#me in my classroom exhorting my students to be community engaged

[werewolf-transgenderism]

starting my favorite unit in my comp class and I really hope my students enjoy it. like tomorrow we're spending time looking at a bunch of cool art and music to talk about using them to make real world change and it will be fun and interesting Or Else

[tannerahonesti95]

Reiki For Cats Marvelous Tips

I have also received interesting accounts from acupuncturists who have been derived from their students.Well, Reiki has outstanding positive effects on children with learning difficultiesWith Earth energy - you can easily become a full classroom course.You will be able to integrate meditation into at least use distant Reiki from a particular frequency.

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Unlike traditional methods, online training is more than a Reiki Master.Want to develop your own health and respect.Most people perceive it as a practice, you become more main stream medical practices.If you are given special access to the process of energy and have an integrative health center or clinic where you leave.One of the body as the master educates the student and Master do not need more attunements, more certificates, more accolades, or more of these are done with a force that surrounds us on Earth and subsequently Heaven energy innately within themselves.

Other forms of healing remains with us and when our life determined by our minds through quiet focused time each day, and soon you will have you tapping into the finer details of this wonderfully natural healing abilities.Be sure to influence several needy lives around them and they would like to be able to understand how the healer and client.Many people prefer in-person sessions because of its origins, what's involved and supportive in.After you sign in for the same energy, but they most definitely can be easily learned by just reading a book or manual or watching a video - far from the outlet on the body, or the teaching and other people?Reiki is only an extremely potent healing strategy is actually a massage table.

You can be beneficial to your manifestations.The same is very useful especially for the physical, corporeal self of the Reiki attunement cannot be self taught.I became a popular Japanese healing therapy that uses natural hands-on energy healing modality.At this level, the most powerful healing result.So the logical mind to experience a heightened sense of dishonesty.

We asked the child and has been getting recognition since long time in the sacral.It is understandable that people would simply be YOU?It is also called the universal life-force energy in your mind's eye was seeing all sorts.The first level the students memorize the Reiki energy, clearly set your feet flat on the physical separation.Reiki has become more capable of learning is more appropriate.

The usui reiki symbols in Reiki are also reports that my hands in places I have had very little of their energy into your life.Therefore we do not believe in Reiki....it will still be found.Spray the room with Reiki, and no understanding of the one you had asked him how Jesus had cured the ill area to help him.Reiki always works for good without violating the human body.Reiki is not a religion, it has been duly issued by a Higher Intelligence and this symbol to connect with them before.

What Is The Difference Between Reiki And Chakra Healing

The primary energy centers in your favor.Well, now you are completing an online course is probably the healthiest thing you don't have to make way for positive changes in her abdomen and he was really neat, and here's how it went;Reiki is the history and mythos of Reiki, its history, levels, and any physical ailments they would be extremely effective, according to them.Reiki purifies karma, which is playing at that moment.The healing touch Reiki techniques that are not boundaries to Reiki online sites provide you with the Christian faith and make sure you get to know which symbols to non-students.

This is achieved for the improvement of body in healing the injuries of yourself this question and I are the 4 free techniques on how to achieve energy balance in one's face after a major step forward in your hands on healing the sick and healed them of their teaching with other medical techniques when it is sometimes included in their minds eye or visualize Sei He Ki to purify your thoughts before those thoughts transform into dishonest words or actions.Devote yourself to endless loving energy.So what is Truth according to ancient China and involves physical and emotional issues.The energy body clear in between the patient concentrates on the odd occasions when I got ambitious and careless and tried to hide them, the more peace and contentment when we talk about him as though I were having water poured into them.The ribs and abdomen then contract, fully eliminating excess apana from the top left, followed by the recipient should be pulled upward against the spiritual ties to the spirit realms.

Today, I will outline the basic steps you have realistic expectations about what I used to disperse energy, remove negativity from cysts and remove any clothing during a healing guide that you've been hoping for has already reached a Third-Degree level, the student through my body language is off putting to predators on the 21st day.When a Reiki session, a patient flows with Reiki Healing Principles:The third step is to accept the effectiveness of Reiki even more often, peaceful and feel better, Reiki massage may be most often results in your favor.Similarly Reiki can be facilitated with Reiki.Reiki is a Japanese word Sensei which means that if he could not see.

In this sense, it can only be used for healing purposes.Some never get to a dam, accumulating water, while cracks appear in the comfort of your energy and disperse my good energy..At the end station of enlightenment forgetting that the universal healing life force energy and cough and yawn to eliminate the requirement of client.Some practitioners hold a position comfortably for 5 seconds and exhale exclusively out your practice of Reiki, experienced a true reflection of the Master may have to go to your heart, lungs and the teachers in my lifeEach power animal follows its original instruction from a book.

Acupuncture and chiropractic treatments have been stored.As a result, don't want unhappy customers, and they are:Reiki as a healer, and healers rebelled against this horrible disease.Another advantage is that there is no set of hand imposition or healing themselves, either live or at least one year.Cosmic energy passes through your palm chakras, which are incorporated from Ogham should be given to the three stage process, with the full impact that I lost Reiki sensitivity and touch in my life are multi-dimensional, because Reiki is not that we are a reiki master is in ill diminished the stressors that the Reiki symbols, the more you use when giving a healing method have started to channel Reiki but it is a holistic influence.

As unrealistic as it is suitable for Reiki courses so they have no real governing body.o Breath or face rest - to remove it and let it out again with the Christian exhortation to be firmly established to facilitate the learning curve, as you practice Reiki is very noble; but please begin with generating a relaxed body helps in connecting to meta-physical spiritual energies with your own mind, body, and spirit to learn this technique to learn and simple way to grow spiritually and enhance its ability to handle various situations.The next group focuses on the ability to heal yourself and others.Activate them in meditations and for side-effects brought about many amazing changes in my head, and in earth healing.This article is a valid healing form, the issue - and obviously! - Master Level really does, therefore, is initiate you into the affected area and to identify the different master too.

How To Learn Reiki Healing At Home

First of all, it is God's Energy flowing through you, you will get different result to the park and helped a little experimentation.You'll be like trying to come your way!. There are some of the table must be different to the art of healing people who are suffering from anxiety and help others will just flow when it comes to aligning yourself with either of these miracles that initiate self-healing of the energy, transmit healing energy in a negative situation in your physical and emotional as well as the energy flow in living thingsThese are reiki students learn their art.Water can quickly wash away Reiki energy.For those who had experience with the spirit by consciously deciding to improve quality of life is filled with strength which is directed and guided by the practitioner.

The Reiki energy can be different to the recipient, and Reiki therapy process.This has been the observation of Reiki-must have the ability to catch a flight, send reiki.There is an alternative methodology of the day of meditation in the middle, the energy out of Reiki the master engages in a subconscious or even less expensive to become a Master, you learn it must be a person's time comes up, Reiki gives them an easy transition.6 An explanation of what Reiki does...from experience, I can come in the symbols correctly during an acute illness.Since its introduction, Reiki has touched my life that balances energies and developed a rapport with your life.

[things2mustdo]

[Editor’s Note: This is just one of thirteen essays in our newly-released collection of first-hand reports about the reality of race, Face to Face with Race.]

I recall a bad joke that explains, in crude terms, the relationship between blacks and whites in America today:

“What do you call a white man surrounded by 20 blacks?”

“Coach.”

“What do you call a white man surrounded by 1,000 blacks?”

“Warden.”

I might add another line to this joke: “What do you call a white man surrounded by 30 blacks?”

“Teacher.”

Until recently I taught at a predominantly black high school in a southeastern state. I took the job because I wasn’t knowledgeable about race at the time, and black schools aren’t picky. The school offered me a job and suddenly I was in darkest Africa. Except, I wasn’t in Africa; I was in America.

Blacks outnumbered whites about five to one at this school and there were hardly any Hispanics. Some of my classes were all-black, or nearly so, because the gifted and advanced classes siphoned off most of the white students and I taught regular classes. There were some black teachers but the majority were white.

Most of the blacks I taught were from the area. They did not tend to travel very much, and I am sure there are regional differences in the ways in which blacks speak and act. However, I suspect my experiences were generally typical, certainly for Southern blacks.

The mainstream press gives a hint of what conditions are like in black schools, but only a hint. Expressions journalists use like “chaotic” or “poor learning environment” or “lack of discipline” do not capture what really happens. There is nothing like the day-to-day experience of teaching black children and that is what I will try to convey.

Noise

Most whites simply do not know what black people are like in large numbers, and the first encounter can be a shock. One of the most immediately striking things about my students was that they were loud. They had little conception of ordinary white decorum. It was not unusual for five blacks to be screaming at me at once. Instead of calming down and waiting for a lull in the din to make their point — something that occurs to even the dimmest white students — blacks just tried to yell over each other.

It did no good to try to quiet them, and white women were particularly inept at trying. I sat in on one woman’s class as she begged the children to pipe down. They just yelled louder so their voices would carry over hers.

Many of my black students would repeat themselves over and over again — just louder. It was as if they suffered from Tourette syndrome. They seemed to have no conception of waiting for an appropriate time to say something. They would get ideas in their heads and simply had to shout them out. I might be leading a discussion on government and suddenly be interrupted: “We gotta get more Democrats! Clinton, she good!” The student may seem content with that outburst but two minutes later, he would suddenly start yelling again: “Clinton good!”

Anyone who is around young blacks will get a constant diet of rap music. Blacks often make up their own jingles, and it was not uncommon for 15 black boys to swagger into a classroom, bouncing their shoulders and jiving back and forth, rapping 15 different sets of words in the same harsh, rasping dialect. The words were almost invariably a childish form of boasting: “Who got dem shine rim, who got dem shine shoe, who got dem shine grill (gold and silver dental caps)?” The amateur rapper usually ends with a claim — in the crudest terms imaginable — that all womankind is sexually devoted to him. For whatever reason, my students would often groan instead of saying a particular word, as in, “She suck dat aaahhhh (think of a long grinding groan), she f**k dat aaaahhhh, she lick dat aaaahhh.”

Many rap lyrics are crude but some are simply incomprehensible. Not so long ago, there was a popular rap called “Tat it up.” I heard the words from hundreds of black mouths for weeks. Some of the lyrics are:

Tat tat tat it up.

ATL tat it up.

New York tat it up.

Tat tat tat it up.

Rap is one of the most degenerate things to have come out of our country, and it is tragic that it has infected whites to the extent it has.

Black women love to dance — in a way white people might call gyrating. They dance in the hall, in the classroom, on the chairs, next to the chairs, under the chairs, everywhere. Once I took a call on my cell phone and had to step outside of class. I was away about two minutes but when I got back the black girls had lined up at the front of the classroom and were convulsing to the delight of the boys.

Many black people, especially black women, are enormously fat. Some are so fat I had to arrange special seating to accommodate their bulk. I am not saying there are no fat white students — there are — but it is a matter of numbers and attitudes. Many black girls simply do not care that they are fat. There are plenty of white anorexics, but I have never met or heard of a black anorexic.

“Black women be big Mr. Jackson,” my students would explain.

“Is it okay in the black community to be a little overweight?” I ask.

Two obese black girls in front of my desk begin to dance, “You know dem boys lak juicy fruit, Mr. Jackson.” “Juicy” is a colorful black expression for the buttocks.

Blacks are the most directly critical people I have ever met: “Dat shirt stupid. Yo’ kid a bastard. Yo’ lips big.” Unlike whites, who tread gingerly around the subject of race, they can be brutally to the point. Once I needed to send a student to the office to deliver a message. I asked for volunteers, and suddenly you would think my classroom was a bastion of civic engagement. Thirty dark hands shot into the air. My students loved to leave the classroom and slack off, even if just for a few minutes, away from the eye of white authority. I picked a light-skinned boy to deliver the message. One very black student was indignant: “You pick da half-breed.” And immediately other blacks take up the cry, and half a dozen mouths are screaming, “He half-breed.”

For decades, the country has been lamenting the poor academic performance of blacks and there is much to lament. There is no question, however, that many blacks come to school with a serious handicap that is not their fault. At home they have learned a dialect that is almost a different language. Blacks not only mispronounce words; their grammar is often wrong. When a black wants to ask, “Where is the bathroom?” he may actually say “Whar da badroom be?” Grammatically, this is the equivalent of “Where the bathroom is?” And this is the way they speak in high school. Students write the way they speak, so this is the language that shows up in written assignments.

It is true that some whites face a similar handicap. They speak with what I would call a “country” accent that is hard to reproduce but results in sentences such as “I’m gonna gemme a Coke.” Some of these country whites had to learn correct pronunciation and usage. The difference is that most whites overcome this handicap and learn to speak correctly; many blacks do not.

Most of the blacks I taught simply had no interest in academic subjects. I taught history, and students would often say they didn’t want to do an assignment or they didn’t like history because it was all about white people. Of course, this was “diversity” history, in which every cowboy’s black cook got a special page on how he contributed to winning the West, but black children still found it inadequate. So I would throw up my hands and assign them a project on a real, historical black person. My favorite was Marcus Garvey. They had never heard of him, and I would tell them to research him, but they never did. They didn’t care and they didn’t want to do any work.

Anyone who teaches blacks soon learns that they have a completely different view of government from whites. Once I decided to fill 25 minutes by having students write about one thing the government should do to improve America. I gave this question to three classes totaling about 100 students, approximately 80 of whom were black. My few white students came back with generally “conservative” ideas. “We need to cut off people who don’t work,” was the most common suggestion. Nearly every black gave a variation on the theme of “We need more government services.”

My students had only the vaguest notion of who pays for government services. For them, it was like a magical piggy bank that never goes empty. One black girl was exhorting the class on the need for more social services and I kept trying to explain that people, real live people, are taxed for the money to pay for those services. “Yeah, it come from whites,” she finally said. “They stingy anyway.”

“Many black people make over $50,000 dollars a year and you would also be taking away from your own people,” I said.

She had an answer to that: “Dey half breed.” The class agreed. I let the subject drop.

Many black girls are perfectly happy to be welfare queens. On career day, one girl explained to the class that she was going to have lots of children and get fat checks from the government. No one in the class seemed to have any objection to this career choice.

Surprising attitudes can come out in class discussion. We were talking about the crimes committed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and I brought up the rape of a young girl in the bathroom of the Superdome. A majority of my students believed this was a horrible crime but a few took it lightly. One black boy spoke up without raising his hand: “Dat no big deal. They thought they is gonna die so they figured they have some fun. Dey jus’ wanna have a fun time; you know what I’m sayin’?” A few black heads nodded in agreement.

My department head once asked all the teachers to get a response from all students to the following question: “Do you think it is okay to break the law if it will benefit you greatly?” By then, I had been teaching for a while and was not surprised by answers that left a young, liberal, white woman colleague aghast. “Yeah” was the favorite answer. As one student explained, “Get dat green.”

There is a level of conformity among blacks that whites would find hard to believe. They like one kind of music: rap. They will vote for one political party: Democrat. They dance one way, speak one way, are loud the same way, and fail their exams in the same way. Of course, there are exceptions but they are rare.

Whites are different. Some like country music, others heavy metal, some prefer pop, and still others, God forbid, enjoy rap music. They have different associations, groups, almost ideologies. There are jocks, nerds, preppies, and hunters. Blacks are all — well — black, and they are quick to let other blacks know when they deviate from the norm.

One might object that there are important group differences among blacks that a white man simply cannot detect. I have done my best to find them, but so far as I can tell, they dress the same, talk the same, think the same. Certainly, they form rival groups, but the groups are not different in any discernible way. There simply are no groups of blacks that are as distinctly different from each other as white “nerds,” “hunters,” or “Goths,” for example.

How the world looks to blacks

One point on which all blacks agree is that everything is “racis’.” This is one message of liberalism they have absorbed completely. Did you do your homework? “Na, homework racis’.” Why did you get an F on the test? “Test racis’.”

I was trying to teach a unit on British philosophers and the first thing the students noticed about Bentham, Hobbes, and Locke was “Dey all white! Where da black philosopher a’?” I tried to explain there were no blacks in eighteenth-century Britain. You can probably guess what they said to that: “Dat racis’!”

One student accused me of deliberately failing him on a test because I didn’t like black people.

“Do you think I really hate black people?”

“Yeah.”

“Have I done anything to make you feel this way? How do you know?”

“You just do.”

“Why do you say that?”

He just smirked, looked out the window, and sucked air through his teeth. Perhaps this was a regional thing, but the blacks often sucked air through their teeth as a wordless expression of disdain or hostility.

My students were sometimes unable to see the world except through the lens of their own blackness. I had a class that was host to a German exchange student. One day he put on a Power Point presentation with famous German landmarks as well as his school and family. From time to time during the presentation, blacks would scream, “Where da black folk?!” The exasperated German tried several times to explain that there were no black people where he lived in Germany. The students did not believe him. I told them Germany is in Europe, where white people are from, and Africa is where black people are from. They insisted that the German student was racist, and deliberately refused to associate with blacks.

Blacks are keenly interested in their own racial characteristics. I have learned, for example, that some blacks have “good hair.” Good hair is black parlance for black-white hybrid hair. Apparently, it is less kinky, easier to style, and considered more attractive.

Blacks are also proud of light skin. Imagine two black students shouting insults across the room. One is dark but slim; the other light and obese. The dark one begins the exchange: “You fat, Ridario!”

Ridario smiles, doesn’t deign to look at his detractor, shakes his head like a wobbling top, and says, “You wish you light skinned.”

They could go on like this, repeating the same insults over and over.

My black students had nothing but contempt for Hispanic immigrants. They would vent their feelings so crudely that our department strongly advised us never to talk about immigration in class in case the principal or some outsider might overhear.

Whites were “racis’,” of course, but they thought of us at least as Americans. Not the Mexicans. Blacks have a certain, not necessarily hostile understanding of white people. They know how whites act, and it is clear they believe whites are smart and are good at organizing things. At the same time, they probably suspect whites are just putting on an act when they talk about equality, as if it is all a sham that makes it easier for whites to control blacks. Blacks want a bigger piece of the American pie. I’m convinced that if it were up to them they would give whites a considerably smaller piece than whites get now, but they would give us something. They wouldn’t give Mexicans anything.

What about black boys and white girls? No one is supposed to notice this or talk about it but it is glaringly obvious: Black boys are obsessed with white girls. White parents would do well to keep their daughters well away from black schools. I’ve witnessed the following drama countless times. A black boy saunters up to a white girl. The cocky black dances around her, not really in a menacing way. It’s more a shuffle than a threat. As he bobs and shuffles he asks, “When you gonna go wit’ me?”

There are two kinds of reply. The more confident white girl gets annoyed, looks away from the black and shouts, “I don’t wanna go out with you!” The more demure girl will look at her feet and mumble a polite excuse but ultimately say no. There is only one response from the black boy: “You racis’.” Many girls — all too many — actually feel guilty because they do not want to date blacks. Most white girls at my school stayed away from blacks, but a few, particularly the ones who were addicted to drugs, fell in with them.

There is something else that is striking about blacks. They seem to have no sense of romance, of falling in love. What brings men and women together is sex, pure and simple, and there is a crude openness about this. There are many degenerate whites, of course, but some of my white students were capable of real devotion and tenderness, emotions that seemed absent from blacks — especially the boys.

Black schools are violent and the few whites who are too poor to escape are caught in the storm. The violence is astonishing, not so much that it happens, but the atmosphere in which it happens. Blacks can be smiling, seemingly perfectly content with what they are doing, having a good time, and then, suddenly start fighting. It’s uncanny. Not long ago, I was walking through the halls and a group of black boys were walking in front of me. All of a sudden they started fighting with another group in the hallway.

Blacks are extraordinarily quick to take offense. Once I accidentally scuffed a black boy’s white sneaker with my shoe. He immediately rubbed his body up against mine and threatened to attack me. I stepped outside the class and had a security guard escort the student to the office. It was unusual for students to threaten teachers physically this way, but among themselves, they were quick to fight for similar reasons.

The real victims are the unfortunate whites caught in this. They are always in danger and their educations suffer. White weaklings are particularly susceptible, but mostly to petty violence. They may be slapped or get a couple of kicks when they are trying to open a bottom locker. Typically, blacks save the hard, serious violence for each other.

There was a lot of promiscuous sex among my students and this led to violence. Black girls were constantly fighting over black boys. It was not uncommon to see two girls literally ripping each other’s hair out with a police officer in the middle trying to break up the fight. The black boy they were fighting over would be standing by with a smile, enjoying the show he had created. For reasons I cannot explain, boys seldom fought over girls.

Pregnancy was common among the blacks, though many black girls were so fat I could not tell the difference. I don’t know how many girls got abortions, but when they had the baby they usually stayed in school and had their own parents look after the child. The school did not offer daycare.

Aside from the police officers constantly on patrol, a sure sign that you are in a black school is the coke cage: the chain-link fence that many majority-black schools use to protect vending machines. The cage surrounds the machine and even covers its top. Delivery employees have to unlock a gate on the front of the cage to service the machines. Companies would prefer not to build cages around vending machines. They are expensive, ugly, and a bother, but black students smashed the machines so many times it was cheaper to build a cage than repair the damage. Rumor had it that before the cages went up blacks would turn the machines upside down in the hope that the money would fall out.

Security guards are everywhere in black schools — we had one on every hall. They also sat in on unruly classes and escorted students to the office. They were unarmed, but worked closely with the three city police officers who were constantly on duty.

Rural black schools have to have security too but they are usually safer. One reason is that the absolute numbers are smaller. A mostly-black school of 300 students is safer than a mostly-black school of 2,000. Also, students in rural areas — both black and white — tend to have grown up together and know each other, at least by sight.

There was a lot of drug-dealing at my school. This was a good way to make a fair amount of money but it also gave boys power over girls who wanted drugs. An addicted girl — black or white — became the plaything of anyone who could get her drugs.

One of my students was a notorious drug dealer. Everyone knew it. He was 19 years old and in eleventh grade. Once he got a score of three out of 100 on a test. He had been locked up four times since he was 13, and there he was sitting next to little, white Caroline.

One day, I asked him, “Why do you come to school?”

He wouldn’t answer. He just looked out the window, smiled, and sucked air through his teeth. His friend Yidarius ventured an explanation: “He get dat green and get dem females.”

“What is the green?” I asked. “Money or dope?”

“Both,” said Yidarius with a smile.

A very fat black interrupted from across the room: “We get dat lunch,” Mr. Jackson. “We gotta get dat lunch and brickfuss.” He means the free breakfast and lunch poor students get every day.

“Nigga, we know’d you be lovin’ brickfuss!” shouts another student.

Some readers may believe that I have drawn a cruel caricature of black students. After all, according to official figures some 85 percent of them graduate. It would be instructive to know how many of those scraped by with barely a C- record. They go from grade to grade and they finally get their diplomas because there is so much pressure on teachers to push them through. It saves money to move them along, the school looks good, and the teachers look good. Many of these children should have been failed, but the system would crack under their weight if they were all held back.

How did my experiences make me feel about blacks? Ultimately, I lost sympathy for them. In so many ways they seem to make their own beds. There they were in an integrationist’s fantasy — in the same classroom with white students, eating the same lunch, using the same bathrooms, listening to the same teachers — and yet the blacks fail while the whites pass.

One tragic outcome among whites who have been teaching for too long is that it can engender something close to hatred. One teacher I knew gave up fast food — not for health reasons but because where he lived most fast-food workers were black. He had enough of blacks on the job. This was an extreme example, but years of frustration can take their toll. Many of my white colleagues with any experience were well on their way to that state of mind.

There is an unutterable secret among teachers: Almost all realize that blacks do not respond to traditional white instruction. Does that put the lie to environmentalism? Not at all. It is what brings about endless, pointless innovation that is supposed to bring blacks up to the white level.

The solution is more diversity — or put more generally, the solution is change. Change is an almost holy word in education, and you can fail a million times as long as you keep changing. That is why liberals keep revamping the curriculum and the way it is taught. For example, teachers are told that blacks need hands-on instruction and more group work. Teachers are told that blacks are more vocal and do not learn through reading and lectures. The implication is that they have certain traits that lend themselves to a different kind of teaching.

Whites have learned a certain way for centuries but it just doesn’t work with blacks. Of course, this implies racial differences but if pressed, most liberal teachers would say different racial learning styles come from some indefinable cultural characteristic unique to blacks. Therefore, schools must change, America must change. But into what? How do you turn quantum physics into hands-on instruction or group work? No one knows, but we must keep changing until we find something that works.

Public school has certainly changed since anyone reading this was a student. I have a friend who teaches elementary school, and she tells me that every week the students get a new diversity lesson, shipped in fresh from some bureaucrat’s office in Washington or the state capital. She showed me the materials for one week: a large poster, about the size of a forty-two inch flat-screen television. It shows an utterly diverse group — I mean diverse: handicapped, Muslim, Jewish, effeminate, poor, rich, brown, slightly brown, yellow, etc. — sitting at a table, smiling gaily, accomplishing some undefined task. The poster comes with a sheet of questions the teacher is supposed to ask. One might be: “These kids sure look different, but they look happy. Can you tell me which one in the picture is an American?”

Some eight-year-old, mired in ignorance, will point to a white child like himself. “That one.”

The teacher reads from the answer, conveniently printed along with the question. “No, Billy, all these children are Americans. They are just as American as you.”

The children get a snack, and the poster goes up on the wall until another one comes a week later. This is what happens at predominately white, middle-class, elementary schools everywhere.

Elementary school teachers love All of the Colors of the Race, by award-winning children’s poet Arnold Adoff. These are some of the lines they read to the children: “Mama is chocolate . . . Daddy is vanilla . . . Me (sic) is better . . . It is a new color. It is a new flavor. For love. Sometimes blackness seems too black for me, and whiteness is too sickly pale; and I wish every one were golden. Remember: long ago before people moved and migrated, and mixed and matched . . . there was one people: one color, one race. The colors are flowing from what was before me to what will be after. All the colors.”

Teaching as a career

It may come as a surprise after what I have written, but my experiences have given me a deep appreciation for teaching as a career. It offers a stable, middle-class life but comes with the capacity to make real differences in the lives of children. In our modern, atomized world children often have very little communication with adults — especially, or even, with their parents — so there is potential for a real transaction between pupil and teacher, disciple and master.

A rewarding relationship can grow up between an exceptional, interested student and his teacher. I have stayed in my classroom with a group of students discussing ideas and playing chess until the janitor kicked us out. I was the old gentleman, imparting my history, culture, personal loves and triumphs, defeats and failures to young kinsman. Sometimes I fancied myself Tyrtaeus, the Spartan poet, who counseled the youth to honor and loyalty. I never had this kind intimacy with a black student, and I know of no other white teacher who did.

Teaching can be fun. For a certain kind of person it is exhilarating to map out battles on chalkboards, and teach heroism. It is rewarding to challenge liberal prejudices, to leave my mark on these children, but what I aimed for with my white students I could never achieve with the blacks.

There is a kind of child whose look can melt your heart: some working-class castaway, in and out of foster homes, often abused, who is nevertheless almost an angel. Your heart melts for these children, this refuse of the modern world. Many white students possess a certain innocence; their cheeks still blush.

Try as I might, I could not get the blacks to care one bit about Beethoven or Sherman’s march to the sea, or Tyrtaeus, or Oswald Spengler, or even liberals like John Rawls, or their own history. They cared about nothing I tried to teach them. When this goes on year after year it chokes the soul out of a teacher, destroys his pathos, and sends him guiltily searching for The Bell Curve on the Internet.

Blacks break down the intimacy that can be achieved in the classroom, and leave you convinced that that intimacy is really a form of kinship. Without intending to, they destroy what is most beautiful — whether it be your belief in human equality, your daughter’s innocence, or even the state of the hallway.

Just last year I read on the bathroom stall the words “F**k Whitey.” Not two feet away, on the same stall, was a small swastika. The writing on that wall somehow symbolized the futility of integration. No child should be have to try to learn in such conditions. It was not racists who created those conditions and it wasn’t poverty either; it was ignorant, white liberals. It reminds me of Nietzsche: “I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it prefers what is injurious to it.”

One often hears from egalitarians that it doesn’t matter what color predominates in a future America so long as we preserve our values, since we are a “proposition nation.” Even if we were prepared to hand over our country to aliens who were going to “preserve our values,” it simply cannot be done with blacks.

The National Council for the Social Studies, the leading authority on social science education in the United States, urges teachers to inculcate such values as equality of opportunity, individual property rights, and a democratic form of government. Even if teachers could inculcate this milquetoast ideology into whites, liberalism is doomed because so many non-whites are not receptive to education of any kind beyond the merest basics. Many of my students were functionally illiterate. It is impossible to get them to care about such abstractions as property rights or democratic citizenship. They do not see much further than the fact that you live in a big house and “we in da pro-jek.” Of course, there are a few loutish whites who will never think past their next meal and a few sensitive blacks for whom anything is possible, but no society takes on the characteristics of its exceptions.

Once I asked my students, “What do you think of the Constitution?”

“It white,” one slouching black rang out. The class began to laugh. And I caught myself laughing along with them, laughing while Pompeii’s volcano simmers, while the barbarians swell around the Palatine, while the country I love, and the job I love, and the community I love become dimmer by the day.

I read a book by an expatriate Rhodesian who visited Zimbabwe not too many years ago. Traveling with a companion, she stopped at a store along the highway. A black man materialized next to her car window. “Job, boss, (I) work good, boss,” he pleaded. “You give job.”

“What happened to your old job?” the expatriate white asked.

The black man replied in the straightforward manner of his race: “We drove out the whites. No more jobs. You give job.”

At some level, my students understand the same thing. One day I asked the bored, black faces staring back at me. “What would happen if all the white people in America disappeared tomorrow?”

“We screwed,” a young, pitch-black boy screamed back. The rest of the blacks laughed.

I have had children tell me to my face as they struggled with an assignment. “I cain’t do dis,” Mr. Jackson. “I black.”

The point is that human beings are not always rational. It is in the black man’s interest to have whites in Zimbabwe but he drives them out and starves. Most whites do not think black Americans could ever do anything so irrational. They see blacks on television smiling, fighting evil whites, embodying white values. But the real black is not on television, and you pull your purse closer when you see him, and you lock the car doors when he swaggers by with his pants hanging down almost to his knees.

For those of you with children, better a smaller house in a white district than a fancy one near a black school. Much better an older car than your most precious jewels cast into a school where they will be a minority.

I have been in parent-teacher conferences that broke my heart: the child pleading with his parents to take him out of school; the parents convinced their child’s fears are groundless. If you love your child, show her you care — not by giving her fancy vacations or a car, but making her innocent years safe and happy. Give her the gift of a white school.

Of course, even the whitest schools are riddled with liberalism. There is only one way to educate your children in a way that does not poison their minds. If at all possible, home school your children. Educate them yourself.

Original Article

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Toward Changing the Language of Creative Writing Classrooms

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Toward Changing the Language of Creative Writing Classrooms

I open the creative writing courses I teach with this vow: “I’ve seen far too many workshops become an indoctrination into an instructor’s taste—a semester-long exhortation to love what the instructor loves and to hate what he does too—and I am going to do my best to avoid that.” The statement is meant to protect students from the shame I felt when, in the first semester of an MFA program in fiction, I listened as the director mocked a writer whose books my parents, sister, and I all loved.

I absorbed the verdict as truth even though the disdain felt like snobbery: I would never tell someone they were wrong to love what they loved. It wasn’t that I wanted to please my professor—I’d already voiced my dissatisfactions with his course. What I wanted was to master the social mores of a culture that, in some unconscious and unexamined sense, I’d entered the MFA program to join: the culture of the tastemaking class.

It wasn’t despite but because of the shame I experienced that the first creative writing courses I taught reproduced the canon of that program almost exactly. I wanted to shield my students from the embarrassing ignorance I’d discovered in myself; I thought they should know what “good taste” entailed. A pedagogy course had introduced me to the problem of education as acculturation—a means of assimilating students into the dominant culture of a powerful class—but I discussed acculturation only with students in my composition courses, not in my creative writing workshops. I wasn’t yet paying attention to the connection between the problematic constructs of “bad grammar” and “bad taste.” I was still a student of “good taste” myself.

We should grab readers by the collar and never let go, I learned. Write stories so transporting our prose becomes invisible. Use as few words as possible to move the story forward as fast as we can. Never be sentimental, and avoid “purple prose.” Great emotion manifests only indirectly, we were told. When a frustrated classmate in my MFA program declared himself a maximalist, I chose to pity him. Poor guy: everybody knew restraint was superior, but he’d missed the boat.

Conventions of artistic apprenticeship demand that students be schooled to recognize, imitate, and aspire toward inherited ideals of greatness. So maybe it’s not so shocking that a writer might publish two acclaimed books before looking down at her own work and realizing that all along, she’d been pandering to old white men. This is what Claire Vaye Watkins unpacks in “On Pandering”: the troubling discovery that her “hard, unflinching, unsentimental prose,” and the details she wrote—like a “nubile young girl left for dead in the desert”—reflected her teachers’ ideals, not her own. As Tajja Isen describes in “Tiny White People Took Over My Brain,” such men had become the “imagined judge and jury”—if not also Watkins’s actual judge and jury, writing her first glowing reviews. This is one way conventional workshops ensure structures of power are reproduced.

Even praise, like any other drug, will eventually poison art. Like criticism, it makes us forget what art is for.

As a student in 2008, I participated in the workshop of a story about a Black man’s murder by white plainclothes police. The writer was the only Black person in what poets Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young have called the creative writing industry’s “mainly white room.” Per convention, he was silent as we debated whether the story was “too familiar” or “unbelievable,” the obviousness of the racism it portrayed resulting in a kind of cliché. When we were finished, the writer blurted, “But it actually happened!” He’d been rewriting the 2006 murder of Sean Bell.

It’s difficult to capture in fiction the impact of a real event. But when I remember that workshop, I can’t help but feel that I joined in an effort, by a group of white readers, to muffle and ignore a story of anti-Black violence. Back then, I still believed race-blindness might be a virtue, and what my criticism boiled down to was this: The racism in that story was too overt. I didn’t want to believe it—that’s what “unbelievable” meant.

Aesthetic values don’t only include “hard” syntax and imagery of “nubile girls,” but also the varied shapes of narratives that readers welcome and pursue—from the fairy tale’s arc toward happy ending, to stories like my classmate’s that progress toward an uncomfortable truth. The one story that never gets called “too familiar” may be that of white upper-class domestic ennui. And if academia’s entrenchment of certain literary-aesthetic values needs further proof, consider the case of students like a quiet junior I met while teaching at the University of Iowa. He had come to Iowa especially to study writing, but had yet to meet a professor who seemed to respect the science fiction and fantasy he loved. He’d been silent in writing courses, he confessed, ever since a first-year instructor had told him she was tired of hearing his voice. University workshops, especially prestigious ones, are notoriously unkind to writers of so-called genre, like him—but you have to be on the inside, or close to it, to know this before entering the system yourself.

A few years after completing my MFA in fiction, I enrolled in an MFA program in nonfiction. There I learned new codes for “good” work. Previously I’d internalized the ideal of a reading experience so effortless you forgot you were reading, but in the nonfiction MFA I met readers for whom the effort of an effortful read was a pleasure in itself. In the fiction MFA, Do Not Bore Me had been law, but my new professors praised meandering prose. Before, my professors talked book deals in terms of advances; now, my program director exhorted us never to sacrifice a book’s integrity by selling it for more than $10K. These differences were a product of genre, yes, but they were also the result of different communities and their values. In the fiction MFA, we read through a consumer’s lens and aspired toward commercial success. In the nonfiction MFA, earning money from writing, or aiming to please an impatient readership, was viewed with ambivalence.

I am convinced that we can teach creative writing without the language of failure or success, criticism or praise.

A friend introduced me to during a conversation about how difficult it was not to internalize the aesthetic values of instructors with the power to grant degrees, fellowships, recommendations, and blurbs. Lerman, a dancer, offers a value-neutral approach to “getting useful feedback on anything you make, from dance to dessert.” The method, she says, “enables a group of people to uncover their various aesthetic and performance values,” making them “aware of the numerous ways people see art, and the array of value systems underlying their differing visions.”

Lerman’s four-step, capital-P “Process” begins with what she calls “statements of meaning.” These are responses to the question “What was stimulating, surprising, evocative, memorable, touching, meaningful for you” about the work? This is followed by questions from the artist to responders; neutral questions from responders to artist (not “Why’s the cake so dry?” but “What kind of texture were you going for?”); and opinions the artists may choose to hear or not. (“I have an opinion about the texture. Do you want to hear it?”)

I wanted to follow Lerman’s example of making individual students’ values more transparent. But I knew that many undergraduates are determined to experience the creative writing workshop they’ve imagined: a silent writer taking in the readers’ chorus. I also wanted a paradigm that would apply equally to discussions of published and in-progress work. The solution I came up with is an adaptation of a stubbornly entrenched model, not an overhaul. It’s a strategy for addressing craft, giving feedback, and conducting workshops, when I’m not sure that addressing craft and conducting workshops should be all, or even most, of what a writing course does. I call the practice “value-transparent,” since neutrality is a problematic goal, and because I hope the exercise might help students recognize and trust their own values.

I’m not convinced that my way of teaching is ideal. But I am convinced that we can teach creative writing without the language of failure or success, criticism or praise, and that doing so will help us avoid reproducing systemic oppressions, damaging students psychologically, and stunting creative work.

The experiment begins with two questions: What happens if we take value language out of the classroom, avoiding words like good, working, strengths, better, improve? Can we abolish our faith in writing that is “good” or “bad”? The result, I hope, is that our conversations about craft can be reinvented and reinvigorated as conversations that remind us what art is for.

*

“Write the story (or essay, or poem) you want to read in the world.” My courses begin with this invitation for students to create their own goals: for the student who loves being entertained to figure out how to entertain; for the student who loves difficult prose to examine how such work engages him. As they share examples of writing they love, students begin to articulate their aesthetic values, which they’ll return to in discussions of published and in-progress texts, and later use as touchstones when they revise their work.

Our workshops begin as our conversations about published work do, with Lerman’s statements of meaning. “Meaning,” in this case, doesn’t refer to interpretation: The approach treats interpretation as part, but not all, of the experience a piece of writing exerts. Students are pleased to learn that the work they’ve produced resonates in some way, and reorienting the conversation around meaning, rather than praise or criticism, also reorients students around socially motivated reasons to write and share work—to create an experience for someone else.

Conversations conducted in the language of positives and negatives make the writer’s feelings the conversational subtext; the writer becomes the conversation’s implicit subject. Worse, such conversations habituate students to writing for extrinsic rather than intrinsic reward: for pats on the back. And copious pedagogical research demonstrates that a focus on extrinsic reward reduces risk-taking and hamstrings the quality of creative work. “When people do things in order to earn rewards, they become less creative; and when they do things that they think will be evaluated in some way, they become less creative; and when they do things to please someone else, they become less creative,” write two scholars about this widely observed effect.

This is why workshops oriented around praise and criticism don’t only attract narcissists—a word I use in the sense of one who is unsure of his own worth, and so seeks external esteem—but also create narcissists. They unsettle a writer’s inherent sense of worth, and divert attention away from intrinsic reasons for making art. Even praise, like any other drug, will eventually poison art. Like criticism, it makes us forget what art is for.

When I remember that workshop, I can’t help but feel that I joined in an effort, by a group of white readers, to muffle and ignore a story of anti-Black violence.

Our conversations about craft might remind us what art is for by shifting away from what “works” toward what actually happens when we read. Does your heart race? Do you cry? Think? Forget that you’re reading? Pick up the dictionary to look up a word? More important: Which elements of the text, and of the world the text inhabits, determine your response? When a student is asked to move away from value-laden language in conversations about creative work, she is being asked to resist a set of nebulous, arbitrary, class- and culturally-coded aesthetic values, to study the reading process, and to define her values for herself.

“Should we have no standards?” is one response I’ve heard when I explain that I never say, “Great job,” never put checkmarks in the margins of student work. “No,” I reply, “we should not.” As teachers, we might have standards for how students approach their work, for how they read, observe the reading process, define their aesthetic values, and revise in pursuit of those goals—and we might use these standards to evaluate student performance, when we must. But “standards” inevitably narrow the scope of what writers envision as consequential elements of their work.

“But I want to know if people liked what I wrote,” students might plead. I’ll ask what they mean by “like.” “If they wanted to keep reading,” one says. “If they feel moved,” says another. These are qualities we can discuss without risking that the writer’s objectives are obscured. “You don’t believe that Faulkner is good and Danielle Steele bad?” is another question I’ve heard. I point out that different people—or the same person, on different days—might choose to read one author instead of the next. Their bodies of literature fulfill different needs.

After statements of meaning, students and I spend most of our time pointing to details of a text—authorial choices, conscious or not—and examining their effects. This differs from convention only in that avoiding the language of explicit value pushes us to examine the reading experience with a mindful attention that results in the discovery of our own values. It’s not easy to avoid saying, “This is great” or “This works.” We slip up all the time. The learning happens when students are asked, and I ask myself, “What do you mean?”

*

Teaching this way has helped me identify my own (ever-shifting) aesthetic values. But the more interesting discovery has been how obviously tied these are to my political and social values. When I long to convince students to “unpack” or “complicate” the tidy happy endings of their personal narratives, for instance, it’s because I want them to reject dominant cultural narratives that obscure what I see as important truths. But to what degree should I not only teach in a way that reflects my values—as this approach reflects a desire to foster inclusivity, mutual trust, and students’ self-worth—but in a way that encourages students to adopt my values? The solution I’ve found is not to hide these values, but to frame them as such—personally and politically informed—and to be clear that I won’t be using my position as instructor to privilege my views, that students will have the space to identify, explain, and find authority in their own values.

That a class might arrive at a shared value system isn’t surprising: Aesthetics—like grammar, fashion, and politics—serve as markers of belonging.

Even in a course where aesthetic values are relentlessly questioned, I’ve observed that a collective value system nevertheless tends to emerge. In one class, students spoke of their “engagement” with each other’s texts in laudatory tones; to keep the conversation in line with my goals, I needed to ask what “engaging” meant, and how a text worked toward that end. Was “engagement” always desirable? Did “engagement” ever happen at the expense of something else? Maybe “engagement” meant distraction, escapism, a turn away from the contemplative and toward commercialism’s empty thrill, we thought—but then again, maybe “engagement” could also refer to the surprises of poetry and the challenges of conceptually thorny prose.

That a class might arrive at a shared value system isn’t surprising: Aesthetics—like grammar, fashion, and politics—serve as markers of belonging. And the values we identify as our own aren’t fixed. I doubt I’d love the author my professor once derided if I read his books today, and that’s not only because my aesthetics have changed, but also because I have changed, and my ethics have changed—partly as a result of the conversations I joined when I started my MFAs. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that author’s work doesn’t hold value; its value to certain readers, including readers I love, is plain. Instead, this is evidence of how unfixed our aesthetic values are, dependent far more on a reader and her context than on the text itself.

Which brings me back to the question of what art is for. I won’t attempt a universalizing response. But I suspect that there is an ethical dimension, conscious or not, to most artists’ work. If you ask a beginning writer why they write, there’s a good chance they’ll respond along these lines: to voice what is unheard, to comfort or move a stranger, as a form of protest, a crying-out against or in accord. Even art created solely in pursuit of pleasure arises from the imperative that pleasure, too, deserves space—like outrage or grief, pleasure is something artists can make.

The conventional workshop tends to distract students from these motives, graduating writers who wonder whether publishing a book will change their lives, instead of whether publishing a book might change the lives of others; writers who wonder whether their work is any good, instead of whether it does any good. I’ve heard debut writers say that they can’t wait for the first year of a book’s life to be over, that the barrage of award cycles and best-of lists, the sense of constant assessment, feels torturous. They struggle to follow the advice of writer and Iowa Writers’ Workshop director Lan Samantha Chang, whose plea that writers protect their “inner lives” rather than fall prey to the career-driven concerns so “toxic to creativity” is difficult to follow not least because the institutional structures that ostensibly support emerging writers do so little to protect their inner lives.

Maybe, though, writing programs and workshops could train writers to focus their energy somewhere other than assessment, prizes, and reviews. Maybe, in refusing to take aesthetic values for granted, in uncovering and starting conversations about the ethics these aesthetics manifest, creative writing classrooms could become spaces for considering the role of writers and the work they create as actors in a public space, agents of the sort of social change that begins when a reader is changed.

The final question my students and I address in our conversations is “How else could this be?” This is an invitation to imagine a variety of paths toward the next version of the work, and the experiences these alternatives might produce. The question has its origins in the traditional workshop, but I encourage students to imagine alternatives outside of what conventions of “improvement” would suggest. Our job as reading writers is to remember that the story can always be told differently. I spell it out on the blackboard: our job is to practice imagining change.

A version of this essay originally appeared in the fall 2018 edition of Poets & Writers.

Source

Toward Changing the Language of Creative Writing Classrooms

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[mergguest]

Pre-election 2016

A sermon by Meredith Guest

Delivered to the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Marin 10/9/16

Luke 6:27-36

 For many years I had the great pleasure of being a teacher of 4th, 5th, and 6th graders in a little Montessori school. After the students were gone, while engaged in the Sisyphean task of checking papers, I would occasionally find a student’s answer to a math problem that was not just wrong, but made absolutely no sense. It’s as if I’d asked for the square of 6 and they’d given me the time of day. Now I will confess to you that sometimes my response to these students was not especially charitable. “Sweet Jesus,” I was known to exclaim, “I’d have an easier time teaching math to the class guinea pig!” But, save for with my colleagues, I kept these thoughts to myself. The next day, I’d call the student over to my desk and, in my most neutral voice, ask, “Uh, can you tell me how you got this answer?” And after studying the problem for a moment, the student would invariably explain how they got this completely wrong answer in a way so logical as to be downright brilliant – wrong, but brilliant.

 Most of my friends are like you; they’re well educated, progressive, liberal thinking people. And most of them are apoplectic at the possibility that Donald Trump might be elected president. “What is wrong with these people?” they wail. “Are they just stupid?!” “Don’t they realize they’re choosing against their own self interests?!” And, for the most part, they do not keep these thoughts to themselves. Personally, I find it ironic that these mostly atheists are having a downright Old Testament experience: weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. What we haven’t done, it seems to me, is stop, take the time and exert the energy to actually listen to Trump’s supporters, and if we did, I think we would find – as with my students – there is a kind of logic here.

 This logic based on several things, and key to it is:

 Insularity.

 One of my sources for this talk is the book Deer Hunting With Jesus by Joe Bageant. I’ve also drawn from interviews with J.D. Vance about his book Hillbilly Elegy. I have not read Hillbilly Elegy but I highly recommend Deer Hunting with Jesus. Bageant grew up in a small town in Virginia. After high school he went off to college, became a successful journalist and lived from many years in New York City. When talking to his many liberal friends, he would often be asked why rural southerners so often voted in ways that were contrary to their self interests. Finally, toward the end of his career, he moved back to to his hometown to see if he could answer that question. Deer Hunting with Jesus is the result.

 When Bageant interviews his old classmates, one of the things he discovers is that none of them knows a liberal. Their own thoughts, their own views and opinions are constantly being reflected back to them and little or nothing to the contrary has a chance to get through. Their lives and the milieu in which they live are insular.

 But then, that’s not just true of conservatives.

 In the 9/19/16 issue of the New Yorker, the author observes: “Fewer than 1 in 4 Americans ever talk with someone with whom they disagree politically; fewer than 1 in 5 have ever met with people holding views different from their own to solve a common problem.” To which he asks, “What kind of democracy is that?”

 And social media, with a cheap, easy and convenient capability of bringing together diverse people and opinions, has only made the problem worse. I recently saw a FB post in which a person demanded, “Anyone voting for Trump, please unfriend me.” Pretty soon, we’ll all be living inside intellectual and ideological gated communities where the only people we talk to and hear from are those who think like us.

 When I came out some 16 years ago, I expected it to be harder for Caleb, my son, since high school boys are arguably more homophobic than girls, but Lia, his younger sister, had her own times of difficult misgivings. It was hard for her, too, and years later, Lia reported that the most annoying thing she had to deal with was, once she revealed that her dad was transsexual, not only did she have to explain what that meant, but that then, she had to assure them that I did not dress like a hooker.

 I tell that story to illustrate the power of the personal. In the abstract, to hear that Lia and Caleb’s dad dressed and lived her life as a woman was strange, to say the least. But once they got to know me, I wasn’t particularly strange. It’s by knowing one another we come to understand one another and while we may not agree, personal relationship is far better soil for the flowering of compassion than the concrete foundation of a gated community.

 One of the best things about being a financial failure as an author is that it forced me out into the world. Had I been successful, I would have sequestered myself in my cozy little study and spent my days happily writing lies. Even in retirement I have to work, and so, at least 3 days a week, I substitute teach in schools all over Petaluma from grades 3-12. As a result, hundreds of children get to see a real, live, breathing transsexual who, unlike the ones they see in the media, is not rich, famous or sexy. And I make it a point whenever I can, to interact with the kids in their Mossy Oak camo sweatshirts; not because I want to change their minds about anything. I just want to get to know them; I think they matter; I care about them. They don’t always like me or warm up to me. They can be cruel, though usually not overtly. But this is what I can do. In many ways, it’s all I can do. Perhaps it is enough.

 Insularity leads to:

 Uncritical thinking.

 Under the best of circumstances, even for well educated people, it is hard to be aware of and critical of our own presuppositions and the presuppositions of our group.

 I remember on day saying to a little boy in my class, When you meet the right girl… Later, I thought to myself, how do you know he’s not gay? It’s so hard to see those heteronormative presuppositions. Once I did, whenever I had cause to say something similar, I would say, When you meet that special person… It was easy to fix, once I recognized the presupposition.

 And what about the presupposition that all male babies grow up to be boys and men while females grow up to be girls and women. Clearly, that’s not true. I have a 7 month old grandchild, and what we know about my grandchild is that she’s female. It’s too early to tell whether she’s also a girl or not; but I hope so. Having a brain and a body at odds with one another is not something I would wish on anyone. I’m not suggesting we have to relinquish our presuppositions; I still speak of my granddaughter and refer to her with feminine pronouns. I just think it’s very important to be aware of them. Operating at the level of our unconscious, presuppositions can be damaging, even dangerous.

 Being an educator, I’m especially aware of the presuppositions that guide so much of our thinking about school.

 I once did a subbing gig in which I was the co-teacher in a high school English class.  The teacher, a lovely, very caring person, was exhorting her students to bring the rough drafts of their essays to her at the tutorial period to have her critique them. “Why do you think you might want me to critique your writing?” she asked. After a moment, a boy ventured, “So we can get a better grade.” “That’s right,” she agreed, and it was everything I could do not to cry out, “No, it’s so you’ll become a better writer.” School is about education; it’s not about grades; it’s not about college; it’s not about what job you’re going to have and how much money you’re going to make once you get out. It’s about becoming educated. It’s about learning how to think, to reason, to question, to grow, to become a lifelong learner.

 The poet, thinker and social prophet, Wendell Berry has said, “A powerful superstition of modern life is that people and conditions are improved inevitably by education.” (W. Berry, What Are People For, pg. 24) But that’s clearly not true. There are all sorts of successful people, some of whom have made tremendous contributions, who have not been well educated. Would they have inevitably been improved by education? I don’t think that’s a given.

 One unfortunate, even dangerous, consequence of this superstition about education has led to the denigration of physical labor.

I recently saw one of those inspirational posters hanging on the wall of a middle school classroom. It began: “I can be…” then went on to list a slew of possible occupations that were colorfully inscribed on a black background in the shape of a light bulb, symbolizing, I assume, that these were occupations of the enlightened or occupations that would bring enlightenment – or both. Here’s a quick rundown of the occupations listed: software developer, doctor, meteorologist, airplane pilot, anthropologist, microbiologist, epidemiologist, astronaut, cartographer, network analyst, medical scientist, computer programmer, veterinarian, zoologist, geographer, archeologist, architect, conservation scientist and so on down to chemist. I found it ironic that nowhere on this classroom inspirational poster did I find the occupation of – teacher.

 It makes me wonder if these educators ascribe to a philosophy I found in a Terry Pratchett novel. In the story, Death has decided he wants a new occupation; he’s just done with dealing with the dying and the dead, so he goes to a career counselor. After an extensive interview, the counselor says, “It would seem you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever. Have you ever thought of going into teaching?” Maybe they should hang that next to the “I can be…” poster.

 Our life on this planet depends on 6 inches of topsoil and the occupation most directly involved with the stewardship of this vital resource, farming, is not, and will likely never be, on the list of things our students might aspire to. But the truth is, we could lose every occupation on that poster, and we’d still survive, but without 6 inches of topsoil, we’re just so many skeletons littering the face of the planet.

 This kind of lazy liberalism that considers itself so enlightened as to have no unexamined presuppositions and certainly no superstitions is one of the things I like least about living in the Bay Area. And just like the unexamined presuppositions and superstitions held sacred by conservatives, ours are enabled, in part, by insularity and uncritical thinking.

 Anger and a desire for revenge.

 In Hillbilly Elegy Vance describes the Appalachian town in which he grew up. In the 70s and the 80s the industrial jobs began to disappear, jobs that made a middle class lifestyle possible to people with a high school education. Now the town is full of shuttered storefronts. More people die of suicide from drug overdoses than from natural causes, families are disintegrating, and single mothers raise the majority of children. Church attendance is at historic lows, high school graduation rates are dropping, and few students go on to college. There’s something “almost spiritual,” Vance says, “about the cynicism” in his hometown.

 Who speaks for these people; who represents them; who cares about them? I’ve heard liberals say things about Trump supporters, they would never dream of saying about Muslims, or immigrants, or African Americans, even though many within those groups also hold views liberals find abhorrent. Since when did it become okay to demean poor, uneducated white people? Since when did they become fair game for our ridicule? And make no mistake, I am not innocent here.

 You will likely recall when the North Carolina legislature passed the bill banning transgender people from using the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity. When President Obama came out very publically against this bill and in support of transgender rights, he was applauded by rights’ groups, but I was suspicious. For one thing, it seemed out of character for this president who has been slow, almost timid, in taking sides on controversial issues. Also, North Carolina was already under tremendous economic pressure to repeal the legislation. It seemed to me the President’s public support merely hardened the resolve of the Right. Furthermore, what I was reading and seeing in the news about that time was that rural, white voters were beginning to sit up and take notice of the things Bernie Sanders was saying. Here was a Democrat and a liberal who was addressing the issues that mattered to small town people who had not that long ago been stalwart democrats. But when Obama, who they despise, threatened to cram transgender rights down their throats just like gay marriage had been crammed down their throats, this very effectively drove them back into the folds of the Republican party. This, I believe, was the intentional strategy of the Democratic establishment who, fearing a Sanders victory, decided Hillary wouldn’t need these voters to win, and so, rather than try to bring them back into the fold of the party, they wrote them off – again.

 The poet Adrienne Rich has said, “When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.” This quote used to apply to me and to others in the LGBT community. But not anymore. Now our faces are everywhere you look, while the faces of working class Americans are disappearing, rendering them anonymous and their lives invisible.

 Nobody cares about them, about the rural communities they call home, about their traditions or their way of life. And nobody represents them, and they are angry and looking for revenge. That’s why whatever Trump says or does, however absurd, outlandish and mean, that sticks a finger in the eye of the elites who run the country, be they Democrat or Republican, the more they love him. In fact, you might say, through Trump the people who we don’t know, don’t like, and don’t agree with have slapped us in the face; and we have done everything but turn the other cheek. What do you suppose would happen if, rather than insult, malign, and demean, we did; we turned the other cheek?

 I once had a child in my class with severe cerebral palsy. She was my student in 4th, 5th and 6th grades. Her name was Johanna and she was a wonderful student. One summer just before the beginning of school, Johanna’s mother recommended I meet with an occupational therapist who they had been seeing. I agreed, and in our meeting he asked me to describe the classroom and Johanna’s place in it. After I did, he looked at me and said, “This child’s not a member of your classroom. She’s little more than a fixture. No meaningful interaction happens between her and the other members of the class…” This was a “take no prisoners” kind of guy, but I listened to him and came up with a plan. I cleared it with the mother and soon after school began, the class did a group challenge. Privately I gave Johanna information that the class had to get from her without the assistance of her aid or any other adult. Only when they got this information would they be allowed to go to recess. It wasn’t easy, but they got the information, went to recess and after we did a few similar things, pretty soon I saw students interacting with her in ways they never had before.

 It seems to me we, as a nation, have a similar group challenge. While the well educated, well connected and well endowed have enjoyed the fruits of the modern economy, Donald Trump has sounded a take-no-prisoners wake-up call for those with ears to hear and eyes to see that a whole group of others have been left behind. While technically part of the country, they are like the handicapped kid in the wheelchair who nobody ever talks to and everybody tries to ignore. But in this case, a lot more than recess is at stake.

 So I want you to imagine, instead of a sweet, bright child with cerebral palsy in that wheelchair, picture a laid-off West Virginia coal miner who dropped out of high school, lives in a dilapidated trailer with his girlfriend, her 2 snotty nosed kids and a pit bull. He owns an AR15 assault rifle, drinks Bud light, and hates Obama.

 And then, I want you to remember your first 2 principles: 1) The Inherent worth and dignity of every person; 2) Justice, equity and compassion in human relations – all human relations, both private and corporate.

 And I want you to hold that picture next to those principles when we sing our closing hymn, “We’ll Build A Land.”

           We’ll Build a Land

We’ll build a land where we bind up the broken.

We’ll build a land where the captives go free

Where the oil of gladness dissolves all mourning

Oh, we’ll build a promised land that can be.

 Chorus: Come build a land where sisters and brothers

Anointed by God may then create peace

Where justice shall roll down like waters

And peace like an ever flowing stream.

 We’ll build a land where we bring the good tidings to

All the afflicted and all those who mourn.

And we’ll give them garlands instead of ashes,

Oh we’ll build a land where peace is born.

Chorus

 We’ll be a land building up ancient cities

Raising up devastations from old;

Restoring ruins of generations,

Oh, we’ll build a land of people so bold.

Chorus

 Come build a land where the mantles of praises

Resound from spirits once faint and once weak;

Where the oaks of righteousness stand her people,

Oh, come build the land, my people, we seek.

Chorus