Education

Issues of governance, funding and curriculum

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Tyranny of the Minority

The particulars of the Advanced Placement course in African American Studies are not published yet, but it is apparent that the State of Florida will have a resounding impact on what passes for African American Studies in the country.

As presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value,” the department’s office of articulation, which oversees accelerated programs for high school students, wrote on Jan. 12. In the future, should the College Board “be willing to come back to the table with lawful, historically accurate content, FDOE will always be willing to reopen the discussion.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/us/desantis-florida-ap-african-american-studies.html?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-us-schools&variant=show&region=MAIN_CONTENT_1&block=storyline_top_links_recirc]

What did the Department of Education of Florida object to, and how will it change the content of the Advanced Placement Course in African American Studies?  This degree of regulation should be anathema to freedom-loving Republicans, but we will probably learn that, in the case of public school curricula, they are happy to restrict public familiarity with writers they don’t agree with. And in a state with a disproportionate number of senior citizens appalled by the changing mores of race and gender in the 21st Century.

The AP Placement Test regulators will seriously consider whatever limitations the department of education of a massive state wants to impose. Their response to the rejection of the Florida Department of Education:

The process of piloting and revising course frameworks is a standard part of any new A.P. course, and frameworks often change significantly as a result,” the College Board said in a statement.

The Chief Executive Officer of the College Board, David Coleman, made an appearance on PBS Wednesday night (the beginning of Black History month), insisting that all revisions to the AA curriculum had been made before Governor DeSantis and the Stop WOKE Act had been applied to the framework.  He insisted that the readings listed  for the course were all optional and that the College Board would welcome whatever readings AP teachers brought to the course.

It is a little ingenuous to claim that all contributions to AP African American Studies are welcome, when the outcomes are evaluated by an AP Test designed and assessed by the College Board. The power wielded by the administrators of a test is considerable. The Florida Department of Education recognizes this, and they have already taken a sharp instrument to the African American frameworks.

What the College Board and the FDOE neglect to admit is that the elimination of certain authors or topics at the top of the secondary curriculum will essentially eliminate related authors and topics from the curriculum below the Advanced Placement level, not only for the students of Florida, but for the rest of the country that bases its African American studies objectives on the objectives set by the College Board.

Governor DeSantis indignantly objected to the AP topic of “Black Queer Studies,” because he thought it irrelevant to African American Studies. He obviously is not familiar with

  1. James Baldwin,  a gay man whose Go Tell It On the Mountain was one of 100 best English-language novels released from 1923 to 2005. 
  2. Charles Blow ( A gay New York Times columnist, his memoir, now a play – Fire Shut Up in My Bones)
  3. Alice Walker (Her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple with prominent gay characters)

These authors use their own experiences to reveal discriminations against race and gender within the same work. Because some censors, such as  activist parents and the FDOE, do not accept homosexuality in their culture, these prominent authors could be banned from reading lists of the most advanced students in Florida.

The FDOE also called out the Black feminist bell hooks, author of Ain’t I a Woman?. Her indictment of the “white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy” raised objections from the state reviewers. That critique did not seem suitable to the topic “Black Study and Black Struggle in the 21st Century.”  Does this also threaten the study of August Wilson’s Fences and The Piano Lesson, Pulitzer Prize-winning plays exposing racial struggle, or the study of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a frank critic of racism in his childhood memoir Between the World and Me? What about the racial and gender overtones of Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye and Beloved)?  Where should students hear the voices of dissent–on Netflix and the street corners?

These authors wrote to unsettle their readers, Black and White, and left their writing on the chopping block for those who don’t want to be “uncomfortable.” Teachers of African American Studies could make such authors mileposts of their curricula, but their writing is vulnerable to the indiscriminate (or discriminatory) whims of the Florida Department of Education.

What we are witnessing is the wholesale whitening of the secondary school curriculum. The censoring of the highest levels of literacy permeates the literacy of grades 6-11.  The very essence of Blackness is under attack by a minority of White guardians of public schooling. Advanced Placement teachers in Florida will be censored, and the ripples will spread to AP curricula and curricula in the lower grades across the country.

Who has the prominence to check the indiscriminate claw of Ron DeSantis? Where will the purge of Black authors end?

 

 

 

 

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The Portal and Its Users

What could possibly be wrong with sharing the materials and objectives of a school curriculum with the parents of school children? Shouldn’t schools strive to be transparent, so that parents can collaborate in the education of their children?  Isn’t public education a community pursuit, rather than a study behind closed doors?

The problem with transparency is the intent. Will a shared curriculum become a dialog between parents and educators of history and English or will it become an expression of outrage to make sure someone’s values are reinforced more than the values of others?  Will we be collaborators or a police force for political correctness and their victims?

The name of the State Portal legislation tips us off to the intent: “Missouri Education Transparency and Accountability Portal.”  Schools would be “accountable,” not centers for community education.  The Portal would provide access “to every school district’s curriculum, source materials and professional development materials,” a comprehensive, investigatory tool to expose sources and professional development materials that generate curriculum, as well as the curriculum itself.  Does this sound like an innocent, information resource?

A fascinating memoir, Robert E. Lee and Me, by Ty Seidule, shows how prejudice can infest the school curriculum. In this memoir, a Professor Emeritus of History at West Point tells how his education controlled his thinking about “The Lost Cause,” beliefs about the Civil War that romanticize the plight of slaves and the purposes and outcomes of the War.

The significant take-away from this memoir of disillusionment is that how we memorialize heroes and frame curricula about the events of the Civil War (or any historical events), can distort or illuminate history for generations of students and teachers to come.  “The Lost Cause” was Seidule’s curriculum as a student and a serviceman and a military officer. It was not until he became a professor of military history at West Point and probed beneath the myths about General Lee that he learned a more factual history. He made a new definitive judgment of Lee based on the narratives of witnesses and the primary documents from Lee’s own hand. Writing to the Confederate secretary of war, Lee described the Emancipation Proclamation as

savage and brutal policy . . . which leaves us no alternative but success or degradation worse than death, if we would save the honor of our families from pollution, our social system from destruction. (231)

In a border state like Missouri the “Lost Cause” may still be considered factual in some communities and attempts, to revise the record of the Civil War with a new perspective, would meet opposition. Seidule’s own public education, even his college education, reinforced myths of the Civil War that have been echoed in movies like Gone with the Wind and by statues that memorialize soldiers who fought for the Confederacy.  How many sentimental descendants of the Confederacy realize that Robert E. Lee criticized the Emancipation Proclamation as “savage and brutal policy”?  What would they say about the attempts to place their heroes in the light of contemporary history?

This is one of the challenges of a “Portal” to public education. Parents and grandparents who wish to keep the “Lost Cause” alive might fight to preserve their Confederacy-correct version of the Civil War. Curricula that undermine the “Lost Cause” would come under attack, because certain people want to remember the Civil War as it was remembered by the grandparents and great-grandparents of school children. Certain myths will be perpetuated, as they were in Ty Seidule’s own education in his upbringing in North Carolina.

How to reconcile the facts of the Civil War with the memories we wanted to preserve? Not by attacking curricula we dislike, but by constructive conversations about what modern historians have to say today. What if teachers and the parents of their students met in book clubs to discuss the reading of Ty Seidule’s Robert E. Lee and Me? They would have to look at disagreements together and understand that history is not all about facts and dates. Sometimes it is of a story told by the winners of history. Seidule’s book offers that perspective.

The innocent proposal of a Portal to public education is fraught with the dangers of division. If parents want to prevent the “divisiveness” of curriculum, they need to participate in the public discussion of history and literature, instead of attempting to enforce opinions that might be founded on myth. Dialogue should be our method, not anger and investigation. The Portal reform legislation would not be a platform for discussion, but a weapon to exposure new history for attack.

 

 

 

 

 

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A State of Neglect

I am ashamed to receive a state tax cut of 5%, while child care workers like Laura Muhammed earn below a living wage– $15/ hour [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 12.29.2022]. I am ashamed that the top earners in Missouri stand to pay 0.1 per cent less in taxes over future years of economic boom, when some rural public school teachers start their careers earning below the poverty level. I am ashamed that it is not possible to lift the annual salary of beginning teachers in Missouri to the national median salary of beginning teachers of $40,000 per year, while federal assistance is pouring into the state to support social services.

Governor Parson has decided that the tax-payers of Missouri would prefer to receive a few extra dollars in their pay checks, rather than raise the wage and salary floor for Missouri teachers from pre-K to high school.  That’s because lowering taxes, even a pittance, has always been a crowd-pleasing strategy, not because anyone is getting wealthy from this kickback. It is only the idea of lowering taxes that delights most citizens. No one actually feels their standard of living raised.

At the risk of being labeled “socialist,” I suggest most Missouri tax-payers will take responsibility for the next generation of students.  We don’t have to actually house school-age children to feel some responsibility for their success, to wish them the best possible education at least through the twelfth grade. If we have had even moderate success in the workplace, we know it is time to pay back to the generations following us in school.

Even the most self-interested adults among us realize that the financial growth of the state depends on

  • fully educated workers
  • competitive salaries to attract the best educators
  • high quality childcare for working families
  • corporations moving into the state in the confidence of good schools for their employees
  • research that creates Twenty-first Century jobs

The simplest measures of economic productivity begin with better-than-average schools. Missouri does not have them, because Missouri does not invest in the educational workplace, whether at the level of daycare or for high schools.

Beyond our economic self-interest we owe the children of Missouri a high-quality education, even if those children do not belong to our nuclear families. We have a collective responsibility to educate our citizens for success, even if our own education did not meet our expectations. The idea that citizens are responsible for the educating all children is not new.

More novel is the idea that teachers of all grade levels deserve a living wage.   When public schools originated in the United States teachers were typically single women with no families with no expectations except to sustain the local school on their meager salaries.  Some citizens bemoaned the professionalization of teachers in the next century, which included a living wage and benefits allowing many teachers to work within a 60-hour week and to support a fledgling family.

Teaching has evolved into a highly-skilled profession, not deserving the salary of a teacher/ missionary of the nineteenth century or even the minimal professional salary of the twentieth century. Pre-k – 12 classes have grown larger and much more diverse. A mainstream classroom usually includes both special education students and some not fluent in English.  The Zoom classroom of the last two years has demanded a new level of proficiency, teaching virtually at the same time as on-location.  The complicated demands of teaching today are not adequately compensated, and even those who enlist may leave the profession after 2-3 years.

School principals understand the destabilizing effect of non-competitive salaries, because they are faced with replacing the majority of their faculty in three-year cycles.  That frustrates cohesion in a school community and the cultivation of experienced faculty who can mentor younger teachers and spearhead school reform.  A school with continuing high turnover can not be a good place for teaching and learning.

So the problem of low teacher salaries is both of attracting and retaining younger faculty who will see a future of better salaries and successful reform within their schools.  With the present teacher salary structure in Missouri that future is highly problematic.

Teachers are obviously not in the profession to get rich, but they need to survive, not just in the first two years of teaching, but in a job which grows with them and offers inducements to continue.   They usually have the talent to succeed in other professions and, for the moment, job opportunities abound. It has never been true, but today it is absurd to think that, “Those who can do, and those can’t teach.”  Better-paying opportunities already draw away dissatisfied teachers, exacerbating a shortage.

If communities are satisfied with education-on-the cheap, they will soon find education-on-the scrapheap.  Better education will produce more responsive citizens, more capable employees, and more successful businesses attracted to the state. Education is the best long-term investment for every community from rural to urban, from the prosperous counties to the struggling ones.

So, Missouri legislators, you can take your pitiable tax reduction and shove it—into childcare and pre-K – 12 education.  I am not deluded that I will get rich with your token kickbacks. Rather I will be gratified to see a public contribution to a public interest: the best education we can afford to give Missouri children.

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A Target for Candidates with No Facts

Apparently the public schools will be the whipping boy for the 2024 Presidential election.

The national assault on public schools is mystifying, given that school policies are local and highly variable. Performances on national tests vary dramatically from one state to the next, and books that have been banned in one school district are part of the explicit curriculum in others.  Yet the murmuring from potential Republican candidates is unmistakeable.

Ron DeSantis started it with his “Don’t Say Gay” legislation to prevent LGBTQ topics from surfacing in the school curriculum, an early assault on local autonomy from the State of Florida.  Eric Schmitt rallied a small percentage of right wing parents to create a “Parents Bill of Rights” to oppose curricula unpopular with an agitating minority. The same Attorney General Schmitt doubled down by suing the schools that had a mandatory mask policy at the height of the CoVid pandemic in early 2022.

More recently, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared, “If you ask, “Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?” It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids, and the fact that they don’t know math and reading or writing.”  The all-but-declared Presidential candidate believes the President of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, is the most dangerous person in the U.S.

There is no such thing as a typical public school, and Randi Weingarten represents only a minority of K-12 teachers (1.7 million out of 3.8 million).  Public education is a shape-shifting entity as you travel from North to South, and West to Midwest. So how do you campaign against a moving target?

The sweeping generalities that politicians will use in a nation-wide campaign will undoubtedly be inaccurate and deceptive. For example, a 2022 poll by IPSOs/ NPR found that 76% of respondents agree that “my child’s school does a good job keeping me informed about the curriculum, including potentially controversial topics.” Could it be that Republicans are planning to win an election based on the opinions of the other 24%?  Or will they just assume they can entrap the rest of us in half-truths?

The opportunist candidate will be willing to exaggerate and stir up anger if it brings the aroused parental minority, with their independent sympathizing friends, to the polls.  That campaign strategy plays on local grievances to draw a national turnout, a questionable strategy.

But why pick on the public schools?

  1. Schools cannot afford the fund-raisers and lobbyists to mount an opposition.  Even Randi Weingarten gets little respect as a union president, because her members are diverse in income and politics.  Unions don’t have the clout they used to have.
  2. Schools have not performed well during the pandemic, according to the most reliable measure, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Math and Reading scores for middle and high school have declined significantly. That is the fact, but of course schools suffered from the absence of face-to-face, not necessarily incompetent, teaching.
  3. School libraries are under assault for making explicit young adult literature available to teenagers. Any fiction that normalizes LGBTQ behavior can arouse straight parents, and some graphic literature can be more graphic than some families can tolerate.
  4. Every candidate considers him- or herself an expert on education merely because they have been students. With such limited experience the candidate feels capable of judging why schools in some localities are failing.
  5. Evidence has become optional in national political campaigns. As a result of #4 campaigns against public education will be highly emotional, bringing out the loudest and most aggrieved parents and/ or teachers.  That makes good soundbites.

So we can expect a campaign making heated accusations of mindless teaching and anti-American curricula, but lacking the respectable research or professional experts who use data to identify real problems.  In other words–a shout-fest.  Pathetic model of critical thinking for a school population that sorely needs good models. If  you want fourth and eighth graders to think critically, you could start by modeling it on high profile election campaigns.

This campaign could very well sow division, where teacher-parent relationships have previously been good, according to the IPSOs/NPR poll cited above, which documents 76% of parents trusting their children’s teachers.  By fanning some parent and educator discontent, the national campaign could weaken the credibility of effective teachers.  We know that somewhere in America there are children who can’t divide, teachers who indoctrinate, and librarians who don’t create age-appropriate reading lists. If the election-machine finds them, they will become celebrities of the worst kind– evidence that our entire educational system is failing.

A wiser candidate would locate successful innovations in the schools and, if elected, promise to replicate and fund them.  That would be constructive. But more likely the campaign will thrive on the popular wisdom that progressive education and immoral, unpatriotic curricula are the problem, and it will be resolved by firing personnel and throwing out the offending materials.  This would be the “You’re fired!” approach to school reform.

The voices of articulate and thoughtful voters must be heard to prove that critical, cool-headed thinking has not been lost to posterity. If the anti-education lobby seizes the day, we are in for dark ages in public education. It is a problem that replicates itself, because we learn how to vote intelligently in schools, while future schools could become incubators of fill-in-the-blank  and true/false reasoning. Thus we create the dazed voters that re-elect flawed leaders.

Perhaps a savvy opponent or a well-informed educator will rise up against the fact-free campaign I am describing. Perhaps parents will not be swayed by the fury of the school board meeting provocateurs. Perhaps articulate teens will testify on behalf of their schools. And perhaps the youngest voters, Generation Z, will flock to the polls to prevent a mindless assault on schools. That could stem the tide of negativity.

As absurd as a national campaign against local education may sound, it is dangerous, just the same. We cannot let ill-informed, power-brokers dictate local policies. Public education needs reform by professionals, including teachers themselves, but giving it over to political hacks is not a solution.  We should speak up for local autonomy and participate in our local schools.

The school we save may be our own.

 

 

 

 

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The Educator

Dear Mr. Pompeo,

You a cum laude graduate of West Point and a former Secretary of State of the U.S. Government. When you were asked to diagnose why the public schools are failing, you said,

“If you ask, “Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?” It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids, and the fact that they don’t know math and reading or writing.”

If you want to attack teachers’ unions, you should offer a constructive solution to prove you know what you are talking about.

Otherwise you should stop scapegoating public education like an illiterate boor.

You should demonstrate the level of critical thinking you are demanding of fourth graders (if you are using the NAEP for evidence of failure).

Among the topics you might have addressed are

What do you consider “filth”?  What kinds of literature for young adults would not be classified as “filth”?

What exactly are the problems with how  math and reading and writing are taught? How are teachers’ unions responsible for this methodology?

What is your basis for diagnosing these problems?

What grade levels are these trends most evident?

What do you consider a fact-based curriculum in U.S. History?

How do teachers instruct in “critical thinking,” rather than “indoctrination,” which would be the method in totalitarian countries?

How important is class size in the teaching of critical thinking?

How important is salary and benefits in recruiting competent teachers of critical thinking?

If you are going to use teachers’ unions as a scapegoat for performance in public education, you should demonstrate more analysis and evidence to prove you are capable of the reasoning you are demanding of fourth graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.  To date, you are a sad example for students to follow in their critical thinking in math, reading and writing.

Mr. Pompeo, Let’s have a dialogue worthy of the critical reasoning you expect of our students.

Respectfully,

William D. Tucker, Ph.D.

1895 Schoettler Valley Drive

Chesterfield  MO 63017

 

 

 

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Books Unite Us

 

“. . . not one cent of taxpayer money should be used to define or divide young Oklahomans about their race or sex,” said Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt about the bill H.B. 1775 after he signed it in May, 2021.

The wave of state legislation about the K-12 curriculum seems to ask: Does knowledge of race and gender identity unite us or divide us as U.S. citizens?  When books address race or gender discrimination does that give us pause to think about the other or does it turn us against the other? Should classroom curricula illumine the social stress outside the classroom or should it be gender and color blind?

The slogan for Banned Books Week is “Books Unite Us.” Is that a fair generalization? It is a challenge to this legislation designed to control student reading and public school curricula. Let’s look at the objection to one popular young adult novel as a case in point.

  1. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
    Reasons: Banned and challenged for profanity and violence and because it was thought to promote an anti-police message and indoctrination of a social agenda [https://bannedbooksweek.org/about/]

The novel depicts a police shooting of a teenager from multiple points of view, showing the tension within a community, BUT ultimately bringing some groups together to recognize a police over-reaction. The story crosses racial boundaries as we see some Black characters blaming the teenager and some White characters blaming the police officer. Is this a divisive book or does it energize our thinking about race and society?

The Criteria for Banning

The existence of profanity in the novel only acknowledges the coarseness of expression we see in realistic fiction. For example, the following list of books have been banned by public watch dogs in part for their “language.”

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger; The Color Purple by Alice Walker; The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck; Beloved by Toni Morrison; Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; Native Son by Richard Wright; Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut; A Separate Peace by John Knowles.; Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson.

Three books are by Nobel Prize Winners (John Steinbeck and Toni Morrison), two won the Pulitzer Prize (The Color Purple and Beloved ), and one is a Newbery Award Winner (The Bridge to Terebithia). What does this suggest? That offensive language does not mar critical excellence.  It may be part of the portrayal of real characters. If we want to expose students to professionally- recognized literature, we may have to read past the objectionable language.

The objection to violence in the novel fails to consider the subject matter. There is more graphic violence in The Red Badge of Courage, in All Quiet on the Western Front, indeed in the Bible (see Judges 5:24-27) than in this novel. At the core of the story is a violent crime, so the subject matter entails violence. Violence may be the subject of great literature.

Then comes the claim of an anti-police message. You have to read the book to decide if this is true, because it gives the law and order point of view alongside the victims’ points of view. It would be a bad novel if it reduced its characters to the good guys vs. the bad guys, and most teachers would avoid such over-simplification in their assigned reading. An “anti-police message” would be too simplistic. My personal view is that the novel avoids stereotyping the “Black” point of view against the “White” point of view by including a Black policeman as a significant character in the story.

The indoctrination of a social agenda smells strongly like one person’s personal disagreement with the over-riding themes of the book.  Critical reading, an essential skill for teen-age readers, requires a mature reader to engage with the themes of a book and decide whether the reader agrees or disagrees. No secondary reading curriculum should lack this skill, regardless of the proficiency expected in the reader. Even a hilarious book like the Newbery award winner Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli might have a social agenda, and I imagine some parents might detect one. It is the role of critical reading to ferret this out and make decisions about the point of view.

The “indoctrination” claim addresses the way a book is taught. Only bad teachers teach by telling the students what the author’s message is. It kills critical thinking, and students hate when teachers do that. If the book, itself, takes an indoctrinating approach, it is bad fiction. As I commented above, “It would be a bad novel if it reduced its characters to the good guys vs. the bad guys, and most teachers would avoid such over-simplification in their assigned reading.”

If readers can get past the language and give The Hate U Give a fair reading, I think they will find an even-handed approach to police responsibility, racial identity, and community dialog. It is precisely the community dialog that is lacking in many American communities today, the very reason this book should be read, not banned.

This book should unite, not divide communities. At the very least it would be a great read for parent groups that want to read what their kids are reading. In the interests of dialogue some high schools and middle schools organize such groups to shed light on books that parents may want to be informed of. Such reading groups would be a good test of the theory that “Books Unite Us.”

I think The Hate You Give is the kind of book that unites us.

 

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The Trials of Privilege

Fiona Harrigan recounts spending her final years of high school taking the ACT and SAT five times to get a score high enough for merit scholarships, throwing away her “dream” list of schools and rewriting a “realistic” one, and ultimately settling on living at home and commuting to the local public university. “I took on heavy course loads and cashed in on AP credits to finish school a semester early. I didn’t study abroad in college. I dropped a second major and elected not to participate in language programs and research opportunities so I could finish school earlier,”  The Dispatch
[https://morning.thedispatch.com/p/the-morning-dispatch-in-search-of-151?utm_source=email]

The sound of privilege echoes through this essay, written for the journal Reason about the sacrifices one student made to get through college faster. Apparently the writer feels that her strategies to avoid college loans deserve great praise, and that loan forgiveness offered now by the federal government cheapens her hard work in college.

It sounds like the whining of the upper middle class. Ms. Harrigan recounts the many times she took the S.A.T., and the many A.P. exams she took, trying to qualify for Merit scholarships and finish college early.  Many students can barely afford the cost of taking those exams once, for lack of hundreds of dollars in fees. Many do not qualify for AP classes and yet qualify for college and its expenses.

Ms. Harrigan denied herself other privileges, such as private education and living in college dormitories. Tell that to the many students who attend two years of community college before going on to public four-year schools, yet still borrowing to pay the tuition at those moderately-priced institutions.

Ms. Harrigan had resources from her parents that kept her from going into debt. “Through the aid and some strategic choices, my college education never cost more than $2,000 per year, which my parents graciously paid  [emphasis added] and I helped mitigate by continuing to apply for scholarships.”  Many parents cannot afford even that modest expense for tuition, and so their children apply for loans.

Ms. Harrigan denied herself the privilege of studying abroad and took a moderate load of classes so she could avoid student loans. Tell that to the students who worked part-time, even full-time, in order to afford living expenses while attending college.  I have known students, who, against the counsel of their advisors, continued to work while student teaching, a full-time job of its own.  Most of those students required student loans in spite of that diligence.

Ms. Harrigan had to drop a second major, dismissed special language programs and research opportunities, presumably as an undergraduate, so she could finish school early.  Such opportunities are offered only to elite students, who doubtless deserve them, but the majority of college students may not qualify for such programs or attend schools that cannot offer them.  What she denies herself, other students have no access to, yet they must borrow to finish college.

Ms. Harrigan does mention employment. “At times, I worked three jobs to afford travel to internship and conference opportunities, as well as the nontuition costs of my education.” This does not sound like employment for necessities, but for opportunities she chose to pursue.

Compared to the struggle of lower middle class students to finish college in five, yes six to ten years, Ms. Hill’s rant sounds like the pouting of the privileged. Nowhere does she mention having to work for a living in college. She denied herself nothing that most students attending public universities could even dream of.  Her cost-efficiencies relate exclusively to finishing college early, rather than working to support her living needs and delaying graduation for one to ten years.

Yes, Ms. Harrigan made sacrifices and worked extraordinarily hard in college, but she then begrudges those who worked just as hard for a longer stretch of time the student loan forgiveness they needed when they graduated—to lower-paying jobs.  She cannot sacrifice without resentment of others who had no choice but to borrow.  She seems to be oblivious that anyone else could have sacrificed as much or more than she did.

Hardship does not look the same from the perspective of the privileged and the disadvantaged classes. It is no sin to lack the perspective of the classes we do not inhabit, but it is contemptible to pretend your sacrifices are unique and others are unworthy for the grace offered to them.

Student loan forgiveness may seem gratuitous to the prosperous, but for many it is a lifeline out of debt.  The privileged should honor that, even if they managed to survive without those loans.  If they graduated from college without empathy, then their education was not worth what they paid for it.

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To Catch a Thief

Stealthy as a thief in the night

For me to catch eternally. 

[Edward Clarke, A Book of Psalms, p. 28]

God’s approach has been compared to a thief in the night, and Edward Clarke’s poem  “To Catch a Thief” suggests that he is trying to catch that thief, while God is already “inhabiting the wasted words of my cries.”

It is Clarke’s meditation on Psalm 22, also called “The Deer of the Dawn,” the Psalm that begins,

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Psalm 22 goes back and forth between feeling abandoned and knowing God’s faithfulness. Why is that called “The Deer of the Dawn”? I think God is like the elusive deer that comes quietly to us, when we least can detect its presence–at dawn. Deer are so stealthy and appear suddenly as if from nowhere. At the dawn they can be barely seen, and once in the clearing, they may startle and be gone.

The poet Clarke expresses this same sense when he compares the pursuit of God to the pursuit of a thief.  As Jesus has said,  “if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not let his house be broken into” (Matt 24:43).  It may be too literal to compare God to a thief, but being alert is like being prepared for that thief, so Clarke calls his poem “To Catch a Thief.”

In Revelations 3:3, the Spirit warns the church in Sardis, “If you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know what hour I will come to you.” So God is like the stealthy deer or the stealthy thief, upon us before we know it. We are expected to be ready and recognize the presence of God when it is upon us.

What does Edward Clarke mean that “God is inhabiting the wasted words of my cries”? Really that God is everywhere at every time, so that even when the Psalmist says “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” God is, in fact, present, and when Jesus uttered those same words at his crucifixion, God was present, “inhabiting the wasted words of my cries.” When we despair, God is present.  When we are idle, God is present. When we sleep, God is present. When we write, God is present in our words.

Catching the thief it is more like seeing the God who was always there. For those grieving, seeing God in their grief. For the slumbering church, seeing God’s approach to wake them up. For the poet, discovering God in the words written down. Jesus also said, “Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:21).

We are trying to capture the thief when we speak of incidents of our lives as “God moments.” The moments pass by unnoticed unless we look for them. They are moments of grace, of kindness, of forgiveness. When we notice them, we catch the thief.  When they pass us by, we are deprived of a vision of God.

The same discovery came to Moses as he kept his sheep in the desert.  “Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. 3 So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up” (Genesis 3:3). And then Moses had the most famous God moment of all time.  Moses did not walk by the bush, but investigated and discovered God. What if he walked by and said only, “Hmm, that’s interesting”? Would he have missed the presence of God?

I share Edward Clarke’s curiosity about his own words. Sometimes I have the moment of recognition that God has spoken to me through my own words. When I began to write this piece, I thought God might surprise me. When I thought of God coming to the church of Sardis, I  thought of my own need to wake up. When I remembered Moses stepping aside to see the burning bush, I thought of my own weak curiosity. I need to wonder and seek.

Barely two weeks ago I wrote about a funeral I attended.

From the middle of the group of women around the coffin, a few quiet voices began to sing: “Abide with me. Fast falls the eventide.”  Bright, solemn voices around them took up the verse in perfect unison.

Abide with me. Fast falls the eventide.

The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide.

A quietly startling moment. The service had begun from the rear of the sanctuary without the least preparation.  A spark of love, of gratitude, of prayer.

And I knew it was a God-moment I was describing. Not because we were in a sanctuary. Not because the women were singing a beloved hymn. But because God’s light had come down, and we felt it, before even the organ had announced the beginning of the funeral service.  And my words had captured it–the moment, the thief, the deer.

And even  now, as I reflect on this moment, I feel I have caught the thief.  I am not a prophet, but God has come down in my words. God revealed that God is always here, but because I have looked for the presence of God, I have found it.

Alleluia. Deo gratia.

 

 

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Stratford Denouement

Friday we had scheduled two plays, a matinee and an evening performance. Two bittersweet comedies: All’s Well that Ends Well and 1939.  The first returned us to the Tom Patterson Theater, the newest venue on the banks of the Avon.

All’s Well makes you question its title, because its themes are rejected love and disloyalty to country. And the title is repeated twice in the dialogue, so you start to wonder. Helen places her heartfelt love before the audience at the beginning, but it gets rejected by the callous and superior Bertram.  We see her resourcefulness and kindness by the curing of the King’s fatal illness and her plan to follow Bertram into battle and somehow win him back. Although she succeeds with the help of sympathetic allies, I feel a strangled joy at the extreme measures she needed to woo Bertram back.

Likewise the comic character Parolles, a companion to Bertram, who, despite his bravado, betrays his friend and his army, once he is captured by his fellow soldiers, blindfolded and probed for the secrets and vulnerabilities of  Bertram’s  and their cause. Parolles is stripped of his uniform, his wig and his mustache, but somehow returns home rehabilitated, a repentant figure.

Does all end well under the circumstances of betrayal and rejection? That is the question that lingers into the companion production of 1939.

Coleus Flower Box Outside Bradshaw’s

Set of 1939

A performance by indigenous adolescents of the play All’s Well that End’s Well for the King and Queen of England is the premise of 1939. I never did learn the significance of the title.

The play moves briskly through the rehearsals and trauma of the students at a Residential School for indigenous children. You see the official board announcing the rehearsals below. Behind this board are smaller slanted boards that reveal messages from the students that are erased between each scene by the older white leaders of the school, the teacher/ director and the Episcopal priest. The symbolism is clear: the identities of the indigenous students are erased by the curriculum of the school.

What surprised me was the humor injected by the students, who, through their pain of lost tribal identity, still labor over this performance and begin to inject their own culture into the script. The local news reporter sees the struggle to marry Shakespeare and indigenous life, and applauds their effort, calling their emerging production an “Indian Shakespeare.” The overturning of the adults’ plans to produce authentic Elizabethan drama becomes hilarious, along with the priest’s tendency to fart nosily and foully when he is nervous.

After a chaotic presentation, the young people feel validated, but their future remains clouded with limited opportunities. They separate to go to different roles in pedagogical study, the army, the theater and returning to home to farm.

At the close of the play we were invited to view an installation about the Action of the  Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and to spend time reflecting on the performance with an indigenous instructor, a woman who teaches secondary teachers about indigenous culture and methods of learning.  We sat in a circle, a format that equalizes all members of the tribe. We all had questions about the survival of culture and work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the instructor was forthcoming and conciliatory about the resistance to colonialism in Canada. Her conclusion: “colonialism sucks.”

We spent the day walking between these companion performances from the modernistic Patterson Theater to the intimate Studio Theater, indulging in more buying, eating and drinking at the Heritage Brewery, and bumping into Marty and Hope twice before encountering them at 1939.  Stratford is a small town, and we tourists are a small community. We even bumped into two University of Detroit professors at the end of 1939. One was a teaching methods instructor, who told  about the elimination of his program at U of D.

We will round out this visit with brunch with Hope and Marty and a matinee performance of Little Women.  The reviews from our friends and the U of D professors have contradicted each other.  We’ve already been warned it is very unconventional, but that’s Stratford.

 

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Two Days in Stratford

Our first days of theater included Richard III in the afternoon and the next day The Miser in the evening.  No two plays written within a century of each other could be more different.

We saw Richard on the thrust stage of the Tom Patterson Theater, named for the founder of the Stratford Festival.  Richard III was also the inaugural play produced in 1957 in a massive tent. Today the Patterson Theater is a sprawling complex along the Avon River. Victoria sits below just a few yards from the river with the building in the background.

If you travel northeast up the river, you come to the Festival Theater, the oldest of the four theaters that are home to the Festival. It houses one large semi-circular theater where we saw The Miser Thursday night. The set for that comedy-farce is pictured below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Richard the Third is a dark, authentic history with a cast of nobility in taut struggle for power. Richard is by far the most diabolical and ruthless and for a time assumes sovereignty over England by killing off the heirs in his way, including two young boys.  He also displays some ruthless charm by marrying first Anne Neville, the wife of one deceased lord, then, with subtle pressure, threatening to marry Elizabeth, daughter of Elizabeth Woodville the widow of Edward III.  This is a pale synopsis of the intrigue and betrayal that pits Richard against his own allies and other nobility at the end of the play. In the end Elizabeth marries Henry Tudor, the earl of Richmond at the close of a deadly battle for the throne. Richard’s famous line, “My kingdom for a horse!” fatally ends his rule of England.

The Miser is a seventeenth century French comedy of manners which borders on farce. We saw a play modernized by Ranjit Bolt with many contemporary allusions to the theme of greed that made you think of famous examples.  Harper, the character portrayed as the miser, is so consumed with his money that, when he discovers thievery, looks out into the masked audience and moans,”No one wearing masks can be trusted!”   The generational conflict involves his two children trying to marry their chosen partners,  while he threatens to disinherit them.

Remarkably Colm Feore, the actor playing the pathetic miser was Richard III only one day previous.  He showed versatility as a dangerous foe vs. a ludicrous greedy miser. The role of Jack, played by Ron Kennell, was particularly hilarious, as he literally changed hats to assume the roles of cook, chauffeur, and dispute mediator.

The denouement unites all the right couples with frenetic dancing and joy,  as long-lost sisters, brothers, fathers and mothers are re-united. Everybody, it appears has access to a fortune, as the character Arthur Edgerton turns out to be the rich father of  Victor and Marianne, who can now marry into the miser’s family. The moral seems to be “Money conquers all!”

The delightful gardens of the Festival Theater are barely represented here. We visited them in daylight on Thursday, but we had to flee under cloud and rain. The boar’s head flower pattern below represents the insignia of Richard III. There others representing the profile of Little Women and the handgun of the musical Chicago, all in a horizontal line of a bed directly in front and parallel  to the Festival Theater.