Heaven in a Clothesline

“See, now, I wanna clothesline!”

I’m sitting in the noodle-shaped back yard that backs my tiny, old, ramshackle house. It’s Territory Days weekend, and cars are parked along every available spot on my street, hood-by-bumper thick. Families and couples walk by in expectation of instant fun on what is, in effect, a very crowded outdoor mall. Men wear Jack Daniels t-shirts; women sport plastic cowboy hats. Two hours or so later they come back, dragging crying, exhausted children in strollers and wagons. Sarah Palin can see Russia from her yard; I can hear the sound system from the music booth on 28th and Colorado, as far west as the street fair goes.

Jake and I went yesterday. I had twelve bucks tucked in a buttoned pocket, which turned out to be enough for a plate of chocolate-sauce covered funnel cake, since neither of us had the patience to wait in the block-long line for turkey legs. As the syrup dripped all over my shoes, we dutifully walked, as quickly as we could, past all the booths facing south, then turned back to observe the second half. We stopped for a few minutes to listen to the surprisingly great-voiced singer in Bancroft Park. I thought about how Tim would critique the Subarus parked in their usual spot by the ice cream shop.

We stopped to relieve the parched soil of the community garden on the way home, but the effort seemed as futile symbolically as our fight with the watering can, against the hot-drying wind. Seriously, what difference will a community garden make, in a world so desperate for materialistic entertainment that they’ll turn out in the tens of thousands to walk past booths of people selling the junkiest toys and the trashiest food?

Having performed our West Side resident duty for the year, we went back to our usual summer lives. This morning I sliced some homemade bread for Jake’s breakfast, performed the Yoga routine I’ve cobbled together, ran 5 or so miles of trail in the Garden of the Gods, connected to Jake via cell phone line. I came home, lectured him a little on living sans-electronics for at least some of his life, ran a load of laundry and hung it on, yes, the clothesline behind my house.

There’s a definite beauty in the act of hanging laundry. You take a piece out of the basket, give it the shake you’ve perfected in years of practice, quickly judge how best to hang it to minimize wrinkles and drying time. Then you do the next piece, until they’re all done. A few hours later, you take it down, warm from the sun, with not a single static spark on the most artificial-fibered items. Even t-shirts and shorts give you a sense of accomplishment, but the sheets, which retain a straight-from-heaven scent even a few days later as you spread them on your bed, are the ultimate reward.

I’ll be the first to admit the task takes too much time during the uncertain weather and busy schedule of my winter. But every year it’s one way I celebrate summer’s coming. I remember my sturdy grandmother, who hung taut sheets on a taut line on the cement back porch behind her sweet house in Brno, the Czech Republic. And most of all, I think of my mother, whose commitment to drying on a clothesline led to an unfriendly visit from the leaders of her neighborhood association in Texas, and who now dodges the rains of Seattle to dry her laundry.

There are, of course, sound carbon-fighting reasons for drying clothes this way. Dryers take up a disproportionate amount of electricity, increase the temperature in an already summer-heated house, and cause house fires, too. I’ve read about college dorms adding indoor drying spaces, and again remembered my grandma, who had an entire room in the basement devoted to nothing but. Going completely without electric dryer systems seems a little extreme to me - but very much an American, either-or kind of solution. Me, I like having the option, in case, you know, it rains, or snows, or hails, any of which are, in Colorado Springs in June, a possibility.

In the meantime, though, even though the young woman spoke her admiration for my clothesline in a sort of “oh, check out the fun natives” style, I saw it as a sign of hope. She probably arrived in an air-conditioned SUV with about four times the needed interior space. But she wanted a clothesline.

Adventures in Vacation Parenting

You’d think if anyone could deal with a vacationing eleven year old, it would be me.
We middle school special ed teachers, after all, pretty much get it all. This year I had a kid whose nervous system slowly, inexorably deteriorated all year long; by March, I watched urine dripping down from her wheelchair, her eyes full of tears, in the middle of language class. Another student rarely bathed, got the glasses he needed only after the community facilitator supervised his exam and drove to the optician to pick them up, and had twenty absences in the spring semester – and his lugubrious learning curve showed it. Other kids were only cooperative as long as there was candy in the offing; the rest of the time, behaviors such as reading, writing, or completing math assignments seemed beyond their repertoire.
But those kids go home at the end of the day. We teachers sigh, mentally shake ourselves like a lab getting out of a pond of water, finish whatever paperwork must be turned in before the end of the day, and go home, to think about our students only sporadically. Your own kid doesn’t leave, especially during vacations; he’s there at noon, at 3, and at 730 at night too.
Parenting is exceptionally interesting when you’re the vacation parent. I spend a little over 4 weeks of the summer with Jake. Some of the days are easy, when we run up to the Denver museum, or the zoo, or when his friend comes over and they spend the day play-fighting mostly, upstairs in his room or in the yard. But the rest of the time, Jake voices only one ambition – to watch videos of Anime cartoons on the computer.
I understand his need for predictable, easy-to-decipher stories. As a kid, I loved the novels of Karl Mai for the same reason. I’ve no idea how many times I reread the tales of Old Shatterhand and his Apache friend Vinetou, acted them out with my friends when I could, daydreamed how I too would reduce foes to fearful jelly. But this summer I’ve decided to limit the time Jake spends with his Anime friends, in an effort to reduce his dependence on passive electronic entertainment.
My decision wasn’t well received.
“So I was thinking,” he said as we walked to the community garden to water our so-far-dormant seeds, “what if I read for an hour, and then I can get two hours on the computer?”
“You can get an hour if you spend an hour reading, and pick up a trashcan of sticks from the yard,” I responded.
“A trashcan? No way! Not gonna do it!”
“Ok, well, then you aren’t getting on the computer.”
If you’ve dealt with an eleven-year-old who thinks he’s getting a raw deal, you pretty well know what came next. Jake told me that I used to do fun things with him, but “now all we do is go to the community garden.” He told me that his dad was much more fun, because he took Jake fishing. That I was just as bad as his stepmother. He demanded to call his father (who is probably incommunicado on a fishing trip, but that was beside the point.) He demanded to go to his father’s house. When we got home and I still hadn’t relented, he picked up a book.
Ten minutes later he came out to where I was hanging the laundry on the line. “I’m sorry…”
And so it went for the next hour or so. He was angry, and said so, kicked shoes and books on the floor, yelled at the cats. Then he said he was sorry. Then he tried to negotiate the time back up to two hours. We compromised on an hour and half. He demanded I take him to his father’s house. He picked up the shovel, though I think not even he knew what he planned to do with it.
We’re still at it. He’s finished his reading; now he’ll need to do stick patrol; then he can get on the computer.
I, in the meantime, excoriate myself for not having set more limits on his computer use all along. When you’ve only got your kid a little of the time, it’s hard to remember that raising them is your job too.

Socialized Medicine and Me: a Love - Hate Affair.

I had a pretty nice beginning.

Born free of charge, to a couple of pediatricians in a city that, even in its postwar funk, radiated beauty.

But things went wrong pretty quickly. Mom had to work; off to daycare I went, there to catch colds that led to ear infections that followed each other so quickly that, in the apparent absence of decent antibiotics and total ignorance of tubes to drain inner-ear fluid, became chronic by the time I was three. Only surgery could heal me. They tried, three times, and I just kept getting worse.

In ’68 we emigrated. Right after my parents passed the ECFMG, and could practice medicine, they found a good otolaryngologist. Unlike the doctors of my east-central European homeland, he had a microscope to operate with, and antibiotics specific for my problem. By 14 I was infection-free, though almost completely deaf in my left ear – the doctor had to essentially amputate my entire cochlea.

I’ve adapted; my friends and children sit and walk on my right side. But whenever my mother gets nostalgic and regretful about their decision to leave the Czech lands, I remind her that, had we stayed, I would probably be at least deaf, and possibly brain damaged or dead. By the time my American doctor got the infection out, it was a few millimeters away from the auditory nerve.

My older son had ear infections too, one after the other. He ate a drugstore’s worth of Amoxicillin by the time he was three, and the doctor made noises about tubes. But his hearing is perfect.

I haven’t told that story for a few years. I worried that it would reflect badly on medical training in the land of my birth, but, even more, on socialized medicine.

And you would think that I would be the most fervent supporter of private health care. Like Rush Limbaugh (well, unlike Rush – he got the socialized version, Hawaii style) I benefited – greatly – from the system as it stands. Not only did it help me finally get healthy; my parents’ incomes as physicians financed a long, aimless exploration through college, as well as sundry expenses after.

But once I grew up and the professional courtesy that, in my adolescence, paid for my routine care, ran out, I began to understand the costs of that private system. And once I began my career, in which I so often work with those in the lowest income bracket, I began to understand its inherent injustices.

I saw adults and children with chronic mental illness that couldn’t afford either the medicine most appropriate for their condition, or the talk therapy to help them deal with its impact on their lives. I sat in a meeting with a parent who burned his eyes on the job, but couldn’t afford to go see a doctor. I saw kids who couldn’t play sports because their parents couldn’t afford the costs of a physical.

Me, I was lucky. Two uncomplicated deliveries, and a bike accident, both subsidized by insurance companies that valued their relationships with school districts too much not to pay. But still, I made many phone calls, necessarily during work hours, to ensure that payment, and often it seemed that the goal of all those hoops was for the consumer to just get too tired or disorganized, and stop trying.

It rankled. Like my father, I grew the conviction that all medical care should be fee-free to all individuals. The failure of the Clinton plan broke my heart, and I was afraid to believe that the ascent of Obama and the Democratic majority would make any difference. I was wrong, of course. And a few Sundays ago, as I clicked between the HBO series The Pacific and the House vote, I felt relief and resignation about both topics by the end of the evening. Relief that the some objective had been achieved, but resignation that so much blood, real and figurative, had been spilled along the way, to achieve relatively little.

And yet. Perhaps the outcome was the best it could have been. Yes, I’ll have to keep making phone calls to make sure my medical bills get paid. But one hopes, fervently, that enough of a profit motive will remain in the system to keep the medical nightmare that pestered my childhood from becoming a reality here.

Talking Back, Part 2

I had, as usually, bought more than I meant to at the grocery store, and was just looking for a checkout stand that included an actual person, when I walked past the magazine display. 'Education' was the word that caught my eye.

On closer look, I saw the complete title was 'The Solution to Education,' splashed in a red ribbon on the cover of Newsweek. Behind it, written as if by a boy suffering old fashioned punishment, over and over on a blackboard, were the words 'we must fire bad teachers.'

It's such a simple solution, isn't it? And it has the force of research - the quality of a teacher can make up to a 75% change in the achievement of the kids with the same background, even in the same school.

And I've seen it. I've seen the kid that seems to be attempting to wiggle right off the ground in one class, literally bounce, smile radiating, from the praise of another teacher.

And like everyone who's read the New Yorker article or heard the This American Life story, I recoiled at the tales of New York's 'rubber room,' where teacher who have proved their unsuitability for the classroom sit all day, doing nothing, collecting paychecks.

But, as with most problems, the immediate solution looks much more complicated, close up.

What is a bad teacher, anyway? More to the point - what is a good teacher?

Take the wiggly kid. The class he likes better is science; language arts, not so much. Yes, the science teacher has a charisma that, perhaps cannot even be learned or duplicated. And he's a guy, and a coach. But teaching this student how to organize a paragraph is a much more daunting task than, say, helping him measure the volume of an irregular object. The first is abstract, and involves an ease with words that is beyond his third-grade level reading skills. The second involves measuring a water level, dunking the rock in, measuring the water level again. For a kid that learns with his eyes and body movements, the hands-on task is infinitely less frustrating.

Many teachers, too, are more effective with some groups of kids than others. I spend some time in an advanced language arts class every day. The kids are (well, mostly) very engaged in the presentation, discussion and implementation of every topic. Each time the teacher asks a question, several hands go up, and the kids usually arrive at the correct answer. She asks them to do a lot of writing, and they get it done. She fills up every second of the class with learning. Effective teacher, right? Yes she is. But I've also been in one of her less advanced classes. Chaos doesn't exactly rule there, but frustration does at least some of the time, both on the part of teacher and students. She's good. She isn't perfect.

The research that's been performed, shows that effective teachers establish classrooms in which the kids feel empowered but organized and orderly. She or he 'accepts and expands'- even a partial answer is accepted, praised, and built on to create the concept the kids need to learn. Important concepts and procedures are drilled, anchored, rehearsed, utilized. And kids' behaviors are shaped to the level desired through praise, structured rewards, and celebrations.

Teachers are largely evaluated on implementing these procedures. But, here's the crux. Although most of the time, this is what you do to get students to achieve and learn essential academic skills, that learning doesn't always show up on the most high-stakes measure of all - the state achievement tests.

My evaluations have, almost without exception, been stellar; I love the performance, the 'in the zone' aspect of teaching, and generally can keep a class engaged for the entire period, in activities that are 'standards-based' and oriented toward the most essential learning. But you know what? By the measure of the achievement tests, I stink worse than Stilton cheese. Because, I already know, the great majority of my kids will score 'unproficient.' Across the board.

But, you say, your kids have special needs. And it's true, they do. My heart gets broken every year about this time, as I watch some of my kids struggle, fail, and eventually largely give up on the state test. For some, learning the key terms in a word problem, that signal the desired operation (think 'less than' or 'how many more') was a victory - but none of those key terms are used on a state math test. Kids with Autism and Aspergers don't have the theory of mind that allows them to pretend a situation they haven't experienced - so the 'imagine this situation:' questions on the writing test are unintelligible. And some, like my student this morning, look over the test, decide it's too difficult, and simply refuse to even attempt it, because they don't have the emotional skills to handle taking a chance on failure.

I watch all this happen, and my internal dialogue is scathing. Fool, I think, you should've seen the question they're all stuck on, or have given up on, coming. You should have taught it, or something like it, directly.

I used to work with a special education professor who said, if your kids fail a test, 'you ain't taught it good enough.' I always liked that, but so often nowadays, I ask, what is it that I should have taught 'good enough?' Which of the hundreds of things they don't know?

Yes, my kids have special needs. But there are many children out there who are equally unsuccessful, but whose skills are just ok enough not to qualify for an Individual Education Program. How will we determine whether their test scores are the fault of bad teaching?

What, exactly, makes one a good or bad teacher?

Talking Back

Anybody who knows me wouldn't be surprised to see me on the way to work this morning, gesticulating to the extent my little Yaris will allow, talking back to the radio.

My friends and family would be amazed, though, by the identity of my unseen and unknowing communicant. Not Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh - though come to think of it, those guys I wouldn't even be listening to, much less bothering to talk to.

No, it was NPR.

Somehow this was parenting and education morning. First, there was a story about the impact of losing the hearing in one ear, especially for kids and their learning. It's harder, with just one functional ear, to locate and understand speech, and thus compels sufferers to avoid noisy, chaotic environments. I design my own social life partly around that particular deficit; but I understand that children and adolescents rarely possess the self-confidence and self knowledge to adjust similarly.

But it was Joanne Silberner's second story that incensed me so. British researchers, she intoned a little victoriously, have determined, through a longitudinal study, that kids who have behavior problems in school, complain of more pain and ailments as adults.

"Doh!!" is what I said back.

I hang with kids who have trouble behaving in school pretty much all the time. Every place I've taught, the educational environment has been leveled: there are top-level classes, called SAIL or IB or just plain advanced; the mid-level classes, and then the classes where much of the work performed is remedial in nature, and the kids almost all struggle.

This is based on sound educational theory and practice; kids learn better in environments homogeneous enough to give them learning at a level they need. And it's particularly true in middle school, where the more basic learners tend to also be concrete learners, and require concepts to be explained in terms heavily reliant on the visual and kinesthetic.

Note that word, 'kinesthetic.' Because that also means that these kids are often wiggly. And wiggly often translates to bad behavior. It's just that much more challenging for a kid who learns through body movement to sit still and listen respectfully as a teacher or even another student has his/her say.

And what that means is that the basic classes where I hang my teacher shingle are also the classes where the toughest kids practice their most challenging behaviors.

So yeah, I know a lot of 'bad actors.'

They include 'Jeremiah,' whose arms are covered with burn scars from, my guess is a failed attempt at making fireworks more exciting, though for all Iknow he was heroically saving someone from a fire. Jeremiah has a blonde buzz cut and uses baby talk to let us know we're boring him. He requires a personal invitation to put even a sentence on paper.

Then there's 'Paulie.' He too makes lots of noise, and works hard to announce it to the world that he doesn't care if he gets into trouble. He's got an engaging smile, and his hand is up whenever there's a question he can answer. He tells me he loves to cook, and wants to be a chef when he grows up. I think he could be great.

'Henry' is about a foot too tall for middle school desks. I've learned to let him sit in any position in which he's comfortable. Most of the time, he just talks out in class - and until I started consequencing him by making him stay late, he announced, five minutes from the end of class, loudly, 'it's time to go!'
It's a small thing. It drives you crazy.

'Nick' just came back from a few months' expulsion. Just in time for CSAP testing. He's still got that 'glad to be back' diffidence about him. He's feeling things out, smiling, ingratiating. But he got expelled for hitting other kids. Hard. And today, once he figured out that he could, he just put whatever occurred to him for answers on the test. Because he had no idea of how to solve the math problems, or because he just didn't feel like trying? Who knows? I'm not sure even he does.

Finally, 'Ellwood'. A gorgeous child that responds beautifully to praise and a kind smile. But bore him, criticise him, at your own peril. Oh, and you better let him stand up whenever he wants to.

So what do all these character sketches have to do with Joanne Silberner's report?

They've all been suspended for bad behavior. And my guess is, they'll all have futures challenged by health problems.

It was her conclusion that bothered me, though. Fix behavior problems, and you'll fix health problems, she said.

Nope. Not that easy. I could put these kids in uniforms, set up reinforcement schedules, punish the slightest misbehavior (assuming their parents would agree) and I'd get well-behaved kids. But I'm not sure it would change their futures one iota.

These kids, if they finish high school, and even if they don't, are headed for minimum wage, at least for a while. You ever work at those jobs? Repetitive, physically challenging, and exquisitely boring.

This is a combination practically guaranteed to cause physical injury and/or depression.

Many years ago now, I did a stint helping people with disabilities find jobs. The folks who had the hardest time? Those who'd been hurt, had a lifting limitation of, say, ten pounds, few skills, and were depressed. It was almost impossible to find a job that would match these people's preferences, skills, and medical needs.

So, what to do?

The government white paper entitled 'The Forgotten Half" was written over twenty years ago. It addressed the problem caused by American schools' neglect of kids who are not college bound. The authors pointed out that these students graduate from high school with few marketable skills and prospects.

With the advent of 'No Child Left Behind,' things have gotten worse. High schools have few to no true vocational programs, except for those with echt disabilities; kids like Jeremiah are left in the cold. We make noises about community colleges, but to get through even a two year program, you need more motivation and energy than he'd been given. Jeremiah will languish; only pure luck will keep him from a stint or two in jail.

Of the group I listed above, I hold out the most hope for Paulie. He knows what he likes, hones his skills at home already, and is stubborn enough to go for it. Henry will probably help out at his dad's body shop and may take it over someday. The rest of them?

Chances are, at 25, they'll have some pain and ailments.

Making It

I was coming up from the fitness room; she, down from the racquetball courts. Her eyes were even more impossibly enormous for the generous application of kohl, but I recognized her immediately. It was 'Ria.' A few years ago she was an 8th grader who'd somehow managed to appeal to everyone: teachers showered her with praise, other girls befriended her, the shy boys stammered and the bad boys flirted with her whenever they got the chance.

I got to be her teacher for a year, and in that year her reading level grew by 17 months, by dint of her own hard work (yes. I know in the last post I blasted exactly this kind of educational measurement. What're you gonna do.)

Thing is, she shouldn't have been so successful. She lived with her grandparents because both parents were in jail, apparently for many years. She had a significant reading disability, mostly because she didn't understand auditory input at all. She should have been failing everything; instead, she shone. Her father's an artist; she loved to draw, especially tattoo-like pictures of roses and pretty girls, which she gave away to anyone who asked. When she walked across the stage in the middle school continuation ceremony, I was one of many who jumped up to applaud.

I saw her again a couple of years later, and this time snapped a picture for my portrait series. It was a very different Ria. Her makeup looked several days old. Her clothes were ripped. I found her sitting in the hall, waiting for her little sister's teacher conference to end.

"My boyfriend's in jail now," she shared, elaborately casual. And then something about high school girls and fights in locker rooms. It was all very gang-like, and I thought, well, maybe she's getting ready to follow her parents' tracks. Maybe the next time I see her, she'll have a toddler in tow, and cigarettes on her breath, and the light in her eyes will be stolen by the crudity of her life.

I was wrong. Ria, this afternoon, wore skin-tight, shiny lime jeans and t-shirt. Her hair, still gorgeous but bound up, and her athletic shoes, were the only concession to the racquetball game. School was good, she said; next year, she'll start trying out different jobs to see what she wants to do and is good at. I knew about the program, I said; what is she dreaming of?

"I'd like to be a sign interpreter," she shared a little shyly, the way I'd have said, at her age, that I wanted to be an archaeologist. Only, her ambition was a lot more marketable.

"You'd be so good at that," I enthused, "you're such a visual person!"

"Well, we'll see. It depends on how I do on the English test."

She took my breath away, such a young lady, so mature. She's figured life out.

The Fury of Poverty

There were seven of us at the table. The student was eleven, with a pert pageboy and a charming lisp. The social worker was thirtyish and gently male. But the rest of us were middle-aged females.

You couldn't truly paint any of us with an unchanging brush - certainly the speech pathologist, with makeup caked to a mask and perfect bright red nail polish, wouldn't fit into the same slot as I, in my trail-running shoes. But there was an important distinction nevertheless between the school professionals and the parent.

"Lizzie's" grandma had arrived late at the meeting because her husband was late getting the car home. Her hair was long, limp and anything but carefree, the mouth a severe line, the eyes topped by tired, drooping lids. She wore some sort of nondescript navy blue windbreaker; her belly bulged over her gray knit pants, clad in a maroon t-shirt with faded flowers. A stuffed purse emitted frequent rings from her cell phone.

A minute into the first presentation of the evaluation of her granddaughter's academic skills, she said "Grade level. I want the grade level." for the first time.

Anyone who's been in education longer than a year knows that simply getting the grade level is inaccurate. A kid's score on a test indicates only how he or she scored in comparison with all the other kids who took the test. If they scored the same number of points as the median of the kids in the same grade, they're at grade level. So on a writing test, the kid could be way above grade-level skills in organization, and way below grade level in spelling, but still score at grade level.

But grandma had learned that demanding this information was a way to stop educators in their tracks. She is the parent; in today's educational atmosphere, what she asks for, she gets, especially with a child who receives special education services. So nobody argued with her, or tried to explain; everyone supplied the grade level approximation of each test as asked.

Grandma ran the show.

Putatively I was there to help the team formulate middle-school level goals and services.

Actually, I quickly realized, my presence was required so my school knew who we would cope with next year. And eventually I undestood that arguing that the services written into the plan were unrealistic at the middle school level would only inflame conflict. The one time I tried, grandma responded with, "if I don't get what I need (want, I thought privately in response), I'll just take Lizzie somewhere else!"

I suppressed the thought "well, maybe that wouldn't be so bad.." and relaxed. Somehow we'd make it work, like we always do.

As I drove back to my school, though, I didn't think of the services we will provide for Lizzie - who by the way is a charming, hard-working student who will have no trouble whatsoever next year.

I thought about grandma.

At one point, the talk around the table turned to funding, as it always does. Grandma's view: "You're not gonna tell me the school district doesn't have money... look at all those buildings, the schools they've closed that are just being used for storage! They've wasted money, and now they want us to pay!"

And I thought, I bet she voted against 2-C. I bet she assiduously watches the coverage of the tea party movement on Fox; I bet she goes to every rally she can make it to.

Grandma suspects everything about the system. She, like millions, believes that she's been taxed to fund goodies for the ruling class.

And the tragic part? She's right.

Look at the faces of the senators on TV. Don't they look like they have daily facials along with their shaves, at the Senate barber shop we pay for? They wear Armani suits and silk ties the price of Grandma's family daily food budget, for her, her husband, and all seven of the grandkids who live with her.

Grandma's at least sixty, maybe more; but no golden-age-retirement for her. Somebody has to feed, clothe and shelter those kids her progeny made and abandoned. And she's angry, about it all, about the one old car, and the budget that allows for only second hand clothes for her, and no time or money for manicures like that speech pathologist has.

And right now, she can only scare five educators at a granddaughter's staffing meeting.

But watch out.