Margotlog: Going, Going, Going Gone Global
In the mid-1990s, when the U.S. signed another trade agreement (I now realize it was NAFTA, a regional agreement among the U.S., Mexico, and Canada) I was driving into Wisconsin. The MPR newscast announced this new freedom granted to U.S. corporations to take their manufacturing operations outside the U.S. with impunity. I immediately had a sick feeling. How exactly this would effect American life or my mounting sense of global justice, I could only dimly perceive at the time. But the simple clear question that occurred to me was this: if Americans aren't making the goods they will eventually buy, then how will they have the money to continue buying them?
World stability depends in part on a rising standard of living worldwide. Though world trade agreements can help to produce that, they can't protect against a host of ills that don't come within the ken of such agreements. Like the underlying political system of a country, its educational standards, its wage and working structures, etc. Just because tariffs between the U.S. and Mexico are lowered, doesn't mean that the young Mexican women sewing shirts or jeans for the U.S. market are protected against low wages or long hours, poorly ventilated buildings, or ruinous invasions of privacy by their employers--for instance, forced use of contraceptives. In fact, as I saw documentaries through a local nonprofit dedicated to global human rights, it became clear that U.S. corporations were at the root of keeping wages and working conditions poor for these workers outside the U.S.
During the next ten years, from the 90s into the early 2000s, the effects of globalized business came to my attention in other, immediate ways: calling Delta Airlines, I found myself talking to someone from India who was hard to understand and didn't have the knowledge of U.S. geography or time differences to make much sense of my ticketing problems. Buying new clothes on sale, I discovered that I was purchasing a garment made in Bangladesh. Caught between appreciating the relative cheapness of the garment and worrying about what the lives of these workers were like, I carried my purchase home, put it on my body and forgot about it.
Meantime, my global environmental ethic was aroused: I was buying and eating pears from Chile, and fish and wine from Australia. Surely the emissions from transporting these products such long distances must be factored into their overall, global cost. We were experiencing global warming, weren't we? Were my consuming habits here in Minnesota contributing to cutting down the rainforests? Was my coffee, hidden in its Maxwell House comfy American label, contributing to an environmental disaster somewhere else in the world? All these concerns crossed my palate with the food. Then there was the energy question, lately come to a head with Canadian gas being extracted from a horrendously damaging method called fracking.
Now our own U.S. workers are in trouble. The U.S. gained not a single job in August, so the news reports. Unions which have traditionally protected workers from sweatshop conditions and low pay are under fire by a form of Republicanism one can only call exploitative. Our education system, after being wrenched about by No Child..., is now being forced by the same brand of Republicanism to take larger and larger numbers of students into a single class. Two days ago, a special education teacher I'm mentoring talked about having three times the number of students that used to be mandated for a single teacher's load. "We can't teach much," she commented. "These are autistic kids who are very delicately balanced. They freak out with too much noise, etc."
How to connect the big global picture to what is happening here at home? Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, has voiced some deep concerns about the globalization of American business and consumption. Yesterday a StarTribune interview indicated that Reich is "concerned about what we can afford to pay for what we as a nation need to do." Such as educate all our children for the highly demanding, technologically savvy work that is coming along. We can't afford as a nation to create a widening underclass with poor nutrition, poor education, poor life prospects. Why? Because simply put, if our workers can't compete with those overseas, American corporations will take those jobs overseas. Thus, it seems clear to me that we must do some or all of the following things:
* resist mightily continuing cuts to education. The public education system simply can't sustain any more without damaging the viability of our people and their work skills
* support unions because they protect American jobs and their decent pay.
* rethink the corporate advantages of various trade agreements, and where necessary, tailor tariffs and reciprocal regional agreements to benefit health and human viability within our borders. American corporations donate enormous amounts to largely Republican politicians who throw a scrim over the realities of how corporations have drained the life-blood from American livelihoods. Note: the Ponzi schemes for bundling mortgages and then taking out insurance assuming the mortgages would fail have bereft many Americans not only of homes but of the funds they sank into those they've lost. Likewise this enormously risky financial maneuvering has rippled across all kinds of economic transactions, creating first the recession of 2008, and now this stagnant, no-growth economy.
* insist on higher taxes for the upper 5 % of Americans. They are the ones benefiting from corporate practices; not the middle or lower classes. They should contribute more of their earnings, as Warren Buffet, Mr. Money-Pants himself attested recently. As Robert Reich has said, the voices of big corporations are drowning out the voice of ordinary citizens. It is time we began to look around us and see just how deeply the loss has reached.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Margotlog: Not So Fast
Margotlog: Not So Fast
I'm borrowing a title from Phebe Hanson and Joan Pride's travel memoir because it applies to all kinds of motions--teeth, bows, feet. Item: in the last two weeks, I've been visited by two performances of Bach that were too fast. "Listen to this last movement," advised Steve Staruck on MPR. I did. A bunch of crickets hyped to the max. Then last weekend at the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, their excitement got out of hand. Joana Carneiro, the young Portuguese conductor, led the orchestra in Bach's "Double VIolin Concerto in D. Minor." I couldn't distinguish Allegro and Vivace--both first and third movements grinding notes into a flurry of cornmeal that rose like a flock of gnats over the stage. Don't get me wrong: Joana Carneiro herself as a conductor works like a mad peasant from Kathe Kollwitz's Peasants Revolt series, or Goya's "Disasters of War." The vigor of her black-clad back, swooping and bending, cajoling and inciting was, in itself, an art form.
Fast is over-rated unless you're trying to outrun a tornado or flood. There's almost always another train. Rushing down the highway these days almost always ends in a stalemate stuck in a traffic jam. This summer, taking the train, not the plane from Chicago to Saint Paul we went slow enough through the water meadows of Wisconsin for me to spy two cranes rising on their huge gray wings like enormous cloaks giving way to the breeze. I want to teach the small people in my life to paw through a tub of shells over and over, counting and describing, as light flickers over us and the water eddies back and forth. Last evening walking down a familiar alley, I noticed a V of geese headed straight west overhead. Then they got lost in the huge flickering head of a cottonwood. A bird-eating tree? When I finally spied them again, they had veered sharply southeast, heading no doubt toward Lake Pepin and ultimately down the Mississippi flyway. They knew that tree, something told me. Something about the way it flickered pointed them south, on a diagonal away from the setting sun. If I'd been running, I would have missed them.
Then there's the savor of munching slow. A while back, a doctor told me, drink a glass of water before eating dinner. Then take small bites, with time in between. Chew thoroughly, savor the flavor and texture. Notice what you're eating. Sit and rest between courses. Sit and read The New Yorker after cleaning your plate. When I first attempted this revolution, I had to rein the consuming horse under control. My husband who can finish a huge plate of food in five to ten minutes, became agitated. Finally I had to tell him: "I'm not going to rush. I'm going to sit here. You go on. I'll see you later." Now I have the table to myself for half an hour or more after he's decamped.
Remember, our progenitors, thousands of years ago, walked. Or ran, or rode on horseback, muleback, camelback. Speed consuming miles and baked potatoes and a flurry of notes does not a life make. It makes a blur, a buzz, a stomach ache.
I'm borrowing a title from Phebe Hanson and Joan Pride's travel memoir because it applies to all kinds of motions--teeth, bows, feet. Item: in the last two weeks, I've been visited by two performances of Bach that were too fast. "Listen to this last movement," advised Steve Staruck on MPR. I did. A bunch of crickets hyped to the max. Then last weekend at the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, their excitement got out of hand. Joana Carneiro, the young Portuguese conductor, led the orchestra in Bach's "Double VIolin Concerto in D. Minor." I couldn't distinguish Allegro and Vivace--both first and third movements grinding notes into a flurry of cornmeal that rose like a flock of gnats over the stage. Don't get me wrong: Joana Carneiro herself as a conductor works like a mad peasant from Kathe Kollwitz's Peasants Revolt series, or Goya's "Disasters of War." The vigor of her black-clad back, swooping and bending, cajoling and inciting was, in itself, an art form.
Fast is over-rated unless you're trying to outrun a tornado or flood. There's almost always another train. Rushing down the highway these days almost always ends in a stalemate stuck in a traffic jam. This summer, taking the train, not the plane from Chicago to Saint Paul we went slow enough through the water meadows of Wisconsin for me to spy two cranes rising on their huge gray wings like enormous cloaks giving way to the breeze. I want to teach the small people in my life to paw through a tub of shells over and over, counting and describing, as light flickers over us and the water eddies back and forth. Last evening walking down a familiar alley, I noticed a V of geese headed straight west overhead. Then they got lost in the huge flickering head of a cottonwood. A bird-eating tree? When I finally spied them again, they had veered sharply southeast, heading no doubt toward Lake Pepin and ultimately down the Mississippi flyway. They knew that tree, something told me. Something about the way it flickered pointed them south, on a diagonal away from the setting sun. If I'd been running, I would have missed them.
Then there's the savor of munching slow. A while back, a doctor told me, drink a glass of water before eating dinner. Then take small bites, with time in between. Chew thoroughly, savor the flavor and texture. Notice what you're eating. Sit and rest between courses. Sit and read The New Yorker after cleaning your plate. When I first attempted this revolution, I had to rein the consuming horse under control. My husband who can finish a huge plate of food in five to ten minutes, became agitated. Finally I had to tell him: "I'm not going to rush. I'm going to sit here. You go on. I'll see you later." Now I have the table to myself for half an hour or more after he's decamped.
Remember, our progenitors, thousands of years ago, walked. Or ran, or rode on horseback, muleback, camelback. Speed consuming miles and baked potatoes and a flurry of notes does not a life make. It makes a blur, a buzz, a stomach ache.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Margotlog: From HIstory to Story
Margotlog: From History to Story
When I published The Story in History in 1992, the idea of using historical material to inspire creative writing was far from new--there was, after all, Tolstoy's War and Peace, 1869, not to mention the Shakespeare plays about all those English kings, Henry IV Part One with Falstaff and Prince Hal being my favorite. But aside from rather fluffy historical romances of the type I loved to read as a Southern teenager, about belles in the antebellum South, and dashing soldiers in gray, the notion of reinterpreting history through the lens of poetry and fiction needed some updating, some diffusion into modern creative possibilities.
Today that enrichment has extended beyond my own modest dreams to the point that some of the greatest poets and prose writers of the last twenty years astound us with their concoctions. Now looking at the recipes from the historical end intrigues me as much as discerning how fiction can enrich our portrayal of the past. Let's take David McCullough's 1776. What can this masterful historian teach us about weaving brilliant narrative from solid documentary evidence? What are some differences between contemporary fictional treatments of history and what history itself creates?
1776 brought the rebels surprising victories early and late, but in the middle, the American forces under General Washington suffered horrendous defeats in and around New York. It was one of the times that try men's souls, not to mention the women at home, receiving their letters.
The pen, for the historian, is far mightier than the sword: pity the poor historian in a hundred years, trying to piece together what common soldiers in Afganistan and Iraq, or their commanders, have to say about battles there. All told in emails, I suspect. Will they have survived?
McCullough's narrative is enriched time and again by vivid quotations from Washington's general orders to his officers, by his letters to Congress, to Mount Vernon. McCullough quotes letters from the youngest soldier, a fifer aged 15, and from his superiors, for instance Henry Knox all of 26, former bookseller in Boston, turned ordinance commander. The English are no less literary. It's these voices from the front, and occasional responses, especially from Abigail Adams, at home that bring McCullough's narrative to life.
Their authenticity is unquestionable. They are not fiction. The portrait McCullough paints of the public Washington--his facade of indomitable courage, his refusal to give up, his cool presence on a powerful horse leading the weary and shoeless men through icy countryside to attack Princeton at the turn of the year--all this is echoed by the men who observed him. But his letters show us his private griefs and doubts, his exhaustion and fears, and his continual return to thoughts of Mount Vernon as an antidote to this war he was learning to fight. These two perspectives prove one of McCullough's conclusions: the war, which would drag on another six years, ending only in 1783, was won through the perseverance, intelligence, and courage of George Washington. We are right to call him the father of our country.
How would a fictional account differ? A contemporary fiction of this important year? I suspect it would not focus on Washington at all, but take an unexpected point of view. Maybe the 15 year old fifer; maybe one of the Hessian soldiers captured at Trenton in a battle that lasted 20 minutes and roused American spirits after long months of defeat and mistakes in and around New York. That "Crossing of the Delaware" made so famous in the painting by German Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1851, in the Metropolitan Museum, New York) might inspire a cross-dressing rower as a subject for a novel. As there were in the Civil War, so probably also in the Revolution: women took up arms after disguising themselves as men.
Another element that distinguishes McCullough's narrative is its sweeping portrayal of landscape. We get bird's eye and more earthbound views, positioning us on either side of the Delaware; rather insistent chronology of Congress's removal to Baltimore, for fear of a British attack; of British General Howe's decision to pull the largest portion of his army away from the Delaware, leaving only a small force of 1000 Hessian troops at Trenton. Washington couldn't figure out for the longest time whether Howe had left the area or not. But we, the historical readers, know more than he did. We have hindsight to sweep forward and back through time, and up and down the coastal geography. This differs from what a fiction writer would probably choose to do: to embed our knowledge narrowly in the more limited perspective of participants. We would tramp with the Americans, shoeless and freezing in the tempest-tossed Delaware, uncertain of whom we would meet at Trenton. Though tension certainly exists in McCullough's narrative, it's not as fierce as a fictional account might create.
And McCullough does not dwell on the grisly or nefarious possibilities. Though he describes how the Hessian commander stuffed a warning of an American approach into his coat pocket and continued playing cards that Christmas evening, he does not do more than mention the possibility that the Hessian leader was thoroughly drunk. He died in the battle, McCullough tells us. That is enough to put such speculation to rest. I suspect that a fiction writer would not be so gallant. Go where the drama is, ferret out the possible underlying cause that the Hessians and their well-tried commander failed so miserably. Though McCullough includes the experiences of commoner and foot soldiers, he does so almost always to portray what is tinted with a bright hue, the red of freshly spilled blood, or the trembling voice of a storekeeper in British-occupied New York, who pulls a captured American soldier into the back room to relate that General Washington has taken 800 Hessians prisoner. Historians write for posterity; novelists turn over the dead and pillage their pockets and guts.
There are many more differences, of course. For now, this Sunday morning, when our contemporary course as a nation struggles on, this heroism and perseverance seem one of the best parts of our historical legacy.
When I published The Story in History in 1992, the idea of using historical material to inspire creative writing was far from new--there was, after all, Tolstoy's War and Peace, 1869, not to mention the Shakespeare plays about all those English kings, Henry IV Part One with Falstaff and Prince Hal being my favorite. But aside from rather fluffy historical romances of the type I loved to read as a Southern teenager, about belles in the antebellum South, and dashing soldiers in gray, the notion of reinterpreting history through the lens of poetry and fiction needed some updating, some diffusion into modern creative possibilities.
Today that enrichment has extended beyond my own modest dreams to the point that some of the greatest poets and prose writers of the last twenty years astound us with their concoctions. Now looking at the recipes from the historical end intrigues me as much as discerning how fiction can enrich our portrayal of the past. Let's take David McCullough's 1776. What can this masterful historian teach us about weaving brilliant narrative from solid documentary evidence? What are some differences between contemporary fictional treatments of history and what history itself creates?
1776 brought the rebels surprising victories early and late, but in the middle, the American forces under General Washington suffered horrendous defeats in and around New York. It was one of the times that try men's souls, not to mention the women at home, receiving their letters.
The pen, for the historian, is far mightier than the sword: pity the poor historian in a hundred years, trying to piece together what common soldiers in Afganistan and Iraq, or their commanders, have to say about battles there. All told in emails, I suspect. Will they have survived?
McCullough's narrative is enriched time and again by vivid quotations from Washington's general orders to his officers, by his letters to Congress, to Mount Vernon. McCullough quotes letters from the youngest soldier, a fifer aged 15, and from his superiors, for instance Henry Knox all of 26, former bookseller in Boston, turned ordinance commander. The English are no less literary. It's these voices from the front, and occasional responses, especially from Abigail Adams, at home that bring McCullough's narrative to life.
Their authenticity is unquestionable. They are not fiction. The portrait McCullough paints of the public Washington--his facade of indomitable courage, his refusal to give up, his cool presence on a powerful horse leading the weary and shoeless men through icy countryside to attack Princeton at the turn of the year--all this is echoed by the men who observed him. But his letters show us his private griefs and doubts, his exhaustion and fears, and his continual return to thoughts of Mount Vernon as an antidote to this war he was learning to fight. These two perspectives prove one of McCullough's conclusions: the war, which would drag on another six years, ending only in 1783, was won through the perseverance, intelligence, and courage of George Washington. We are right to call him the father of our country.
How would a fictional account differ? A contemporary fiction of this important year? I suspect it would not focus on Washington at all, but take an unexpected point of view. Maybe the 15 year old fifer; maybe one of the Hessian soldiers captured at Trenton in a battle that lasted 20 minutes and roused American spirits after long months of defeat and mistakes in and around New York. That "Crossing of the Delaware" made so famous in the painting by German Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1851, in the Metropolitan Museum, New York) might inspire a cross-dressing rower as a subject for a novel. As there were in the Civil War, so probably also in the Revolution: women took up arms after disguising themselves as men.
Another element that distinguishes McCullough's narrative is its sweeping portrayal of landscape. We get bird's eye and more earthbound views, positioning us on either side of the Delaware; rather insistent chronology of Congress's removal to Baltimore, for fear of a British attack; of British General Howe's decision to pull the largest portion of his army away from the Delaware, leaving only a small force of 1000 Hessian troops at Trenton. Washington couldn't figure out for the longest time whether Howe had left the area or not. But we, the historical readers, know more than he did. We have hindsight to sweep forward and back through time, and up and down the coastal geography. This differs from what a fiction writer would probably choose to do: to embed our knowledge narrowly in the more limited perspective of participants. We would tramp with the Americans, shoeless and freezing in the tempest-tossed Delaware, uncertain of whom we would meet at Trenton. Though tension certainly exists in McCullough's narrative, it's not as fierce as a fictional account might create.
And McCullough does not dwell on the grisly or nefarious possibilities. Though he describes how the Hessian commander stuffed a warning of an American approach into his coat pocket and continued playing cards that Christmas evening, he does not do more than mention the possibility that the Hessian leader was thoroughly drunk. He died in the battle, McCullough tells us. That is enough to put such speculation to rest. I suspect that a fiction writer would not be so gallant. Go where the drama is, ferret out the possible underlying cause that the Hessians and their well-tried commander failed so miserably. Though McCullough includes the experiences of commoner and foot soldiers, he does so almost always to portray what is tinted with a bright hue, the red of freshly spilled blood, or the trembling voice of a storekeeper in British-occupied New York, who pulls a captured American soldier into the back room to relate that General Washington has taken 800 Hessians prisoner. Historians write for posterity; novelists turn over the dead and pillage their pockets and guts.
There are many more differences, of course. For now, this Sunday morning, when our contemporary course as a nation struggles on, this heroism and perseverance seem one of the best parts of our historical legacy.
Friday, September 9, 2011
Margotlog: Turgenev and Tension Among the Generations
Margotlog: Turgenev and Tension Among the Generations
When I first read Fathers and Sons by the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, I hadn't been prepared first by Isaiah Berlin's essay on the Russian intelligentsia. This time around I read Berlin's essay which serves as an introduction to the Penguin edition. I learned that the outsider, young scientist Bazarov, who comes to visit with his pal Arkady, represents the nihilists (Arkady uses this term to describe his blunt, brusque friend), who wanted to sweep all the stuck-in-the-mud or snooty Russian bureaucrats and aristocrats away, but had rather nothing to put in their place.
Frankly, no matter how true this was to the period when Turgenev was writing--the book was published in 1862--what strikes me on this second reading is how contemporary Turgenev's portrayal of generational conflict feels to the present. Arkady has completed his education in Petersburg and returns to his father Nikolai's estate which has been much reduced by division of the land with the peasants. A gentle peace-maker, Arkady and his not so elderly father are moved to tears and awkwardness by this reunion. Nikolai has taken a very young mistress after his wife's death, and early in the novel, he tries to explain Fenichka's presence and that of her baby boy. This creates a forward-and-back dance of tension between father and son. Arkady displays manly adult acceptance, and his father the reticence and embarrassment of having to acknowledge a sexual life after his wife's death.
Bazarov could not be more unlike his friend Arkady--brusque, often silent, not at all given to emotional responses (he is, after all, an outsider), Basarov goes out of his way to insult the fourth man of the group, Pavel Petrovich, who is Arkady's uncle. Pavel could not be more unlike his brother Nikolai. Where Nikolai is very much the country squire, easy-going, affectionate, not overly fancy or persnickety about linen or food, etc., his brother Pavel continues to wear beautifully tailored clothes; is always scented with perfume, eats hardly anything, and generally comports himself as the disappointed and idle dandy that he was in younger days. It's a mark of Turgenev's skill that we accept this scheme of opposing pairs in two generations as the most natural occurrence in the world.
Isaiah Berlin comments that Turgenev was not a politically minded writer, unlike Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, his younger contemporaries. In fact, Turgenev spent many years of his adulthood in France where his long-time mistress, the singer Pauline Garcia-Viardot, lived with her husband and children, pursuing a career. Thinking about his acceptance into this household (where his own daughter by a seamstress was brought up), I glimpse what perhaps was the real-life experience on which Turgenev bases the odd sexual relationship between the father Nikolai and his much younger mistress, and the feints and gradual revelations of this liason which make up the first half of the novel.
Then there's Basarov and Pavel, so opposed in behavior and allegiances that they must come to blows. And so they do, in an awkward but murderous duel which leaves Pavel dead. After this, Basarov must leave, which he does, returning to his own parents, not far away, his father a one-time army doctor, and his mother one of the unforgettable characters in Russian literature, humble, entirely given over to cooking to please her son, and devout in the entreme. Among his own people, Basarov's nihilism becomes less extreme; his care for the peasants a touching corrective to his brusqueness with the fancy aristocracy, and his agonizing death from typhus (which his doctor father cannot cure), another of the novel's dramatic and highly touching scenes.
Thinking of these young men and their relations to their parents, I'm reminded not so much of myself, as of my husband Fran and his missionary parents. Fran was one of the young radicals of the 1960s, protesting the Vietnam war and eventually allowing himself to be sent to prison as a pacifist--he refused the various "outs" that might have worked, such as exiting to Canada or declaring himself a conscientious objector. I use his story to frame Vietnam protest in my book Stop This War: Americans Protest the Vietnam Conflict (available from Amazon). Fran's father had also been a pacifist sent to prison after refusing to register for the World War II draft. What has often touched me about Fran's prison experience is the fact that his father did not visit him. His mother came, the parent with whom Fran had the greater conflict. I interpret this as the father not wanting to acknowledge that his son had upstaged him. The mother, who had lived with her in-laws during her husband's incarceration, felt, I imagine, the hollowness that must be part of such a radical choice. This hollowness echoes in Basarov and his death, which seems such a waste. As does Fran's imprisonment, a chunk of 17 months out of his life, from which he had to recover. And yet, in our modern instance, there's also the alternative to consider: 17 months in Vietnam would no doubt have left a far deeper and more lasting wound. As Turgenev so gently shows, the young are put or put themselves on the front line of a culture's decadence.
When I first read Fathers and Sons by the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, I hadn't been prepared first by Isaiah Berlin's essay on the Russian intelligentsia. This time around I read Berlin's essay which serves as an introduction to the Penguin edition. I learned that the outsider, young scientist Bazarov, who comes to visit with his pal Arkady, represents the nihilists (Arkady uses this term to describe his blunt, brusque friend), who wanted to sweep all the stuck-in-the-mud or snooty Russian bureaucrats and aristocrats away, but had rather nothing to put in their place.
Frankly, no matter how true this was to the period when Turgenev was writing--the book was published in 1862--what strikes me on this second reading is how contemporary Turgenev's portrayal of generational conflict feels to the present. Arkady has completed his education in Petersburg and returns to his father Nikolai's estate which has been much reduced by division of the land with the peasants. A gentle peace-maker, Arkady and his not so elderly father are moved to tears and awkwardness by this reunion. Nikolai has taken a very young mistress after his wife's death, and early in the novel, he tries to explain Fenichka's presence and that of her baby boy. This creates a forward-and-back dance of tension between father and son. Arkady displays manly adult acceptance, and his father the reticence and embarrassment of having to acknowledge a sexual life after his wife's death.
Bazarov could not be more unlike his friend Arkady--brusque, often silent, not at all given to emotional responses (he is, after all, an outsider), Basarov goes out of his way to insult the fourth man of the group, Pavel Petrovich, who is Arkady's uncle. Pavel could not be more unlike his brother Nikolai. Where Nikolai is very much the country squire, easy-going, affectionate, not overly fancy or persnickety about linen or food, etc., his brother Pavel continues to wear beautifully tailored clothes; is always scented with perfume, eats hardly anything, and generally comports himself as the disappointed and idle dandy that he was in younger days. It's a mark of Turgenev's skill that we accept this scheme of opposing pairs in two generations as the most natural occurrence in the world.
Isaiah Berlin comments that Turgenev was not a politically minded writer, unlike Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, his younger contemporaries. In fact, Turgenev spent many years of his adulthood in France where his long-time mistress, the singer Pauline Garcia-Viardot, lived with her husband and children, pursuing a career. Thinking about his acceptance into this household (where his own daughter by a seamstress was brought up), I glimpse what perhaps was the real-life experience on which Turgenev bases the odd sexual relationship between the father Nikolai and his much younger mistress, and the feints and gradual revelations of this liason which make up the first half of the novel.
Then there's Basarov and Pavel, so opposed in behavior and allegiances that they must come to blows. And so they do, in an awkward but murderous duel which leaves Pavel dead. After this, Basarov must leave, which he does, returning to his own parents, not far away, his father a one-time army doctor, and his mother one of the unforgettable characters in Russian literature, humble, entirely given over to cooking to please her son, and devout in the entreme. Among his own people, Basarov's nihilism becomes less extreme; his care for the peasants a touching corrective to his brusqueness with the fancy aristocracy, and his agonizing death from typhus (which his doctor father cannot cure), another of the novel's dramatic and highly touching scenes.
Thinking of these young men and their relations to their parents, I'm reminded not so much of myself, as of my husband Fran and his missionary parents. Fran was one of the young radicals of the 1960s, protesting the Vietnam war and eventually allowing himself to be sent to prison as a pacifist--he refused the various "outs" that might have worked, such as exiting to Canada or declaring himself a conscientious objector. I use his story to frame Vietnam protest in my book Stop This War: Americans Protest the Vietnam Conflict (available from Amazon). Fran's father had also been a pacifist sent to prison after refusing to register for the World War II draft. What has often touched me about Fran's prison experience is the fact that his father did not visit him. His mother came, the parent with whom Fran had the greater conflict. I interpret this as the father not wanting to acknowledge that his son had upstaged him. The mother, who had lived with her in-laws during her husband's incarceration, felt, I imagine, the hollowness that must be part of such a radical choice. This hollowness echoes in Basarov and his death, which seems such a waste. As does Fran's imprisonment, a chunk of 17 months out of his life, from which he had to recover. And yet, in our modern instance, there's also the alternative to consider: 17 months in Vietnam would no doubt have left a far deeper and more lasting wound. As Turgenev so gently shows, the young are put or put themselves on the front line of a culture's decadence.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Margotlog: Let's Give a Hand for Trees
Margotlog: Let's Give a Hand to Trees
Before I was forty, I didn't take trees seriously. They were there, older and taller than I was. But I noticed them and asked their names. Tall stately magnolias in my parents' first South Carolina lot, Mount Pleasant, north of Charleston. These majestic beings must have been 150 years old, my mother, the German tree-hugger, insisted. Nothing north of the Mason Dixon line measured up until I met the elephant trunk beeches at Winterthur, the DuPont estate outside Wilmington, Delaware. Their smooth grey trunks flared into huge flanges that clutched the earth, while their enormous heads fluttered far above in the blue. Then I moved to Minnesota and met city boulevard elms, who rivaled the beech, and further north, vast white pine, atavars of an earlier period before white people came to hack and hew. Stepping from a canoe on the Namekagon or upper St. Croix, my husband and I looked up in awe from the trunks that we couldn't encompass with both our arms stretched around them.
Then two things began to happen. The elms along Minneapolis boulevards began to die, and my first husband and I treated those in front of our house. Second, we divorced, I moved to Saint Paul, eventually remarried and bought a house that was built in 1912. It had been covered with aluminum siding, and its postage-stamp yard thatched with sod. Nothing but a rather puny boulevard ash grew higher than grass. I was suddenly appalled. Where were the leafy consorts shading and beautifying the house? Where were the green-haired friends I'd taken for granted before?
Trees talk, you know. They talked their way onto my yard: first in the front a Honey Locust with feathery golden leaves, and its companion, a Russian olive that bloomed tiny sweet flowers each spring. In the back, against the fence, courtesy of the Arbor Foundation, sprouts of white pine, and blue spruce. I planted so many spruce I had to dig one up when it was still under a foot tall and donate to the next door neighbor. Next on a trip to visit my husband's parents who lived in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, I acquired three silver maples shoots from my new mother-in-law. These people, missionaries to China, then to poor communities in Virginia, North Dakota, and Iowa, had no heirlooms to give us, but Lu, my husband's mother, knew what was lasting, and had potted these seedlings for us to take home. If I'd known better, I could have dug similar ones from someone's yard in Saint Paul, but it seemed fitting that we'd drive these little spouts, no higher than my mid-calf, north to plant all over the back yard, again, so many trees I had to repot one and donate it across the street.
That was the mid-1980s. Every tree but one maple we had to cut down--it was too close to the house--has survived. I listened to them, and when they said "Water," I did, with the hose turned on low nestled a foot from their trunks. When they said nourish, I did, with fertilizer stakes, pounded into the wet spring soil. I added a lovely spring-flowering crabapple, whose white blossoms float over the backyard like frozen kisses. I'd still be adding trees if I could, but there's simply no more space. Several years ago, the emerald Ash beetle was sighted in Minnesota, and we had our boulevard ash treated. SInce it may not survive the beetle onslaught, I planted among the astilbe and goldenrod further along the boulevard, a tiny tamarack from the bogs of Northern MInnesota. It likes its feet wet, and we have a kind of rain garden there.
This year in Saint Paul, we had more than enough rain through July. Then the natural watering stopped. There have been sprinkles since, but nothing substantial for going on six weeks. It's too long for growing things, especially fledgling trees. Along Selby Avenue coming up the hill from Lexington Parkway, I notice droopy new elms, just planted in the boulevards, a variety that's resistant to Dutch Elm disease. They may not die of Elm beetles, but they will of thirst unless someone wakes up and waters them good. What does a good watering mean? A couple of hours of low-hose seepage around the roots, every week, all the way through the autumn until the ground freezes. Big trees have put down wide-flung root systems that capture water low in the ground. But these new sprouts have yet to do that. They are dying of thirst. I hope somebody will listen. P.S. I also water my big trees because I love them and want them to flourish. Home to me means people I love, a roof that's secure, cats to purr up close, and trees outside to filter out noise, dust, sun and heat. A house is not a home without its companion trees.
Before I was forty, I didn't take trees seriously. They were there, older and taller than I was. But I noticed them and asked their names. Tall stately magnolias in my parents' first South Carolina lot, Mount Pleasant, north of Charleston. These majestic beings must have been 150 years old, my mother, the German tree-hugger, insisted. Nothing north of the Mason Dixon line measured up until I met the elephant trunk beeches at Winterthur, the DuPont estate outside Wilmington, Delaware. Their smooth grey trunks flared into huge flanges that clutched the earth, while their enormous heads fluttered far above in the blue. Then I moved to Minnesota and met city boulevard elms, who rivaled the beech, and further north, vast white pine, atavars of an earlier period before white people came to hack and hew. Stepping from a canoe on the Namekagon or upper St. Croix, my husband and I looked up in awe from the trunks that we couldn't encompass with both our arms stretched around them.
Then two things began to happen. The elms along Minneapolis boulevards began to die, and my first husband and I treated those in front of our house. Second, we divorced, I moved to Saint Paul, eventually remarried and bought a house that was built in 1912. It had been covered with aluminum siding, and its postage-stamp yard thatched with sod. Nothing but a rather puny boulevard ash grew higher than grass. I was suddenly appalled. Where were the leafy consorts shading and beautifying the house? Where were the green-haired friends I'd taken for granted before?
Trees talk, you know. They talked their way onto my yard: first in the front a Honey Locust with feathery golden leaves, and its companion, a Russian olive that bloomed tiny sweet flowers each spring. In the back, against the fence, courtesy of the Arbor Foundation, sprouts of white pine, and blue spruce. I planted so many spruce I had to dig one up when it was still under a foot tall and donate to the next door neighbor. Next on a trip to visit my husband's parents who lived in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, I acquired three silver maples shoots from my new mother-in-law. These people, missionaries to China, then to poor communities in Virginia, North Dakota, and Iowa, had no heirlooms to give us, but Lu, my husband's mother, knew what was lasting, and had potted these seedlings for us to take home. If I'd known better, I could have dug similar ones from someone's yard in Saint Paul, but it seemed fitting that we'd drive these little spouts, no higher than my mid-calf, north to plant all over the back yard, again, so many trees I had to repot one and donate it across the street.
That was the mid-1980s. Every tree but one maple we had to cut down--it was too close to the house--has survived. I listened to them, and when they said "Water," I did, with the hose turned on low nestled a foot from their trunks. When they said nourish, I did, with fertilizer stakes, pounded into the wet spring soil. I added a lovely spring-flowering crabapple, whose white blossoms float over the backyard like frozen kisses. I'd still be adding trees if I could, but there's simply no more space. Several years ago, the emerald Ash beetle was sighted in Minnesota, and we had our boulevard ash treated. SInce it may not survive the beetle onslaught, I planted among the astilbe and goldenrod further along the boulevard, a tiny tamarack from the bogs of Northern MInnesota. It likes its feet wet, and we have a kind of rain garden there.
This year in Saint Paul, we had more than enough rain through July. Then the natural watering stopped. There have been sprinkles since, but nothing substantial for going on six weeks. It's too long for growing things, especially fledgling trees. Along Selby Avenue coming up the hill from Lexington Parkway, I notice droopy new elms, just planted in the boulevards, a variety that's resistant to Dutch Elm disease. They may not die of Elm beetles, but they will of thirst unless someone wakes up and waters them good. What does a good watering mean? A couple of hours of low-hose seepage around the roots, every week, all the way through the autumn until the ground freezes. Big trees have put down wide-flung root systems that capture water low in the ground. But these new sprouts have yet to do that. They are dying of thirst. I hope somebody will listen. P.S. I also water my big trees because I love them and want them to flourish. Home to me means people I love, a roof that's secure, cats to purr up close, and trees outside to filter out noise, dust, sun and heat. A house is not a home without its companion trees.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Margotlog: Round Pegs in Square Holes
Margotlog: Round Pegs in Square Holes
They don't work, or so we should have discovered first hand in kindergarten. It's a very primary lesson BUT not much help in politics. I could have started this mumbling with a more dramatic flair: my husband commented the other day, "Republican presidents seem to get more done." But didn't want to prejudice readers of the other stripe right off the bat, because I too tend to vote for the Democrats. Yet, in polarized times like these, when even what I'd call smart Democrats and smart Republicans are getting sucked further into antagonism, I wake up in the wee hours trying to turn those round and square, triangular and hexagonal pegs for further inspection.
Let's examine the "debt ceiling" for all its worth. In simple terms, raising the debt ceiling meant that the federal government had congressional authorization to borrow enough to keep paying its debts. Since we're in a recession, with more drain on the federal coffers than they can long sustain, such a move looked at first glance like the wrong peg for the hole. Yet it was not. We'd just witnessed abroad what happens when governments fail to pay their debts. Internal and external chaos ensues. The debt ceiling had to be raised, but with compensating adjustments to some of the other huge expenditures like social security which are becoming financially insecure.
Why did the Republicans and some Democrats in Congress resist raising the debt ceiling? Because they had become so blinded by "round peg in round hole" thinking that they couldn't step toward a more complicated version of what fits where. Now comes the fun part: I'm going to tell you my night thoughts about this radicalization.
First, the Republicans who hate federal government interference so profoundly that they're ready to shuck the whole mess and disband the union. I suspect them of white-washing more personal prejudices. It is profoundly not politically correct these days to protest African-Americans or other people of color in politics. We have elected an African-American president (though my husband the extreme liberal corrects me: "He's half white and half Kenyan." Forget that, I say, in the eyes of most Americans President Obama looks African-American.) White privilege is alive and well in the United States, especially the further one gets from the city center. Statistics suggest that the largest growing population in the U.S. is Hispanic. Someday we may become a dual-language country.
Then there are the two enormously sensitive personal issues that tap into religious feelings: abortion and same-sex marriage. Along some highways leading from the Twin Cities into the Minnesota hinterlands, billboards announce that babies in the womb are alive, fully human. They feel pain. We will be practicing homicide if we practice abortion. I don't question the weight of belief and emotion that helped erect these messages. And that weight bears down in favor of hometown round pegs which desperately want to fit into round holes. It refuses to consider what another child born to a family already strapped economically could mean homelessness or worse. Or what an unwanted pregnancy could do to a high school student whose family is rigidly Christian and will ostracize her or worse. It refuses to look at individual cases and consider how they deviate from a norm.
Now let's take a look in the other direction. Most Democrats like to think of themselves as the party of rationality. We are not hobbled by round peg-square hole problems. Wrong, I say. Here are some recent personal and more public examples: my own congressional rep, Democrat Betty McCollum has recently taken three extreme positions on what I consider crucial issues:
* the new bridge over the St. Croix from Stillwater into Wisconsin. She resists any bridge at all.
* raising the debt ceiling. She voted against doing so.
* presenting to Congress and passing new trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Columbia. She opposes these trade agreements.
A few days ago we drove to Stillwater. The downtown was clogged with cars. Have you noticed, despite the growing evidence of global warming, Americans are driving larger and larger vehicles. Or is it only Minnesotans? The once sleepy small town of Stillwater, with its narrow main street running parallel to the river, had a traffic jam to rival the log jams that used to clog the river. A new bridge over the river is crucial to the health of this town. New approaches will divert traffic from the downtown, hopefully returning it to manageable proportions. Yes, the river is part of the Scenic Rivers designation, protected from development, but a variance has been allowed to build a new bridge. Betty McCollum is taking a rigid position on this--she's being a steward of the river, but not looking at the traffic problems within the town itself.
Raising the debt ceiling was, in my opinion, one of the most difficult but crucial votes in the Congress for years. When at the last instant there was a compromise, McCollum along with Al Franken voted against it. What's with these extreme Dems? I hear my husband's voice: "Republican presidents get more done." He would add that the Democrats usually go along with a Republican president; whereas with Dem presidents, Republicans don't follow that pattern. I'd counter, "Look at this! Clearly in a issue of national importance, two of our own Minnesota Dems opted out." This is resistance at the other extreme.
Ditto on these proposed trade agreements that will erase protective tariffs against American goods in three trading partners. Here my very liberal husband has a knee-jerk reaction, hates the World Trade Agreement passed during the Clinton administration so much--which allowed American corporations to export jobs overseas yet still claim all the advantages of being listed as American corporations, that he thinks this is the same thing. "No, " I insist. "This is a different kind of trade agreement. It will open countries to American goods. It will make American goods less expensive in these countries. Canada and the European Union have already signed agreements with these three countries. Get with it!" Am I not surprised that Betty McCollum has also come out against the agreements?
In such antagonistic times, it's harder to assess any issue on its own merit. Time to hold these various shapes in our hands and think deeper night thoughts.
They don't work, or so we should have discovered first hand in kindergarten. It's a very primary lesson BUT not much help in politics. I could have started this mumbling with a more dramatic flair: my husband commented the other day, "Republican presidents seem to get more done." But didn't want to prejudice readers of the other stripe right off the bat, because I too tend to vote for the Democrats. Yet, in polarized times like these, when even what I'd call smart Democrats and smart Republicans are getting sucked further into antagonism, I wake up in the wee hours trying to turn those round and square, triangular and hexagonal pegs for further inspection.
Let's examine the "debt ceiling" for all its worth. In simple terms, raising the debt ceiling meant that the federal government had congressional authorization to borrow enough to keep paying its debts. Since we're in a recession, with more drain on the federal coffers than they can long sustain, such a move looked at first glance like the wrong peg for the hole. Yet it was not. We'd just witnessed abroad what happens when governments fail to pay their debts. Internal and external chaos ensues. The debt ceiling had to be raised, but with compensating adjustments to some of the other huge expenditures like social security which are becoming financially insecure.
Why did the Republicans and some Democrats in Congress resist raising the debt ceiling? Because they had become so blinded by "round peg in round hole" thinking that they couldn't step toward a more complicated version of what fits where. Now comes the fun part: I'm going to tell you my night thoughts about this radicalization.
First, the Republicans who hate federal government interference so profoundly that they're ready to shuck the whole mess and disband the union. I suspect them of white-washing more personal prejudices. It is profoundly not politically correct these days to protest African-Americans or other people of color in politics. We have elected an African-American president (though my husband the extreme liberal corrects me: "He's half white and half Kenyan." Forget that, I say, in the eyes of most Americans President Obama looks African-American.) White privilege is alive and well in the United States, especially the further one gets from the city center. Statistics suggest that the largest growing population in the U.S. is Hispanic. Someday we may become a dual-language country.
Then there are the two enormously sensitive personal issues that tap into religious feelings: abortion and same-sex marriage. Along some highways leading from the Twin Cities into the Minnesota hinterlands, billboards announce that babies in the womb are alive, fully human. They feel pain. We will be practicing homicide if we practice abortion. I don't question the weight of belief and emotion that helped erect these messages. And that weight bears down in favor of hometown round pegs which desperately want to fit into round holes. It refuses to consider what another child born to a family already strapped economically could mean homelessness or worse. Or what an unwanted pregnancy could do to a high school student whose family is rigidly Christian and will ostracize her or worse. It refuses to look at individual cases and consider how they deviate from a norm.
Now let's take a look in the other direction. Most Democrats like to think of themselves as the party of rationality. We are not hobbled by round peg-square hole problems. Wrong, I say. Here are some recent personal and more public examples: my own congressional rep, Democrat Betty McCollum has recently taken three extreme positions on what I consider crucial issues:
* the new bridge over the St. Croix from Stillwater into Wisconsin. She resists any bridge at all.
* raising the debt ceiling. She voted against doing so.
* presenting to Congress and passing new trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Columbia. She opposes these trade agreements.
A few days ago we drove to Stillwater. The downtown was clogged with cars. Have you noticed, despite the growing evidence of global warming, Americans are driving larger and larger vehicles. Or is it only Minnesotans? The once sleepy small town of Stillwater, with its narrow main street running parallel to the river, had a traffic jam to rival the log jams that used to clog the river. A new bridge over the river is crucial to the health of this town. New approaches will divert traffic from the downtown, hopefully returning it to manageable proportions. Yes, the river is part of the Scenic Rivers designation, protected from development, but a variance has been allowed to build a new bridge. Betty McCollum is taking a rigid position on this--she's being a steward of the river, but not looking at the traffic problems within the town itself.
Raising the debt ceiling was, in my opinion, one of the most difficult but crucial votes in the Congress for years. When at the last instant there was a compromise, McCollum along with Al Franken voted against it. What's with these extreme Dems? I hear my husband's voice: "Republican presidents get more done." He would add that the Democrats usually go along with a Republican president; whereas with Dem presidents, Republicans don't follow that pattern. I'd counter, "Look at this! Clearly in a issue of national importance, two of our own Minnesota Dems opted out." This is resistance at the other extreme.
Ditto on these proposed trade agreements that will erase protective tariffs against American goods in three trading partners. Here my very liberal husband has a knee-jerk reaction, hates the World Trade Agreement passed during the Clinton administration so much--which allowed American corporations to export jobs overseas yet still claim all the advantages of being listed as American corporations, that he thinks this is the same thing. "No, " I insist. "This is a different kind of trade agreement. It will open countries to American goods. It will make American goods less expensive in these countries. Canada and the European Union have already signed agreements with these three countries. Get with it!" Am I not surprised that Betty McCollum has also come out against the agreements?
In such antagonistic times, it's harder to assess any issue on its own merit. Time to hold these various shapes in our hands and think deeper night thoughts.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Margotlog: I Looked the Part
Margotlog: I Looked the Part
Heavy hair that framed the sides of my face like spaniel ears, large dark eyes which by third grade would peer through blue-rimmed glasses, and a rather heavy gait since I wore orthopedic shoes. How could I not be a good student?
Recently I was struck by the qualities that promote studentdom, not only because school is starting, and I'm now a teacher, but also because two vivid instances of students who beat the odds have appeared before me, one immediate and one from my past.
First the distant one: When I was a college student at Goucher College outside Baltimore, Florence Howe was one of the few women professors, a rather discouraging fact, given that Goucher was then a women's college. Not only was she female, but young and striking looking with a full head of dark hair marked in front by a white streak. Recently I've been reading her memoir, A Life in Motion, published by the Feminist Press which she founded.
Child of working-class New York Jews, FLorence Howe's intelligence and scholarly application made itself known by high school, but her mother persistently denigrated or ignored her accomplishments. Her mother worked and when she came home, wanted to listen to radio programs, not help Florence do homework. Possibly her mother didn't have the skills, after a certain point, to offer much help. Nor to conceive of college. Her father, who drove a cab, took a different attitude, praising and encouraging her, but he couldn't provide much help either. It was her teachers at Hunter College High School, then at Hunter College itself (which was free) who led her in various directions that culminated in graduate school and her position at Goucher in the early 1960s. What her mother did say, however, was a kind of backhanded directive: Become a teacher so you'll have your own money and your husband can't make you grovel. This didn't describe her own father's behavior exactly, but fit the family's poverty: her mother's job helped put food on the table.
Now the modern instance: This is a young high-school English teacher in a Twin Cities suburban high school whom I know because she's finishing her master's degree in education, and I'm her advisor. Let's call her Natalie. Natalie is African-American. Beginning in Chicago and concluding in the Twin Cities, Natalie's elementary and high school education had three parts: kindergarten through third grade, fourth through seventh in Chicago, then eighth through graduation from high school in the Twin Cities.
As Natalie and I talk about her capstone paper's focus--on the achievement gap between students of color and white students (which is very high in Minnesota)--I encourage her to tell her own story because it so clearly emphasizes two crucial elements in students' success: a settled school history, i.e. staying in one school for as long as possible, and the importance of teachers and parents.
Natalie's first four years of school in Chicago, her single mom moved the family from one neighborhood to another. Natalie's schooling was disrupted by what we call today transience. It's like uprooting a little plant and never letting it put down strong roots. That changed when her mother settled into an all-black neighborhood with a neighborhood school. As Natalie describes that school, I'm struck by several elements that contributed to help her take hold: all her teachers were black. They provided strong role models for African-American accomplishment, and they knew the culture and racial dimensions of their students' lives. "Our teachers would call in our parents if we acted up," says Natalie. "They ate with us in the lunchroom, stayed with us on the playground, saw us out the door. We walked to school with the same students through all our elementary grades because Chicago's philosophy required elementary schools to serve surrounding neighborhoods. There was no busing."
This seems crucial to both of us as we unpack what this meant for Natalie's education. Stability, first of all. A constant strong guiding presence in and outside the classroom. Knowledge of students' lives first hand--no student came from far away. Their home lives, their discipline, etc., all could be easily determined by the school. Finally a cohort of friends to accompany a kid throughout the day.
I've often wondered about the value of busing. Yes, it was put in place across the nation to combat segregation. Though Natalie's school and neighborhood were essentially segregated, the quality of education was high. And the students were taught by people of their own race. Nor were they taken away from a familiar neighborhood every day to attend a school with kids far different from themselves. Undoubtedly in some schools busing has created greater opportunities for underserved students, but it's no surprise to me that Saint Paul has decided against busing (for all students or only elementary?). Eliminating busing in Saint Paul is a money-saving measure, but it also gives kids a chance to know the world under their feet, all around them, at the slow pace of walking, taking it in, day after day. That kind of environmental consciousness--this is my world and this is myself in it--can help form a sense of self among others, distinct and united. I venture to say it's the foundation for ethical thinking.
When Natalie's mother brought her family to the Twin Cities hoping for a better life, they settled first in Minneapolis and Natalie began at a junior-senior high combo. When they moved the next year, and the next, and the next, from suburb to suburb, Natalie convinced her mother to let her take the city bus into the city and conclude high school where she had started it. "Teachers knew me; they guided and encouraged me," Natalie says. "I did homework on the city bus. My mother trusted me. If I'd lived by the mandate that you go to the closest high school,I would have changed high schools three times."
That kind of up-rooting is extremely damaging at any age, but especially when the focus should be on developing mental, social, and emotional capacity. No wonder transience is highly correlated with school failure. Transience is also correlated with low-income. As Natalie explains, "We always rented for a year at a time. If Mom wanted to find a better apartment or a better job, it wasn't hard for us to pick up and move, but I insisted on staying at the same school."
It's no surprise to me that Natalie has become a high school English teacher, eager to teach the classics, but also, I say to myself, a highly important role model and guide to the students whose background mirrors her own. She was helped to make important choices for education. Those choices will be different from student to student. But there are certain constants--stability, continuity and teachers who can light the spark. I'm honing my sparks.
Heavy hair that framed the sides of my face like spaniel ears, large dark eyes which by third grade would peer through blue-rimmed glasses, and a rather heavy gait since I wore orthopedic shoes. How could I not be a good student?
Recently I was struck by the qualities that promote studentdom, not only because school is starting, and I'm now a teacher, but also because two vivid instances of students who beat the odds have appeared before me, one immediate and one from my past.
First the distant one: When I was a college student at Goucher College outside Baltimore, Florence Howe was one of the few women professors, a rather discouraging fact, given that Goucher was then a women's college. Not only was she female, but young and striking looking with a full head of dark hair marked in front by a white streak. Recently I've been reading her memoir, A Life in Motion, published by the Feminist Press which she founded.
Child of working-class New York Jews, FLorence Howe's intelligence and scholarly application made itself known by high school, but her mother persistently denigrated or ignored her accomplishments. Her mother worked and when she came home, wanted to listen to radio programs, not help Florence do homework. Possibly her mother didn't have the skills, after a certain point, to offer much help. Nor to conceive of college. Her father, who drove a cab, took a different attitude, praising and encouraging her, but he couldn't provide much help either. It was her teachers at Hunter College High School, then at Hunter College itself (which was free) who led her in various directions that culminated in graduate school and her position at Goucher in the early 1960s. What her mother did say, however, was a kind of backhanded directive: Become a teacher so you'll have your own money and your husband can't make you grovel. This didn't describe her own father's behavior exactly, but fit the family's poverty: her mother's job helped put food on the table.
Now the modern instance: This is a young high-school English teacher in a Twin Cities suburban high school whom I know because she's finishing her master's degree in education, and I'm her advisor. Let's call her Natalie. Natalie is African-American. Beginning in Chicago and concluding in the Twin Cities, Natalie's elementary and high school education had three parts: kindergarten through third grade, fourth through seventh in Chicago, then eighth through graduation from high school in the Twin Cities.
As Natalie and I talk about her capstone paper's focus--on the achievement gap between students of color and white students (which is very high in Minnesota)--I encourage her to tell her own story because it so clearly emphasizes two crucial elements in students' success: a settled school history, i.e. staying in one school for as long as possible, and the importance of teachers and parents.
Natalie's first four years of school in Chicago, her single mom moved the family from one neighborhood to another. Natalie's schooling was disrupted by what we call today transience. It's like uprooting a little plant and never letting it put down strong roots. That changed when her mother settled into an all-black neighborhood with a neighborhood school. As Natalie describes that school, I'm struck by several elements that contributed to help her take hold: all her teachers were black. They provided strong role models for African-American accomplishment, and they knew the culture and racial dimensions of their students' lives. "Our teachers would call in our parents if we acted up," says Natalie. "They ate with us in the lunchroom, stayed with us on the playground, saw us out the door. We walked to school with the same students through all our elementary grades because Chicago's philosophy required elementary schools to serve surrounding neighborhoods. There was no busing."
This seems crucial to both of us as we unpack what this meant for Natalie's education. Stability, first of all. A constant strong guiding presence in and outside the classroom. Knowledge of students' lives first hand--no student came from far away. Their home lives, their discipline, etc., all could be easily determined by the school. Finally a cohort of friends to accompany a kid throughout the day.
I've often wondered about the value of busing. Yes, it was put in place across the nation to combat segregation. Though Natalie's school and neighborhood were essentially segregated, the quality of education was high. And the students were taught by people of their own race. Nor were they taken away from a familiar neighborhood every day to attend a school with kids far different from themselves. Undoubtedly in some schools busing has created greater opportunities for underserved students, but it's no surprise to me that Saint Paul has decided against busing (for all students or only elementary?). Eliminating busing in Saint Paul is a money-saving measure, but it also gives kids a chance to know the world under their feet, all around them, at the slow pace of walking, taking it in, day after day. That kind of environmental consciousness--this is my world and this is myself in it--can help form a sense of self among others, distinct and united. I venture to say it's the foundation for ethical thinking.
When Natalie's mother brought her family to the Twin Cities hoping for a better life, they settled first in Minneapolis and Natalie began at a junior-senior high combo. When they moved the next year, and the next, and the next, from suburb to suburb, Natalie convinced her mother to let her take the city bus into the city and conclude high school where she had started it. "Teachers knew me; they guided and encouraged me," Natalie says. "I did homework on the city bus. My mother trusted me. If I'd lived by the mandate that you go to the closest high school,I would have changed high schools three times."
That kind of up-rooting is extremely damaging at any age, but especially when the focus should be on developing mental, social, and emotional capacity. No wonder transience is highly correlated with school failure. Transience is also correlated with low-income. As Natalie explains, "We always rented for a year at a time. If Mom wanted to find a better apartment or a better job, it wasn't hard for us to pick up and move, but I insisted on staying at the same school."
It's no surprise to me that Natalie has become a high school English teacher, eager to teach the classics, but also, I say to myself, a highly important role model and guide to the students whose background mirrors her own. She was helped to make important choices for education. Those choices will be different from student to student. But there are certain constants--stability, continuity and teachers who can light the spark. I'm honing my sparks.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)