NewsGossip

During his tenure with the New England Patriots Bill Belichick has taken a lot of abuse for controlling the information doled out to the press. His laconic style has starved the media of stories about stories and personal views about brewing controversies.   Now it all makes sense. Belichick was right all along.

The media frenzy surrounding professional athletes crosses the line of gossip every day.  The New York Jets were transformed from mediocre performance to soap opera by the New York media. Tim Tebow was rescued by the Patriots, because there was no better sanctuary from the insatiable media.   Every member of the Patriots has been questioned about their views on a team mate now under indictment for murder, and yet no sensations have emerged at the outset of the summer camp.

The problem, of course, is that there is a story to be told in each of these cases. The question is when does the story become idle chatter and filling up airspace and column inches?

The Hernandez story has reached that threshold. A man is on trial for a capital crime, and his team mates are asked to pass judgment on that crime and indeed on the man’s character as a football player.  The Patriots have responded with characteristic restraint, including forbidding unauthorized commentary to the media.  Sound strategy for the team, as well as the legal process.

Now Belichick looks like a prophet of media control. The discipline he has enforced with the Patriots has made them a model of discretion and team solidarity.  They refuse to give fuel to the story-within-the-story, the idle chatter, known also as gossip.  They released their views of the Hernandez proceeding through their team captains and made it clear that Hernandez would not be the story to cover during training camp.  They shrank the gossip factor to zero.

Although I enjoy a story drained to its dregs as much as the next reader, I also think the need-to-know is an American obsession, challenged only by the British lunatic stalking of the royal family.  Athletes and celebrities who resist the pressure of the media and its voyeuristic readers can preserve a team culture, preserve family or fraternal solidarity, and prevent perversion of justice.  The news that is fit to print or broadcast is a lot less than the media deems necessary.

Belichick got it right.  Opinionating needs to be restrained in an era of omnipresent news coverage.  Professional athletes have no obligation to fill the media’s appetite for gossip, and they are wiser not to indulge it. But don’t expect the media to give Belichick credit for shutting them out.

Summer of Surprises

Exactly two years ago I wrote a blog called “Not Waiting for Superman,” seizing on Rethinking Schools’ critique of that movie that was then dominating the conversation about school reform. Tonight I realize how much this conversation persists and how much the teachers of our Summer Institute continue to be the rejoinder to the claim that it will take super-heroes to change public education.

In 2011 I wrote:

I am “not waiting for Superman,” because I have spent twenty days listening to, and delighting in,  twelve amazing teachers of writing, who gave up four weeks of their summer to become better teachers of writing. And I know, from experience, that there are 200 more sites of the National Writing Project completing very similar summer institutes as I write this.  That makes about 3,000 teachers of writing becoming better writers and teachers by concentrating on their craft for six hours a day, while many of their detractors assume they are traveling or lying by the pool.

What they are doing is writing relentlessly, listening to demonstrations on teaching writing, offering feedback on the demonstrations, and setting a research agenda to investigate writing in their own classrooms.

Amazing how easily this memory translates to 2013. We again have twelve courageous teachers of all grade levels, K-college. We again have writing, teaching demonstrations, and teacher research proposals. We again share our model of professional development with nearly 200 sites of the National Writing Project. But there are amazing differences.

We have four teachers with  three years’ professional teaching experience among them, who have stepped into their profession with remarkable talent and confidence.  We have several teachers at the other end of the spectrum, one even about to retire, and they have taken inspiring risks with writing and technology. They are the ones beginning novels, mastering Prezi, demonstrating Haiku Deck and other tricks of digital writing.  We have teachers who have been abruptly shifted into new roles, when before they were math teachers, ESL teachers or Speech Therapists. They came to find out if they could teach writing, and they taught us how a professional steps up to challenges. We have teachers who came from almost a hundred miles and some who nearly lived on campus.  We have teachers who come from schools under siege, from forced consolidation to the targets of lawsuits to demoralized faculty.  You might say “a motley crew.”

I would say “an inspiring company,” who threw off their differences, their baggage, their inexperience and their despair to work together as caring teachers, trusting and supporting each other, and reclaiming their voices as writers.  And how they opened their hearts to the motley crew that began the summer together is an entirely new version of the Writing Project narrative.  Yes, it has happened before, but never like this.

Ask a Writing Project teacher about the Summer Institute, and you will hear various stories of transformation, rejuvenation, re-invention, and recovery, but they are all different.  This summer was full of surprises, from the sneaker found in the road of our Writing Marathon to the surreal rendition of Peter Elbow’s Yearbook.  We’ve been visited by Writing Project teachers from Pennsylvania and Virginia, by pre-school, middle school, and never-left-school children, by superintendents and principals and associate deans. We have been a crossroads of learning.

We are still “not waiting for Superman,”  because education is going to be saved by regular classroom teachers who understand the power of two . . .  or three or more.  The power of teachers working in concert, whether in melodic or discordant song, but working together to learn and to teach. That’s what we witnessed again in the Summer Institute, but in a completely different way.

 

“Fair” is not the same as “Equal”

So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. When they received it they began to grumble against the landowner. “These men who were hired last worked only one hour,” they said, “and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.”

But he answered one of them, “Friend I am not being unfair to you. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?” (Matt 120:10-15)

Based on the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, it is pretty clear how Jesus stood on amnesty. The late-arriving workers in the parable are a perfect analogue for immigrants who entered this country later and without legal documents.  In the case of the “Dreamers” legislation which gives the amnesty to the children of these immigrants so they might enroll in college, it portrays the later arrivals as hard-working laborers, who had no role in the illegal migration of their parents.

The latest amnesty controversy addresses whether these children of illegal immigrants should be allowed to drive legally. Most states have granted licenses to the children of undocumented parents, but Arizona and Nebraska have been adamant about withholding that privilege. As the governor of Nebraska declared “policies that reward illegal behavior are not fair to those individuals who do follow the rules.”

These words can hardly be stated without whining. Behind them is the premise that good behavior must always be rewarded and bad behavior should always be punished.  Jesus campaigned against this principle from the beginning to the end of his public ministry.  He favored the condemned and outcast the way the Father favored the Prodigal Son, the way the shepherd favored the lost sheep, the way the Vineyard owner favored the late-arriving workers.  And those who complained of discrimination he scolded for envy.  Envy and jealousy are what drive so many cries for “fairness.”

No parent or teacher can deny that they must favor one child over the other under certain circumstances.  Forgiveness is what allows children to grow up without oppressive guilt.  If they are manipulated by guilt, as some parents feel constrained to do, they are bent or broken in their adulthood, constantly trying to appease the parent who would not forgive them as children. They form adult relationships based on guilt and they retain harsh expectations of their own children. It is a vicious cycle of unrelieved guilt.

That is why “fair” is not the same as “equal.” You have to make an exception to give the offending child a chance to recover and return to wholeness. You may have to allow a privilege that the good child did not receive, as the Father gave a feast for the Prodigal Son, but you know that the offending child needs this opportunity to return to life and restore a broken relationship. So you risk offending the “good” child.

Teachers face this dilemma interminably with grading delinquent students. According to school regulations or to the requirements set down in the syllabus, students should fail your class for non-performance. Maybe the assignment was not turned in, even within a grace period for late work. Maybe the early assignments were poorly written during a family emergency.
Maybe the paper was riddled with errors reflecting a learning disability, but the student recognizes and addresses the problem in later assignments.  Equal treatment would consign the student to a “C” status from the beginning. Hard work and improvement would be negated by poor performance at the beginning.

My students, all future teachers themselves, are often divided on how you treat erratic performances like these. Those who can identify with the contingencies that interfere with school will understand why the student could be cut some slack and given advantages not accorded the best performers in the class. Those who have worked diligently through school with appropriate rewards see equal treatment as the cardinal principle of teaching. If they knew I had allowed the single mother to do make-up assignments long after the work was due, they would be indignant. Everyone gets their denarius, but some get it for working hard at the end of the semester.

Inevitably there are those who arrive to the vineyard late and then expect to get their denarius for a token effort. They should get something for trying, right?  Those malingerers should read the Parable of the Talents, which I interpret to mean that “showing up” is not always enough.  There is always that critical moment in teaching when you decide that the student will have to come back and work in another vineyard and another day.

To those who say, “Our work is degraded by those who get A minuses just for working hard at the end of semester,” I say, “You have your “A,” don’t whine about those who got a break when they needed it.”  And I hope they will teach their future students in the same way.

Fair is not always equal.