Margoglog: The Cat and Katrina
We had to yell at Fran's brother Lester: "Get out of New Orleans!" It was the morning before Katrina hit. These two brothers have a history of ignoring the obvious. Lester had moved out of Minneapolis five years before, vowing he'd never see his breath again. Probably right, but he might never breathe again if he didn't get in his ancient Chevy Malibu and hightail it away from the on-coming hurricane.
"And fill the bathtub with water," I insisted. remembering my mother's response to hurricanes in South Carolina.
If you remember, that late August day Katrina hit was beautifully clear and balmy in Mpls/St. Paul. Hard to imagine directly south a mega-storm was wrecking the ancient city of water. Lester had no cell phone. Heck, lots of us one had cell phones in 2005. The TV reports were more and more ominous, then down-right terrifying. We went to bed and prayed he'd taken our advice.
Lester had a cat. He'd left Minneapolis with two cats, Patricia and Mitchell. Patricia was his find; Mitchell had sauntered onto our deck in St. Paul where I still indulged in feeding strays. The large, scrawny, mild-mannered grey tabby seemed just right for a lonesome guy in Minneapolis who'd just lost one of his two felines. Patricia had a different opinion initially, but by the time all three arrived in New Orleans, the two cats had bonded. Especially after they lived for six days in the station wagon while Lester found a little cabin/house to rent. Patricia died a few years later. Now Lester left Mitchell to the wind and water.
No one was prepared for the breaching of the levees and the flooding of the city. It was one of the worst weather disasters of all time. At least in the U.S. Two days later Lester called. He'd made it to the airport and was subsisting on candy bars and chips from various vending machine. Two more days passed. He called from a town west and north of New Orleans where he'd been able to rent a trailer behind a completely full motel. They skies were clear and sunny. No one was allowed back in the city.
We wired him money. Standing at the counter at Wal-Mart, I was very grateful for wire money transfer. Then we waited for him to check in. A week passed. Two weeks passed. Still no one was being allowed back in the city, though search and rescue teams were going house to house, looking for pets and people.
He couldn't wait any longer. Driving close to the city (I picture it almost like a walled medieval city with various huge gates), Lester talked to some search and rescue types. They said they'd check on his cat, but they were from out of town. Could he give them directions? "Sure, let me lie in the back of your truck, and I'll get you there." That's how Lester entered New Orleans, stepped out of the truck and unlocked the cabin door. Water marks on the little house were several feet high.
He opened the door and called, "Mitchell."
"Merow" came an answer. There was big Mitchell atop the fridgerator. A search and rescue team had spray-painted across the house, "No people, no pets." Evidently when they checked, Mitchell had hidden. There was a tiny film of wet left in the bathtub, and a bag of dry food had a huge hole in the bottom. Clearly Mitchell had eaten some, though now, most was soaked with flood water. Lester opened a can of food, and placed a dish on the table. Mitchell jumped down and took a bite. But he had to stop and nudge Lester's hand, then eat some more. Eat, nudge, eat nudge.
Lester packed him into a cat carrier and began to walk out of the city. A few police and other officials stopped him, but when he showed them his "loot," they smiled and let him go. Lester figures Mitchell
had food and water for maybe 10 days, then simply waited and hoped. "If I'd been a day or two later, he might not have made it," Lester muses now as we relive that harrowing time. My opinion: the hope of return kept a cat alive, and the hope of finding a friend kept a man from going mad. Though there is no evidence of such in the Lester/Fran side of the family. They roll with the punches.
Mitchell lived five years after Katrina while Lester reconstituted his life in Baton Rouge. He didn't look for full-time work until 2009 and didn't find any for a while after that. Now there is a new Patricia and a younger female feline whose name I can't recall, though I talked to Lester only a few days ago. This cat-human connection is very private, and Lester names his cats as if they were future debutants or West Point cadets. He'd howl if he heard me say this. Still, there's no "Fluffy" or "Archie" in him.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Margotlog: What's So Innocent about Orhan Pamuk's Museum?
Margotlog: What's So Innocent about Orhan Pamuk's Museum?
From start to last, Pamuk's novel The Museum of Innocence reeks of love and sex and, in part, of privilege. Yet, underlying the main character's obsession with Fushon, a young woman at least 15 years younger than he, is an innocence toward the world that slowly emerges the longer I think about this extraordinary novel. We in the US define innocence almost entirely as the absence of wrong-doing or ignorance of human knavery. In these senses, the playboy lover is far from innocent. Though engaged to be engaged to the lovely Sibelle (forgive me for misspelling names--I listened to the novel on disc), he begins a clandestine love affair with Fushon, meeting her daily in the apartment designated by his wealthy family for cast-off articles.
He also has the audacity to invite Fushon and her parents (distant relations of his family) to his engagement party at the Istanbul Hilton. Here we meet the glittering late-60s (?) jet-setting Turkish aristocracy--the daughters with their degrees from the Sorbonne, the mothers with their designer gowns and handbags, the fathers and brothers beginning to expand into global business. In fact, it's a mistake about a Jenny Cologne (?) handbag that brings the narrator back to the shop where Fushon works and so begins their love-affair.
Yet underlying this audacity is his wrong-doing: he has had sex with a virgin outside marriage, a tabu still very much in force in Turkish society. He also will soon discover that he has wronged his heart--for in attempting to have his cake and eat it too, he disparages his deep affection for Fushon. Try as he might, he can't carry on the fiction that he still wants to marry Sibelle, a woman of his class and education. He has fallen completely and utterly in love with Fushon, to the point of losing his will to live. Only when he finally breaks it off with Sibelle and offers himself to Fushon's family does he reach any kind of peace.
Here begins the long, langorous heart of The Museum of Innocence. As the narrator is driven by the family chauffeur, evening after evening, to have dinner with Fushon and her parents, he discovers how radically her life has changed. To protect what we would call her honor, she has married a young movie-maker wannabe, retreated into the confines of her family's apartment, and now wears a head scarf. For eight years the narrator's slow loving attachment to simply being in her presence, eating dinner with her family, then watching TV with them becomes a routine that could almost be portrayed in one of those American TV family shows from the 50s and 60s. "Leave It to Beaver," maybe. Or "Father Knows Best.."
Gradually he puts aside all desire except to be near her. Still working at his father's plant, he allows his father and brother to start-up a competing company. He tolerates Fushon's husband (does he have any choice?), meekly offering to fund the young man's movie-making ambition. Gradually Fushon's marriage disintegrates, her desire to be a film star fades, but through dogged persistence she learns to drive a car. By then, the narrator has collected the astonishing array of tiny objects from his evenings at her family home, which will go into his Museum of Innocence, housed in the apartment where they first made love.
This is a very long novel. It's a tribute to the author's seductive attention to tiny details, tiny changes in his relation to Fushon and her family, her neighborhood, her tribe--that we continue with him for so long. But, of course, the novel has to end. Fushon and the narrator become engaged and drive out of the city with her mother for a dinner, then overnight. Drinking too much, finally making love again, they step again into the relentless onslaught of history. I won't tell you the ending, but it has to do with a car, driven very very fast by Fushon.
This is the end of innocence! It's the end of a life that can be redeemed by slow, loving attention. We are to understand that this museum the narrator spends the rest of his life preparing will celebrate a way of life before the crash. A crash with worldwide symbolic significance--though Pamuk has far too much sense and skill to do anything more than let us figure this out for ourselves. Speed for the sake of speed, eyes ahead on an ever-unwinding road--such a life makes the devotion the novel celebrates impossible.
Underneath it all, the Museum of Innocence is a cautionary tale!
From start to last, Pamuk's novel The Museum of Innocence reeks of love and sex and, in part, of privilege. Yet, underlying the main character's obsession with Fushon, a young woman at least 15 years younger than he, is an innocence toward the world that slowly emerges the longer I think about this extraordinary novel. We in the US define innocence almost entirely as the absence of wrong-doing or ignorance of human knavery. In these senses, the playboy lover is far from innocent. Though engaged to be engaged to the lovely Sibelle (forgive me for misspelling names--I listened to the novel on disc), he begins a clandestine love affair with Fushon, meeting her daily in the apartment designated by his wealthy family for cast-off articles.
He also has the audacity to invite Fushon and her parents (distant relations of his family) to his engagement party at the Istanbul Hilton. Here we meet the glittering late-60s (?) jet-setting Turkish aristocracy--the daughters with their degrees from the Sorbonne, the mothers with their designer gowns and handbags, the fathers and brothers beginning to expand into global business. In fact, it's a mistake about a Jenny Cologne (?) handbag that brings the narrator back to the shop where Fushon works and so begins their love-affair.
Yet underlying this audacity is his wrong-doing: he has had sex with a virgin outside marriage, a tabu still very much in force in Turkish society. He also will soon discover that he has wronged his heart--for in attempting to have his cake and eat it too, he disparages his deep affection for Fushon. Try as he might, he can't carry on the fiction that he still wants to marry Sibelle, a woman of his class and education. He has fallen completely and utterly in love with Fushon, to the point of losing his will to live. Only when he finally breaks it off with Sibelle and offers himself to Fushon's family does he reach any kind of peace.
Here begins the long, langorous heart of The Museum of Innocence. As the narrator is driven by the family chauffeur, evening after evening, to have dinner with Fushon and her parents, he discovers how radically her life has changed. To protect what we would call her honor, she has married a young movie-maker wannabe, retreated into the confines of her family's apartment, and now wears a head scarf. For eight years the narrator's slow loving attachment to simply being in her presence, eating dinner with her family, then watching TV with them becomes a routine that could almost be portrayed in one of those American TV family shows from the 50s and 60s. "Leave It to Beaver," maybe. Or "Father Knows Best.."
Gradually he puts aside all desire except to be near her. Still working at his father's plant, he allows his father and brother to start-up a competing company. He tolerates Fushon's husband (does he have any choice?), meekly offering to fund the young man's movie-making ambition. Gradually Fushon's marriage disintegrates, her desire to be a film star fades, but through dogged persistence she learns to drive a car. By then, the narrator has collected the astonishing array of tiny objects from his evenings at her family home, which will go into his Museum of Innocence, housed in the apartment where they first made love.
This is a very long novel. It's a tribute to the author's seductive attention to tiny details, tiny changes in his relation to Fushon and her family, her neighborhood, her tribe--that we continue with him for so long. But, of course, the novel has to end. Fushon and the narrator become engaged and drive out of the city with her mother for a dinner, then overnight. Drinking too much, finally making love again, they step again into the relentless onslaught of history. I won't tell you the ending, but it has to do with a car, driven very very fast by Fushon.
This is the end of innocence! It's the end of a life that can be redeemed by slow, loving attention. We are to understand that this museum the narrator spends the rest of his life preparing will celebrate a way of life before the crash. A crash with worldwide symbolic significance--though Pamuk has far too much sense and skill to do anything more than let us figure this out for ourselves. Speed for the sake of speed, eyes ahead on an ever-unwinding road--such a life makes the devotion the novel celebrates impossible.
Underneath it all, the Museum of Innocence is a cautionary tale!
Friday, May 25, 2012
Margotlog: Train Fare
Margotlog: Train Fare
Back in the days before the transcontinental highway system and the plethora of family cars, we took the train. Almost every summer with our North Dakota mother (who didn't drive), we boarded the Seaboard Air Line or later the Atlantic Coast Line in Charleston and headed north, then at Cincinnati, west. Riding the train was like having a whole swath of humanity spread out in a long snake, car to car. Riding in the backseat of my father's Chevie was like being squeezed by family traits--we really hadn't left home, only packed every bit of us in a squirmy cubicle. Thank god for the turquoise gleam of afternoon swimming pools when we finally stopped for the night.
The train was my introduction to the magic of travel. Ribbons of mountains with deep gorges flowed beneath our dining car window--we'd entered the Appalachians and soon, the porter would make up our berths. Then in early morning we changed trains at Cincinnati. Standing beside the huge wheels that exhaled steam, I searched the sides of cars for "Chessie," the C&O mascot. The Chesapeake and Ohio line began somewhere in Maryland (I presume) and headed west. Chessie's cute kitten face slept on a plump pillow the whole way.
Reaching Chicago, we'd visit the enormous Art Institute with its serious lions guarding the high door. Or the Museum of Science and Industry, drilling deep into the earth as we rode an elevator down into a coal mine.Changing trains again in either Saint Paul or Minneapolis--I remember better the cavernous Minneapolis station near the river--we'd take a final train across what became broad sweeping prairie. Finally we would stop at Wapeton where Papa Max met us in his pick-up--all four of us crammed into the cab.
Last night just before a cat woke me up--Chessie was adorable back in the days, but nothing like a real cat waking up before dawn--I dreamed about being suddenly roused from train bliss to a conductor telling me my station was next. Frantically I rose out of deep sleep and began searching under the seat, in the overhead rack for my belongings.
I think this dream is a composite of my childhood train trips, my recent return from Venice and Verona, where once again, I took a train in the old-fashioned way. These two things with the addition of reading just before sleep Isabel Wilkerson's immensely compelling history of the Great Migration: The Warmth of Other Suns.
For those "colored people"--what they called themselves and she does here--riding the segregated cars north was an escape from harrassment, poverty, and degredation for which there was no redress. The train was their way north, their hope for a way out, their chance for a better life.
Just as I remember, the segregation of the cars changed once we crossed the Mason-Dixon line, though usually everyone stayed put. Not until much later do I remember encountering black people sitting in the same rail cars with us white folks. But the porters--all colored men in immaculate white-jacketed uniforms--worked the cars, up and down, helping passengers stow their suitcases on the overhead racks, waking sleepers to their fast-approaching destinations.
One of Wilkerson's main characters was a railroad porter, after he and his family escaped Florida for New York City. He worked his way up to the fast trains going south and returning north, until he encountered a huge hateful conductor--the white man who punched tickets. This conductor did everything shy of a direct physical attack to make George's life on the train a nightmare. In the last straw, he purposefully bumped George who was lifting a heavy suitcase above a frail old white lady. Luckily George didn't drop the suitcase, but he half sprawled afterwards into her seat.
She had seen what the white conductor did. "Why did he act like that?" she asked. And George
described the many hazing behaviors. "You should report him," she urged, but George explained that was impossible. Instead he urged her to write a letter, then and there, which he would make sure found its way to the appropriate authority.
The letter made almost no difference. Ultimately, George realized that if he wanted to keep his job and not suffer physical harm, he would have to get off the train that this conductor worked.
My mother was no huge white conductor. Anyone meeting her in a social situation would have decided she was a carefully dressed, quiet matron, standing to the side of her flashier, laughing husband. But when roused, her mean streak struck like a viper.
My childhood opinion of the colored porters on the Atlantic Coast Line was all sympathy. I saw their deferential treatment of white people, though I could not name it. I saw them putting up with insistent demands and sometimes rude rejoinders. But I never saw anyone other than my mother publicly upbraid a porter. Standing in the aisle, she gave him a tongue lashing. What it was about, I have no idea. But as clear as crystal remains my agony at her obvious ugliness. She was taking on a man who could do nothing but treat her politely. His dark face remained a mask of politeness. She was taking advantage of her superior station. I was deeply ashamed of her, and sorry for him. It was one of my earliest lessons in racism. I vowed never to act that way myself.
It's probably the very last thing she expected to come from that encounter. And I had the sense, even as a girl of seven or eight, never to talk to her about it. She would not have remembered, or brushed it off with a "Oh, he was used to that sort of thing."
Back in the days before the transcontinental highway system and the plethora of family cars, we took the train. Almost every summer with our North Dakota mother (who didn't drive), we boarded the Seaboard Air Line or later the Atlantic Coast Line in Charleston and headed north, then at Cincinnati, west. Riding the train was like having a whole swath of humanity spread out in a long snake, car to car. Riding in the backseat of my father's Chevie was like being squeezed by family traits--we really hadn't left home, only packed every bit of us in a squirmy cubicle. Thank god for the turquoise gleam of afternoon swimming pools when we finally stopped for the night.
The train was my introduction to the magic of travel. Ribbons of mountains with deep gorges flowed beneath our dining car window--we'd entered the Appalachians and soon, the porter would make up our berths. Then in early morning we changed trains at Cincinnati. Standing beside the huge wheels that exhaled steam, I searched the sides of cars for "Chessie," the C&O mascot. The Chesapeake and Ohio line began somewhere in Maryland (I presume) and headed west. Chessie's cute kitten face slept on a plump pillow the whole way.
Reaching Chicago, we'd visit the enormous Art Institute with its serious lions guarding the high door. Or the Museum of Science and Industry, drilling deep into the earth as we rode an elevator down into a coal mine.Changing trains again in either Saint Paul or Minneapolis--I remember better the cavernous Minneapolis station near the river--we'd take a final train across what became broad sweeping prairie. Finally we would stop at Wapeton where Papa Max met us in his pick-up--all four of us crammed into the cab.
Last night just before a cat woke me up--Chessie was adorable back in the days, but nothing like a real cat waking up before dawn--I dreamed about being suddenly roused from train bliss to a conductor telling me my station was next. Frantically I rose out of deep sleep and began searching under the seat, in the overhead rack for my belongings.
I think this dream is a composite of my childhood train trips, my recent return from Venice and Verona, where once again, I took a train in the old-fashioned way. These two things with the addition of reading just before sleep Isabel Wilkerson's immensely compelling history of the Great Migration: The Warmth of Other Suns.
For those "colored people"--what they called themselves and she does here--riding the segregated cars north was an escape from harrassment, poverty, and degredation for which there was no redress. The train was their way north, their hope for a way out, their chance for a better life.
Just as I remember, the segregation of the cars changed once we crossed the Mason-Dixon line, though usually everyone stayed put. Not until much later do I remember encountering black people sitting in the same rail cars with us white folks. But the porters--all colored men in immaculate white-jacketed uniforms--worked the cars, up and down, helping passengers stow their suitcases on the overhead racks, waking sleepers to their fast-approaching destinations.
One of Wilkerson's main characters was a railroad porter, after he and his family escaped Florida for New York City. He worked his way up to the fast trains going south and returning north, until he encountered a huge hateful conductor--the white man who punched tickets. This conductor did everything shy of a direct physical attack to make George's life on the train a nightmare. In the last straw, he purposefully bumped George who was lifting a heavy suitcase above a frail old white lady. Luckily George didn't drop the suitcase, but he half sprawled afterwards into her seat.
She had seen what the white conductor did. "Why did he act like that?" she asked. And George
described the many hazing behaviors. "You should report him," she urged, but George explained that was impossible. Instead he urged her to write a letter, then and there, which he would make sure found its way to the appropriate authority.
The letter made almost no difference. Ultimately, George realized that if he wanted to keep his job and not suffer physical harm, he would have to get off the train that this conductor worked.
My mother was no huge white conductor. Anyone meeting her in a social situation would have decided she was a carefully dressed, quiet matron, standing to the side of her flashier, laughing husband. But when roused, her mean streak struck like a viper.
My childhood opinion of the colored porters on the Atlantic Coast Line was all sympathy. I saw their deferential treatment of white people, though I could not name it. I saw them putting up with insistent demands and sometimes rude rejoinders. But I never saw anyone other than my mother publicly upbraid a porter. Standing in the aisle, she gave him a tongue lashing. What it was about, I have no idea. But as clear as crystal remains my agony at her obvious ugliness. She was taking on a man who could do nothing but treat her politely. His dark face remained a mask of politeness. She was taking advantage of her superior station. I was deeply ashamed of her, and sorry for him. It was one of my earliest lessons in racism. I vowed never to act that way myself.
It's probably the very last thing she expected to come from that encounter. And I had the sense, even as a girl of seven or eight, never to talk to her about it. She would not have remembered, or brushed it off with a "Oh, he was used to that sort of thing."
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Margotlog: Poetic Attachments
Margotlog: Poetic Attachments
Yesterday at The Loft, a Place for Readers & Writers in Minneapolis, two poets talked about their love of the art.. Mark Doty and Terry K. Smith, the first teacher to the second, the first well-known for writing a haunting memoir about the life and death of his gay partner called Heaven's Coast, the second recently come to fame by winning the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.
As I listened, I felt the psychic tug of poems that have become attached to me. They pull at my hem as I stand at the sink; they follow my steps as I stride across city streets. There's William Carlos Williams' little poem about a sheet of paper tumbling over and over.
What is it that makes poems become entwined with our memories and actions? Sometimes it's the grace and sonority of their being: William Butler Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree, "I will arise and go now..." Or it's Galway Kinnell's long poem to his tiny daughter waking at night: "Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight." "you cling to me/hard/as if clinging could save us." Yes, I've experienced that years ago, and though I made no such promises in the dark to my daughter, I believe Kinnell's promises to his Little Maud:
I would blow the flame out of your silver cup
I would suck the rot from your finger nail....
I would let nothing of your go, ever
until washerwomen
feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands
and hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades...
Remembering the poem, I call up the occasion and the dense surprise of his promises. It's enough to tell me that the poem has entered my body.
Then for exquisite control and shape, Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art"--
It's a villanelle, I've known almost as long as I've known the poem, but when I call it up out of the blue, it's not any particular line that flies to me, but the compression of grief, the vast repetition of those deflating "sssss's."
I could go on with Marge Piercy's poem about unhooking a sea gull from a fish hook embedded in its beak. Or the Chinese poet Tu Fu from the 8th century: "It is spring in the mountains.". Or e.e. cummings, the little balloon man who whistles "far and wee." Often these poems first accompanied me into a classroom. I can't count the number of times I taught the Tu Fu poem to classes of 6th, 7th, 8th graders--a model for their own writing. Or rather, a poem usually announces itself in privacy as I look out a grey window, and there is Denise Levertov's "The Crack"--
While snow fell carelessly
floating indifferent in eddies of
rooftop air, circling the black
chimney cowls,
a spring night entered
my mind through the tight-closed window,
wearing
a loose Russian shirt of
light silk,
For this, then,
that slanting
line was left, that crack, the pane
never replaced.
Or struggling to meet a recalcitrant student, a poem of Richard Wilbur's returns to me: I can't remember the title or find it on the internet, but I have its architecture: upstairs the daughter types furiously, and below the father listens to the pauses and remembers how hard the shaping of words as he silently apologizes for belittling her effort and sends her good wishes.
Sometimes I think these recurrences are like Greek gods who come to earth and set the beauty of a flowering tree aflame.
Yesterday at The Loft, a Place for Readers & Writers in Minneapolis, two poets talked about their love of the art.. Mark Doty and Terry K. Smith, the first teacher to the second, the first well-known for writing a haunting memoir about the life and death of his gay partner called Heaven's Coast, the second recently come to fame by winning the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.
As I listened, I felt the psychic tug of poems that have become attached to me. They pull at my hem as I stand at the sink; they follow my steps as I stride across city streets. There's William Carlos Williams' little poem about a sheet of paper tumbling over and over.
What is it that makes poems become entwined with our memories and actions? Sometimes it's the grace and sonority of their being: William Butler Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree, "I will arise and go now..." Or it's Galway Kinnell's long poem to his tiny daughter waking at night: "Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight." "you cling to me/hard/as if clinging could save us." Yes, I've experienced that years ago, and though I made no such promises in the dark to my daughter, I believe Kinnell's promises to his Little Maud:
I would blow the flame out of your silver cup
I would suck the rot from your finger nail....
I would let nothing of your go, ever
until washerwomen
feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands
and hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades...
Remembering the poem, I call up the occasion and the dense surprise of his promises. It's enough to tell me that the poem has entered my body.
Then for exquisite control and shape, Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art"--
The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. --Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. | ||
It's a villanelle, I've known almost as long as I've known the poem, but when I call it up out of the blue, it's not any particular line that flies to me, but the compression of grief, the vast repetition of those deflating "sssss's."
I could go on with Marge Piercy's poem about unhooking a sea gull from a fish hook embedded in its beak. Or the Chinese poet Tu Fu from the 8th century: "It is spring in the mountains.". Or e.e. cummings, the little balloon man who whistles "far and wee." Often these poems first accompanied me into a classroom. I can't count the number of times I taught the Tu Fu poem to classes of 6th, 7th, 8th graders--a model for their own writing. Or rather, a poem usually announces itself in privacy as I look out a grey window, and there is Denise Levertov's "The Crack"--
While snow fell carelessly
floating indifferent in eddies of
rooftop air, circling the black
chimney cowls,
a spring night entered
my mind through the tight-closed window,
wearing
a loose Russian shirt of
light silk,
For this, then,
that slanting
line was left, that crack, the pane
never replaced.
Or struggling to meet a recalcitrant student, a poem of Richard Wilbur's returns to me: I can't remember the title or find it on the internet, but I have its architecture: upstairs the daughter types furiously, and below the father listens to the pauses and remembers how hard the shaping of words as he silently apologizes for belittling her effort and sends her good wishes.
Sometimes I think these recurrences are like Greek gods who come to earth and set the beauty of a flowering tree aflame.
Friday, May 18, 2012
Margotlog: Talking Human Rights at 37,000 Feet
Margotlog: Talking Human Rights at 37,000 Feet
For the first hour or two after take-off on an over-the-ocean flight, my spirits are bouyant. I enjoy talking to my seat-mate. Yesterday (which stretched an additional 7 hours), my good luck had me seated next to an Irish lawyer employed by the European Union Institute in Florence, Italy--a university funded by the countries in the EU. She's spent time in Pakistan studying women's rights in the northwest province, next to Afghanistan, an area which has become more and more conservative.
She's also been to Kabul: "I was amazed to find a women in a burka arguing with a vegetable seller," she said. "Completely covered in her black head-to-toe burka, she shouted at him in public." There went some notions about the invisibility of Afghani women. In fact, like the women during the era of the Shah in Iran, women in pre-Taliban Afghanistan were much more visible and vocal in the political arena. Not to mention in education. "Yes, young women went to university," said my seat mate, "but they were escorted to and from classes by family body guards."
We'd been discussing the threats to women's rights in the U.S. from rising conservative factions: threats to the rights to birth control, to abortion. And by extension the vociferous resistance to marriage being defined more broadly to include same-sex partners. I commented that the current arch-conservative Saint Paul Catholic bishop has urged local parish priests to argue against "same sex unions" among their parishioners. But many parishioners and priests resist this directive: "We have brothers, sisters, friends who are committed partners," said letters written to the StarTribune. "Why should they not have the same legal status as a marriage of one man and one woman?"
My Irish seat-mate noted that in Ireland, the government told the Catholic Church that this same issue was outside church control. "Yet, abortion is illegal in Ireland except to save the life of a mother," she said. "Even in the case of conception after a rape, an abortion is illegal."
Next we found ourselves talking about Pakistan: There was a brutal beating and gang rape of a trans-gender young man by police, my seat mate related. This was in Lahore. A local businessman was so incensed that he funded a court case which went up to the Pakistani Supreme Court. This case, asking for explicit recognition of trans-gendered persons as a "Third Gender" was won.
The "hijra" or transgender men live in self-contained communities but are far from isolated from the rest of society. In fact, they are frequently asked to perform at weddings. Beautifully made up, they dance as women, which is very much enjoyed by the wedding guests. "Remember," said my seat made, "the genders are segregated in Pakistan. I've seen this only from the point of view of women who tease and laugh at the hijra dancers. How the men on their side of the room react, I can only guess is different."
In my private, home-style opinion, there are times when I'd just as soon not be part of my husband's male gatherings. Hours of conversation about baseball, football? With short incisions about male grief and loneliness, judgments about women in their lives? Better these good-hearted men be left to themselves, to the freedom of brotherhood sympathy, just as I enjoy my all-women sisterly discussions.
For the first hour or two after take-off on an over-the-ocean flight, my spirits are bouyant. I enjoy talking to my seat-mate. Yesterday (which stretched an additional 7 hours), my good luck had me seated next to an Irish lawyer employed by the European Union Institute in Florence, Italy--a university funded by the countries in the EU. She's spent time in Pakistan studying women's rights in the northwest province, next to Afghanistan, an area which has become more and more conservative.
She's also been to Kabul: "I was amazed to find a women in a burka arguing with a vegetable seller," she said. "Completely covered in her black head-to-toe burka, she shouted at him in public." There went some notions about the invisibility of Afghani women. In fact, like the women during the era of the Shah in Iran, women in pre-Taliban Afghanistan were much more visible and vocal in the political arena. Not to mention in education. "Yes, young women went to university," said my seat mate, "but they were escorted to and from classes by family body guards."
We'd been discussing the threats to women's rights in the U.S. from rising conservative factions: threats to the rights to birth control, to abortion. And by extension the vociferous resistance to marriage being defined more broadly to include same-sex partners. I commented that the current arch-conservative Saint Paul Catholic bishop has urged local parish priests to argue against "same sex unions" among their parishioners. But many parishioners and priests resist this directive: "We have brothers, sisters, friends who are committed partners," said letters written to the StarTribune. "Why should they not have the same legal status as a marriage of one man and one woman?"
My Irish seat-mate noted that in Ireland, the government told the Catholic Church that this same issue was outside church control. "Yet, abortion is illegal in Ireland except to save the life of a mother," she said. "Even in the case of conception after a rape, an abortion is illegal."
Next we found ourselves talking about Pakistan: There was a brutal beating and gang rape of a trans-gender young man by police, my seat mate related. This was in Lahore. A local businessman was so incensed that he funded a court case which went up to the Pakistani Supreme Court. This case, asking for explicit recognition of trans-gendered persons as a "Third Gender" was won.
The "hijra" or transgender men live in self-contained communities but are far from isolated from the rest of society. In fact, they are frequently asked to perform at weddings. Beautifully made up, they dance as women, which is very much enjoyed by the wedding guests. "Remember," said my seat made, "the genders are segregated in Pakistan. I've seen this only from the point of view of women who tease and laugh at the hijra dancers. How the men on their side of the room react, I can only guess is different."
In my private, home-style opinion, there are times when I'd just as soon not be part of my husband's male gatherings. Hours of conversation about baseball, football? With short incisions about male grief and loneliness, judgments about women in their lives? Better these good-hearted men be left to themselves, to the freedom of brotherhood sympathy, just as I enjoy my all-women sisterly discussions.
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Margotlog: More Angry Young (Southern) White Men
Margotlog: More Angry (and not all Southern) White Men
They were never just young. Not the disaffected youths with cigarettes dangling from their lips: James Dean and company whose coolness had to do with disaffection, disengagement, a superior stance that would not grub nor lord it over.
This anger goes back decades. Here's the prompt: I've been reading the start of a truly magnum opus: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson. She herself comes from a family that migrated north during the three decades--from World War I through World War II--called "The Great Migration."
The initial chapters depict from her many interviews actual scarifying occurrences in the rural south: terrorizing of black men (not the old ones) by white men. The sounds of a beating in the woods heard by two black boys, a beating so intense that it leads to death, with a break in the middle for the victim to pray. A community strictly segregated that builds its white children a gothic new school and does nothing (as a community) when the black school burns down. A man and his children on the sidewalk of a small Southern town: when a group of white men approach, the black father and two older sons step off the sidewalk, but the youngest black boy, his head in a book, grazes the side of one white man and is "roughed up." Even though the father and boy himself apologize profusely.
Though I never saw such horrors, the air was heavy with the division--Charleston, South Carolina, treated its black residents with greater restraint than did some other Southern towns. But white male anger invaded my home in the form of my father's virulent racism.
Recently on a trip back to Charleston, I read newspaper accounts of a hospital workers strike, the May after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot--1968. These black hospital workers were paid a much lower wage than their white counterparts. Their strike virtually closed down the Medical College of South Carolina hospital. Not the only one in the city, but the major one. The first-day march was led by Ralph Abernathy and Coretta Scott King. After a number of weeks, the hospital settled on equal pay for equal work.
But that was later, after the Great Migration which created the huge black communities in Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, and on up the east coast to New York. And yes, in California. Still segregated were most of these communities, facing the ugly housing "wars" of the 1950s and 60s, the urban "renewal" with its fortress high-rises where dreams went to die. And on up to the present with our own, homegrown, Minnesota achievement gap. We too had a strong black community in the Rondo neighborhood of Saint Paul, but for many reasons, including the building of Highway 94 right through it, the community faltered and the residents moved elsewhere.
I've been musing on this white male anger, the kind that with impunity made life a horror for black boys and men. Here are some recent thoughts: in its first incarnation, this anger erupted when federal troops left the South after "Reconstruction," essentially giving control of purse and politics back to white men. The Civil War decimated Southern commerce and agriculture in ways that northerners who didn't see later wars in Europe, Asia, could not possibly understand. Even when I left the South in the 1960s, it was still poorer than most northern states. And by then the huge exodus of black people had come and gone.
Losing the Civil War meant losing control of a "servant" population--the former slaves were freed, and for the period of Reconstruction, many were elected into political positions. Then the lid of hatred closed down with a snap, and the long grinding years of Southern poverty began in earnest. Southern agriculture had always been hard on the soil. The boll weevil did the rest. James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men shows precisely how absolutely dirt poor southern whites who depended on some kind of farming could be. Shacks with holes in the floor, rough sheets, "tatters" and "greens" for food. Molasses the sweetening.
Resentment against the Civil War's loss, the burning of Atlanta, the burning of homes and plantations (a visit to Middleton Plantation recently impressed on me the current owners' passion for regathering what Northern troops had dispersed, and that was virtually 150 years ago).
When one distinctly different set of people "own" another, and then debase them, a complicated set of feints and blinds get established. These solidify into unquestioned superiority, privilege, and "Right." Especially when the supposedly superior lose almost everything and continue to feel that loss--chained to their poor land with no possible escape--then anger builds up to a blinding intensity. Everything gets swept into its vortex: Christianity, inviolate Southern white maidenhood, the command of a public sidewalk, male privilege. White male privilege. No wonder millions of black left the south.
The thought has flitted through on occasion that President Barack Obama's obvious blackness--well, it acts as a goad. And because many white people hold in their innermost hearts a caveat against "all men are created equal and endowed by their creator" etc, there mounts up a rage against government in general. Because it is no longer "cool" to rant and rave against black people, let's be blunt and say black men, this rage and utter resistance to "government," to "compromise" with the other party in U.S. politics drapes itself in the early symbols of American resistance: And we have the Tea Party.
The South has been familiar for years with white political movements that co-opted workers (whites) by white-washing the true intent of their goals. It's a simple psychological ploy: drum up hatred of those outside the pale, and then focus that hatred away from one's own best interests and into a single rallying call against "Race." Today the call is against "government." But the blindness induced is the same. What a onetime poor white textile worker in the South and today's retired white Iowa sales clerk have in common is that they are blinded to what is in their best interest.
I have to hope that the hugeness and variety of the U.S. today can ultimately trounce the hatred and throw out the do-nothings, the recalcitrant legislators (we have plenty in Minnesota) and elect decent compromisers who want to return politics to functioning for the greater good of all.
They were never just young. Not the disaffected youths with cigarettes dangling from their lips: James Dean and company whose coolness had to do with disaffection, disengagement, a superior stance that would not grub nor lord it over.
This anger goes back decades. Here's the prompt: I've been reading the start of a truly magnum opus: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson. She herself comes from a family that migrated north during the three decades--from World War I through World War II--called "The Great Migration."
The initial chapters depict from her many interviews actual scarifying occurrences in the rural south: terrorizing of black men (not the old ones) by white men. The sounds of a beating in the woods heard by two black boys, a beating so intense that it leads to death, with a break in the middle for the victim to pray. A community strictly segregated that builds its white children a gothic new school and does nothing (as a community) when the black school burns down. A man and his children on the sidewalk of a small Southern town: when a group of white men approach, the black father and two older sons step off the sidewalk, but the youngest black boy, his head in a book, grazes the side of one white man and is "roughed up." Even though the father and boy himself apologize profusely.
Though I never saw such horrors, the air was heavy with the division--Charleston, South Carolina, treated its black residents with greater restraint than did some other Southern towns. But white male anger invaded my home in the form of my father's virulent racism.
Recently on a trip back to Charleston, I read newspaper accounts of a hospital workers strike, the May after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot--1968. These black hospital workers were paid a much lower wage than their white counterparts. Their strike virtually closed down the Medical College of South Carolina hospital. Not the only one in the city, but the major one. The first-day march was led by Ralph Abernathy and Coretta Scott King. After a number of weeks, the hospital settled on equal pay for equal work.
But that was later, after the Great Migration which created the huge black communities in Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, and on up the east coast to New York. And yes, in California. Still segregated were most of these communities, facing the ugly housing "wars" of the 1950s and 60s, the urban "renewal" with its fortress high-rises where dreams went to die. And on up to the present with our own, homegrown, Minnesota achievement gap. We too had a strong black community in the Rondo neighborhood of Saint Paul, but for many reasons, including the building of Highway 94 right through it, the community faltered and the residents moved elsewhere.
I've been musing on this white male anger, the kind that with impunity made life a horror for black boys and men. Here are some recent thoughts: in its first incarnation, this anger erupted when federal troops left the South after "Reconstruction," essentially giving control of purse and politics back to white men. The Civil War decimated Southern commerce and agriculture in ways that northerners who didn't see later wars in Europe, Asia, could not possibly understand. Even when I left the South in the 1960s, it was still poorer than most northern states. And by then the huge exodus of black people had come and gone.
Losing the Civil War meant losing control of a "servant" population--the former slaves were freed, and for the period of Reconstruction, many were elected into political positions. Then the lid of hatred closed down with a snap, and the long grinding years of Southern poverty began in earnest. Southern agriculture had always been hard on the soil. The boll weevil did the rest. James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men shows precisely how absolutely dirt poor southern whites who depended on some kind of farming could be. Shacks with holes in the floor, rough sheets, "tatters" and "greens" for food. Molasses the sweetening.
Resentment against the Civil War's loss, the burning of Atlanta, the burning of homes and plantations (a visit to Middleton Plantation recently impressed on me the current owners' passion for regathering what Northern troops had dispersed, and that was virtually 150 years ago).
When one distinctly different set of people "own" another, and then debase them, a complicated set of feints and blinds get established. These solidify into unquestioned superiority, privilege, and "Right." Especially when the supposedly superior lose almost everything and continue to feel that loss--chained to their poor land with no possible escape--then anger builds up to a blinding intensity. Everything gets swept into its vortex: Christianity, inviolate Southern white maidenhood, the command of a public sidewalk, male privilege. White male privilege. No wonder millions of black left the south.
The thought has flitted through on occasion that President Barack Obama's obvious blackness--well, it acts as a goad. And because many white people hold in their innermost hearts a caveat against "all men are created equal and endowed by their creator" etc, there mounts up a rage against government in general. Because it is no longer "cool" to rant and rave against black people, let's be blunt and say black men, this rage and utter resistance to "government," to "compromise" with the other party in U.S. politics drapes itself in the early symbols of American resistance: And we have the Tea Party.
The South has been familiar for years with white political movements that co-opted workers (whites) by white-washing the true intent of their goals. It's a simple psychological ploy: drum up hatred of those outside the pale, and then focus that hatred away from one's own best interests and into a single rallying call against "Race." Today the call is against "government." But the blindness induced is the same. What a onetime poor white textile worker in the South and today's retired white Iowa sales clerk have in common is that they are blinded to what is in their best interest.
I have to hope that the hugeness and variety of the U.S. today can ultimately trounce the hatred and throw out the do-nothings, the recalcitrant legislators (we have plenty in Minnesota) and elect decent compromisers who want to return politics to functioning for the greater good of all.
Monday, May 7, 2012
Margotlog: Kindergarten
Margotlog: Kindergarten
Before the academic police put the U.S. education system in its grip, Kindergarten was run like a glorified play center. Not so anymore, with grave consequences. It turns out, as the great modern observers of childhood development have been telling us--i.e. Piaget, Maria Montessori, and company--children need to play. They need to play with a vengeance.
Lately I've been hearing about truly sad, chaotic kindergartens. My students who teach kindergarten report that now there are academic standards that loom over kids aged 5, just as they do for much more mature students. Children under the age of, let's say 5-6, still are very very young, neurologically, emotionally, socially. Their attention spans for sitting in a circle while Teacher directs their attention to the board is short. Probably no more than 7 minutes at best. They do not learn in rigid, controlled atmospheres. They do not learn from lectures.
They learn from play. My husband Fran is fond of saying that he was allowed to skip kindergarten because he already knew how to take naps. I always laugh at this. I, on the other hand, reveled in my first half-days at school, the lovely, gentle Ashley Hall in Charleston, South Carolina.
We had a very tall teacher. Hers is the only name I remember from all my years of secondary education: Miss McClure. She was tall, raw-boned, and not at all soft and cuddly. But she had a lovely sweeping manner of almost singing her suggestions that we come sit in a circle at her feet. I remember those feet: clad in tie-up black pumps, with columnar legs growing out of them, measured in back by long black lines.--the seams in her stockings.
Her hair was drawn back in a bun and she wore glasses. I didn't get my own glasses until third grade when it turned out I couldn't see the board. But my father wore glasses--wire-rimmed like hers. And he too was a teacher, hurrying off every morning with a huge briefcase stuffed with student papers. Our student papers were large sheets of what I'd call foolscap (is that really a word?) on which we colored with huge crayons.
Unfortunately, my sheets often tore, since I bore down so hard with the crayons.
We probably learned our ABCs though I suspect I already knew mine. We sang a lot. What songs exactly, I don't remember. We sat cross-legged at Miss McClure's feet like busy little flowers under a tall swaying tree. And we ran outside to the glorious playground across the hot playing fields, where we bumped each other on small seesaws, climbed jungle gyms, dug in sandboxes, and generally made a lot of noise.
It's possible that we also began to learn a little French from "M'amselle," because now it's coming to me from my early years at Ashley Hall, voices singing "Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques, dormez vous? Dormez-vous? Sonnez-le matina, sonnez-le matina, ding, ding dong, etc."
"Je m'appelle Margot," I also hear myself saying. I am called Margot.
Nobody talked to us about standards, other than not biting or scratching, other than sitting quietly for short times as Miss McClure spoke to us from her height. We didn't have "play stations," such as little kitchens or baby basinettes (we were all girls at Ashley Hall), but we all had such things at home. We grew up in an era of extended play, inside, outside almost all year long, with the Old Citadel being my first kindergarten.
Living there, in the block-long former barracks of the military college called The Citadel, we had (now I hear my mother's voice) 150 children in one block. It's hard to believe, but there were lots of us, swarming up and down the irregular blocks of the slate sidewalk, playing "school" in a huge refrigerator packing
case, set on its long side. I was always the teacher, our little Mexican chairs brought out for students to sit in.
We collected the persimmon blossoms with their rubbery orange cups for doll tea parties--the Mexican chairs again. We drew hopscotch under the hackberry tree, and probably a bit later than kindergarten age, we swung our jump ropes--sometimes the individual ones that made an arc over our heads, and sometimes a huge communal one that required two of us to swing. And much later, probably fourth grade, we swung "double Dutch" ropes, two that twined around and made it tough for the jumper to enter.
Inside we were surrounded by books--our father's school books, books from the Charleston County Free Library, and the volumes of the Book House. Every night before my sister and I went to bed, we snuggled on either side of our mother while she read to us. I do not remember ever not being able to read.
BUT I was one of those youngsters for whom the printed page is a goldmine, the sound of words being read aloud little short of heaven, and school, eventually full day school, largely an inevitable and welcome place. No one pushed me in kindergarten to sit longer than I was capable of doing. No one tested my knowledge, forced me to read or write, spell or compute to a test. I don't remember tests until third grade when I'd been out sick for at least a week, and missed learning pronouns. The shame of not knowing along with my classmates still comes back to me--a dark, unfortunate shame.
Kindergarten is for play, for exploring lightly among the opportunities of school. Full days are very hard on most five-year-olds. They need to be closely tethered to home. It is best if they can walk to school, accompanied by a much older high-school girl, as I was. Forcing them to sit still for long periods leads to boredom, outbursts, fighting--disaster.
No Child Left Behind often leaves kindergarten children so scarred by excessive rigor that they become demons. So, I'm hearing from masters students who are trying to find a way out of this trap for their kindergarten classes.
Before the academic police put the U.S. education system in its grip, Kindergarten was run like a glorified play center. Not so anymore, with grave consequences. It turns out, as the great modern observers of childhood development have been telling us--i.e. Piaget, Maria Montessori, and company--children need to play. They need to play with a vengeance.
Lately I've been hearing about truly sad, chaotic kindergartens. My students who teach kindergarten report that now there are academic standards that loom over kids aged 5, just as they do for much more mature students. Children under the age of, let's say 5-6, still are very very young, neurologically, emotionally, socially. Their attention spans for sitting in a circle while Teacher directs their attention to the board is short. Probably no more than 7 minutes at best. They do not learn in rigid, controlled atmospheres. They do not learn from lectures.
They learn from play. My husband Fran is fond of saying that he was allowed to skip kindergarten because he already knew how to take naps. I always laugh at this. I, on the other hand, reveled in my first half-days at school, the lovely, gentle Ashley Hall in Charleston, South Carolina.
We had a very tall teacher. Hers is the only name I remember from all my years of secondary education: Miss McClure. She was tall, raw-boned, and not at all soft and cuddly. But she had a lovely sweeping manner of almost singing her suggestions that we come sit in a circle at her feet. I remember those feet: clad in tie-up black pumps, with columnar legs growing out of them, measured in back by long black lines.--the seams in her stockings.
Her hair was drawn back in a bun and she wore glasses. I didn't get my own glasses until third grade when it turned out I couldn't see the board. But my father wore glasses--wire-rimmed like hers. And he too was a teacher, hurrying off every morning with a huge briefcase stuffed with student papers. Our student papers were large sheets of what I'd call foolscap (is that really a word?) on which we colored with huge crayons.
Unfortunately, my sheets often tore, since I bore down so hard with the crayons.
We probably learned our ABCs though I suspect I already knew mine. We sang a lot. What songs exactly, I don't remember. We sat cross-legged at Miss McClure's feet like busy little flowers under a tall swaying tree. And we ran outside to the glorious playground across the hot playing fields, where we bumped each other on small seesaws, climbed jungle gyms, dug in sandboxes, and generally made a lot of noise.
It's possible that we also began to learn a little French from "M'amselle," because now it's coming to me from my early years at Ashley Hall, voices singing "Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques, dormez vous? Dormez-vous? Sonnez-le matina, sonnez-le matina, ding, ding dong, etc."
"Je m'appelle Margot," I also hear myself saying. I am called Margot.
Nobody talked to us about standards, other than not biting or scratching, other than sitting quietly for short times as Miss McClure spoke to us from her height. We didn't have "play stations," such as little kitchens or baby basinettes (we were all girls at Ashley Hall), but we all had such things at home. We grew up in an era of extended play, inside, outside almost all year long, with the Old Citadel being my first kindergarten.
Living there, in the block-long former barracks of the military college called The Citadel, we had (now I hear my mother's voice) 150 children in one block. It's hard to believe, but there were lots of us, swarming up and down the irregular blocks of the slate sidewalk, playing "school" in a huge refrigerator packing
case, set on its long side. I was always the teacher, our little Mexican chairs brought out for students to sit in.
We collected the persimmon blossoms with their rubbery orange cups for doll tea parties--the Mexican chairs again. We drew hopscotch under the hackberry tree, and probably a bit later than kindergarten age, we swung our jump ropes--sometimes the individual ones that made an arc over our heads, and sometimes a huge communal one that required two of us to swing. And much later, probably fourth grade, we swung "double Dutch" ropes, two that twined around and made it tough for the jumper to enter.
Inside we were surrounded by books--our father's school books, books from the Charleston County Free Library, and the volumes of the Book House. Every night before my sister and I went to bed, we snuggled on either side of our mother while she read to us. I do not remember ever not being able to read.
BUT I was one of those youngsters for whom the printed page is a goldmine, the sound of words being read aloud little short of heaven, and school, eventually full day school, largely an inevitable and welcome place. No one pushed me in kindergarten to sit longer than I was capable of doing. No one tested my knowledge, forced me to read or write, spell or compute to a test. I don't remember tests until third grade when I'd been out sick for at least a week, and missed learning pronouns. The shame of not knowing along with my classmates still comes back to me--a dark, unfortunate shame.
Kindergarten is for play, for exploring lightly among the opportunities of school. Full days are very hard on most five-year-olds. They need to be closely tethered to home. It is best if they can walk to school, accompanied by a much older high-school girl, as I was. Forcing them to sit still for long periods leads to boredom, outbursts, fighting--disaster.
No Child Left Behind often leaves kindergarten children so scarred by excessive rigor that they become demons. So, I'm hearing from masters students who are trying to find a way out of this trap for their kindergarten classes.
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