Carne Vale
The gorilla and the thunderbird wrestle in the classroom. Freddie Krugar walks the halls. A teacher goes to lunch dressed as a dinosaur. An assistant principal attends meeting in a tux. Three football players go to class dressed as a girl band. Homecoming week can be interesting.
The after school carnival became quite the success with a highlight of the principal in a dunk tank, take your aim. The whole week was carnival really--Carne Vale. The carnival is Latin for "goodbye to meat." There are other theories of the origin of the word; there is, after all, no authoritative ancient resource on the origin of names. It was a holiday related to the seasons, and became a celebration in Roman Catholicism before the 40 day Lent fast.
Carnival has come to mean something quite different over time. It has become permission violate social norms. For a while, those norms are suspended and people play with alternative identities and behavior.
Our school is a "no hat or headgear" school, yet this Homecoming week the rule was suspended and students wore everything from the normal baseball caps to outrageous, unidentifiable, homemade somethings. It was difficult not to feel the ingrained enforcement voice spring out, "Please remove your headgear." This week, just this week, it was ok. What would be the reaction to a football player dressed in drag in any normal week? Yet, this week, there was no taunting, no suspicions, no calls to the principal's office. You can learn a lot about individual students in this one week, and they learn about each other. Everyone seems to be more tolerant and realize that the world really doesn't fall apart because someone does something strange. Hopefully, some of that tolerance will seep into the weeks to come.
It's a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes to pull off an entire week of events, dances, carnival, the final homecoming football game, work that mostly goes unnoticed. It's an important week in the life of the school community. It will have, for many, more impact than a lesson on Socrates or General Andrew Jackson or the inverse of a matrix. It has its place, and we can't forget that.
Mis Spellings
Soviet-style laws will garner Soviet-style results.
Jose is a second language learner, as is Maria, Julio and Jaime. Jose is a 455, Maria a 580, Julio a 327, and Jaime a 456. This is a little sample mathematics story problem. I know how we all dreaded those story problems, but this one is quite simple. If you have Maria, Julio, Jaime and Maria in class and you have to show improvement in reading scores for Colorado and for the No Child Left Behind improvement quota, and the passing score is 457, which students would you focus on? [Answer: Jose and Jaime.]
The saddest part of that little sample problem is that it is real. Teachers are being told, yes told, to focus on those students who are most likely to move from the Partially Proficient to the Proficient categories. These aren't evil people. The system establishes every rational reason to leave Maria and Julio behind in order to "show" progress.
In the old Soviet Union, if a factory was given a quota for 5,000 pounds of nuts, it didn't really matter whether those nuts had holes, or fit the bolts, or were round or square. In fact, it was easier and faster to produce holeless nuts, since they weigh more and meet the quota faster. With 6,000 pounds of holeless nuts, you might even receive a commendation. Jose and Jaime are our little holeless nuts under the "No Child Left Behind" quota system of improvement. The high stakes and severe sanctions for not meeting NCLB or state-level education quotas demand that kind of rationality. And the quotas are not "good goals", they are utopian wizardry. Yet the "improvement" propaganda of NCLB drones on and on.
Do you think that FEMA would dare to publically set a goal of 100% of disaster victims surviving? Yet the NCLB sets a goal of 100% of students acheiving at grade level by 2014. And the only way to try to achieve that, even in the short run, is to eject those students from the system that can't achieve at that level.
The Department of Education also wants to limit the percentage of students taking alternate assessments whose scores would not be counted in adequate yearly progress (AYP) calculations. That limit would be 1.0 percent of the state's (or district's) total number of students in the grades assessed.
If a district has more than 1.0% of special education or non-English speaking students? Well, another Soviet quota. Maria and Julio have become liabilities.
Most teachers knew this. Almost all teachers recoil at the systemic abandonment of so many students. Teachers will, however, be under increasing pressure to cut the losses, meet the quota, and manufacture holeless nuts. But sometimes, you have to throw open the shutters and yell that you just won't take it any more.
The Department of Education website states, "Spellings announces more workable, common sense approach to NCLB." Read that again. It couldn't be clearer. NCLB is unworkable and not at all common sense. It's time to cut the Soviet-style quota system of NCLB out of education and get back to the real task of leaving no child behind, before NCLB cuts the "public" out of education.
Sex in the City
Tim is a high school sophomore living with an aunt. His mother, who lives within a few miles, has struggled with addiction difficulties and hasn't been able to provide reliable parenting. Tim is an attractive, charming young man with an addictive smile. He is also counting on that charm to let him coast through life with very little effort. That charm, and teenage hormonal development, make him an attractive target for a good number of girls.
Tim confided, pretty much out of the blue one afternoon, his legal troubles. He was due in court later in the week and was a bit nervous. It turns out that it wasn't overly significant, some curfew violations and school attendance problems. After some conversation and some coaching around how he might respond to the judge about his probation ending, again, pretty much out of the blue, the talk drifted into girlfriend troubles. Then, he confessed, he was also in the midst of a pregnancy scare with his current girlfriend. She would go to the clinic tomorrow for "the" answer.
That conversation established a confidence that Tim used many times to ask for advice. At times it was advice I could provide, and at other times I had to admit the answers were out of my league and encouraged him to seek out a counselor inside or outside of school. Later, after an innocent, "So how are you doing?" Tim asked to talk in the hallway.
"Man, I forgot to tell you. I think I got a girl pregnant." It turns out that earlier in the year his girlfriend was not pregnant. "I don't know who to talk to. I can't tell my aunt, she'll kick me out." It also turns out that this girl whom "he really didn't care about," snuck into his bedroom window at his aunt's and spent the night. This was only one of three girls that he was currently seeing and sexually active with. One was a "real girlfriend." "I'm going to the clinic with her tomorrow and I just really don't know what to do."
It is a dreaded moment. What can I say? What can't I say? What should I say? What shouldn't I say? What would the ensuing conversation look like to an outsider? What responsibility do I have and to whom? There is an easy way out. Something like, "I'm afraid I really can't offer any advice . . . maybe you should talk to fill-in-the-blank." Or, I could take the route of the "no sex" lecture and bask in moral purity. But then, am I shirking an opportunity and a responsibility to someone who has trusted enough to confide, and who has just said that he doesn't have anyone else to talk to? Will his peers give him good advice if he turns to them? Doubtful, at best. And what about the girls involved? Is there any responsibility to them? With the specter of AIDS and other biological consequences, this is indeed a potentially life and death situtation. I don't even know if anyone has ever sat Tim down to give him a "sex talk." I guess I just hope that the health curriculum dealt with this. Someone else's responsibility then.
Besides and beyond the academic debates over abstinence or sex-ed curricula or legal and personal liabilities, the reality is a young man standing in my presence asking for some kind of adult help. And there are no guarantees, no perfectly scripted responses, that any particular discussion or advice will be the correct one. Certainly, the consequences of the response could be enormous, both for Tim and myself. Certainly his current sexual promiscuity and pregnancy scares are a problem. What is the most humane, wise option to choose?
What would you do?
Those Hmong US
Chenda pours over the article with barely concealed enthusiasm. The article itself focuses on the conflict between the ethnic Hmong and Lao in Laos. It’s old news really. Newspapers that yellowed years ago, and tear along the folds too easily. It remains a world away from cell phones and carefully groomed medians along the roadways. It is a world far enough away that it is difficult for most American students to understand the complexities.
The conflict divides along ethnic, cultural, political, ideological and historical lines. A good amount of the conflict lingers from the opposing sides during the Vietnam War, when the Hmong mostly supported the Americans. The human rights violations continue, much as in the old newspapers. The traditional culture continues too. Marriages are most often still arranged, often with girls as young as 12. Some of that culture has been transplanted to the US, as Chenda explains how her family is already pressuring her to accept a good husband from among ethnic Khmer here in Denver. The family will probably make that match. Chenda wants out of the house a soon as possible and is looking for that exit strategy—college, military, work.
The Hmong cultural center site, explains that
in traditional Hmong society, three mornings after a child is born, the family brings in an elder to conduct a ceremony called "hu plig peb tag kis" for the child. This ceremony is to welcome the child's soul to life and him/her to the family as member. In this ceremony, two male and one female chickens are sacrificed for the ritual; two chickens are offered to welcome the child's soul to life and one is offered to thank "niam txiv kab yeeb" for granting the family a child.
Chenda, an ethnic Khmer, blurts that the Hmong are “really weird.” And so, ancient ethnic rivalries and prejudices spring up right in front of us all in the classroom.
Bao was named after a butterfly. She is Hmong and also feels pressure to marry from the family. She is also exceedingly tired of the special attention that males receive in the household. Both Chenda and Bao speak their respective language at home. Neither can read or write in that language. Bao was born in the US, but Chenda was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and soon after came here with the immediate family. Her grandparents remain in Thailand, and she has only traveled to visit them once. The article is interesting because it hits home for Chenda. The refugee camp mentioned is one that her father spent some time in. But for Anglo-American students, it had might as well be science fiction.
At last check, and like many schools across the country, there are approximately 48 ethnic groups and 28 languages spoken as a first language here. With no assigned seating, classrooms still tend to divide along ethnic and racial lines. Asian girls in one section; Asian boys in another. Black students congregated on one side of the room, and Hispanic/Latin students on the other far side of the room. Yet, just seven or so miles down the road, the school is 97% Caucasian. Some suburban schools are still in a position of graduating their first [first!] black student. It’s the divisions, and not the differences in the classroom that I fear most.
U R a Poet
At times, assignments take on a life of their own, evolving into much more than classroom tasks. Katrina, an unusually quite and bookish student who had always achieved well, but never rose to brilliance on essay assignments, suddenly found a voice. It’s a mysterious moment that is unpredictable and unreproducible. It is a poetic moment in education. They have yet to be measured on any standardized assessment or accountability gauge. And usually, they remain hidden and unacknowledged. I’ll provide the assignment directions, and then let Katrina speak for herself. This is an excerpt of the total work. It’s a treasure. It’s addictive. It's why I teach.
Directions: For this assignment there are several fairly open-ended requirements. Its form should reflect the style of Robert Penn Warren that we have been studying. Your poem must be based on the Panama Canal experience; it must use free verse; it must make extensive use of alliteration; it must be interspersed at appropriate points with quotations from primary documents; it must be based on historical fact, although may fictionalize details which are fairly irrelevant to the story; it must be at least 100 lines long.
Building the Canal
At last, here we land, with vision for this ten-mile span of frontier,
Panama, and gold, though for once the only metal pioneers expect to see around is steel. But gold nonetheless, for the United States of America,
this is our project, we will see it through to the end.
The sun shining today, I see it from my room,
the riotous room where I work, where I slave away for the United States, though slavery was abolished thirty-nine years ago.
Nonetheless, I slave at my desk,
engineering erection of edifices in faraway lands,
building the canal in Panama.
1904 and we are just under-way,
for some reason I sense a mountain of meaning in the mountain of mud we are just now building.
We West Indian workers expected to construct a canal, but all we produce now is sweat;
lllllllllllllllland that mountain,
"But what we do now will be of consequence centuries hence,
and we must be sure we are taking the right step before we act."
llllllllllllllll—President Theodore Roosevelt
We men follow orders and that is right enough for us.
1904 and the office erupts in ecstasy and energy, energy we will need in the long years ahead
long years of brutal, back-breaking labor,
labor to manufacture the long-sought-after waterway straight to the East from Europe.
Our work actually began long ago, well, two years ago,
when the fine Frenchman Philippe Bunau-Varilla proposed the purchase of Panama land for a
llllllllllllllllcanal.
This was not any new idea, but it took rounds of research and the like to even design a deal the
llllllllllllllllfirst time,
not to mention the second set of paperwork to assemble an agreement with independent Panama.
"The United States of America and the Republic of Panama
being desirous to insure the construction of a ship-canal across the isthmus of Panama
to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans "
llllllllllllllll—Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty
It is fortunate we were so "desirous."
This is noble.
So we say. We say it to believe it, though many of us die with these words on our lips.
This is noble, not because we believe in it, but because we are paid for it.
We send money home to our families, more money than we could earn there, near them
Still, we are dying,
"And if you talk with these men who are fighting disease-
the engineer, who with transit and chain is laying out drainage ditches;
the man who has the responsibility of guarding the purity of the drinking water;
the rat-catcher, who strolls about with a Flobert rifle and a pocket full of poison;
the red-headed young doctor who vaccinates you at Colon;
or even the bacteriologist who finds his interesting researches 'disturbed' -
they will speak of themselves as 'ditch-diggers.'"
llllllllllllllll—Albert Edwards, journalist
We wage war against the smallest of bugs, the mosquito, with the greatest of battle-plans,
elimination,
and we will not regret our raging reaction to this threat of yellow fever
when it is all done.
We remain as men, and would much like to remain.
I heard some babble early this morning,
and I know not whether it is true, but I know it sure woke me up.
46,000,000 cubic yards of earth "moved to date."
And what is the date? 1906, and that is all I know.
"A cut or canal for the purpose of navigation somewhere through the isthmus that connects the new Americas, to unite the Pacific and Atlantic oceans …"
llllllllllllllll—US Secretary of State Henry Clay, 1826
Perhaps back in Henry Clay's day terminology was different,
but in my day, 46,000,000 cubic yards of earth is more than a "cut."
. . .
The figures are in for 1906. 46,000,000 cubic yards of earth "moved to date," I am fond of that phrase, I crafted it myself
What is more, four hundred thirty-seven million dollars spent "to date"
on our entire canal endeavor.
I hope these figures provoke proper awe in the president, along with all others who view them. This is progress, plain and pure;
I am sure the world is watching what is happening in Panama.
. . .
"The Land Divided, The World United!"
This is the first time I have heard the phrase, but it appeals to me instantly.
I watch the S. S. Ancon sail through the canal,
proudly bearing the American flag,
proudly proclaiming to the world the success of the Panama Canal.
The craft cruises out of sight now, and I turn my back,
only to turn back again, to the beauty of this place, a beauty that completely escapes the loaded
lllllllllllllllllaborer, exhaustedly excavating earth from pits much taller than himself
This is a beauty I never saw before, and one I will never forget.
It is the beauty of success, on a large scale,
the beauty of well over four hundred million dollars,
the beauty of the work of over 43,400 individuals,
for One Cause.
My heart and soul swells with the idea of what this canal means, even if its appearance were not
llllllllllllllllso satisfying;
this canal, this "cut," means unity, both of past labor and of future trade and transportation.
I am returning home now, but this place I will always remember.
I will remember my fellow workers, both those I saw and did not see,
for in viewing the enormity of this structure, this canal we have built,
I realize that more than digging made it.
I know that it was an enormous effort.
We built the canal.
"'It seems to me as if we had together made something great.'"
llllllllllllllll-Philippe Bunau-Varilla, upon signing the canal treaty
May it last forever.
Now that's history.
