Scapegoats and Saviors II

About a year ago, my friend Jason amused himself by starting or ending sentences with the phrase “in THIS economy.”

He'd say things like “man, it is hot today... in THIS economy.” Or, “in THIS economy, we should go to the movies.” Or, “this burger is really good... in THIS economy.”

Jason got a kick out of the fact that everywhere in the media, seemingly, everyone was talking about the ECONOMY. And Jason was spot on: people WERE freaking out. Everything seemed to be about THIS economy. The housing bubble was bursting. The Dow was tanking; unemployment was rising. Pensions were disappearing and factories were continuing to close. Healthcare costs skyrocketing. And, as some theorize, Obama, our first black president, was elected because of the desperation of THIS economy.

Nothing could be-- or can be, because we're still there-- seen outside the lens of money. Financial security is the panacea to all that ails us.

Enter teachers: summers off, long holidays, work only until 3pm. With fat pensions and solid healthcare benefits. All a teacher has to do is get through the first couple of years and then they have guaranteed jobs forever. With constant raises. Those jerks.

People hate a lot of things about teachers. But they loathe 'tenure' in education.

Some have forgotten why tenure has always been so important. It's quite simple: tenure allows professionals the right to be unpopular. In an industry where most of the 'product' and 'returns' come years (sometimes decades) after the work is completed, tenure has protected fantastic instructors from the caprice of administrators and parents.

Teachers are like umpires or cops: an essential part of the job is telling people things they don't want to hear. Tenure has allowed transformative teachers the ability to lead the unwilling and unmotivated to consider new ideas. To break generational chains of ignorance. To encourage courage.

My friend Nancy puts it most succinctly. Tenure gives teachers permission to be honest.

But I have a brief announcement:
tenure... is... dead.

Or, at least, is on it's last legs. About to bite the bullet. Buy the farm. Check out. Croak.

And, no, not because of 'No Child Left Behind' or 'Race To The Top' or any governmental edict (although I continue to research the RTTP national standards and I'll finish the article sometime soon! I hope). Obama's initiative might expedite tenure's demise, but the government won't be brandishing the executioner's axe.

Tenure will die because, in THIS economy, people are scared. And people are mad.

Some teachers are to blame for the bad rep of tenure. Who didn't have at least one obscenely horrible teacher? I had a half dozen freak shows in front of me as a student. Drunks, molesters, abusers, dimwits, anti-intellectuals... and that's just grade school. Ok, AND high school. I wish I were joking. You've probably got horrible stories, too. And I can practically guarantee that the worst teachers any of us ever had were tenured. They were protected while they made a sham of the profession.

And we return to our jokes about teachers.
What do you call a welfare recipient with a book?
A teacher.
What do you call a welfare recipient with a ball?
Coach.
What do you call a man in a dress who feels up kids?
A drama teacher.

Our favorite worst stories about school are about bad teachers.

Our memories of our teachers, coupled with our cultural tendency to portray teachers as either criminals or saints, give anyone the right to believe that tenure is the stink at the bottom of the education barrel.

And that's why teachers are so sexy these days. Because fear and anger and stinky things get us all hot and bothered.

So what will happen to honesty in talented but vulnerable teachers? What will happen to the greatness of those teachers who inspire hope and change?

In part III, I'll talk about why we keep having the wrong conversation about tenure and what will happen when it's over.

And I won't use any more death euphemisms for tenure. Let this blog be the last breath, the final twitch, the death rattle of these morbid expressions.

The Coronet

Mixology


So, I like to make drinks.

I've decided that this blog could use some refreshing, especially given the sub-tropical climate as of late. It's fun to say that something needs 'refreshing.' I'm worried that this word is being hijacked by the internet browser brigade. The purpose of a good drink, a clever rejoinder, or a sparkling introduction is to refresh. To refresh something else is a beautiful, generous thing. It is at the center of hospitality and civility.

Here's to iBlogAmerica's first drink- an original creation! And here's to you.

The Coronet

2 oz. Gin (preferably Hendricks)
a healthy splash of Rosemary infused simple syrup
a cucumber
club soda
ice

To make the syrup, heat a cup of water until it simmers. Slowly add a cup of sugar and kill the heat. Stir until the sugar has melted. Get a handful of rosemary, tear it up, and toss in the syrup to steep for as long as you like. Let syrup cool and bottle it. Some people like to strain the herbs out. Do your thing. Then...

Fill a shaker with ice. Add the gin, the Rosemary syrup, and one or two thin rounds of cucumber, cubed. Shake it like you mean it-- until your hands hurt from the cold of the ice.

Strain into a highball glass (or a glass slipper, a coiled palm frond, or what have you) over ice. Top with club soda and garnish with one or two thinly sliced rounds of cucumber.

Ah, the coronet. Bright, cheery, a little sophisticated, and wildly refreshing.

Sigh. I love the summer.

Teachers: Scapegoats and Saviors I

If you can't DO, then TEACH.
If you can't teach, teach Gym.

What do you call a lazy, know-it-all with summers off?
A high school student.
What do you call a lazy, know-it-all with summers off with pay?
A high school teacher.


It's actually kind of hard to find good teacher jokes on the interwebs. I mean: hard in a “I found it on Google or Yahoo in .34 seconds” sort of way. I only looked for five minutes-- which is the equivalent of three weeks in pre-internet time-- and found really stupid, “family friendly” jokes. Gross. I think I hate “family friendly” anything. (Disclaimer to my parent readers out there: I know that I am a myopic bachelor who lives at the center of my own universe AND when/if I have children, my outlook on everything, including “family friendly” will change. Check. I got it.)

Anyway, I started thinking of writing this blog based on a simple supposition I have: teaching is the most controversial profession of our time. More than oil tycoons, prostitutes, priests, or bloggers, teachers bring out reactions in us. We all have opinions about them, many of us think most are frauds, we've all been screwed by them, and we know that a good one is priceless.

No one doesn't have an opinion about school teachers. Whether we are talking about summers off, salary, moral character, or competence, everyone feels free to judge teachers. A few of my favorites:

“Teachers only work nine months a year-- and they only work from 8-3.”
“People who become teachers do it because they get to push around little kids.”
“I had a teacher who was wasted/high all the time.”
“Teachers have no 'real life' experience.”
“My friend/cousin/coworker had a teacher who was sleeping with his students.”
“Teachers are people who couldn't make it in 'real world.'”

Fun! And these are just among the most common. My favorites are about how teachers are lazy fakers who mooch off the tax system, just to teach their own, narrow belief systems.

Don't get me wrong. I know that the other side of the coin is equally charged: the belief that teachers are magic-working angels. That a good teacher literally gives his life for his students, sacrificing a life outside school in order to grade papers, plan assignments and activities, and tend to his most needy students. These teachers are the Christs or Buddhas of our times. They have no families, are divorced or unmarried, often have nine cats or a couple of dogs, and float a few inches off the ground.

Anyway, so what's it all about? How did the 'fall back job' of the last few generations become the Lady Gaga of professions?

Check back soon and let's talk about it in Part Two!
And I'd love to hear your thoughts...

Cartoons and Mirrors

A film review.


Once again, Pixar uses brightly colored playthings to smash us to pieces, only to glue us together again.

Prickly pieces have punctuated Pixar's productions in the past. In Finding Nemo, we find a desperate father absolutely devastated by the death of his long lost son. In The Incredibles, a family gets ripped to pieces by secrets that question identity and trust. Wall-E gives us harshly dystopian world in which an orphaned, trash picking robot is the only 'life' left on a planet destroyed by humans. And who can forget the brilliant opening sequence in Up? The perfect confection of boy meets girl leads unstoppably to the bitterness of loss and widowhood.

Dark stuff for kiddie movies. These people at Pixar aren't messing around.

This summer's Toy Story 3 avoids none of the bleakness, either. The end of childhood comes to toy-stewarding Andy, and never in the film do we see him happy to go to college. The focus remains on the toys, however, and here we find abandonment, attempted homicide, and the annihilation of a family.

I'm reminded of the unvarnished Grimm tales. Before Disney (ironically the parent company of Pixar) got a hold of a Grimm tale like "Cinderella," the story was filled with harsh consequences. For instance, the “evil” stepfamily abused Cinderella and constantly lied to her. Cinderella's name comes from the fact that she picked her food from the ashes in the fireplace- often for the sport of her family. Late in the story, when faced with a too-small glass slipper, one of the sisters cut off her own heel to make a gory fit. The prince recognized that Cinderella as the true owner of the shoe simply because “there was no blood in” the shoe when she slipped it on. Birds that spent the story helping Cinderella finish the tale by pecking out the eyes of the sisters, leaving them blinded for a life of darkness.

Yikes.

What makes a Grimm “children's story” tick are the abject desolation and violence that many stories of our time whitewash. Oh, sure, our stories have explosions and death; we love a good chase scene and showdown. But most of our stories often leave us where they found us, counting on the idea that all will be right in the end. The status quo will be preserved. The good guys (or girls) will win and everything will be returned to normal.

The storytellers at Pixar make no deals with us. They grasp that an authentic representation of the world must include irreversible consequences. On one hand, Pixar films seem to offer escape and bliss: we go to these movies expecting to have our heartstrings pulled while we giggle and laugh. On the other hand, Pixar films abuse us with the burdens of our sympathies: we lean forward, inhaling, worried that these little dolls/fish/robots might not actually survive how awful everything is.

We adults watching these films know that the world is an unforgiving place. Bad things happen to good people. Friends leave us. Homes are destroyed forever. People die. We know what's on the line for Nemo's dad when he breaks down in the face of how incredibly large and dangerous the ocean is. We understand that Wall-E's trash dump world is a reasonable, if avoidable, future to our own fragile green planet. And we know that Andy's loyal and determined toys, like all playthings, are all destined to be tossed off by a boy who outgrows his own childhood.

These Pixar characters are destined to be changed forever by their travails, left with permanent scars and irretrievable pasts. In Toy Story 3, Woody and Buzz and the toy gang go through a one-way door, forever leaving the familiar comforts of grown-boy Andy's bedroom. And Andy, too, goes through his own threshold, leaving his emptied bedroom for college. Andy, like his erstwhile plastic and fuzzy friends, will never be the same.

And we, watching from the chilly dark of our cineplex, recognize these primal forces at work. We know that these animations are merely ephemeral pixies, pretty things that glow from hard drives. (It's just a cartoon!) But something about the distance of it all-- the remove of the cartoon coupled with the remove of the cinematic experience, opens a window into the very center of us.

In the dazzling color of all, something wonderful happens. Through the unique alchemy of animation, Pixar makes us kids again. Witches are real, as are giants and monsters. We re-encounter the way we experienced stories as children. We look up at towering kitchen tables, looking through belt buckle perspectives and are reminded just how big and scary and thrilling this world can be.

Where nostalgia helps us shine up our memories, focusing on the good and the beautiful, Pixar's Toy Story 3 gives us the entire memory. We see mom's heartbreak at our newly emptied room. We remember our own favorite and worn toys from our childhood, knowing that these well-loved pieces are likely in a landfill somewhere.

And we remember that first, last time we looked at the place we grew up, that first time we left home. We clearly see that one way door that led from our technicolor childhood to our complex and ever-shifting adulthood.

For a moment, in that half light of the cinema, the fragility and durability of these animated toys pulls back the curtain. And the beauty is more than enough.

Staring At the Sea

All of my gay friends spent the Fourth of July in 'Gay Towns.'

You know 'Gay Towns.' These are the places where lesbians push baby strollers and middle aged gay men get to wear those tight tank tops that they don't wear to office parties. Trannies order cafe lattes right next to bald, hairy men in leather vests. Muscle boys in cargo shorts flirt with skinny boys in American Apparel short shorts. Women in ankle length skirts with unshorn underarms hold hands and blare Amy Ray from boom boxes. Other women, in baseball caps and sleeveless shirts, talk sports or politics while sipping beer.

A few of my friends went to Provincetown on Cape Cod, others went to Rehoboth on the shore of Maryland. Like Melville's Ishmael, all seemed drawn to the water. Why do the gays head to the coast? Maybe it's the idea of an outpost away from society, where mores and customs seem more relaxed. There's a 'live and let live' quality that so few of us practice and yet many of us claim.

Perhaps it's the sense of scale at the ocean: the social hierarchies and rules of human beings can appear trivial in the face of the irrefutable horizon of the sea.

At any rate, my friends, all of them Americans, left their homes for the holiday and headed to the sea for safe harbor among like-minded people. Every year they do this. It's an annual tradition.

We celebrate the Fourth of July to recognize a singular event represented by a searing piece of writing from the 18th Century. Standing at a crossroads in history, the Declaration Of Independence championed an idea: no governing body could bestow basic rights upon human beings because human beings already had those rights. No king, no emperor, no minister, no consulate, no board, no governor, no voting body-- no one-- was empowered to give or take certain, inalienable rights from people. Among these were life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 'We are born free,' the document said.

I'm still knocked out by all of that. The power of the Declaration still vibrates and pulses; its relentless tide still disturbs, resonates, and inspires. Like the ocean, its hard-line horizon is irrefutable.

Two hundred and thirty four years ago, a group of men left their homes and headed to a port town, on the water. With it's bustling marine commerce, it was a lot like a coastal town. It was named for and dedicated to Brotherly Love. These men sought safe harbor among like-minded people. And they wrote about freedom.

And as I think about those men, who literally put their names to an idea that flew directly against norms and laws and the power of a king, I can't help but wonder what we, as a nation, are doing with gay rights.

How is it possible that gays cannot serve openly in our military? How is it possible that gay people cannot get married? How is it possible that these people must choose to be 'open' or 'in the closet?' Gay or Bi or Trannies or whatever. What is going on here?

On the Fourth of July, we gather to recognize the signing of an incredible document. It's our most important national holiday and it's about freedom. Every year we do this. It's an annual tradition.

And the sea is there, with its undeniable horizon, sending wave after wave.

We are born free. We are born free. We are born free.

Monsters Singing You To Sleep

A music review.


The music scene is riddled with average singers, couched in polished production and sugared with Autotune. Everybody sounds the same, it seems.

Scott Peterson, of Pittsburgh's feisty band The Wreckids, is no average singer. And he's no average songwriter, either. Accompanied by his brilliant actress/musician wife, Sarah Siplak, Peterson has made a record for our time, putting his toy boat of hope in a sloshing tub of fears.

The Wreckids' 2010 EP release Singing You To Sleep But Giving You Nightmares finds a place between worlds of sweetness and bitterness, often stealing into both. The Wreckids tell wry stories of loss and heartbreak, layering thrilling harmonies with old school acoustic guitar playing. They're not afraid to make you laugh or make you cry; Peterson's authenticity simply demands a response from you.

"What'R We Gonna Do?" drops you into the Wreckids' cockeyed world of jokes wrapped in dark but plain observations. We're trapped in our boring lives, Peterson reminds us before advising us to "eat" and "sleep" in order to deal with it. "Somebody's Heart" cuts you with its scalpel lyrics only to sew you back up with its soaring vocals and harmonies. And you'll sing along without meaning to; this is a real folk album.

But don't expect a 70's throwback: Peterson isn't James Taylor or Joni Mitchell. The Wreckids are clearly not trying to replicate a sound. If you need a comparison, Peterson might be closer to earnestness of Ani DiFranco with the tenderness of Rufus Wainwright. He's playful, too, like Regina Spektor, but kind of nerdy, like Ben Folds.

The point is: The Wreckids have a whole sound, a new voice on the scene. And Peterson and Siplak put on an undeniably riveting live show that grabs and builds audiences immediately. There is something special here, and audiences in Pittsburgh and New York City know it.

In a music world of hipsters, rockers, ingenues, and models, The Wreckids bring you something different. They bring you the real thing: music for music's sake. Get this record. It'll soon be one of your favorites.

Singing You To Sleep But Giving You Nightmares is available on itunes.

Full disclosure: The Wreckids' Peterson and Siplak have been known to personally serve food, jokes, and whiskey to the author of this review. Among other things.