Teaching--Too Tough a Job for a Lifetime?

I’ve met a lot of teachers—from perky little blonds right out of school who just love children—to grumpy old men (and women) of forty who’ve been on the job way, way too long. Other than lawyers, teachers are the most cynical professionals I’ve ever met. Like lawyers, teachers have seen enough guilty go free and enough innocent hang.
Young teachers tend to agonize over failing students. They allow students to retake and retake tests until somehow they achieve a passing grade (don’t you wish your boss was as nice?). Experienced teachers can sound so bland when they mention that half the kids in this or that class are flunking.
A teacher I really liked, who taught honors, senior English classes and adjunct courses at college, was sitting in his classroom during that magic week in June when seniors are already gone. His feet were up on the desk; he was watching television. He grinned when I stuck my head in his door, “School wouldn’t be such a bad place if it weren’t for the students.”
Every time I tell that story to a teacher—at least to one who has taught more than five years--I get anything from a cynical snicker to a weary nod. None have ever expressed surprise or dismay. It is a shared feeling.
Listening to a principal, a superintendent, or an “educator” who is far removed from the classroom is like listening to a Congressman opine about the glories and sacrifices of war. Do you want facts? Talk to the guys in the trenches—privately, off the record.
I quit teaching in the 1960s and didn’t return for decades. I saw 129 students a day. I concluded that I had approximately three minutes a day for each kid. I.Q.s ranged from 85 to over 150. I defy man or angel to devise a single lesson plan that can cover that spread.
Some of my kids (I was in Junior High—then 7, 8 and 9th grade students) were simply waiting for the magic age of sixteen so they could walk. They were my real discipline problems. It was a rural district so some of my kids could look forward to taking over acres of rich muck land and making an excellent income out of it. They could imagine no reason why English, history or algebra was going to help them in any way. Neither could their parents.
Except for a precious few who had college aspirations, motivation was nil. When they would defiantly ask me why they needed English, I could only answer, “Someday you may visit a foreign country, like the United States, where it is spoken.” (We were in Michigan.)
I got tired of forcing the unwanted upon the unwilling. That is stressful (I gained fifty pounds in a year), and it is hopelessly discouraging. You feel like your life is such a waste. Even the occasional kid who tells you you matter isn’t enough to re-invigorate you.
(One of those kids, incidentally, whose I.Q. was over 150 and whose father really cared, is now president of the college I attended. He’s a rare case. A tour in Vietnam where he was a forward artillery spotter may have provided additional motivation.)
Maybe asking people to teach for thirty or more years is just too much. I recall reading something about Inca civilization. They divided life into three stages. From birth to 20, you were a learner. From 20 to 50 you were a producer/worker. At 50 you began to teach the learners whatever you had done all your life as a producer (men and women).
I know our society is far more sophisticated and technologically demanding than theirs was—but I wonder if the idea of NOT having “professional/life time teachers” isn’t a good one. Who can do a better job of teaching algebra, or economics, history or English—a 20 something fresh out of school or someone who worked with it all of his or her life?
There’s logic to the answer to that question. It doesn’t hurt that research shows people of grandparent age relate better to kids than do people in their twenties and thirties. Something has got to work better than the present system does.
Even beyond motivating parents to care (yesterday’s thought).

Education--Who's Really Responsible?

Our scores aren’t matching up. Japanese kids do science better than ours; New Zealand kids read better—and on and on and on. It’s somebody’s fault—somebody must be MADE to do it better. Who else should that be but the people who are paid to do it?
Wonderful story—kid comes home with a dreadful mark in Algebra. Father looks at the report card and says, “I’m really disappointed with your teacher.” Kid nods, “So am I.” Yeah. Do you suppose that’s one of the same kids that I handed an assignment to today and he said, “I ain’t gonna do this” and threw the paper on the floor? Sounds like it.
There’s no way to make him. You can send him to the Counseling Office where he’ll get a lugubrious talk on responsibility and respect for his teacher. You can kick him out of school, and that same dad in the story will stay too busy to notice. The kid’ll watch TV for a week.
There is simply no way to make those young men or women PICK UP that paper and do the assignment if they decide not to. Many teachers I talk to wish mightily (and privately) that they would bring the paddle back in school. That certainly would motivate some students.
I’m not against it. I can pull the faces to mind right now of a dozen or so high schoolers that I KNOW would react positively to that sort of stimulus and, as I sit here, I can imagine nothing else that would get them to pick up the paper and work.
But the rumble out of Washington and from more and more states is: we’re going to peg teachers’ pay to how well their students perform on the standardized tests. In other words, if those kids will not pick up his paper and work, we’ll dock the teacher’s pay.
On the face of it, that’s stupid—and it shows a kind of mindless desperation, suggesting the sort of floundering that one expects from a panicked, drowning person. (At least the life guard is sllowed to use physical force to subdue a potentially dangerous flounderer.)
Our whole system is panicked. We are graduating schools full of kids who can neither read nor write nor do sums. Each year whole faculties are trained in some new system to better teach math or reading. Nobody tells them how to get the kids to pick up the papers.
I remember reading several books on teaching experiences in inner city schools during the 1960s. The bottom line in each one of them was that there was no motivation from home. I found that to be true when I taught in 1963. The parents didn’t care—they got angry if you flunked a kid for cheating on his test, yes, indeedy. But they saw little enough use for education themselves. Why hassle their kids about it?
Illiterate immigrant families on New York’s lower East Side produced untold numbers of doctors, lawyers, writers, accountants, teachers and scholars during the last century. Why? Parents believed that the classroom was the only way out of the sweat shops—and if the teacher even hinted that the kid was a problem? Boom! I know I never wanted my Grand Rapids parents to hear about problems at school. They didn’t do a lot of teaching, but they motivated me! So did a lot of my friends’ moms and dads.
Parents have got to get involved again—and not automatically side with their child when there’s a problem. The paddle may have to come back for kids who have no parents who care enough to motivate them.
The teacher cannot do it alone. He or she has been left with nothing in his or her educational arsenal with which to deal with the kid who doesn’t care—and the parents who don’t care. Cutting teacher pay will not motivate parents or students.
This is the emphasis that must come out of Washington. Teachers CANNOT do it alone. There must be books in the home, parents willing to take the time to read to young children, to turn the TV off and have quiet times for study. (Pull the cable out, deny internet access during certain hours.)
(But the parent wants to watch too—and play computer games. He often doesn’t care enough for his kids to deny himself. Kids who do care often come to school exhausted because they didn’t start studying until after midnight.)
Education doesn’t take place at home—but it MUST begin there. The motivation must start there. No child must be allowed to enjoy the security that comes from knowing he can drop his paper on the floor, refuse to work, and there will be no consequences.
Cutting salaries because we parents have allowed that to happen is simply vicious.

Student Loans--The Next Bubble?

Last week a friend of ours was looking over some application forms for college when she looked up and said, “We’ve had a ‘Tech Bubble’; we’ve had a ‘Housing Bubble’—the next bubble will be the student loan bubble.”
She’s thinking of going back to school and finishing the art degree she never quite got back in the 1970s. Along with sticker shock at tuition prices, she’s been both astonished and horrified at the nonchalance with which colleges assume she will be taking out thousands of dollars in student loans. It’s simply expected.
These loans are expected because, today, books alone cost more than tuition did when she started college in 1972. Parking fees alone at several area colleges equal what I paid in tuition when I started college in 1957. (My youngest son’s high school even charges for parking this year.)
College after college says, you get so much in direct scholarships (over the years this friend has maintained a 3.96 GPA), so much in work study, and the other ten, or fifteen or even twenty thousand a year will come in the form of loans.
This morning I had occasion to visit a local college campus. I overheard some students talking—very casually—about the thousands of dollars they had accumulated in loans. (This was at a relatively inexpensive state college.) I joined the conversation.
I mentioned my son who has gone back to graduate school. When he started three years ago, his job prospects looked very bright. Now, as he finishes his course, those prospects have dried up. There isn’t a job in his field this side of the Arab oil states—if there’s one there.
He’s slated to be done in June. He owes thousands—which, three years ago, he assumed he could nicely pay back with the job he was expecting. Six months after his last class, job or no job, the clock runs out and he must start paying back those loans—with substantial interest.
His best option seems to be to take out another loan, return to school in the fall, and put off the evil day of repayment for another year. I mentioned this situation to the students I was chatting with. “Yes,” one of them said, “my brother is in his seventh years at the University of Michigan.
“He’s caught In the same bind.” The only problem with his temporary solution of taking more classes to avoid repayment is that this just accumulates more debt. When the clock does run out, he will have far more to repay than he ever planned on.
Just like in the real estate boom days, people took out big mortgages imagining that raises would come automatically and paying off the mortgage would be easy. When the bottom dropped out, that assumption proved to be grievously faulty.
How many kids are in the same bind my son is—or the brother of the student I talked to this morning? What happens if many of them stay in school for another year, racking up more debt, and then NEVER find the expected, high paying job with which to repay.
What happens when they need to buy transportation, pay high rent and start supporting themselves—all after servicing that huge student loan debt? What happens if enough of them simply cannot do it?
What do the banks do that cannot collect on all of these lovely student loans they so willingly (just like mortgages) pushed on tens of thousands of kids all over the country? Do we have another debt/credit crunch? Who bails out this one?
My acquaintance may or may not be proven correct—but it is certainly something worth watching out for over the next few years.
It’s nothing I hear them worrying—or even talking—about in Washington or on the financial pages. But they were telling us before the last two bubbles popped that something fundamental had changed in the market. It hadn’t then—has it now?

Democracy In Iraq--BOOM!

Was it five car bombs—or was it seven—that went off in Baghdad the other day? I guess it depends on whether you count in Arabic or English. The locals say one thing; what’s left of the American military presence says the other.
We sponsored an election. It was apparently a reasonably fair election; it was also a dreadfully close election. We take close elections to the Supreme Court or the loser simply quits and lets the other guy have it. In simpler societies, recounts can get bloody.
So far, just in April, 100 Iraqi’s have died in the process. This comes just as we are preparing to cut the 96,000 GIs remaining in Iraq down to under 50,000. That should be completed by September; everybody is scheduled to leave by next year.
Why does this remind me of 1921?
What happened then, you ask. Read on—and see if it sounds familiar. There was a once a province of the brutal Turkish Empire that was maintained by force of arms, not by democratic mandate or agreement of the mutually hostile tribal and religious groups.
The Turkish Empire went away in a cloud of gun smoke back in 1918 and the British decided to take this province over. Mesopotamia, as it was then called, had NEVER been a unified country. Already by the end of World War I, people were beginning to sense just how much oil this piece of earth contained. Britain was quite willing to take on that burden.
Britain, however, was short on cash, and there was not a lot of political sentiment back in England for another foreign war—even for oil. In fact there was none. World War I had left England broke and sick of war—she wanted her boys home.
So young Winston Churchill, who was Colonial Secretary in 1921, held a meeting in Cairo where he came up with what seemed like a brilliant idea—to him. He would 1) combine three hostile tribal areas in Mesopotamia—that of the Kurds, the Shiites and the Sunni’s into one brand new country, called Iraq.
Two, he installed one of the characters out of “Lawrence of Arabia” as king—thus creating a unified national government. (This chap, by the way was from Arabia and had already been tossed out of Syria for trying to make himself king there.) Then, 3) Churchill decided to create an Iraqi national army under this new government so that the British troops could go home.
Cheaper, fewer British casualties, instead of three areas to pacify—one nation state with its own army. Absolutely brilliant plan. Rather like the plan Churchill had as a boy when he sought to gain entrance to a “haunted house” by blowing up a home-made bomb in the outside well. He blew himself high in the air and never found the “secret passage” into the house.
His plan for Iraq didn’t work either. The three Mesopotamian tribes went right on hating each other. The new government was powerless to stop them from killing each other. Without sufficient British troops on the ground to pacify things, everything just go worse.
In 1930, Britain quit and went home. They left Iraq to its new king (whose entire family was finally wiped out in 1958—by a group that included Saddam Hussein). Churchill’s grand design exists today only in the name on the map—where the three groups that still hate each other live to this day.
Now it’s America’s turn to try to create a nation state out of these three groups. (Like the British, we’ve already given up on the oil.) Like the British we are only too willing to pull our own troops out and leave the mess to the Iraqi national army.
One can almost see Mr. Churchill, sitting on a back bench in heaven, shaking his head as he looks down and murmurs, “Good luck”.

Afghanistan--Show Me The Way To Go Home!

I dislike very much when something I have thought about threatens to come to pass. Several months ago I wrote about the very tenuous supply line we have for troops and materiel coming into (and out of) Afghanistan.
I repeat again: the country is landlocked. To the west lies Iran—somehow I don’t see them letting our supply or troop delivery planes fly through their airspace any time soon. To the east lies Pakistan—a dubious ally with very good reasons not to let large amounts of American equipment or troops traverse its territory.
These two nations meet south of Afghanistan—blocking access to the sea. To the north lie a series of former Soviet Republics—from west to east, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan—all primarily Muslim, all still in the Russia sphere of influence.
Just north of Tajikistan lies the smallest and poorest of the former Soviet Republics, Kyrgyzstan—which also borders Russia and China. Over half the country is situated 10,000 feet up, which does nothing to add to its wealth .
One way the tiny nation (five million souls) thought to make a little spare cash was to allow the United States to build a major airbase there. The US Transit Center at Manas International Airport just outside of the capital city of Biskek has become a crucial link in our supply chain.
That worked wonderfully as long as the regime that granted us the rights to that base remained in power. Last week that regime came to an end. It seems that the populace became peevish over things like a 200% raise in utility rates—and major corruption by the pro-US government.
Riots broke out and people tossed the old regime out. The apparent victors are calling for closing down the American base.
So far the base reports it is operating normally. The shooting seems to be limited to the capital city for now. Even if the base is shut down, that will not immediately choke us to death in Afghanistan. But it should sound a whole lot of alarm bells in both the Pentagon and Kabul.
What happened in Kyrgyzstan could very well happen in other Muslim states north of Afghanistan and even in Pakistan. We should start—if we haven’t already—thinking very seriously about how we are going to get a whole lot of Americans and NATO types home again if the not-too-unthinkable happens sometime in the future.
Russia has influence there. She is not our friend. She may, for the moment prefer that neighboring Muslim radicals spend their time shooting at Americans rather than Russians—or she may decide to propitiate a few Muslims by inducing her former republics to shut down our northern supply line. I dislike the thought that we are in anyway at the mercy of the former home of the KGB.
Is China our friend? She, too, may not mind us shooting up a few Islamic extremists at the moment. But what if her western Muslim tribesmen become fractious and she starts looking for ways of making them happier?
The world north of Afghanistan could turn upside down at any moment—and we have no real control over the situation. Were I a general in Afghanistan that reality would not make me a happy man.
In Iraq, at least, we have access to the sea. We can come and go—right now—pretty much as we please. In Afghanistan we remain dependent upon a little help from some very dubious friends.
And we think we’ve got troubles NOW. Oh my.

Obama--Cutting Back The Nukes: Good Idea?

The Obama Administration just announced that it is going to change certain aspects of American nuclear war policy. Specifically it is going to list situations in which it would NOT resort to nuclear weaponry. That reverses policy that has been in place most of my life.
The idea makes me nervous. I understand that there has always been pressure to take nukes out of the military equation because they scare the liver out of everybody. But, I remind you, that’s the whole point of nuclear deterrence.
Let’s not forget that it has worked. It’s been sixty-five years since the last major war. There were only twenty-one years between World War I and World War II. There were 99 years between World War I and the previous world war (the Napoleonic wars). That century without major war lasted only so long as one nation maintained an absolute preponderance of naval power.
So long as no would could sneeze or speak without British concurrence you had peace. When Germany built a fleet to rival England’s, war became as inevitable as a fallen soufflé in a fireworks display. The atomic/hydrogen bomb eliminated the need for any one nation to have absolute military superiority. You didn’t mess with anybody who had nukes and a credible willingness to use them.
When I was in graduate school, former President Eisenhower’s foreign policy was a thing of contempt and distain among modern young (and liberal) professors. Eisenhower was a major architect of the policy of massive nuclear retaliation.
Kennedy won the election of 1960 in part because he demanded that we limit our dependence on nukes and come up with more conventional options. Like Obama, he worked to limit situations under which we would use nuclear or hydrogen weapons.
In a seminar course, a professor of mine sneeringly asked if anyone wanted to try to defend Eisenhower/Dulles foreign policy. (It was also an article of faith among liberal scholars that Ike was merely a puppet for John Foster Dulles.) I agreed to try.
I did lots of reading. I soon could demonstrate that, if anyone was the puppet, it was Dulles. I came up with a lot of other facts that definitely indicated Eisenhower’s methods of preserving the stalemate peace between the Soviets and the US had a lot to be said for it.
I summed up what I had learned in a simple allegory with which I began my presentation. I created the verbal image of an old western bar room (pre-atomic Europe, if you will). Every Saturday night there was a shooting (The Napoleonic Wars, World War I, The Seven Years War, etc.). and every Sunday bodies were buried.
A new sheriff was elected—who had seen enough gun fights and didn’t like them (Ike). The first Saturday night he was on duty, he carried a beaker of liquid into the bar. “This,” he announced, ” is a jar full of nitro-glycerin.” He sat down, set the jar on the edge of his table and ordered his dinner. “Golly,” he said, “I hope no one knocks this glass over.”
No shooting that night, or the next or the next. Things went on for a few years until a young fellow (named Kennedy) ran for sheriff. “How awful,” he proclaimed, “to have such dangerous stuff as nitro in a bar full of people!!! Let’s get rid of it!”
He got elected. He removed the jar of liquid that scared people so much and came into the bar with the latest model Colt pistols on his hips (remember McNamara and the Whiz Kids at the Pentagon?). A couple of Saturday nights later there was a shooting, and then another. The undertaker was back in business.
My instructor was enraged. He ranted at me for a full hour after class was supposed to end. He walked out muttering, “I didn’t think it could be done” and gave me an “A”. Today, of course, most historians think better of Eisenhower than they did in 1966.
Let’s not forget WHY he had that bottle of nitro sitting on the table.

Geography--What You Don't Know Can Hurt You

Years ago when I was in graduate school, I opted for a survey course covering Chinese history. As the course went into its third week or so I became terribly confused. This baffled me—no history course of any kind had befuddled me since I was ten years old.
Why now? What was the problem? It struck me: I had no concept whatsoever of interior Chinese GEOGRAPHY. I spent several hours one afternoon poring over maps of China—and my confusion was gone. I enjoyed the course.
Americans are notoriously bad at history. Most can’t tell you within several decades when either the Civil War or the Revolution occurred. Most also have zero notion of geography, American or world.
Harvard University’s admissions office has sent applications back to residents of New Mexico, telling them they needed to apply on forms for foreign students. Credit card companies and ticket venders for the last American Olympics (1996) have made the same mistake.
Ask a kid on the East Coast to locate Idaho or Arkansas; ask a child on the West Coast to find Rhode Island or Delaware. Many will fail. Then there was the hotel clerk in Ottawa (Canada’s capital) who remembers American tourists asking her where the Polar Bears were.
The other day I subbed in a room where three of the World History classes were taking an open book test that involved knowing world geography. It was fun—and appalling; these were sixteen year old eleventh graders—to listen to their questions.
No one seemed to know where the Andes Mountains were. Very few could locate Russia on a world map and no one that I saw could tell which nation in Europe had the largest population. When asked which language is used in the most countries in Asia, a lot of them ventured that it might be English. None seemed to know that there are a raft of new nations in Asia that speak Russian.
They might have a cousin fighting there, but very few could locate Afghanistan—and the question of which national capital was located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers floored a majority. Again, some might even have relatives serving in Baghdad.
Bahrain may as well have been located on the moon—reading maps with latitude and longitude clearly demarcated was a forgotten art. Locating the arctic circle was beyond most, and the whereabouts of Australia was a complete mystery.
And so it went, around the globe in blithering befuddlement. This isn’t new. When Vietnam turned hot in the early 1960s, most Americans hadn’t the foggiest where it was. It was in World War II that our lack of geographic knowledge turned truly deadly.
The British kept trying to tell Eisenhower and the Americans to land NORTH of the Monte Casino pass in 1943. They had been taught in grade school that the pass there blocks the passage from northern to southern Italy. They wanted to bypass it by landing north.
Ike wouldn’t listen. South of Monte Casino seemed closer and safer. So he landed at Salerno. It took him until September, 1944, to fight his way up the peninsula. The Germans were able to hold out a year and kill thousands of allied troops.
We now know that the German commander was prepared to concede the entire peninsula to us if we had landed north of Casino. We’d have gotten to the Po River by September, 1943, not September, 1944, had we known our geography.
I still remember the day I spent mastering the rudiments of interior Chinese geography—and I recall vividly the confusion I felt BEFORE I mastered it. A tad more emphasis on geography—especially as it applies to politics, war and diplomacy wouldn’t hurt any of us—in school or in the Pentagon.