Appreciating a certain teacher

I had a pretty miserable time in "K-12" education. Hell, I've had a pretty miserable time in all my time as a "student." It's not that I'm not good at learning. I love learning. I think most of us do, but "school" is not traditionally about learning, but rather about arbitrary rules and arbitrary rankings - and I do not like either.

Yet, within a range of horrors that "school" has been for me, there are amazing bright spots... and those bright spots are almost all related to great teachers. A third grade teacher, Mrs. Janowitz, who let me show what I could do with music and architecture and made school a little bit safe. A sixth grade teacher, Martin McNeil, who understood an 11 - 12-year-old boy's needs for certain forms of space. Alan Shapiro, who I spent four years with (formally) as teacher, mentor, advisor, friend, and who showed me what education could be. Joe Kuszai, at Michigan State University, who gave me space as an artist to grow and learn and even lead. Antonio Diaz, police sergeant and lawyer in the New York City Police Academy who focused on what I could do, not on what I could not. Y.S. Lee at Pratt Institute, a master teacher who understand the purpose of education. Jonathan White and Kathy Bailey, life changing educators in Criminal Justice at Grand Valley State University, and Alexandra Gottardo and Elizabeth Schaughency, not just great teachers and colleagues, but the "special educators" who truly transformed my life.

below: Alan Shapiro on education, unionization, life...

I can bring myself all the way to the present and Punya Mishra, Lynn Fendler, and Susan Peters at MSU's College of Education.

And I sincerely thank everyone of these brilliant people... but, and in part inspired by Charles Blow, as "Teacher Appreciation Week" begins - and as people like Barack Obama and Arne Duncan begin their faux statements after years of teacher bashing - I want to speak about one teacher in particular.

Her name is Ruth Socol, and she's my mom.

I can remember when she began teaching - I can remember when she graduated from Hunter College - probably mostly focused on adding a touch of income stability to the family. She began teaching in a pre-union time, earned almost nothing and had any chance at free time taken up supervising playgrounds and cafeterias. I remember her up till all hours of the night at this little desk which sat by the front door working on lessons, working on grading. I remember her taking all sorts of summer jobs to help make ends meet.

But that's not what I want to write about.

Not her teacher pic... (obviously)... but my Ma as a young bride was
"movie star" beautiful... and this is an incredible photograph

I want to write about the fighter. My mom never accepted the status quo. She sure could have done all her work and gone home. There sure was plenty to do at home, and honestly, for the time, the schools she taught in were pretty good. But she wasn't satisfied, at any level.

She fought really hard for unionization and the AFT - few elementary teachers pushed very hard for this, it was mostly a secondary thing - but she battled for it. It not only meant decent pay, it meant having a real voice. And when it came down to a big strike over teacher power in the schools - as much as it hurt her to do so - she was part of a small picket line outside of a huge elementary school.

My mom taught third grade, which
featured Dick and Jane in Streets and Roads
when she began

But even more critically, she fought for kids, every day. She pushed for "open classrooms," literally knocking down walls between rooms in order to build a multiage space with no desks, and almost no chairs, where kids could move and get comfortable and progress at their own rate. She pushed her administrators on this, moving them forward, embracing a newly diverse student body and making it work. She spent summers helping to create new - and multimedia - learning materials, leading the push to kick "Dick and Jane" out of the schools. Leading the push to bring manipulatives into maths. (I clearly remember a few summers, around age ten, when I had piles of Cuisinaire Rods to play with...)

She visited her students' homes. She talked to them in the supermarket. She individualized her lessons and fought against homework. And she observed and observed and observed.

"If I could do one thing," she told me when I was maybe 16, "it would be to never push any kid to read before third grade. Most aren't ready for it, and every year my room is filled with eight-year-olds who hate reading and never want to see a book again."

She was among the earliest teachers I knew to toss classroom furniture and replace those desks and chairs with carpet and pillows because, as she said, "kids hate those chairs." Now, her students were no different than any other students, and what she was seeing was no different than what anyone else was seeing, but she simply wouldn't accept what she knew didn't work.

She fought and she worked and she fought for everything that was right for kids, for her community. And she made a real difference. Hardly a month goes by in which I don't get a message in Facebook from one of her ex-students. "Am I her son?" "How is she?" "Please tell her that she changed my life." All this about a woman kids met at age eight.

Anyway, I am her son, and I am the continuation of her life work. She is doing great, she's healthy and active and living well. And thank you, because she changed the lives of many, in really important ways, as so many great teachers do.

From childhood, from my mom, I learned that there is no profession more important to society than teaching. And for all these years, I've wished our culture recognized that.

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week to my Ma, to every teacher. And Happy Mother's Day too.

- Ira Socol

"the realities of victims and the realities of observers are worlds apart"

Happy Valley/Omelas, Buffalo High School, the Occupy Movement, and our Classrooms

Back in 2008 I wrote a post about "Constructing Disability." I was writing from bed after a disastrous accident and week in hospital. That week gave me a lot of time to think, and I thought about my life, my education, and my role as an educator.

I wrote that we disable people, that we make people "less than fully human," by using a number of techniques:
1. Not bothering to know who you are.
2. Not really listening.
3. Assuming that "you" can't hear.
4. Infantilizing.
5. Making it look easy.

If the "scandals" at Pennsylvania State University seem to be an obsession of mine this week, please forgive me, but please understand that I see in the events in State College, Pennsylvania over the past two decades - and in the past week - too much that is too familiar in education. And, reading people's thoughts on this, and discussing them with "Penn Staters," who both tend to agree with me and tend not to, I find the parallels overwhelming.

And so, in need of processing by us all.

"I will start us off, (a Penn State student and survivor/victim of child sexual abuse wrote to the State College newspaper Sunday) because I have something unpopular to say. I see everywhere — in your editorials on your social media pages, in your subversively-written chalk messages printed all over campus — your desperate insistence that “We are still Penn State.”

"And each of these that I come upon creates in me a feeling of isolating sadness and emptiness. It reinforces in me what I have long felt -that the realities of victims and the realities of observers are worlds apart." 

In so many ways this echoes what I see with children who "are different" - the students who we call "disabled" or "special needs," the students we see as "unsuccessful," in their interactions with so many of our schools and so many of our classrooms.

Let us pray that we can forget about all of this and go back to football and alcohol
AP Photo by Gene J. Puskar

Matt Bodenschatz, in his letter to his community the day after Penn State's big "healing" day of football, describes three of the five techniques I describe above:
1. The student body and the institution are not listening to the victims
2. The student body and the institution are pretending that the victims cannot hear them
3. The student body and the institution, in the form of the football program, are pretending it is easy
And so, the actions of those surrounding the victims re-wounded those same injured parties.

The "public piety" of the organized events at Penn State Friday and Saturday which so disturbed columnist Charles P. Pierce, "Watching everyone on the field take a knee before the Penn State-Nebraska game, and listening to the commentary about how devoutly everybody was praying for the victims at Penn State, was enough to get me reaching for a bucket and a Bible all at once."..."These things cannot be prayed away. Let us hear nothing about "closure" or about "moving on." And God help us, let us not hear a single mumbling word about how football can help the university "heal" (Lord, let the Alamo Bowl be an instrument of your peace.)," were so tone deaf, so cruel in many ways, and so obviously geared to demonstrating how quickly the institution could recover and students could get back to ranking themselves as "the number one party school in America," that, of course, a victim - even a non-connected victim like Bodenschatz - felt assaulted all over again.

Which is little different than what John Holtfound, as the 1950s ended, regarding his students who were "different." "I asked them, "Well, what kind of names do you hate to be called?" We were off. Before the end of the period the board was covered with names. About half were what I expected, the usual ten-year-old insults­ - idiot, stupid, nuthead, fat slob, chicken, dope, scaredy-cat, etc. The rest surprised me. They were all terms of endearment. It was quite a scene. There were all these bright-faced, lively children, eyes dancing with excitement and enthusiasm, seeing who could most strongly express their collective disgust for all the names that adults might suppose they like most. Someone would say, “Dearie-ug-g-g-g-gh!” Chorus of agreement. Someone else would say, "Honey-ic-c-c-c-ch!" More agreement. Every imagi­nable term of affection and endearment came in for its share. Not one was legitimate, not one was accepted. No­body said of any term, "Well, that's not too bad.""

In Holt's classroom he discovered that every adult attempt to "help" these students was really more of an attempt by the adults to help themselves - to support the self-image of the caregivers - and each of those attempts wounded the students.

Which is the issue, we need to look beyond ourselves if we are to be capable of empathy, but we are all too rarely willing to do that.

Two friends, Punya Mishra and Michael Faris, brought a short science fiction to my attention last night, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Variations on a theme by William James) by Ursula K. Le Guin. Now Punya writes: (see Michelle at Sans Serif and John Scalzi at Whatever for other blogs on this)

"It is about a beautiful city called Omelas, a city of happy people unburdened by any pain or sorrow. But this happiness is the result of a faustian bargain—a bargain where the happiness of all is dependent on having one child bear all the pain and sorrow of the entire city. This child lives in a dark, basement room, neglected and in constant pain. The story says that many people, though initially shocked, learn to accept this and seek to lead fruitful lives in Omelas. However, the story concludes that, there are always a few, who walk away, from the city, never to return. The story asks the question of whether it is, “right for the happiness of many to be built on pain and sorrow for one.”

I know that my synopsis does not do justice to the story. Do read it for yourself right here. Yes, right now. I can wait.
"OK. Welcome back. Now wasn’t that a great story. I truly think it is one of the greatest stories ever written (at lease one of the greatest I have ever read).

"So now coming back to the sorry state of affairs at Penn State. It seems to me that the Happy Valley in some sense struck a bargain similar to the one in the story. The entire football and university staff who knew or suspected what was going on chose to turn a blind eye to what was going on. The graduate assistant who stumbled upon the scene in the showers chose to let the child suffer to protect the good name of the program. The suffering of one child was worth it in exchange for maintaining the reputation of the football team or the University. The students who rioted after the firing of Joe Paterno were willing to make the same choice as well."

And I will argue that the students praying at Penn State's football game as others hugged the statue of Joe Paterno, were making the same choice as well. And further, I would argue that those working with students who "are different" without fighting to change a system which builds dependence and second-class humanity, are also making that choice. Whenever we choose what is easier for our system, our budget, our classroom, our effort, rather than what is right for kids, we make that choice (see, Not Getting to Universal Design).

Making the choice: PSU student Alexander Pinquett hugs the
bronze Joe Paterno Saturday
Photo: David Swanson/Philadelphia Inquirer/MCT

"We too often consult our own convenience, rather than the comfort, welfare, or accommodation of our children," William A. Alcott wrote in 1831, so, none of this is particularly new, nor, as I have said, is it rare.

This week the Buffalo, Wyoming school board, referring to a football coach who had passed out a "survey" to his players referring to people as "pussies" and "cry babbies" and people whose "butts are too easily hurt," said, “They accepted his resignation for his coaching and his other weight room activities. We’ve retained him as a school counselor, under administrative supervision meaning that we’re going to work on building his reputation back to where it needs to be.” Yes, you read it right, the issue for this school board, the choice they are making, is, "we’re going to work on building his reputation back to where it needs to be." Comfort, convenience, and the ability to not see the harm.

NYPD prepares to evict Occupy Wall Street camp. The threat that Mike Bloomberg's
friends might see, or even think about, their Omelas child was too great a discomfort
for the mayor (or his counterparts in Oakland and Portland) to handle.

And at the same time, clearly with tacit approval from Barack Obama's Department of Homeland Security, mayors from New York to Oakland to Portland, great "liberal" cities, made the same choice, evicting citizens who were choosing to be uncomfortable as a way of highlighting unfairness from public spaces, because these scenes might have forced the wealthy and powerful to see that child locked away in Omelas. And most of us stood by. And no major figure even resigned, as at least someone in Britain did over the absurdity of this.

"But this isn't about you. It’s not even about me," Matt Bodenschatz wrote Sunday, "Until and unless you find a way to do something genuine, lasting and sincerely sympathetic for someone at the receiving end of these very real, crippling crimes in our headlines — even if you never get to meet them or to know any of their names — then your indignation is unearned and misplaced."

And this is the most true thing of all. We are either walking away from Omelas, or we are not. The only other option is to break down that door, free that child, and destroy Omelas as it exists.

Are we willing to do that?

- Ira Socol