Not A Day Goes By

I woke late this morning.

Well, late for me, used to the cold and dark of 4:00 or 5:00am on days when a drill rig or contractor was waiting, but I'd had another night of broken bad sleep. Between the knees and the Little Cat (who continued her tradition of rising loud and proud several times a night) I was still tired and disoriented as I made the coffee and checked my phone to see what had happened overnight.

I found that I no longer shared the Earth with Stephen Sondheim.

It's strange-funny how life and time transmute us and the world around us.

The Girl is a high school sophomore, and if she can be categorized as part of a high school clique - and I assume there still are cliques; jocks, nerds, stoners, normies - she's a "dramat", part of the thespian society which is delightfully strong in her otherwise-fairly-sketchy-urban high school.

She's not a dramat-dramat, not an aspiring actor with all the baggage associated with that. She's a  "techie", running her sound booth or light board for the shows. In fact, she has a fairly side-eyed view of actors, whom she blames for insisting on missing their cues or marks and messing up the tech. After the fall musical she came home cussing the actors so vituperatively that we ad to watch the Mel Brooks The Producers for the moment that Zero Mostel tells Kenneth Mars; "Here! Take the pistol! Go to the theater! Kill the actors!"

Because of her enthusiasm I've been pulled back into a world I left forty years ago; musical theater.

When you stop to think about it, the American musical is a very weird thing. How do you explain a particular subset of live drama where at random moments the actors break into song? Is there anything even remotely similar in real life?

But if they're good, musicals can be powerful in ways that no straight play can be.

Stephen Sondheim created those sorts of musicals.

In the late Seventies and early Eighties I was, like The Girl, a sort of peripheral member of the college Green Room and the people who hung around it. I had a bit part in Romeo and Juliet, not for my acting chops but because I fenced and the director wanted some realism for the opening fight scenes.

 
It was though the Green Roomers that I found musical theater, and the towering figure at that time was Sondheim.

Keep in mind that in the Seventies and early Eighties a Broadway ticket was an expense, not an investment. You could get a pass to a matinee for twenty bucks, and if you hit the TKTS booth in Times Square even an evening performance for maybe twice that - a bit of a stretch for  a college student but not insane, not the eighty or hundred dollars (or more..!) you'll pay now.

So I learned musical theater at the feet of Sondheim.

Oh, sure, I went to see the other sorts of stuff showing in the late Seventies; Nine, Side by Side, Barnum, Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (and is there ever a property that has worn less well..?) and, in 1979, Sweeney Todd.

Sweeney was a thunderbolt, a revelation, that you could tell a story - a grim, dark, convoluted, intensely gripping story, through song alone. Dialogue was minimal, just bridges between the numbers, and the songs themselves were jewelboxes; rich, melodic and harmonic while at the same time jarring and atonal and as dark and twisted as the tale itself.

I was enthralled, in my cheap matinee seat in Row GG.

So, a convert to the Church of Sondheim, I waited impatiently for his next work of genius. That came two years later, and I couldn't wait for Opening Night. I scored preview tickets for Merrily We Roll Along.

 
I knew that the original was a Kaufman and Hart property from the Thirties, something about a dramat who makes it big by selling his soul, but that was all I knew other than it would be Sondheim and Hal Prince, those colossi who bestrode the Broadway world while we petty men crept between their legs to marvel at what they wrought.

So, dressed in my "business casual" that was as dressy as I could afford to fit in with the Broadway crowd, I waited eagerly in the dark for the curtain to rise.

It did...and that was the high point of the show.

What's peculiar is that Merrily seems to have grown in the telling. It's been revived several times, successfully, and is supposedly considered among the better Sondheim/Furth properties - perhaps not up there with Pacific Overtures or Company but better than The Frogs...

The 1981 production was a resounding disaster. 

Even a theater noob like me could sense it coming, as the muddled story and interchangeable cast struggled through the backwards-chronology towards the first act curtain. The intermission applause had a tentative quality that boded poorly for the second act which turned out to be as poorly received as the first. Along with the rest of the audience I was sort of stunned. This was a Stephen Sndheim show? The book, not the songs, was largely the problem, attempting to lift the story from the cynical opening to the sunshine-y final curtain and largely producing, instead, the sort of grim, forced brightness of a Hallmark commercial pitch.

The original run notoriously closed after 16 performances, the worst a Sondheim show had ever done up to that point.

I read that the failure of Merrily hit Sondheim hard. He considered abandoning Broadway altogether. And, indeed, his Broadway work was greatly reduced; Sunday in the Park with George in 1984, his first collaboration with James Lapine and Into The Woods three years later.

In a life that has featured as many failures as successes - as I imagine many, probably most lives do - it may sound odd that the immediate memory the news of that Sondheim would never again write the music and lyrics for a musical play brought to my mind was that of one of his great failures.

Even in failure, though,the enjoyment of musical theater I'd come to, largely though Sondheim's talents, never left me so that so many years later I could sit and enjoy Wicked and In The Heights with my neo-dramat daughter.

Is there a point to this ramble?

Perhaps only that we touch each others lives in odd and unpredictable ways; that the life now ended touched me, and mine touched my child's, and here we are, waiting in dark for the curtain to rise on another production for another day.

Nuke 'em 'til they glow and then wander around in the dark: TMI 1979

In the spring of 1979 I was pretty much what most 22-year-old guys are; clueless yet unabashed, barbarous in an oversocialized, post-industrial sort of fashion. I was also attending a small private college in south-central Pennsylvania. Like many of my peers I was concerned with my social life more than learning, with getting laid more than getting educated. In short, I was what a young nomad would have been had he been de-loused and shoved into Topsiders and a polo shirt and told to stop riding across other people's grazing lands.

What I was not was particularly aware of my surroundings. I paid as little attention to the world's business as I had just half a dozen years earlier when I was approaching draft age and the war in Southeast Asia was winding down...which says something about how gormless I was, given that I had not the slightest assurance that my government might want me to go to proof-test the Domino Theory with my body when I came to legal adulthood.

I was a dope. A fairly socialized, relatively educated dope, but a dope nonetheless.

So I can't say it was surprising that I hadn't the slightest idea on this day 38 years ago that as I was lazing about sleeping in my old bedroom in my parent's house on a Spring Break vacation Wednesday that about sixty miles to the northwest, at the Three Mile Island power station, reactor TMI-2 was melting down.

It was four in the fucking morning; who was getting up that early on a vacation weekday..?

Here's the sad, funny part of this story, though.

You can read the accounts of "Three Mile Island" to get the history; it's a bit beyond this post, which is just a personal momento nuki. The accident was more frightening than actually dangerous but it was frightening, and a fairly broad swath of central Pennsylvania (and, I think, even a bit of north-central Maryland) was warned that a deadly radioactive cloud might descend at any time in the manner of one of those Fifties mutant-monster films. The governor of Pennsylvania issued some sort of evacuation order which was widely ignored, and the public response was entirely determined by individual threshold levels of nuclear panic.

Young Chief, being, as noted above, a clueless git, had no panic because he had no clue. Literally; I didn't turn on the news or bother to read the newspaper. I had no idea what the fresh hell was going on along the banks of the Susquehanna River. Armored in that impervious ignorance I bagged up my clean laundry and shoved it in my father's secondhand Ford Pinto station wagon (all I could afford as college transportation and quite the babe-magnet it was, I tell you. Ugh.) that Friday. I had a couple of exams early in the next week, and my plan was to return to the dorm to get a weekend of studying in away from the fleshpots of Kennett Square, PA.

I won't pretend that my college, even in the coke-and-disco-fueled Seventies, was the sort of girls-gone-wild party school of college films so I wasn't really surprised that the campus was dark and quiet on an end-of-break Friday night. What was surprising, however, was that the outside door of my dorm was locked.

The exterior doors of dorms were never locked. They just weren't. Not only was it some sort of fire code rule there were always at least a handful of people who needed to go in and out. I recall yanking on the door handle in a sort of irritated disbelief. The fuck..? Who the hell locks a damn dorm door? Must be some sort of prank; the north side door will be open.

Except it wasn't. And on the walk around the outside I began to wonder. My school was pretty dead socially, but...not this dead. West of my dorm was the broad open space hemmed with classroom buildings, underclass dorms, and the student union. Even on the deadest of dead evenings there should have been someone walking across the oval; a couple going to the U, random library-seekers. Someone.

Not that evening.

I don't recall exactly what tuition was running in those days. Certainly much less than the current nearly-quarter-million it costs for four years there today. But for 1979 the costs were steep, so you'd think that after three years I'd have received enough of that expensive education to have figured out that something wasn't right. But you'd have underestimated the thickness of young Chief's skull. I ambled over to the union to find it dark and locked. The geology building? Locked. The freshman dorm across the oval? Yep; darkened and locked.

Finally I did what I should have done first; I wandered over to the campus cop shop. There, finally, was a light, and open door, and an extremely indifferent looking guy in a uniform.

"Ummm...where the heck is everybody?" I whined.

The law, in its impartial majesty, lowered his newspaper and looked at me with a perfect combination of boredom, amusement, and irritation.

"Not here. Campus is closed."

"Closed? What? Why?"

Irritation and boredom were replaced with mild disbelief.

"Because of the nuclear plant blowing up. You don't know about that?"

"Uh, no. What nuclear plant?"

"That one over by Harrisburg, on the river. Something happened, there's a warning, campus is closed until the warning is cancelled."

"The...what the hell? What am I supposed to do?" Now Officer Friendly looked at me with a frown that matched his increasing contempt for my stupidity.

"Go the hell home, kid. Before your balls start to glow in the dark."

So I did. My parents were surprised, and immediately called my kid sister (going to school at another small private college some ways to the north and west of Three Mile Island) to ensure that she was not in immediate danger of nuclear irradiation. She wasn't.

Nobody was, as it turns out.

(As a technical aside, one of the things that has always amazed, irked, and amused me about my country's private nuclear power generation is the ridiculously pre-industrial fashion that U.S. commercial nuclear plants have been typically designed and built.

Military reactors, and most commercial nuclear plants in Europe as well as Japan (where the cost of and access to fossil fuels mean that nuclear power is a much larger part of the power grid), are typically made as part of a mass-produced, standardized series. Reactors and their controls are alike - or identical - in the same way that automobiles of a particular model are alike or identical. Construction is simplified, operations are predictable, and lessons learned from failures can be quickly standardized and disseminated through the production run.

Most U.S. commercial reactors are one-offs, designed and constructed individually (or, at best, very small series of two or three or modifications from an earlier design) for each plant. So Massachusetts' Connecticut Yankee plant's reactors are different from Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island that are different from Oregon's Trojan. Every new plant reinvents the nuclear wheel, making the opportunities for design or operating flaws much greater.

Ironically, TMI-2 was an 879 MWe pressurized water reactor designed and constructed by the firm of Babcock & Wilcox. This type of reactor had a failure identical to the 1979 accident two years earlier at the Davis-Besse plant in Ohio. The Ohio reactor was running at a very low level compared to TMI-2, so the core didn't melt down...but the valve failure wasn't recognized as a design flaw or the problem diagnosed and that diagnosis sent to the other plants operating this type of reactor.

So two years later I got to wander around in the dark wondering where the hell everybody had gone.

If there's a lesson here, I'm not sure what it is, other than "young men are stupid".

But recruiting sergeants have known that since Ramses' regimental sergeant-major bought the village plowboys their first jug of palm wine.

Perhaps it's "Contractors whose sole purpose is profit are stupid so long as it profits them to be."

Although I'll bet pharoah's sergeants could have told you that about contractors, too.

Varsity Drag

Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns & Money...

...makes a hell of a frighteningly good point:

"...a huge social problem, which is made all the more difficult by a consensus, broadly shared across the ideological spectrum, that more education is the solution to an almost unlimited number of economic and social problems. For obvious reasons, those peddling these cures — which as he says is almost everybody in and around the world of education and employment policy — are not eager to consider that a large percentage of the population is not going to be helped by ever-more elaborate treatments along these lines."

Five years or so ago I wrote up a little post about one of the mortally wounded in this losing battle;

"This is the Debatable Land, the very distant fringes of the warm, sunlit uplands of education that you see in the television specials and that politicians and educators tell you is the hope of the future. This isn't Manifest Destiny, the broad horizon and limitless opportunity that the land speculators of pedagogy are selling you; this is the dark hinterlands of learning, the Mountain Meadows of education, where ignorant armies of harassed, poorly prepared, overcharged students scramble to learn by night from equally harassed, poorly paid instructors. This is the recruit depot for a beaten army, where with my jaded sergeant's eye I can pick out the walking dead from the likely survivors. This one, she wears her body bag around her head like a shawl, her puzzled eyes already glazed with the dim awareness of danger and failure around her.

She's not going to make it."

Campos points up the most damning statistic for those who want to cling to the Pollyannaish belief that enough "education" will solve the problems of capital flight and the enforced decay of the middle-class-wage jobs; that pay for college graduates has remained virtually unchanged over damn near 40 years. If a "college education" was the solution to the problem of corporate flight and the deliberate selection of capital over labor then you'd expect that that value would have risen steadily over time, as have prices, costs, and profits.

They have not.

This is not some sort of "inevitable" outcome, some sort of natural progression in the market economic cycle.

It is, instead, what happens when you choose to let the people who own businesses - including education business - do things that are in their short- (and medium-, or even long-term) interest but which are not in the interest of the society as a whole.

The implications of this slow-motion disaster seem obvious. An increasingly desperate citizenry is faced with an increasingly unpayable cost to try and grab and hold on to an increasingly unprofitable and decreasing number of jobs. This citizenry can be reliably counted on to be easily panicked by, and to be easy prey to, the least scrupulous, most vicious demagogue that promises whatever pie-in-the-sky the poor bastards think can save them and their children.

Are you scared? I'm scared.

Fuck, the whole idea is as scary as a secondhand plumber's pickup truck full of ISIS headcutters armed with nuclear machetes and hordes of venomous snakes carrying Ebola.

Why the hell CNN isn't all over this I...oh, wait.

We are so, so, so, so, so, SO fucked.

Friday Sorta-Jukebox: Hello Kitty In Space Edition

(Ridiculously huge h/t to Fallows for this insanely cool science project.)

Mind you...I did wonder that the payload seemed to come down very close to where it took off...hmmm...still...

Whatever. Enjoy.

Corpore sano

Booyah!

Our steroid-stuffed, underpaid "student athletes" are better than YOUR muscle-packed, ludicrously manipulated "student athletes! Neener neener!

I have to say that while I'm mildly pleased the hippies of University of Oregon are getting national press time over the rednecks of OSU my alma mater, Portland State, is a sad afterthought in an Oregon university system that is getting as overpriced and out-of-reach as every other university, and the entire notion that most people know my state's flagship "institute of higher learning" because of a bunch of guys who make absolutely zippety-doo-dah playing a sport where everyone else involved lives by the rule of CREAM* is flat-out fucking ridiculous.

Sigh. Did you hear any of that?

Yeah, yeah, I know, okay, fine.

Gooooooo Ducks! There, I said it. Am I good now?

Back to your regularly scheduled blogging tomorrow.

(CREAM: Cash Rules Everything Around Me)

Small World: Super Secret Spy Edition

Unearthed an odd bit of buried past the other day.

It started with one of those gawdawful Facebook "memes". Even ran into one of them? Blogging tends to get them, though I haven't run across one for ages.

This one was about "how you met me", and it was mildly entertaining hear from old friends and see who remembered how who met whom all those years ago.

But in the process a name came up; a person I knew many years ago and was slightly friendly with in a very passant sort of way.

Her name is Susan Leslie Ireland, and she was just appointed the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis. As such she is "...responsible for the receipt, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence related to the Department's mission to safeguard the international financial system from abuse and to combat threats to U.S. national security."

And I knew her when. Howboutthat?

Anyway, the interesting thing is that when we were in college together I remember her as a painfully serious, intelligent, darkly pretty young woman. She roomed in a group with a clutch of other very bright and clever women, many of whom acted in our college Green Room and, as you might expect, caprioled joyfully with the sort of creative lunacy that has characterized thespians since Aristophanes' time.

Sue - as she was known in those days - was not quite of the same metal as her sisters; "forlorn" is how one of my contemporaries remembers her. She never seemed as...vivid...as her hallmates. And she seems to have had a very fraught relation with them; another former classmate of mine recalls her saying, within earshot of those long-time rooming hall associates and companions "Those people are not my friends..."; a remark almost as sad as it was tactless.I will admit to crushing on her a bit, back in those times; even callow and stupid I had a bit of a thing for seriously smart Dark Ladies. And she was - and is, it seems - very smart. And, as her picture testifies, still Dark and serious.

But I was too immature, and she too otherwise-engaged, and so we drifted away.

But after her name suddenly returning to my attention what I recalled vividly was that several years after graduation we met for a lunch.

She was already working in D.C. in a covert position - I believe probably with the National Security Agency - and I was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division, a line medic for the 1/505th Infantry. I was headed north on a brief leave, called her up, and we made the time to meet at some indifferent lunch place somewhere in Georgetown.

She was still dark, still handsome, and very excited about her work. I was less hairy - still callow, but leaner, and harder - and gaining in both worldly and emotional maturity. So there we were; the young spy and the young paratrooper, sitting chatting on a bright sunny spring morning while a Reagan morning broke across America.We talked of ourselves, and the world's wagging. We discussed parachuting, which it seems that she had to learn as part of her own "basic training" in intelligence - it seems that even in the Eighties U.S. spies still hung on to bit of their OSS heritage. We talked about old friends, and future plans.

There was absolutely not a flint's worth of spark between us.

We enjoyed a pleasant spring day and parted with the usual promises to keep in touch and, as usual, failed to keep them. I went on to become a paratroop sergeant, and then, in succession, a graduate student and husband, a professional geologist, teacher, senior NCO, husband (again) and father.

Sue - or, rather, S. Leslie, as she prefers to be known - continued to find her way through the Hall of Mirrors; "Executive Assistant to the Director and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence and in various analytical and management portfolios at CIA related to the Middle East and weapons of mass destruction....also detailed to the Office of the Secretary of Defense as Country Director for Iran and Kuwait." She also served as the "Iran Mission Manager" for the Director of National Intelligence.

It's strange to think of my old acquaintance as a Power herself; one of the Thrones and Dominations, a Beltway Insider, making reality, as the Bushies were wont to say, with the force of her knowledge, her judgement - one hopes - and her wiles at the subtle and deadly bureaucratic infighting in the halls of the great and the mighty.

But there she is, and, what's more, one of the "Iran Hands"; one of the fonts of intelligence wisdom on that contentious and troubled land.

And now, I wonder; what secrets is she telling to those seats of power?

Because had my life gone in other directions I might be one of those whose fate depended on that tall and serious Dark Lady. On what she said, and what she did not say, to those whose decrees sway the wide world.

To those whose words move armies and fleets, and who might well have sent First Sergeant Lawes plummeting out into the night sky over Qom, on the advice of the sloe-eyed young woman who thirty years ago sat across the cheap formica table from the young sergeant who was him, on that sunny spring Georgetown day, those fine eyes glowing as she described how much she had enjoyed the adventure of her brief "combat training" at Quantico, and the fearsome power she felt as the machinegun lept and thundered in her hands.And I wonder.

What will she say?

Topsiders, Duct Tape, and the National Dilemma of Wealth

I finally broke down and got a new pair of shoes last week. The old ones had become so worn that the sole had actually come loose and was flopping around like one of those clown shoes and had to be held in place with duct tape.Now here's a funny thing; when I was a college kid the whole duct-tape-on-the-Topsiders was considered the height of studly cool in some quarters.

Specifically, preppy quarters.

Remember "preppies"? There was a whole little cottage-industry of preppy-this and preppy-that in the late Seventies and Eighties, if I recall correctly. The whole plaid-skirt and penny-loafers for women, khakis and Lacoste shirts for men (and crew-neck sweaters for both, of course...) was the popular image of the thing. Labrador retrievers were involved, too, I think (or maybe Goldens. It was a while ago, c'mon).Now I was no different than many young people in their early twenties. I had just outgrown my childhood but was fitting badly into adulthood. I was turning and tapping bits of myself to try and see how to make them fit. I invented bits of this and lies about that to try and make myself seem...cooler, more interesting, different, more exciting.

But what I more than anything else wanted was to fit in. To be part of the accepted center of my then-life, a small, undeservedly-snooty Eastern liberal arts college. And a huge proportion of the "accepted center" of that place were the young people who had come from the private schools of the U.S. Northeast.

I don't really have any sense of the breed today, but in the Seventies the products of the Peddie School, Deerfield, and Lawrenceville Academy were the most upper of upper-middle class America. They had spent a dozen years acquiring not just a private-school education but a private school "manner" and part of that manner was the clothes they wore.

Now I was too callow to understand that a dozen years at the Peddie School would do more than teach you how to wear a polo shirt inside a button-down shirt under a crew-neck sweater. But that fashion was the only thing I could understand, and so it was the fashions I aped.It is more than thirty years since I left that place, and my sense of person has expanded to fill the inside of my head since then. I no longer feel any particular need to dress, or be, anyone to please anyone other than myself, my bride, and my children - all the public I need at this point in life.

But some things linger long after the reasons for them have fled, and I still find the Topsider shoes the most comfortable and easy to wear of any men's footwear.So when my old shoes finally died it wasn't a huge surprise that they were made by the folks at Sperry, or that I jacked some tape around them to hold them together before they went to their reward. If it worked in 1977...But I got to thinking, as I painfully parted with the cost of new shoes, that the people whose style I still walked in would have thought little and cared less for the expense.

And that really means something.

Because for most of us, for most Americans, for most people, life centers around the arithmetic that Dickens describes as "Income twenty pounds, expenses nineteen pounds, eleven shillings, sixpence, result; happiness. Income twenty pounds, expenses twenty pounds sixpence, result; misery."

I'm not saying that most of us are poor. What I'm saying is that most of us need to watch what we spend and what we save. We have to worry about things like getting sick. Or getting fired or losing our jobs. Of our roofs leaking, or our cars breaking down, or our taxes being screwed up and costing us penalties and interest.

And the one thing I've noticed now - especially this election year, but for quite some time now - is that the people our political class has chosen to "lead" us seem somewhere between somewhat to utterly clueless about that life.This year's poster boy, of course, is Willard Romney, who can and did talk about "firing" his insurance company.

That's really all you have to know about "Mitt" (a preppy nickname if ever there was one and, sure enough, Willard attended the Cranbrook School in Michigan [his wife prepped, too, at Kingswood]). Most of us don't "fire" our insurance companies; we hope instead that we don't get sick enough that our insurance companies don't force us into bankruptcy and then fire US. That Willard thinks such a thing tells you that the man had lived his entire life swathed, wrapped, bathed, and laved in what in the Army we used to call "fuck-you money".

And you know what?

Damn near all the other pols I can think of are, too. And that's no surprise, because for all we like to pretend it's not true, it's nearly impossible - and by that I mean 99.94% impossible - for a poor or even a modestly wealthy person to run for high office in this country.

Because I've thought about running for office. I'm a pretty smart, well-informed guy. I speak well, I write well. I understand the principles of this country and I think I have a good sense of what is in the best interests of most of its people.

But I can't afford to run.

I can't afford to lost the time I'd need to spend schmoozing the local Democratic Party, volunteering, getting to know the Thrones and Dominations. I can't afford to spend the money I'd need networking, or the lost work time in commuting to Salem or to various meet-and-greets. And if I GOT elected I'd have to constantly fundraise because I couldn't then afford to lost my government job and go BACK to my work as a geologist; I'd simply be too old, too disconnected, too...well, I'd be unemployable. So I'd have to slime my way back to Salem, or D.C. as some kind of lobbyist. Or think-tank scum. Or "consultant"...And that's really sad, and wrong.

Looking around it seems like we're beavering away trying to institutionalize not just bad governance (although God knows we seem to be doing that) but bad, clueless, craphanded, entitled governance. The kind of governance that fusses about "Islamofascism" but not unemployment, about deficits but not bankruptcy, homelessness, and civil rights.

And it may be a coincidence - but it seems unlikely - that it also seems nearly impossible to find anyone in, or running for, public office from local to state to federal who is intellectually anything other than a Lacoste-and-topsiders-or-plaid-skirt-and-pearl-wearing-variety, clueless, craphanded, entitled preppy asshole.And then we wonder why it seems like the world wags towards them and not towards us.

Posted

I've just finished posting the grades for my community college class. It is the last I will ever teach. While I enjoy teaching, and the students, I loathe the time-suck that it demands, and I hate the adjunct faculty system that allows the community colleges to avoid giving real jobs to the instructors that they currently pimp out for convenience store-clerk wages.

I had a great last class; lively, fun, and funny. Many of them did well, too, which I always enjoy. Some didn't, which is the nature of what I do. I once read a long-winded whinge from a community or junior college English instructor in which his snivel was that instructors like us were the

"...academic button men. (We) roam the halls of academe like a modern Coriolanus bearing sword and grade book, “a thing of blood, whose every motion / Was timed with dying cries.”

Um, yeah.

Word, dude, that's what teachers, instructors, and professors DO. Not everyone can master the Next Level, and if the Next Level - high school diploma, associate's, bachelor's, master's, or doctoral degees - is to mean anything it is going to be out of the grasp of an increasingly large number of people.

And so in that sense we're not "button men" but sensei, the blind man with the staff that hits the younglings and makes them think, makes them quick and alert, makes them good - that is, surviving - swordsmen and -women...or teaches them that they will be hewers of wood and drawers of water all their lives because their intellectual swordfighting skills are a danger to themselves and others.

That's teaching and learning and has been since the first australopithecene taught his kids to throw rocks.

Now, mind you, I do think we're doing a lot of this teaching and learning thing the wrong way, but that's fodder for the next post.


But tonight I didn't want to natter on about education. I just wanted to come to a full stop, a night's caesura, and mentally sit on the ground and think over the students I have stood before over the past seven years.I have loved some of you and hated some, too. You have frustrated and angered me, but you have also delighted me, and even enlightened me. I have grieved for some of you, lost souls you were in the howling midnight of a world you couldn't understand. And I have celebrated for the way some of you pushed yourselves high into the hills, above where you thought you could climb.

It was always a climb; sometimes a scenic one, sometimes a grind, always a challenge for you and for me. A climb worthy of us and our labor. But now I turn my back on the hills with no regret.

The light in the window tells me my family is home waiting up for me. I am longing for their silly laughter and their love, I am weary, and grateful for the gentle path down to the warmth, light, and love, knowing I will not walk these hills again.

Потеряно

I'm not a great teacher. I do a serviceable enough job, when I have a subject I enjoy and students who are there to learn. I'm not one of these brilliant teachers who could make a yeshiva class excited about hog farming. I'm just there.

I'm not particularly patient, for one thing, and I have problems finding ways to explain subject matter to people who don't understand it. I hate discipline problems so teaching high school was fairly miserable for me and probably many of my students who (in the words of Charles Laughton surveying the mutinous crew of the Bounty) didn't know wood from canvas and didn't want to learn. Teaching at the local community college is better, since the students are paying their own way and paying for something, like being hanged, concentrates the mind wonderfully. But in the pedagogical horserace, I'm pulling the beer wagon. Trust me; nobody'd hit the trifecta on my teaching.

Every so often I make a genuine intellectual connection with a student and that is a very pleasurable and profitable thing. But those moments are quite unusual.

Much more typical is the young woman in the front row every Monday and Wednesday evening. Neatly dressed, quiet, with a faint, slightly puzzled expression that slips into vacancy from time to time as she loses the sense of the lecture.

She's probably twenty-four, was born abroad or here in southeast Portland of immigrant parents. She was probably a dutiful little student in primary school, a laughing outsider in the "Russian" or "Ukrainian" clique in high school. She probably managed a "C" in most of her high school subjects by dint of hard graft, lots of tutoring, and plenty of help from her teachers.

But she's lost in here, and I can see it in the increasing time her face wears that vacant look.

I've talked to her and she has very minimal English capabilities. Enough to hold a conversation, but she's in a science class and the technical and scientific terms are kicking her ass. She doesn't know a tsunami from mu shu pork, and with her poor English reading ability she's sunk trying to keep up.

This is the ragged edge of the "information society" that education and technology enthusiasts keep telling you about. This is the Debatable Land, the very distant fringes of the warm, sunlit uplands of education that you see in the television specials and that politicians and educators tell you is the hope of the future. This isn't Manifest Destiny, the broad horizon and limitless opportunity that the land speculators of pedagogy are selling you; this is the dark hinterlands of learning, the Mountain Meadows of education, where ignorant armies of harassed, poorly prepared, overcharged students scramble to learn by night from equally harassed, poorly paid instructors. This is the recruit depot for a beaten army, where with my jaded sergeant's eye I can pick out the walking dead from the likely survivors. This one, she wears her body bag around her head like a shawl, her puzzled eyes already glazed with the dim awareness of danger and failure around her.

She's not going to make it.

There are a lot like her.

We're Americans. We like to pretend that all of us can be winners, that we're all just a moment away from success, and that it's just a matter of finding the right magic; the right job, the right marriage, the right school, the right something...and we'll be happy and wealthy and secure.

We don't like to accept that not everyone can learn technical subjects. In fact, it's fairly critical that we don't know this, since as we've watched the old, simpler, hard-work jobs dwindle and those remaining provide less and less for the worker to live on we've steadfastly pretended that we would all just go to work for Intel and it'd be OK. It's important to us not to know that a man or a woman is hard-pressed to live comfortably doing manual labor work today even if such work can be found, lost as much of it is to automatons or outlanders who can be worked for wages you could not buy a pet with in our country. If we understood this we'd feel like we had to do something about it, and that would be difficult and unpleasant for everyone.

But the fact is that not everyone has the intellectual skills to do a technical job, or learn a difficult subject, especially math and science. Many people simply don't have the mental throw-weight; there's a reason that there are so many more fry-cooks than research chemists.

Even more people lack more the general skills needed for technical success; patience, organization, time management, perseverance. My experience is that literacy in general is not in a healthy state. Many people, perhaps more than you'd think, are almost incapable of extracting, analyzing and absorbing information from the printed page. By the time these people are in college, even the troglodyte college where I teach, this is a serious problem for them, and one that is difficult to remedy.

And, too, many of these people have been taught to fail in their early schooling. They have been taught to be afraid to expose their failings, to hide their inability to understand. Not to be "trouble", not to ask questions. They have been beaten with the stick of their own insignificance and ignorance and have lost much of the ability to learn for themselves. Their prior training, and much of their daily lives, makes it difficult for them to discipline and organize themselves enough to study their way out of their troubles, and they often lack even the ability to understand what it is they don't understand. And they're afraid to demand better instruction from people like me.

They are the casualties of our technical society, and after we kill them in the schools their bodies are tipped into the mass graves of the quickie-lube pits, the counters of the minimarts and the checkstands of the groceries, the posts of the night guards and the day laborers.

Or they sit, like my Russian girl, dumb and lost, in the hard plastic chair behind the table in the front row looking up at the whiteboard with the sad, empty eyes of the saints on the icon.