BACK TO SCHOOL

Crayolas. wax-based

This time of year I get a craving for Crayolas, or better, Craypas which are oil pastels -- far more vivid.  Sometimes I even want a Daytimer, but that’s from a different period of my life, when I was a minister rushing around to meetings.  A new box of Crayolas goes back to primary school and is attached to the academic strand of my life.  I have no need for more formal academic work and no wish to teach, which is good -- because no one wants me to, least of all students.  Anyway, I’ll be 77 in a couple of months.

Craypas, oil pastels

But they’re saying that no one wants to teach anymore, and maybe the retired teachers ought to return to service.  Unprepared students are being hired to teach.  (Student lawyers are also being asked to take cases.)  I might be tempted to teach if it would aggravate the administrators -- most of them dead now -- who have helped destroy public schools.  When I first started in the idealistic ’60’s, the superintendent (an idealist) wanted us all to join the NEA, which he thought would make us more professional, sort of like the AMA.  Soon the American Federation of Teachers formed, much more militant and focused on salaries.  

When I began working with Tim, we talked about guerrilla education, meant to escape lockstep classes.  (http://guerillaeducators.typepad.com)  Now I see there’s an outfit called “Bad Ass Teachers.”  (www.badassteacher.org)  It’s Facebook-based, which I consider dangerous because Facebook surrenders to authorities: names the names, pictures the faces.

Of course, now we have charter schools, tribal schools, Catholic schools, home-schooling, immersion schools, all of which CAN work.  But also we have such a culture schism that some students despise anything that smells like school, even if the odor is coming from a hot lunch meant to bribe the homeless or hungry.  And that’s not counting the strange assortment of people who will occasionally break into a school with guns blazing.  

Mrs. Christaens, Principal K-12

I’m saying that even conventional kids are opposed to school and know they can get a teacher fired.  This week when the Valier Schools begin again, the superintendent will have been paid off to make him go away because a cabal of girls decided they didn’t like him. (This is unconfirmed.)  School will open with a K-12 principal and some adjacent school districts monitoring.  And so it goes in Mayberry.

Over on the rez the obits for the old people now going over the horizon mention fondly the names of the little one-room school houses that once dotted the terrain.  Usually they were named for the nearest allotment owner, who might live nearby.  The kids came on horses, no matter the weather.  I dread to think what might have happened to any kid that “ditched” school.

An historical photo of a Blackfeet dad 

fetching his kids from school because of a blizzard.

Nowadays, it’s the family that ditches the kids.  No sober person at home, no food, maybe no home.  Kids rule, because they have to when parents aren’t grown up. We are in a family-destroying culture and that means destroyed kids.

This blog goes along certain lines of inquiry, including church, animals, the land, neurology, the history of my own family, and a relationship with a little group saving boys at risk.  The saviors ARE the boys at risk).  I’m cutting back on the archives I’ve accumulated because I’m getting old.  Also, I realize that I’m running an unhealthy house: too much clutter, too much dust, too much cat hair, too hard to clean.  Maybe I’m a little obsessive.  It's time to edit.

The first boxes I’m throwing out are family emails.  I began sending them to cousins, but they kept sending other stuff to me.  There were no revelations.  It was nice to see familiar handwriting on the letters we had.  I might write more about my mother’s family -- more adventure among the Pinkertons.  The Strachans have been a pretty conscientious low-key bunch.  My remaining brother is so low-key, he’s invisible.

Next to go is the UU-related stuff, but not the books I saved from other UU people’s throwing-out.  It’s a bit of a problem that so many people are throwing things out.  Is there a shelter for unappreciated texts?  I haven’t decided what to do about the ten years of sermons, weddings, funerals, and holiday extravaganzas.

Maggie Dwyer just sent me some government overviews of the Blackfeet because she is dispersing some of her library.  Indian lit broke her heart when Louis Owens died.  I wobble about what to throw out.  I’ve already made a rule not to accumulate things about other tribes.  A little delegation of Blackfeet came recently to ask me questions, so maybe I shouldn’t be hasty.

This was what a Browning father looked like in 1961

when I came to teach -- no nonsense.

I still have some of my English teaching materials.  When I started, we “taught the textbook” even though there never were any that really worked for rez kids. Next we were supposed to throw out the texts (they were too expensive) and to make our own materials, but we had no time and the copy machine broke down weekly.  They took the blackboards and gave us white boards, but there was no money for markers, more expensive than chalk.  It was just like the mental health swindle when they closed the big institutions (scandalous places) with the promise that there would be cozy and friendly neighborhood refuges, but then there was no money and no plan for them.  Park benches and emergency rooms -- maybe jail.

Today academics at all levels are as badly invaded and controlled by money and politics as are medicine, prison, insurance, groceries, old people, the mentally ill, pets, recreation, and -- now I discover to my dismay -- the Internet.  It’s the same technique as a flea or a tick: riding on the back of the dog that seems to be going somewhere until it falls over from flea bites.  Every flea competing with every other flea.  The contemptuous Cut Bank boys of 2003 drew this on the whiteboard for me: a dog with fleas, their version of the town, and in glorious primary marker colors, explained what they thought of it.  Not nice.

We are still educating for conformity, which means going for the money as big and soon as possible.  That means contempt.  That means that as the future unfolds, our kids and schools will be under the rug, instead of sitting at the table.  It’s all very ironic, since the people in demand and making money now are the plumbers, the electricians, and the HVAC techs.  At least if they have enough background to handle computer programming for the new wave of household appliances that talk to each other as well as your car.

What’s missing?  Maybe the names and locations of the top 1% that everyone talks about.  Who educated them?  And what were they taught?  Do you realize that the returned WWII warriors that we so depended on when I was a kid are now great-grandfathers?  No doubt they helped the teacher clean the blackboards with those felt erasers, then went outside to beat the chalk out of the erasers.  About time to do that.  Too much has been erased.

One thing hasn't changed.  I still love the smell of Crayolas in the morning.