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After a hard year of working, now, at last we get to enjoy something I scoped out during the previous year: Denton’s summer activities, in particular, Denton Water Works Park.

The park offers five slides, a water play pool with fountains and sprayers, and a river pool for tubing, along with a lap pool and a shallow indoor pool with basketball hoops. And it’s clean and not too crowded. We have died and gone to swimming heaven, I suppose.  And another thing. With the youngest already almost eight, the supervision responsibilities of the mom have dropped, such that I can at last sit in a lawn chair and read a novel, of course glancing up every paragraph or two to make sure everything is all right.

College girl is here visiting over the summer and she has enjoyed the pool as well, as have the teenaged boys who needed something to break up the monotony of sleeping and playing video games.

I will be taking them to the library today, hopefully, to try to share with them my interest in summer reading. Although all through the winter and spring I’ve sat in front of the Netflix screen, watching movie after movie — mostly Bollywood and some Spanish language — I have to admit there’s nothing quite like the leisure of reading a good book. Especially when you’re sitting in the shade of an umbrella, watching your son squirt his sister with a sprayer as they splash around in the pool.

Denton Water Works Park: Five Stars

You can be a great student and still have an unbelievable ability to not learn from your mistakes

Seriously. This has been me all weekend. Some things happened. They were not pleasant. I was disappointed. But the great part is that I was surprised. Really? Like you had never had that happen before? Like it hadn’t happened a million times already?

So why is this? Why do we find ourselves repeating the same mistakes, building up the same expectations, and thus finding letdowns in every corner? Naivete? Leaky memory? Denial?

A few weeks ago, it occurred to me that I was probably in denial about things. The actual thought was “I bet I am in denial about ten things. I wonder what they are?” (Then I thought about it for a while. I still haven’t come up with anything. Also, ten was an arbitrary, round number that sounded reasonable.). However, denial is not an effective state. It’s like procrastination. It serves no purpose. There is a net negative result. Why not just face it, and buck up, and get on with your life?

Well, that would require…

1. Admissions of fault in self (lame)

2. Admissions of fault in others (not as hard, but perhaps more painful)

3. Admission that the world is not as you want it to be (difficult)

4. Admission that, in this lifetime, certain things may never become what you want them to be (darned unlikely)

5. Admission that, in this lifetime, you may never experience certain things that you desperately desire (asymptote is approaching impossible)

6. Admission that, in this lifetime, you will almost definitely never get certain things you want really bad. And have wanted for a long time. And it would be so great. And so easy. But…basically, not going to happen. Get over it. (impossible?)

No, not impossible: just requiring a redirection of focus. And this can be done. But it seems to me that over time, we slip back into the old mindset. Suddenly, we have a brilliant idea! Oh, it’s going to be perfect! I’ll just _______ ! Why didn’t I think of that before? (You have.) And I’ll do it! (You did.) And now everything is a disaster! (It was.) Why didn’t I remember? (No clue.)

And it will be again? Maybe I should litter my house with sticky notes: Do not work that job, Do not call so-and-so, Do not call anybody when you are feeling such and such, Do not write that down in a letter…

Reminds me, isn’t the definition of insanity supposedly doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?

But what if you honestly forgot? And what if…what if it would be so great?

(The author is a work in progress).

It’s a  question that’s all over the net now, the latest comment I’ve seen on the subject a blog post from a private school in Pittsburg entitled “Why do we teach Mandarin at Sewickly.” As I noted some time back, Nicholas Kristoff claimed that students should be learning Spanish for practical reasons … and I find myself yet again scratching my head. Apparently the whether and which question of foreign language study is fertile ground for blog posts.  Meanwhile, if you’re interested, this post on why you should study Latin, written at great length and detail by a professor of classics at Middlebury College, is in its constructions a lucid argument for the effectiveness of Latin as a tool for developing rhetoric. In a related post, Eleiva at Chronotopia discusses whether the modern subject-based university courses should replace the traditional surveys of English (or American) literature.

It seems to me that over all, each language has reasons for its study, and the problem comes when a school has to make a decision about which languages to teach, based in practical concerns such as providing a series of courses and finding teachers who can teach them.  In an ideal world, all students and parents could choose the language that appealed most.

Or perhaps not. We’re moving again into the region of how schools should choose curriculum for the students, as in fact they have to. We cannot, in a universal public education world, envision a  flower garden of potential topics and our students moseying through, picking the blooms they fancy most … I have a bad feeling that many of my second graders would opt right out of math if they could, and this would be to their real detriment. We have to create and promote a group of courses that satisfy student’s needs — of course, what we define those needs as is part of the question …

A couple of weeks ago I responded to the claim by some education reformer that we’re teaching subjects students no longer need. Of course the problem here is that education is not about “subjects students need.” It’s about developing the mind, body and spirit of a precious human being who will need various ideas and practices, both social and cognitive, to prosper.

The big problem comes when we evaluate the skills students may need not based on what is to their greatest benefit, but through the lens of our society’s most prominent values, which are, unfortnately, largely monetary. Skills students no longer need are skills, like foreign language, which don’t make money — and the foreign language advocates like Kristoff and the Selwicky blogger who claim there is economic benefit directly from foreign language are going out on a limb that opponents may just decide to saw off.

Students should study foreign language because it gives them the perspective to see how grammar and rhetoric work, and, by extension, how society works. Further, they need to reflect from a distance about a society and its strengths and weaknesses so they can conceptualize our own society in the same terms and realize that we are capable of improving or damaging our wellbeing as a people.

For example, we train many, many engineers, and what these workers need is not better engineering skills to get more wages, but more perspecitve on how society works so they can agitate and pursuade their compatriots and government to run more accountably and efficiently. As more effective citizens, they will be able to participate more ably in democracy and make sure that goals such as good use of municipal resources and fair distribution of wealth are realized, and in this way help themselves and their families much more than by taking an extra semester of applied sicence, skills which they might well learn after employment anyway.

These advocacy and societal organizational skills are developed by the liberal arts and in particular foreign language. Eleiva’s survey courses, meanwhile, will likewise develop these overviews and understandings of society that people need to have to support free thinking and free living.

The rush to stop students from thinking like free people has been going on for a while. As many have known for decades, for centuries, the philistines are not at the gates, they’re inside. When someone suggests that we should teach practical topics, instead of say, how to think clearly and be free, I wonder if they’re one of those who expect to benefit from students’ not knowing how to argue on behalf of themselves and what they and their families need.

Dean is fond of saying that only at elite private schools where the children of the rich are educated are the liberal arts still protected and safe from elimination. This should give us pause. If our free education is giving students “skills they need” instead of “skills to be free” whose interest is really being served? And who’s really going to profit from all these work skills anyway, the students or the people who employ them?

On Saturday, I decided to go with the kids to go bike riding. They wanted to show me something they called the “bike ramps” which basically meant an area down by the creek where there are some dirt trails and jumps kids use for practicing their bike motorcross skills.

North Texas cottonmouth moccasin

We had been there about half an hour, and were getting ready to go, when I saw, right next to the trail we had been riding on, a brown and tan striped snake, about two feet long. It had a large, triangular-shaped head. The snake was looking at us.

“Hey, watch out!” I told them. Brand tried to get closer but I shoo’ed them away.  “It could be a cottonmouth.”  We rode home, and I immediately went to check the internet.

Sure enough, the description of the snake matched that of the cottonmouth moccasin, a snake so named because when started it has a tendency to open its jaws threateningly to reveal a white-lined mouth.

“Hey Dean!” I said. “There was a snake down by the bike ramps, and it looks like it was a cottonmouth.”

“Didn’t you see the “warning: snakes” sign? He asked.

“Warning: snakes? In our park? What are snakes doing crawling around, it’s 45 degrees out.”

I searched some more. Cottonmouth bites are deadly but are treatable with the same antivenom that is used for rattlers, so there are few fatalities these days. Nevertheless, I was quite dismayed.

“Stay away from the creek, especially the bike ramps,” I told the kids.

“Aw, mom! We’d be careful … ”

“No means no.” I think they believe me, though the well-travelled state of the bike ramps suggest that despite snake sightings and a sign, kids are challenging the cottonmouths regularly. It makes you wonder.

We assume that the quality of the lesson presented determines much of whether the student learns, without talking much about why students may decide or decide not to try to master material. This was brought home to me this morning, when Dean was reading me a story by the fourteenth century writer Boccaccio. The story concerned a “well-born” young man called Cimon, who sorrowed his father greatly. The young man was completely impervious to any learning of any type, be it about manners, letters, or useful skills. He spoke rudely, could not read, dressed like a peasant, and in general was considered by the entire community to be a hopeless imbecile, for which reason he was called by everyone not Cimon but Chimone, which basically meant “buffoon.”

The story says that Cimon came upon Iphegenia sleeping in the woods with her companions, and that she wore very sheer clothing. Not surprisingly, this inspired a number of classical artworks.

This Chimone, however, one day went walking and caught sight of his true love, and right then and there, he decided to change. He stopped dressing in rough clothing and asked to be taught to read and write, to speak well, to ride a horse and to bear arms. Everyone was amazed when the former imbecile, correctly deciding that he was unattractive in his current mode but could make himself more appealing, in the space of just a couple of years converted himself into an upstanding young gentleman.

Chimone then went on to have difficulties with winning the young lady, but that is beside the point. As an educator, I couldn’t help but notice that the entire weight of whether Chimone learned or not was upon his own attitude. He went from believing there was no benefit to studying, to thinking there was every benefit. Furthermore, the things he was learning had no “useful” purpose per se. Rather, they had a proximate result, leading observers to associate positive qualities with him and to give him friendship and (possibly) entrance into a family.

What might be the effect, I wondered, on our own students if they wanted to learn as badly as Chimone did? And how long, if they all desperately wanted to learn, would it take them to get through the curriculum each day? I dare say we could be out by noon or earlier …

All educators have ideas about how to motivate students. The fact is, however, while in general some teaching techniques have more motivational value than others,  different students have different attitudes about what is important to them, and they will learn most readily when they believe that their interests are being served by learning. Many students do not perceive learning as being important in itself. Chimone didn’t believe learning was important either, but he wanted to marry the young lady so it became important. For me learning is an end in itself, but there will always be many for whom it is no more than a means to an end.

The curriculum we teach does have many benefits that come with learning it, but students often are not aware of this until they have made the choice of whether to focus on the material or not.  By the time a student has chosen the college prep or non-college prep track in  high school, or even whether to take bookkeeping or sewing as an elective, they think they understand school quite well, yet they know only a little of what this choice may mean for them over a lifetime.

This is just the way life is, I suppose: We make our choices long before we understand the consequences.  But I find myself very struck by this thought: Though I am sure, as I wrote yesterday, that the material I teach is worthwhile, why exactly should the students learn the material? And how can I make sure they understand why they should?

Sometimes, the stuff people say about curriculum sends me into orbit. Just such a response was had when I picked up a magazine in my mother’s house and read a short review of a new book about education: “Schools,” according to author Jamie Vollmer, “are designed to select and sort students according to skills and abilities we no longer need … ” (from the book Schools Cannot Do it Alone: Building Public Support for America’s Public Schools.)

Which skills are these that students no longer need? Personally, I only teach skills students need in my classroom. They definitely need to write and read, work with numbers and word problems, and talk and learn to live in a community. They are also learning about computer applications (probably not enough) and do some sports and art (definitely not enough). So when do these students learn the skills they don’t need?

The problem is that this kind of foolish talking and thinking takes away from the individual student and teacher the humanity we’re supposed to be developing in the classroom and in our society. Putting some fancy digital curriculum into my classroom may change some things, but the fundamentals of education are cognitive and in interacting person to person, which is why I don’t believe a computerized, no-teacher curriculum will ever be able to serve more than a tiny minority of students.  And educrats deciding from above they need to tell teachers and students that what they are learning is “skills we no longer need” is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

As I go forward in teaching, I think that the main goal of a school should be teaching students responsible functioning in a democracy. They need to understand our society and, as one of my colleagues said last month, they need to grow up and vote. These skills are tied up in reading and discussion, which is, in general, what education had been about for thousands of years. How are these “skills students no longer need?”

My husband is a college Latin teacher, and although we spend almost no time teaching Latin in K-12, I suppose this is one of the skills students “no longer need.” But the funny thing is, the Latin students tend to be higher than average in all the other subjects too — as if teaching them Latin drives them upward in their other areas of study.

This is known by Texas’ top prep schools, many of which teach Latin because it’s known that such studies prepare students for leadership and achievement as well as bump up their SAT scores. These prep schools also take students to art museums and nature outings as well as dance and musical performances. These “not needed skills” are what make an education strong and complete. I’m tempted to go so far as to say these activities and skills make us more free.

But the philistines are at the gate, as they always have been. Nicholas Kristoff penned this beauty of an opinion essay for the NY Times, arguing that students should be taught Spanish so they can communicate with participants in the rapidly growing economies in Mexico and the south. News bulletin: if we lie to students, they know we are lying. The students do not need to speak Spanish to go do business in Mexico, because only a tiny, tiny minority will have the opportunity to do so.  And although I speak Spanish better than just about any native English speaker I know, I can honestly tell you that the benefit of doing so is in being an educated person who understands the way language works, and understanding another culture, and this benefit can be had from any foreign language study. The benefit is greater when the language and culture is related to ours, or is foundational to ours, as is the case with Latin.

Utilitarianism with regard to education may seem like a needed practical response. But the attitude of Vollmer and Kristoff is what the term “dumbed down” was created for. Education is like a flowering plant, and I guess, deep down in my heart, I believe that students should get the education they’ve always received at good schools, from good teachers:  reading, writing, arithmatic, science, citizenship and culture. If we can cover that in elementary, I think we’ve done our job, and no, I do not think any of those subjects are “skills the students don’t need.”

To my original spiritual guide, Nedra, to tell her that after over a year I am still teaching school, and have thus passed an important milestone of being  self-supporting. Nedra passed away in 2008.

To several people who thought Dean would never finish the PhD:  A combined Christmas card/graduation announcement. 

To my grandmother, to tell her that I now understand what she was talking about when she said “why can’t we all just love eachother.”  She was right, but when you’re in your teens and 20′s, you believe your opinions are far more important than family harmony. “Munner” passed away in 1999, while I was expecting the birth of Joanna. Now that I’ve got children the age I used to be, I see what a lot of trouble opinions can cause. Sorry about that, family. I guess I am fated to take Munner’s position, tell people all this stuff if not actually that important, and have them not listen.

To a couple of guys I used to date a long long time ago to let them know  I am doing well without them and that these excellent children sitting here making Christmas cookies might, if they had played their cards right, have been their children, but they are not. Too bad. So sad. Said guys are still living last I heard, not sure exactly where.

 To a friend from highschool I think I located on Facebook, asking if that’s really her.  I’m not afraid it might not be her — I’m afraid that if it is, she won’t like me the way I turned out after all these years. Maybe I’ll try next year …

To my writers workshop, telling them I’ll be back when I have some time, which I now believe will probably happen approximately never, but then again, I’m no prophet, on this or any other matter.

The hooding ceremony is where your dissertation director places the PhD hood over the graduate’s shoulders and then the graduate is pronounced a “true member of the community of scholars” with all the rights and responsibilities thereto.

Of course, I felt a little strange. I thought Dean was a member of the community of scholars a long time ago, because he seemed never to do anything except read books and teach about them and speak Latin, and because I really believed that he moved in a slightly different world then I did — the Ivory Tower world, where pursuit is not of dollars but of an ephemeral and transcendent kind of New Knowledge, knowable only by the few who are up there in the clouds where the tower leads to. If he weren’t a member of the Community of Scholars, how in the world did he do his dissertation research?

But no, I am quibbling here. I know what they meant — he is now certified a member of the community, and no one can question whether he is really an academic any more. All those people who were asking “when is he finishing his PhD?” will have to sit down and shut up now.

Meanwhile, my mother-in-law asked me if I was ever going back to school. With only a bachelor’s degree (okay, I also have a teaching credential too) I am just about the least educated member of the family. But no. I am too hands-on for the Tower, I told her.

“Besides,” I said, “I really only interested in elementary education. And some say that the people with PhD’s in education are part of the problem, not part of the solution.” Elementary education is hands-on, there’s no point in studying it from the tower, to me. I want to be in the classroom. So the hooding ceremony for Dean will probably have to be “it,” until such time as Suellen finishes … or someone else besides me.

In the weeks and months since I last wrote about Edgar “Shoboy” Sotelo, I have not forgotten about his show; indeed, I have become an addict. I can now tell you that the woman on the show is Anna, and the third character who seems to be Shoboy with a cartoon voice is Michu, who crank calls people, tapes the calls, and plays one every morning at around 7 a.m., when I am turning from the 377 onto the 820 to east Fort Worth. The calls may involve his “vieja” (old lady) who weighs 300 pounds and needs to go on an airplane, or a pretend traffic stop, or calling up a father of the bride and telling him his wedding reservation in ten days is cancelled.

I get lots of important news, including encouragement to support the Dream Act which would allow high achieving children of illegial immigrants to obtain permission to reside (the coveted green card) by succeeding with two years of college or military service. Also I learned about Obama’s stitches on the show. And then there’s the music.

The Shoboy world is another world, a totally heard world. Much has been written about radio and its qualities of intimacy and imagination, and I suppose that’s true. But I’ve never been as interested in radio as I am in this show. Perhaps because I’m learning about the culture. After all, if I listen in English I have to weigh whether I agree with every statement, every song selection. With the Shoboy show, I don’t have to like everything, because I’m trying to learn.

Sometimes I think that it’s better than studying Spanish from a book because you have to really listen to understand what’s going on. I still don’t get it all — but I have noticed that my comprehension has risen. And my understanding for what it is to be Hispanic in Texas has been improved. But the truth is (la true) that I feel a real affinity for the way of thinking — the humor, the assumption of family life, the struggle, that desire for something better every day even if every day is, essentially a trial.  Yes, I am a fan of Shoboy and his show.

Here is a clip of the “Mega Date” program aired by the station. I rarely get to hear this because I get to work about 7:20, but it gives you an idea of what the repartee sounds like.

From a press release by the City: 

The Fort Worth City Council will conduct a citywide town hall meeting to discuss the modern streetcar study at 7 p.m. Dec. 2 at the Fort Worth Convention Center, 1201 Houston St.

The town hall, announced during the unveiling of a streetcar exhibit on Seventh Street, will help the City Council decide whether the study moves into its third phase. The third phase includes preliminary engineering and an environmental assessment, and finalizing the finance plan for the recommended starter route.

Free parking is available in the Commerce Street parking garage, located between 13th and 14th streets.

For more information, visit the Fort Worth Modern Streetcar Study webpage.