Wednesday, December 19, 2012

C. Fite's Santas and Cousin Margaret's "Fuck-It" List




Katherine here.

I'm a creature of guilt.  It's not fair.  I'm not even one of those religions that feeds itself on guilt.  I hate that I'm pretty much consumed by guilt because I've given myself a snow day when I could get to my schools by adding some driving time and getting into my pioneer mood.  It's pretty windy though.  My pioneer mood sucks when it comes to wind.

I figure if I do something productive like writing this, my guilt will abate a bit.  At the moment the only productive alternative I could think of that felt worthy of snow day status was to plug away at our traditional holiday jigsaw puzzle.  I need to build up to that.  It's a Van Gogh Paris street scene done in 1,000 seemingly identical pieces.  Progress has been slow although I tucked in two orangish pieces yesterday.  Jim has done more on the puzzle than I have.  I feel like a slacker.  Guilt.

I had an interesting bout of playful guilt recently when we had a fun dinner over at the Fite-Garland home.  Wondrous and varied Santas populated the whole place.  There were two miniature forests of long and lean Christmas trees replacing the one central tree most of us do.  The trees were decorated thematically both in color and content.  Did I mention there were Santas everywhere?

The Santas, Cindy explained, arose from an outing with her sister and Mom where they all purchased an identical Santa one year long ago.  Each year, each woman buys three Santas and shares two with the others and each year a home is populated with the same Santas in different places and in different formations.  So cool.

Part of me is filled with wonder and part of me realizes that if I had done something like that, I'd have no place to store the Santas and they wouldn't look right with me as their guardian.

The whole thing reminded me of a lifetime of guilt I have about holiday decorating.  I didn't get the holiday decorating gene.  I was a working mom with three kids and a huge amount of grading around every holiday I can think of except the 4th of July and even with that one I never got a buzz out of watching fireworks.

I did the basics for holidays.  We carved pumpkins, did the Valentine thing, and the Easter Bunny arrived dutifully though without the house looking any differently than it normally did.  At Christmas we have one very tall tree decorated with a lifetime of gorgeous ornaments and red bows and if I'm feeling extra festive, I add some red poinsettias to the living room.  I like red.

I was feeling really festive this year.  I  designed new bows and had the Christmas store make them for our big tree and bought new lights.  The bows are chartreuse, purple and red.  I bought two purple poinsettias and one very large white one.  From my point of view, this was a decoration revolution of sorts.  I was in a kind of gung-ho mood.

Then I went to Cindy's.  It was so beautiful.  So full of love and history and good taste.  I guess that was it.  C's house was one of the few I'd ever seen outside some special tour or a Christmas store that was not cute.  It was really beautiful.

I felt guilty for a bit over my holiday efforts, but I'm over that.  Even though the decor is restrained, it's really pretty.  I like my little snowman sitting on the mantle, tucked between one purple poinsettia and some green fern thing that's meant to look like a miniature Christmas tree.  I like my big tree and it's new bows and lights.  Even though it's not for Christmas, I like my forest of orchids that make it seem the fish in the paintings on the wall above them are swimming through something sea-like.  I even like the unfinished jigsaw puzzle that occupies the coffee table.  My house looks good.

I had a kind of monumental moment when I realized how much I liked my house and it's holiday decor after my return from Cindy's wonderland.  My house is just fine so  I put massive holiday decorating on my "Fuck It" list.  It was great.

I need to talk about the list and it's origins.  My cousin Margaret invented it.  Margaret is just a bit older than me and she's been a real-life mentor since I was little.  She taught me to shuffle cards, paint my nails, and to dance the twist in her garage.  She's taught me how to make pickles in the last year.  I hope everybody has a cousin Margaret.  I think she's an essential person to my perspective on lots of things.  She's a great teacher and one of her best recent lessons is about her "Fuck It" list.

When you get to be Margaret's age, my age, there are things you just don't want to do anymore.  If you can stop doing them without harming others or yourself, she says it's time to "Fuck It."  It seemed so easy at first.

It's been interesting working on my own "Fuck It" list.  I'm circling back to guilt here.  I spent a week trying to put something on my list.  Every time I got close, I started worrying--what if America needs me to make phone calls at a phone bank again, what if my absence from an exercise class gets the class cancelled for lack of attendance--it was a hellish week of trying desperately to put something on the list without success.  I felt guilty about that too.

I texted Margaret (too embarrassed to call) and I asked if I put something on the "Fuck It" list, could I take if off later if need be.  She assured me it would be okay.  Whew.


I still struggle with my own "Fuck It" list.  Nevertheless, it is slowly growing.  It's pretty liberating.  Try it sometime.

Katherine's "Fuck it" List.

1.  Making phone calls from a phone bank for any reason.
2.  Showing up consistently for any organized exercise class.
3.  Wearing the prosthetic boobs I bought.
4.  Decorating my house to the hilt for any holiday.



Tuesday, December 18, 2012

I'm A Teacher And I'm Always Packing?

I played a little TV game the first day I watched the news reports from Connecticut.  I rotated between Fox, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, and CNN.  I would settle in on one channel, but as soon as that report became political, or shoved a microphone in some poor kid's face, or started offering speculation based on nothing, I changed to another channel where I would watch until I had to change again.  It didn't take long before my game became an endless rotation through the dial, but I did learn a few things.  I was semi-surprised to learn that Fox was more likely to breathlessly put out false information than the other channels, even MSNBC.  Fox was the first to misidentify the shooter as his older brother!  It was also the first to announce that the shooter's mother was a kindergarten teacher at the school and that she lay dead in her classroom.  All the other channels quickly followed suit, but I was happy to note that the folks at MSNBC were more apt to preface all their bogus pronouncements with the caveat that their story was unsubstantiated.  I guess we can be grateful for that, although I would prefer that unsubstantiated stories be left off the news!

Later, as the different channels finally narrowed in on the true story, the speculation began.  Fox spent a lot of time wondering about security and called for us to begin arming teachers.  If only the faculty and staff of Sandy Hook Elementary had been packing, all this never would have happened.  Right!  Over at MSNBC the speculation, like we can expect from all good liberals, turned to social services.  They got a few staff psychologists on the air who proceeded to psychoanalyze the shooter based on the information that he was a loner at school, may or may not have lived with his mother, and was the product of a broken home.  Depending on the psychological pundit, that meant he was variably a sociopath, a schizophrenic, bi-polar, and, although no one mentioned it, probably suffering Attention Deficit Disorder.

From there people on all sides of the political spectrum began weighing in.  This is the wrong time to talk about gun control.  This is the right time to talk about gun control.  This is a war between the urban and rural parts of society.  This is all about individual rights.  This is all about the framers' original intent.  

I have a few reactions to all of this.  The slaughter of these innocents, especially at this time of year, has taken on biblical parallels to all the slaughtering of innocents that happen in those pages.  Having said that, I can't help but point out that all of the lives taken by lunatic gunfire and not so lunatic gunfire in the past decade or so are equally precious and should have stirred the same outrage.  Only Columbine came close because it was the first BIG event.  Those teenagers and adults in Aurora had their lives taken from them every bit as suddenly as the poor little children in Connecticut.  How many children die of starvation every day?  How many die in drone aircraft strikes in Afghanistan and God knows where else?  Is this shooter's sad lunacy more outrageous, more immoral, than the institutionalized lunacy that happens everywhere, everyday?

MSNBC absolves itself of its mute complicity in all those other deaths by calling for a shrink to make sense of it all.  If we make sense of it all, we might be able to point our finger at the CAUSE of the problem.  Than we can get federal funding and form a study group, or a Commission as Joe Lieberman calls it, and that will free us up to get back to thinking about the Fiscal Cliff.

Fox is worse.  They just accept it as a given that maniacs will be out there armed to the teeth with legal assault rifles and similarly legal armor piercing bullets.  Since that is the case, what we have to do is arm teachers.  As one senator said, if the principal had just had her own Bushmaster stashed in a drawer somewhere, she could  have whipped it out and blown the shooter's head off.

I don't need to point out the obvious, but I'm going to anyway.  Most teachers I know, and I know plenty, would be at a disadvantage going up against a 20 year old lunatic in body armor and trained (BY HIS MOTHER!) in the use of assault weapons.  "Now where did I put that magazine?  Ah, there it is.  Now which of these little slots does it go into?"

What would arming teachers really mean.  It would seriously change the emphasis of methods courses. But that's okay because technology is freeing teachers up to spend more time in munitions training.  When I was taking methods classes, we spent lots of time figuring out how to work the ditto machine.  Now, since ditto machines have gone the way of blackboards (remember those), budding teachers can gather in classrooms where the instructor, an ex-marine, will take them through "The Naming of Parts."  (That's a hilarious esoteric joke for all you English majors out there.)

But the problems are bigger than that.  I looked it up at Cabela's and discovered that the cheapest Smith and Wesson six shot revolver sells for $250.  There are 4000 teachers, not including non-certified help, in Jefferson County.  Of course I'm assuming that the calls for arming teachers aren't calling for teachers to arm themselves, so that means that Jeffco would have to find another million dollars in its budget (definition of fat chance) to insure that all of its teachers were packing heat.

And let's face it.  A lousy six shooter isn't going to be much help against a lunatic with a Bushmaster.  The solution?  Let's upgrade the weaponry.  At Cabela's you can purchase a Bushmaster for $1000 and, the ad assured me, that is a real bargain, especially for an implement that is guaranteed to up your masculinity quotient tenfold.  The problem is that equipping Jeffco teachers with the Bushmasters they will surely need (until the next escalation) will cost Jeffco and Jeffco taxpayers $4,000,000!  We are talking about the same taxpayers who got upset a few years ago when they discovered that Jeffco schools were being profligate with the pizza parties they showered on their undeserving staffs.

I don't know about you, but I am skeptical about the efficacy of the arming teachers solution.

I remember a few years ago Kathie and I were touring Caracol, a Mayan ruin on the border between Belize and Guatemala, with Bud and Janet.  The ruins were amazing, but I couldn't stop looking at the armed guards all over the place carrying Uzis (or Bushmasters, or AK 47s, I don't know the difference) and talking into Walky-Talkies.  I didn't like the feeling.  I don't want to replicate that scene at elementary schools all over the country.

Maybe instead of giving every teacher a gun, schools could do with guns what Green Mountain did with Walky-Talkies after Columbine.  The school just owned a handful of the devices, so whenever you reported for your weekly tour of hall duty, the administrator du jour gave you a Walky-Talkie and instructed you to call in if you needed any help.  As soon as I got out into the halls and away from the main office, I turned the stupid thing off and forgot about it.  See what I mean?  You can't trust someone like me with a communications device let alone a lethal weapon.

There is a sign in front of Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Sandy Hook Elementary
1956
Visitors Welcome

Isn't that the way it's supposed to be?



Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Look for the union label

I've always been a union man.  So when I became a teacher, I naturally joined the union.  In fact, if I remember correctly, I sought out the union rep, he didn't seek me.  It wasn't long before I became a union rep and then I started writing columns for the union newspaper.  I joined committees.  I helped man phone banks.  I drove my VW van, the perfect union car, to a big rally at the ad building and brought admiring looks from all of my friends who still wished we could be back in the sixties protesting outside Sproul Hall at Berkeley, our tie died micro buses waiting out in the parking lot to take us to our next venue.

Having said that, I have always been a little skeptical of unions.  The only union I really know is NEA-CEA-JCEA, so I'll focus on that for a second.  For instance, I am idealistic enough to think that the first priority of a teachers' union should be to insure that kids get a good education, to actively promote ideas and new programs that would achieve that end.  It was and continues to be disillusioning to realize the naiveté of such a belief.  A teachers's union first goal has to be the rights and salaries and benefits of its membership and frequently that preempts efforts to help kids.  Not only is that the way it is, that's the way it has to be because there are some things about unions that I know.

+I know JCEA, CEA, NEA, the AFT, and any other acronyms I'm missing, have done more to help kids and CREATE JOBS than all their detractors put together
+I know without a strong teacher union, school boards and school administrations would fuck over the teaching rank and file without giving it a second thought.  The idea that we are all in this together, that we R-1, is absurd.
+I know I would not have the comfortable life I lead now without all those acronyms listed above.
+I know when a state official calls undermining the power of union a Right To Work initiative that it is a bald faced lie the official gets away with because he knows the electorate is too selfish, stupid, and lazy to discover the truth
+I know Right To Work states create fewer new jobs than other states, that Right To Work states have lower salaries, lower benefits, and a rapidly disappearing middle class
+I know the idea that a low paying job is better than no job is a chimera which will only plunge us further into recession and lower our entire GDP
+I know that those who are pushing Right To Work laws in other states know all this.  Their real motivation is to take even more money away from workers and redistribute it to the JOB CREATORS, the wealthy, the people who make up the definitions.
+I know a strong middle class is the best JOB CREATOR and I further know that more than any other social phenomenon in my lifetime, unions create a strong middle class.

My final thought here is I wonder how serious all this brouhaha in Michigan is.  I know that only 17% of the work force in Michigan is union, but that is pretty typical.  The real question is what is the percentage of autoworkers who are union?  My experience in JCEA might be instructive.  Non-union members were not required to pay dues or even a representation fee, but our percentage of membership was high enough that we didn't need the non-members' contributions.  I suspect it is probably the same in auto manufacturing.

That's another thing--the deciding factor actually--that made joining the union a no-brainer for me.  I looked around the Green Mountain faculty at the people who weren't members--disgruntled white males with ill-fitting baseball caps--and decided that any organization those losers didn't want to belong to was made to order for me.  I immediately went up to Dale Bartkus, our union rep at the time, and said, "Sign me up."