hesitate while reading. I found this very discouraging, because it seems to me that as we’ve dumbed down reading materials we have not seen achievement improve. I find too many students who have no experience reading challenging texts, and not a few who seem actually frightened when the text is “hard”. I have also seen studies suggesting that the working vocabulary of Americans is falling fast.

Now that I’ve read an essay by Tim Shanahan, I’m pretty excited. He warns that there never was much solid evidence to support the easy-reading approach and that now the new “Common Core Standards” are leading in another direction. Unlike most standards used over the past decades, these demand students read higher difficulty material. There’s even research backing up this approach. It sounds as if what I’ve been suspecting for years—that allowing kids to read only easy books that are about themselves (rather than challenging books that also force them to expand their understanding of the world)—contributes to decreasing reading skills. Easy reading materials have actually made it harder for children to become good readers.

If we look at the development of other skills—performing on the trumpet, playing basketball—the notion of only doing easy work in order to improve would seem naïve. We understand that the only way to improve is to be challenged. As a runner, I know the big secret to running faster, is to… well… run faster. The only way to understand advanced and complicated issues is to wrestle with them. Though I’ve long abandoned the no-pain-no-gain approach, I do believe in both literal and proverbial sweat.

In terms of actual reading, I find it ironic that presenters on reading and writing have for at least 20 years argued against the need to “read every word.” A slow reader is handicapped and readers should grasp phrases and not individual words. I am a medium speed reader, but I often have to force myself to slow down and not skim. Skimming is a useful skill, and all students benefit from developing it. Skimming allows us to gather the gist of an argument or description and move on. But skimming is not reading. The ability to actually read a page—every single word—is a valuable skill we also need to cultivate. There is no other way to appreciate poetry or good literature where the rhythm and sound of individual words carry additional meaning. This is true in a literature class, but equally true when evaluating a proposed ballot initiative or contract, for example. Close reading skill is becoming lost, though it’s also a necessary one.

In his essay, “Common Core Standards: Are We Going to Lower the Fences or Teach Kids to Climb?" Shanahan expresses concern that, while there’s plenty of evidence that most readers benefit from challenge, the pendulum may swing too far the other way and fail to address the needs of early readers who need to develop fluency and confidence. That may be true, but, I fear he still doesn’t get the fundamental need to teach kids two simple but challenging truths: It’s okay to struggle while reading and practice will make them better at it.

We also need to look beyond our immediate world, and this is something we rely on from books. Too often I find students reading their own stories over and over, and of course that is one reason to read: to know we are not alone. But reading must also bring us into the broader world, beyond our own knowledge and experience—that is the real wonder of literature, that it provides a gateway to experience, a way to rehearse and imagine how we might or should respond in situations we hope one day to experience, or which we hope never to face.

Reading can be easy and reassuring. It can also present a challenge. I believe that our job in school is to ensure that the latter as well as the former occur.

ABOVE: "Lesendes Mädchen" Gustav Adolph Hennig

BLESS THE CHILD

2011-11-08T10:23:00.000-08:00

"Some years are more eventful than others" a friend once wrote to me. This is one of those years for my husband and me. My situation at school is coming unraveled (more about that later), but in my personal life...

Kerris Cockrell and her husband, our son Ian Anderson-Priddy, & a new little Ruby

born in Portland on Guy Fawkes Day 2011. She is perfect.

BEAUTIFUL

2011-10-30T22:40:00.000-07:00

Some days are just beautiful.

It is wise to notice when we can.

Every day, whether we notice or not.

A MURDER OF CROWS

2011-10-24T06:18:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time in a summer camp as far north and left as you might go, there was not just one crow, but many. And you probably know that a large group of crows has a special name that has been used for centuries. Just as there might be a herd of elk or a pride of lions, there can be a murder of crows. And there was. There always had been in that place.

There was also a hired groundskeeper who watched after the summer camp cabins, repaired sheds and steps, cleared trails in the woods, trimmed back the encroaching undergrowth, and mowed the lawn in the center gathering place. She mostly liked her job, though it did not pay well. She enjoyed the silence and solitude of the off season and did not much mind the hoards of children who showed up in the summer to learn about wildlife, sing songs, swim and canoe in the pond, and create useless handcrafts on days when it rained.

This intrusion of children only lasted for a few weeks, and during that time the groundskeeper could herself go away if the screaming, teaming children bothered her. And then the autumn would come, the winter, and spring with no voices other than her own.

One spring as the groundskeeper went about her chores she found the noise of crows particularly vexing. Clearing a new trail through the wood, they called and cawed and would not let up all day long. Overhead they bounded and flew from branch to branch. Caw caw caw! They shouted at her as she went about her necessary tasks. They spoiled her silent spring with their incessant and harsh calls.

This went on and on until the groundskeeper had had enough. She loaded her pellet gun, filled her pockets with ammunition, and went out to put a stop to the noise. She was a good shot, quiet and patient. She walked the trails, hunting for the small black eyes of the black birds and shot them dead. All day long she shot crows until there was not one left. All gone. Silence regained. The robins and jays remained, but even they were silent for a day.

Now I will ask you: Have crows so annoyed you that you understand or even applaud the groundskeeper’s solution? Do you find it not only legal but reasonable?

Perhaps you know that recent studies suggest crows are among the most intelligent of animals and wonder if murder of a murder can ever be justified? Perhaps you know that crows, like human beings, live in extended families, in communities. Children stay close to their mothers for years. Perhaps you recognize that the calling of the crows in springtime was likely their effort to warn the groundskeeper away from their babies.

Perhaps you have even heard that “crow funerals” are more than apocryphal sentimentality, but have been documented. Crows mourn their dead.

Whatever we think, it’s too late to change what happened that long ago springtime. The robins remain. Gulls fly overhead. Hawks are protected, and eagles. The children returned.

But the murder of crows was gone.

That's Elvis, the blue-eyed baby crow Gary found standing over his dead brother beside highway 101 in the early 80s, Gary brought him home and we fed him pablum and watermelon until he grew out his flight feathers and could fly away.

POTLATCH

2011-10-22T05:26:00.000-07:00

My stack of weavings continues to grow. I am working around the color wheel—burgundy and pink and yellow-greens. Orange is next, then purple and sage with gold. Blue. Forest green. Ruby. People are beginning to ask me what I will do with them. Do I mean to sell them? No. I just like accumulating them. They make me feel rich. Eventually I will give them all away. My stack of woven blankets and shawls reminds me of a potlatch.

Years ago, my husband was tutoring Indian kids in the Edmonds school district north of Seattle. He was also involved in a project at Tulalip to reestablish the Puget Coast Salish language. Because of these connections and because of the people he knew from the UW, he was invited to a naming ceremony, a potlatch of sorts on the reservation, and I got to go as well.

Gifts were given to everyone who attended: blankets and art work, packets of illustrated cards and other objects I no longer recall. Individuals were recognized for their contributions to the success of the one being named and speeches were given. The purpose of a traditional potlatch is to honor everyone involved. It is an old custom and one that anthropologist Franz Boaz disapproved of. He frankly disapproved of all the Pacific Northwest cultures, which seems very odd to me today. The traditional art and literature of the region is rich and diverse and I find it difficult to understand how Boaz missed that. Maybe he was simply offended that anyone would give away what they earned.

Potlatches served very practical purposes of redistributing wealth and building status. Traditionally, the goal of the person holding a potlatch was to impoverish himself. A person or family would accumulate wealth—food, art, tools, and so forth—and then give it entirely away. There is a marvelous bravado in doing this. The celebrant says to the wider community: I am so strong that I can give away everything I have and I will survive. It might seem a supremely self-sacrificing move to give away wealth, but it is primarily a means of achieving honor and status.

It is an action in direct contrast to the fictional Ebenezor Scrooge or Silas Marner sitting alone in the half dark, counting their gold. Not so very long ago, such miserliness was considered a great sin. Today, I wonder how many of us have even considered this sort of selfishness as sin? Among “Christian nations” the notion of sitting alone on wealth and withdrawing from participation with and obligation to the broader community was impoverishment of the soul.

Human beings are not solitary. Everything about us from our prolonged childhood to our social structures emphasizes that we are meant to live in community. We are lions, not leopards. We are horses not deer. We do not exist alone, selfishly for ourselves. The occasional person may go off in the mountains and hermit in a cave, but that is not how most of us have survived and thrived for at least many thousands of years. As the larger community thrives, so do we. As the greater community suffers, so do we. America is a wealthy nation, and those who accumulate wealth here do so because the nation makes this possible, not because it’s possible—not even for Scrooge or Marner—to become wealthy in isolation. We rise or fall as a collective.

All alone I weave my projects. I can afford to purchase the yarn; I can spare the hours necessary to create these beautiful scarves and shawls and baby blankets. But I am not entirely alone. Never alone even in my private success. All this is possible for me because local people have children who grow to be teenagers whom I am allowed to teach. I drive a highway to work. The local fire department will come if I have a chimney fire. The sheriff and hospital are available if I need them. The water from my tap is safe to drink. The local stores sell food that is generally safe to eat. My car has safety belts and blinkers and I drive the speed limit. Products I find in stores do what they are intended to do, or they will be removed. There is an internet that offers me information and communication. My phone responds with a dial tone. Water pours from the tap, electricity comes. My neighbors may be irritating sometimes, but we all follow rules we have agreed to in order to live in this nation. Almost all the time, almost everyone I will ever meet is doing the best they know how to do the right thing. There are laws and police officers, teachers and entire armies to ensure that this happens.

Here is my woven wealth. My woolen objects. I stack them in their multicolored splendor. My gold coins hidden under the bed only temporarily. Eventually, because I do not need them—because I want to share, because I am able and proud to demonstrate that I am willing and able to share—I will give them all away.

I am able. I can make more.

THE ERROR OF MY WAYS

2011-10-16T10:56:00.000-07:00

Lately I’ve been weaving, an interest I shared with the step grandmother who left me my house and still share with one of my oldest friends, Toni. The loom I’m working on belonged to her mother, a 25” 4-harness Baby Wolf by Schacht. I am now weaving the fifth warp since we picked it up from Toni and Jeff in Portland a couple of years ago. Two years ago the first warp was an ambitious pattern, narrow enough to be quick, and I wove two scarves of camel and silk. This year I’ve been weaving with pure wool, one warp right after the other. And I’ve also been rediscovering how to cope with error.

So far I’ve made mistakes in winding the warp and putting the warp on the loom, and I’ve fixed them or managed to live with them. Errors in color are more interesting than distressing. Sometimes accident leads to beauty. There are many stories about perfection and error on the loom. Arachne’s work was perfection, more perfect than Athena’s, and Arachne was punished for it. Around the world there are stories about deliberate mistakes in Asian weaving to keep bad spirits away, among the Navajo about providing a mismatched yarn as a spirit trail to the edge of a blanket. Perfection isn’t what I am after and I make enough accidental errors that I don't feel compelled to create more.

The so-called “humility patch” in a quilt, the name for piece that is turned the wrong way, is mostly seen as a wink-and-nod to the inevitability of human error. [Look hard for the error in Jean Stanclift's beautiful quilt above and then visit Barbara Brackman’s blog to see more. These are not deliberate mistakes, they are human ones.]

We aim for perfection, but accept that sometimes things go wrong. When they do, it’s best not to become discouraged but to make something of the mistake. Sometimes we make up a legend about why it was necessary to put that wrong, and sometimes we make something better than we started with by finding something aesthetically necessary about it.

In my years in the School of Art at the University of Washington I accepted error as part of the game. I learned to be linear and deliberate—when at heart I am an abstract and random sort of person—in my effort to avoid projects going awry. But mistakes occurred anyway and I tried to use them. One example: For at least a year I was heavily invested in enamel on copper. I accidentally overfired a transparent enamel called “pigeon” on one part of a copper piece while the rest was left bare. This created an interesting effect: the bare copper developed a hard, iridescent layer of firescale I couldn’t easily scrub off and the enamel turned the orange metal pale and silvery. The edge between the firescale and the enamel was a painterly black line. I exploited this effect several times in other pieces.

Speaking at his high school graduation last spring, William Leroux pointed out the “real tragedy of poverty is a century of idleness, where progress could have lived” and asked his peers: “It takes ten thousand hours to master a skill. That gives the average person time to learn thirty-four skills. Would you rather those skills include guitar hero, or guitar?”

Among my thirty-four skills is no instrument, but weaving, knitting, quilting, sculpture and clay, writing and reading and so forth. The only sport I play is running, but there is skill in that. The only game I play is solitaire, an indulgence that warns me I need to find something more productive to do. Whatever I'm doing, I will do imperfectly. I am not a machine, capable of deliberate and consistent uniformity. None have kept me from monetary poverty, but these skills have rescued me from real poverty of the soul deprived of creativity and usefulness.

A recent New York Times article discussed the use of machines to write books. The machines make mistakes and the books are aimed at a narrow audience, but surely there are plenty of human authors willing to write bad books to a small target audience. As a writer, I’m bound to say that it seems more trouble than it’s worth to use machines to write books, but I also fear that eventually, like other technological achievements, it will work.

Creating the happy accident and recognizing it when it happens is a peculiarly human trait. I would argue it is the genius or creativity. Can a machine notice that the mismatched threads are more exciting than those planned? Can it grow from error? Perhaps. But why?

It's a depressing world where we deliberately deprive ourselves of work from which we derive employment, pride, and enjoyment. But then, that's what we've been doing since the beginning of the industrial revolution when we put handweavers out of their profession and replaced them with women and children working at poverty wages on machines doing unimaginative but perfect work.

Which brings me back to my loom. I have wound my warp wrong, miscounted, skipped dents in the reed, unbalanced the tension, crossed threads in the heddles, dropped threads, and even broken them in these last five warps. In fact, I’ve made more weaving mistakes these past few months than I can recall making in all of my teens and twenties when I was last weaving. But deliberate, inevitable, careless, magical, necessary, repairable, or not, the mistakes are mine and fixing or living with them is my choice and my pleasure.

THE MEANING OF LIFE

2011-10-12T18:54:00.000-07:00

This is a short week at my school, but a critical week since students have papers due and projects and also the first complete draft of the Senior Research Paper. I meant to go home early on Monday and Tuesday—early meaning an eight hour day instead of a ten hour day—but each day I was busy helping students and trouble-shooting with peers. I stayed late. Even when I got home I still had work to do. Today, like every Wednesday I stayed late in the Library with a Math teacher to work with students, but there was a little window of unassigned time, about two hours between my last class and my shift in the Library. I was sorting through papers and another teacher arrived in my room: “Are we having a meeting or something?”

I’ve written before about the fear of missing things, how my concern that something wonderful might be going on had kept me awake when I was child. Even as an adult, I’ve always found my attention stretched if I pass a room and observe a meeting going on—I wonder: “Am I supposed to be there?”

My whole life feels like that sometimes, as if there are important things I’ve been expected to be doing and have failed to do all these years. Looking back at childhood fantasies, I wonder: Was I supposed to have ridden horses in Arabia by now? Studied the palace at Knosses? Published books? Lived in a riverside cabin without a clock? Built a house just to please myself?

Maybe it’s even worse: Am I supposed to have earned awards for some great deed? Saved a child from drowning? Changed the world?

Do other people worry about this? Or is it because of my age—sixty next year?

At the end of a long life—what I hope will be long—what should I have to show for myself? I wish I knew. And I think I am not alone in wondering. I've listened to enough people despair about "wasting" their youth or their entire lives, that I understand my fretting is not unique. Have humans always worried so? Or is this a modern problem? Perhaps people living simpler lives with clear, simple rules about what they are supposed to do and accomplish have fewer worries about the overall meaning of their lives.

When our youngest son graduated from college (in fact, when he graduated from high school) I thought: Two sons graduated, neither has been arrested, neither has accidentally made someone pregnant. Now they are each gainfully employed. My work is done.

It is a joke. But there is some truth in this—that we pass the world along to the ones who come after us. Maybe that should be enough for me. I wish it were.

I REMEMBER DOS

2011-10-09T11:06:00.000-07:00

The business teacher at the high school where I was then a substitute in the 1980s, wrote the string of code on the chalkboard that would create correct margins for a business letter. “I could explain to you why you need to type this particular string of numbers and symbols,” she told the class, “but it would take a long time and wouldn’t help get your pages typed any faster. Just copy it exactly.”

My first experience with a Mac came a few years later when I took over the “worknights” for the school yearbook class. The advisor was also coaching softball and didn’t have time to stay after to help students meet their deadlines. It was students in 1990 who taught me how to use a computer. (It would always be students, not adults in formal computer classes, who would give me the skills and insights I needed to use PageMaker and InDesign and Word.) There were many Apple computers in the schools by then, given free or provided at greatly reduced prices to public districts, and with plenty of educational software.

But my introduction to Macs was about design because I was and am a designer. Desktop publishing was easiest on a Mac, which had the first page design programs I used and the photo programs and so forth. When I took journalism students on a tour of The Oregonian in the mid-90s, most reporters were composing on dark screens with white letters. The business floor used IBMs to bill customers. The cartooning department had their own special system. But the entire floor of layout for the newspaper, for which The Oregonian was then receiving many awards and worldwide recognition, was a giant Mac lab. The monitors were as big as a double page spread of the newspaper. I was blown away.

In 1998 when my older son arranged a tour of Darkhorse Comics in east Portland, we saw only Macs used by the people who designed pages, and by those who added color and captions. “Does Darkhorse have any Windows computers?” I asked the guide. “Oh, I think there must be one around here someplace.”

Still later, I toured the Will Vinton studios. There were many kinds of computers there, but the “creatives” department was all Mac.

I was teased and even bullied for using a Mac long before it became cool. For a some time I fought back, indulging in my own bullying at times. Finally I learned to keep my head down. When students asked what kind of computer they should get for college, I asked them questions: What’s your major? Businesses use Windows, I told them. Artists use Macs. What kind of computer lab does your future college have? Some campuses lean hard toward one platform or the other. It's better to find out what you will be expected to have. What was I using? A Mac. Over twenty-some years, always a Mac.

My sons have chosen to use both platforms. They learned on Macs and came to Windows originally because the good games were mostly available on Windows. Alan explained the irony of this in regards one game which had been created on a Mac, was transferred to the Windows operating sytem, and then out-putted back to Mac. As a result the Mac version available was not as good (bug-free) as the Windows version. So he bought a PC.

These days I use a perfectly serviceable Dell at work and have a 2006 MacBook Pro that I carry with me everywhere. Thus I use Windows for a few hours on weekdays, and my Mac every day. It's up and in use by six in the morning by both my husband and I, and I turn it off, usually, just before we go to bed. My Dell at school was replaced a year or so ago because it was “three years old, and aging” according to a district specialist who seems a little afraid of Macs. Why not give me a Mac? I asked him. They cost too much, was his answer. In the mean time, my Mac was slowing down after five years of daily work and I was thinking they weren’t making them as good as they used to if I already needed to buy a new one. (The twelve year old Mac Easter-egg computer was still soldering on until I didn’t have room for it anymore in my classroom.)

During a visit home, my younger son Ian borrowed my laptop. He was typing away and then he looked up. “Mom! You have absolutely no memory!” He was scandalized. “How much memory does this computer have—” But he was already looking. “You have a half gig? How did you manage on—You need more memory! Your computer is compressing and moving information around so that it can keep operating.” Or at least I think that’s what he said. There ensued a phone conversation with his brother about their mother’s lack of memory. (If only they knew.) A couple weeks later, I’d ordered a few gigs and Ian installed them and my computer is good as new. Or almost good as new—the keyboard is grubby because I don’t clean it and I’ve worn out the letters on the A and E keys. I think I paid almost double what I might have for a Dell laptop six years ago, but I’ve had my money’s worth.

Until he died, I didn’t pay much attention to the body of work produced by Steve Jobs. I just used it. From my experience I would say the Mac was always the superior tool. My computers (three in 20 years) have never crashed. They never died—I had to force myself to move on. I have lost one document using a Mac. This was 22 years ago when I was using a computer with a memory so small that the application and the documents created by it had to be saved on the same 3 1/2 inch disk. I overloaded the disk's memory and the disk crashed. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but the Mac system has a well-deserved reputation for stability. From what I’ve witnessed, when you overload a Mac to the point it crashes, you turn it off, and then when you turn it back on again, everything is fine. The last saved version of your document is right there.

Though I love Word, I would prefer not to use Microsoft products if I had the choice. (There are many reasons for this that are irrelevant here.) For a few hours every day at work I don’t have that choice and I am reasonably comfortable using Windows. I don’t have an iPad, iPhone, or other Mac device, but I prefer the ease of use of Mac computers. It's what I learned on and what I have relied on for more than twenty years.

Bottom line, I think most of us would prefer to keep using whatever system we started with. I know that’s true for me. There are plenty of choices for operating systems these days. Chrome looks interesting to me. I wouldn’t mind trying that one.

A former PC user who switched over to Mac because she liked their other products, tells me she’d never go back to a PC. But a teacher new to desktop publishing got rid of all the Macs in the production lab because one burned out its battery after being left on night and day for five days out of seven for at least seven years without maintenance. A former student who wanted to sign up for a computer arts class using Macs, which she has never used, called them the “spawn of the devil.” She dropped the class.

I’d say that’s pretty sad.

A computer should only be a tool, not a way of life. Use what works, but trust me, going from Mac to PC or the other way around is not such a difficult journey.

At least they’re both easier than DOS used to be.

SPOILED

2011-10-08T08:55:00.000-07:00

The family story goes that when my husband and I first lived together he took me into the bedroom and showed me the neatly made up bed and said, “This is the way I want the bed made.” Depending on which of us you ask, I either sobbed or retorted, “Make it any way you want!” Probably I did both because I felt guilty about being a slob.

My husband and I have always had an unequal division of labor in terms of housework. He’s always done more than his share. This started out because he has a lower dirt tolerance than I do. I am naturally messy. He is neat. His day-to-day philosophy has a zen-like focus. Mine is all over the place.

When Jim Hensen’s Fraggle Rock was on television, one of the characters liked doing laundry. That’s Gary. It took him eleven years to learn to sort laundry, but now he reads the care labels. I think his increased skill is less the result of turning his own underwear pink more than once, than it is a carry-over skill from his occupation as a grocer for thirty years. When I ask him to pick up deodorant for me he writes down the UPC so that he can find exactly what I want. He knows prices better than a mother shopping to feed a family of twelve. He doesn’t like to ask for directions, but in most ways he’s not cliché.

He also does the dishes and vacuums.

This raises the question: What is my contribution to the household? I cook. I Pay the bills and do the taxes and put away the dishes he washes. I dust. I do most of the painting, varnishing, and refinishing. Okay, I work at least a 50-hour week and I cook and sometimes I dust. Once in a while Gary dusts, but mostly, it’s been me. This means that the paperback book nook in the hall was neglected so long at one point that I could have lifted out the dust like a layer of felt. But I am a good cook.

Since June, Gary has also been retired, so I feel better now about my contribution. He drives me to work sometimes. He brings me coffee before we run. He brags about doing the laundry without complaining about it.

It’s true. I’m spoiled.

A man I know recently posted about how he’d spent an entire day helping out his wife with housework when he should have been scoring essays. He had a long list of his accomplishments including laundry and moving a piece of furniture. It looked like he’d had a productive day. He said he'd done these household tasks to help out his wife because he loved her so much. And all I could think was: You live in the house too, right? It’s your house too? So why is everything about taking care of that house her responsibility and you are helping her? If you’re as smart as I’d thought, you’d have admitted that the entire housework-helping day was less about loving your wife and more about avoiding your own work.

I wondered if he normally did his fair share of housework?

Most men don’t.

Studies show all kinds of figures, but most show that men participate unequally in household tasks. They carry out the trash. They might mow the lawn. Some studies suggest that men are picking up a greater share of the work, while others show that despite greater employment opportunities outside the home, most women are as accountable for most housework as they were twenty or thirty years ago. Though I don’t find their reported figures convincing, CBS News suggests that this is changing.

Over the years I’ve heard many men complain that that they were “stuck babysitting” their own children. Even if both husband and wife work, and he is their father, many men fail to recognize that caring for their own children is a privilege, not an imposition.

It’s an unfortunate mindset. It’s why so many kids have daddy issues. It’s why most men are happier and longer-lived if they are married and women are happier and longer-lived if they are not. It’s the notion that triggered a wonderful essay from 1971: “I Want a Wife” by Judy Brady.

Fortunately for me, my man was among the oldest in a large family and therefore learned early on to pull his weight in terms of household responsibilities. I know plenty of men who cook, clean, shop, and run errands, and who participate as equal partners in the day to day running of their married lives. I know stay-at-home fathers as well as mothers. Perhaps things are changing? But not just men drag their feet about equity in the family. Some women don’t want it. They want the men in their lives sacked out on the couch, watching football, stalling about hauling the trash can to the curb. That's the comfortable cliché husband, right? Some women want to be able to complain about how useless he is around the house. And some men regard it as their right to come home and find their lives perfectly managed, even by wives who have their own job or children to care for, which is a job in itself. People buy into all the men-are-from-mars-and-women-are-from-venus predetermination stuff. Maybe men can’t help being selfish slobs out of touch with their emotions. Maybe. Or maybe we are what we’re encouraged to be.

My man is my partner, not the guy I live with. I like who he is and I respect him. I love him too. And now that he's retired, he has all day to dust.

Yes, it’s true. I’m spoiled.