Want to trade teaching jobs for a week?

            Surely this isn’t the way all teaching jobs are—the unrelenting, unforgiving manic pace of it, the number of students I’m leaving to fail when I have a moment to look over my shoulder and check, the well-intentioned but practicably ridiculous broad and deep lists of ways we should be interacting, challenging, intervening, assessing, diversifying, universalizing, coaching, re-directing and reaching every child, most of which I wholeheartedly agree with and am reminded thereby of the failures and sacrifices of my own instructional practice; surely some schools have similar hopes and expectations for the classroom but throw fewer competing demands at their teachers, fewer students, more resources; or there must, alternatively, be effective schools out there that focus on fewer deep-bore goals at once.

            When I went to Hungary, my interest was not in a comparison of educational policy or pedagogy, but I couldn’t help but be affected by the different orientation teachers and students had with the material and scheduling of their days. It’s how I know that not all teaching jobs are like mine. But I wouldn’t trade on our American push for creativity, collaboration, critical-thinking and choice, nor on the core American belief, backed up by tremendous national investment however flawed, that every child should have resources and opportunities to succeed.

            Still, even here, even locally, surely this isn’t the way all teaching jobs are. This morning I began to fantasize about more local exchange possibilities. What if I could trade into other teaching experiences without jeapordizing programs and relationships—and, to be absolutely aboveboard, financial standing—and could learn and weigh approaches to teaching and lifestyle within the same systems (and commuting locale)?

            What if I could, for example, spend one week at The Nova Project, learning about an alternative high school in Seattle that vastly rejects the many premises that undergird a day in which intellectual behaviors (and, for thirty minutes, socializing behaviors) are fragmented by bells?

            What if I could spend a week living on Vashon Island, home to people who’ve chosen isolation and community over the overwhelming cultural and social bustle of city life? What’s it like to teach at the Vashon High School, or to bike home through the trees?

            Surely there’s some job out there that makes sense.

            And I have so much to offer an exchange partner who will share the possibilities with me. For one week, I could provide targetted lessons in someone else’s classroom, and someone could play to her own expertise in my classroom. I could jump over and, for a week, provide an intensive week on Shakespeare, for example, or close analytical reading of a poem, or sentence diagramming, or rhetorical analysis of text, or the transferable skills of creative writing, or critical thinking and socratic seminars, or a flashbang introduction to popular French and German philosophy, or sophisticated framing of narrative or argumentative essays, or anything I’m asked. And, alternatively, I could provide someone an opportunity to fill my room and not substitute teach but guest teach one week units to my 9^th, 11^th and 12^th grade groups towards instructor passions and student needs.

            An exchange—with all the adventure and fresh relationships and reflection that such an exchange implies!

            That was the fantasy this morning, anyway. If I could slip into someone else’s classroom and he into mine without any to-do from headquarters, and if we could serve each other’s looming deadlines and needs, maybe I’d pursue it.

            Push me, someone! 

Work week longer than my week week

It's Saturday night on Thanksgiving weekend. Stephanie had cooked all day and served two kinds of potatoes, two kinds of cranberry sauce, two kinds of apple pie (and a pecan and a pumpkin), stuffing, brussel sprouts, beets and greens, and a fat, glazed turkey. She brought out and polished her grandmother's vased candlesticks and frilled linen napkins and set forth a beautiful meal for our family, for Lauren, Jeff and Maude, for Wendy, and not for my father, who is in the middle of a six week road trip in honor of an award he is receiving at his high school in Miami, and in honor of his new car.

I have time tonight to write. I've fantasized about this writing, because for maybe a month, I've been arriving at -- if not clear then resonating -- thoughts about work. But of course, the time to actually slow down enough to do more than intuit in a glimpse what I might compose hasn't been handy. Which is what I wanted to write about.

I was listening to NPR a few weeks ago, and a professor was talking about the kinds of preparation students are receiving these days to head out into the work world. Middle class parents tell their children, and then teachers and professors tell their high-achieving students, that they should do what they love, or, "do what you love and you will never have to work a day in your life." Find and follow your passion. But even when the job market's good, this advice so often leads to disappointment and self doubt. The truth is that many jobs out there don't enrich the soul. In the radio essay, a professor says that what "he tries to tell his students is that a good job is good enough; they don't need to have the best job." And that seems like good advice. While we're reading Moby Dick with Arthur Schopenhauer in my Philosophy and Literature class, this point seems to repeated: Schopenhauer reiterates the Buddhist noble truth that life is suffering, and that, as soon as people give up on trying to make themselves happy, they can be in tune with the universe, not happy necessarily, but at peace. Ishmael too finds himself grooving on the masthead, forgetting his philosophizing for a moment and just feeling the vastness of the ocean, or he finds himself contented with the small pleasures in squeezing hands in buckets of oil with the other sailors; meanwhile, Ahab is driving himself to thinness and ruin, trying to exert his will on the universe. To let go.To give up on the desire to define and cage passion or happiness, or the career that will answer the internal rumblings, seems wise.

And yet.

I have loved my job for years. So many aspects to my job are joyful. I love the teenage energy, the pride students feel in original thought or carefully crafted words; I love the thoughtfulness adolescents are willing to put into what it means to be a decent human being, or to live a worthy life; I love unbaring the nuances and subtleties of literature, or the overtly reckless fun in Shakespeare; I love shaping the energy and delight of two and a half dozen people, of producing a sense of moment; I love students' discovery of civic potential, and personal strength; I love the pride they feel after numerous revisions that finally get my nod; and I love the intellectual dialogue suddenly in reach, the deliberate sparring I invite; and the students who linger after class or return in spare moments to add a relevant thought. I even love aspects of my job that get outside my classroom, as when I'm collaborating with other teachers with books we're all teaching together, or sparking off their ideas, or lining up ideas for a meaningful new event.

But these things that I love are getting crowded out. It's now been three times this year that I have come home saying I hate my job, something I hadn't ever said in fifteen years of teaching to this point.

Before I left for Hungary, I had often felt the strain of my work. The role of an English teacher is a big one. Universities rightly lay the blame for poor writing and critical reading skills on high school English teachers; nationally, reading and writing are two of the three things that consistently get tested and compared. Like all of my departmental colleagues, I already felt like Animal Farm's Boxer. I will work harder. I read papers like mad and turned them around in a day through clever staggering of assignments, brought in tutors and student teachers for counseling and extra rounds of revision and feedback, and I pushed students to read and annotate more, knowing that my students were working far harder than I ever did at their age. It was a lot of work, but I never came home and started browsing career possibilities as I've done three times this year. It was enough work, though, that I sought the working sabbatical of the Fulbright to buy me some perspective.

As I'd said in the previous blog entry, all of us returning Fulbright teachers have felt the jarring strain of our return. So, does my dissatisfaction stem from this cultural moment, or has the teaching job actually gotten worse? Of course, it's hard to separate the feelings. But I think the job is getting worse.

One piece is just numerical. I have 148 students a day. I haven't had that many students for half a decade. The numbers are threatening to get higher. Despite the systemic pressure on English teachers to deliver on an enormous array of embedded skills under the standardized microscope, because we have the largest department and therefore the most amorphous numbers, we are easy to trim. The biggest departments outside of Music, Theater and PE -- English, Math, and Social Studies -- have the largest class sizes. If I collect one paper every two weeks from every student, and I devote ten minutes to each paper, if I'm doing nothing else, I am also grading papers for 25 hours. But I'm not doing nothing else. I've taught Philosophy before, but you don't just do Moby Dick or Schopenhauer off the cuff. I've never taught the Advanced Placement Language and Composition class, and that takes preparation too. Even after cutting shameful corners, I still take between one and a half to two and a half hours a day to prepare the next day's lessons. And those papers: ten minutes an essay, really? If no parents e-mailed, if no student needed tutoring, and if I had no meetings to attend, then I'm already overwhelmed; but I don't think I hate the job yet.

The last time I hated my job, it was a Monday, and I was collecting papers from one class, quarterly projects from two others, I was biking downtown after school for a department chair meeting that would get me home to my family (and prepping for school) at 7:00 pm, preparing for a two hour meeting I was running the next day, and a two hour meeting I was running the day after that, and two staffings over failing kids after that, and a conference with two parents after that. When a boy wanted to meet with me to discuss his essay, but I had to run to (another) meeting, I realized -- all the heat rising into my chest and head, heat that was to become hatred, as in, I hate my job -- I realized that I couldn't meet with him before school on Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday either, or during lunch or after school on Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday either. And why the fuck not.

The very next week, I did something I've never done in all my years of teaching: I took a personal day off. On that personal day, I graded papers for six hours straight; I wrote a letter of recommendation; I made revisions to the departmental course catalogue; I cashed two checks that'd been sitting on the piano for two months; I went running; I sent out an application for a grant; and I ate lunch with Stephanie. It was like a revelation. I could do this! If my work week wasn't fitting into my week-week, I could call in sick and put a day-day into my work day. I could be in control. I don't want to end this particular story by admitting how quickly I became overwhelmed again the next day.

Time is a problem, and not being able to give it to that kid, for example, contributed, but it was the meetings themselves that made my feelings towards the job especially poisonous. The meeting I had downtown that Monday evening was in part about the Common Core -- national standards most states including Washington have adopted as the future language of targeted skills. Before I left for Hungary, English department chairs spent one or two sub days every month and two or three meetings every month developing our own standards, that would be in line with the Common Core. I wondered at the time why we didn't just accept the new standards wholesale and save a vast amount of time and money, if indeed, our state was soon going to adopt them. But we didn't. Now we are juggling four sets of standards at the secondary level in our department alone: the existing grade level expectations, on their way out, but still the state law of the land; the reading, writing and oral language standards we sloppily created two years ago; the standards we were encouraged to emulate in the College Board Standards for College Success; and the Common Core. If it's confusing, good news: I have another sub day scheduled next week to sort it in a day called Leadership and the Common Core.

The day after that, I have a three hour training after school to look at something called the Danielson Framework. This, like every set of standards, has pages and pages of charts too, but it's not just about English standards: it's about teaching standards, and every teacher in the district is being trained to use such charts to improve our practice, as we must, because the Danielson Framework is going to be attached to the new evaluation system going into effect next year, the performance evaluation system. I can't remember if the performance evaluation is also going to take stock of students' MAP scores (Measures of Academic Progress), a set of charts and an adaptive test students have been taking on the computer now for three years to measure their RIT levels (Rasch Unit); but I did go to my third training last week to understand how RIT scores worked and how to work with them -- but, for the third time, learned only that when scores go up, that's good. In any event, it's possible that the Danielson Framework charts will be benign, although it's another chart in my head: I'll find out even before that three hour training, because, on top of my whole day downtown for Leadership and the Common Core, I also have a whole day downtown this coming Friday for the Danielson Framework, preceding the three hour session the following week.

That's a lot of sub days, and each one means my work week is going to fit even less into my week week; but even more importantly, it means my head and my planning and my interactions with students are going to be crowded with all sorts of things that don't have anything to do with aspects of the job I love. And these things, they don't just compete with such joyous qualities for time in the school day: they crush.

I am going to many meetings and trainings to look at new charts and rubrics and standards, hundreds of pages of them; every faculty meeting goes over some slice of chart; every district meeting goes over some hunk. Thinking about the future of teaching in our district, with its increasing rigor and chartedness and class sizes, reflected in its absolute dry heave of a motto -- "Every student achieving, everyone accountable" -- it's hateful; and it's not just that I had a fabulous, life-bearing time in Hungary last year; it's that my job now is overwhelming and threatens to be ridiculous.

The class sizes are not going to get better any time soon. We know that the district budget is in trouble, and that the state budget is in dire straits. And this is a great opportunity.

A way the district and the state can save money while retaining the strength of its schools? For the duration, stop meddling. Leave us alone. Poke your head in our rooms when there's trouble, but otherwise, state, and you especially, district, no more all day trainings. No more charts. No more high-stakes tests. You can't afford them. You really can't.

I like so well the advice I heard, that "a good job is good enough." I'm willing to settle for a job that has its bad days and its good, its stresses and its small rewards, its unimpressive salary and invisible hours; but I didn't give thanks for it this year. If my work week doesn't fit into my week week, then that's it.

Thankfully, I have time this weekend to write my thoughts and slow down, and more importantly, to spend time with people I love. They're why a good job can be good enough.

Five minute passing periods and American teaching

            I  have just returned from a convention for international teacher visitors on the Fulbright exchange. My role, as an alumnus of the program, was to share insights and experiences about the cultural and professional exchange, to help troubleshoot and soften the landing into American teaching expectations, and suss out and communicate any problems that might be emerging behind the scenes. I was especially excited to see Franky and explore Denver and get pampered by the State Department again. But what happened additionally was unexpected and potentially nutritive, potentially destructive: questions I’ve been asking since my return (questions—when they’re not muttered discontent and grief) have found their resonance and choral echo.

            It’s one thing to place one’s self in entirely new contexts and from there observe the ways of the world. In Hungary I was always aware that I was picking up on larger cultural truths but not understanding them fully or defining them well, though my heightened awareness of American systems and beliefs, by contrast, gained clarity; this was why, when U.S. teachers got together in Hungary, we urgently compared notes, sizing up the emerging generalizations about our new home. Are you finding teenagers openly groping each other in public areas and buses? I am too! What’s that about? Are you finding people jumping in front of you in lines or totally pushing you out of the way? Not really: that’s happened to me in cities, but mostly the men I’ve seen hold doors and wait for you to pass; do you get that? Generalizations get a much bigger sample when you place many people—in this case, from different regions of the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic and Hungary—in one room and ask for their cultural comparisons and insights.

            When we Americans used to gather last year, we marveled at how much more time we had to live our lives in the school day, at how tightly bound the community of teachers into which we’d each entered, and how many more opportunities there were to know students outside the classroom—traveling together, cooking, celebrating, walking, in some cases even drinking. We were aware that our status as visitors perhaps gave relationships an extra glow, and that our workloads reflected the language barrier that kept us out of meetings, paperwork and supervisory duties. We were aware too, though not as keenly aware as our hosts, that our American paychecks kept us out of the second jobs and private tutoring that took up the afternoons. Nevertheless, we moved and lived in a community where families spent more time, communities celebrated more, teachers played together and had time daily to talk and be human beings in the world with each other, and students could sit on benches with each other and do nothing.

            I came back to my job and it slammed me. I returned wanting to write entries in this blog but was too worn.

            My first two weeks I arrived every day at 6:30 a.m. and left every day between 5:30 and 6:30. I shared lunch in our 35-minute periods with colleagues because I knew it was important but I also felt the strain of losing those minutes. My day has shortened to ten hours since that time, by sheer force of will, cutting larger and larger swathes of the corners teachers cut, and still—and I apologize for this—I still reward a stack of work by peeing, an act relegated to its own efficiencies and hurry.

            This is my sixteenth year teaching. Two of the three courses that I’m teaching this term, I’ve taught before and have extensively planned. And yet.

            At our convention, we had four Hungarian teachers, two Czech, and a little less than twenty Scots and Brits. One teacher after another observed how busy students were during the day, and then after the day, in all the sports and activities of the afternoons and weekends; they observed repeatedly how tightly scheduled the day and week; and individually, they related the same thing over and over, thinking every time that her American school was just a sad exception: the staff doesn’t really know each other at my school, they never spend any time with each other, there’s not really a community of teachers at my school, teachers don’t know who I am or even that my partner is gone. In observations related both by cause and effect, and I’ll explain in a moment, international teachers laughed or marveled at how little American schools trusted their students with their own interests or time.

            The pace of our schools is relentless. I remember teaching at a sprawling, teeming Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, Massachusetts whose passing periods were three minutes—not in spite of the crowds and length of hallways, but because of them. Kids might be a little late if they’re traveling from another building. But they won’t be loitering. It’s the same engineering concept used in Nazi death camps: keep them running and they won’t rebel, won’t break ranks, won’t ask. What I have already expressed to colleagues at Roosevelt is how efficient our days are. We have worked hard to teach bell to bell, to push students to print papers and confer with us between classes and meet us after school, to move students towards those sports and clubs that will make them feel connected while we make the most of our own professional developments and adult meetings. Despite what people out there seem to believe and maybe in contrast to some of the schools out there (but not to any of the schools described or observed this weekend), our schools are incredibly efficient, with every minute accounted for and necessary. There is at least real pressure for this to be so. And within the school periods, we have become better and better at identifying, developing and assessing specific skills and organizing the hour to achieve them. If we finish our planned lesson three minutes early, we know students can usefully spend time reflecting on what they have learned. But this productive schooling doesn’t stop. Students, as the British teachers observed, live at the schools; and social community among teachers is not the common experience that it seems to be in other countries.

            We visited Franky’s school. The visiting American teachers (mentors and administrators of European Fulbright instructors) were especially interested in the free hour both students and teachers have within the 7-period day. Teachers have five classes, one planning period, and one period devoted to tutorials, conferencing and clubs, while students have six classes, with one period unplanned unless they’re ninth graders or have fallen behind and need help. Because this countered what international teachers observed—the relentless pace, the constant supervision of children—we very interested in how it worked. Students drove off campus. Sometimes they came back late. Students hung out outside and in halls as well as the library or lunchroom. Sometimes kids were directed somewhere but didn’t make it. But, the principal said, it was all worth it. Students received interventions and one-on-one relationships and tutoring and downtime; teachers got to know students in more personal ways and more time to breathe and put their arms around the school. Of course, many American visitors said this would never work in my community, and I'm sure they were probably right: this was a largely homogenous, comfortable student body going to school in a big grassy field.

            But I also thought about a moment Roosevelt, with not such a dissimilar population, tried to implement an activity period—an hour once every couple of weeks in which students could gather in clubs during the school day: we shut it down because some kids wandered off campus. I thought about the Denver principal saying, But it’s worth it. I thought about how much we do because we don’t trust kids—the short passing periods, the gradual eclipsing of the one student day we’d had at Roosevelt, the tiny half hour lunch. If we just had recesses in high school, I had been thinking the last month or so; and now I think it loudly: a real lunch hour, or ten minute passing periods, or a week or even two weeks in winter devoted to fun projects designed by teachers or students, or a tutorial hour or even half hour—something to give us all time to conference one-on-one or to play—to play!—to break open the day and slow it down, to give my job its humanity back.

            I met with all the Fulbright alumni now back in their American jobs. We were all relieved and alarmed to discover that each of us was having a hard return. For each of us, the day is too tightly packed and we are too tightly wound. The job feels all wrong. Now that we have worked in schools where teachers and students are trusted and have time and space to relate to each other in other ways than one, the hours and pressures are oppressive.

            Franky and I both sought out the teacher exchange partly because we sought the attitude adjustment: we were driving ourselves in unsustainable ways. What I realized when I was in Hungary and falling in love with my wife again and getting to know my daughters and performing with colleaguges in plays and choruses and dances and sitting on benches with students during passing periods—and I wrote this in an earlier blog—was that my job in Seattle WAS really that big. My job is just very, very big. And when I returned I found this to be true.

            We do a lot to serve our students here in America. We can be proud of this, and proud of our earnest and deliberate efforts to improve what we do. But Oh my God it’s airless.

            I love my students. I sometimes do a great job too. But maximizing productivity and accountability is no way to run a laboratory for democracy and quality life.

            Listening to the international teachers, listening to we who’ve returned to the driving pulse of our American positions, I know our schools and our jobs don’t have to be this way. I know I don’t have to live this way. And knowing it, I can change it—if not one thing, then the other.

Why I support Occupy Wall Street

There is an overriding belief among decision makers—overriding in that even those who don’t believe it are afraid to refute it—that Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand of capitalism will guide business and corporate entities to make decisions that are in the best interests of consumers, that a free market will draw many profit-seeking peoples to the best ideas and will then compete against one another to deliver these best ideas and, through such competition, provide consumers with both choice and lower prices and an active laboratory whereby ideas are further refined until the best, most vigorous ideas emerge, and consumers and businesses are rewarded both. One can find examples in recent and past history to demonstrate that the invisible hand has rewarded not only financiers and business-owners and consumers, but workers as well: Henry Ford knew that his workers were consumers and so paid them enough so they could afford his cars; lately, King County has greatly reduced health care costs to its employees by supporting the healthier choices they make in their insurance structure (1); at the start of the Great Depression, W.K. Kellogg found he could run a profitable business by moving to six hour days at the Kellogg cereal plants—because workers with more time for “family, community, church, and individual freedom” were more productive (2). Though free market arguments go largely unchallenged in our state and federal houses of congress, however, the invisible hand has shown again and again that it has not been good for most citizens of our country. We allow our businesses to make decisions not only primarily but purely to maximize profits and please investors. Corporate responsibility shows up as a single lecture in Ethics classes on the way to earning the most popular Bachelors and Masters degree in our country, Business Administration (3). The profit motive, however, has proven harmful. It’s proven bad for workers, bad for voters, bad for consumers, bad for health, and bad for our planet. While Jim DeMint (Senator from South Carolina) told a room that they might have to “take to the streets to stop America’s slide into socialism,” (4) the historical record has shown that our policy makers have backed off corporate regulation and accountability repeatedly, in the face of numerous abuses, disasters and calls for change; it appears now that the only way to shift the conversation away from the unquestioned faith in the invisible hand is to do exactly as Jim DeMint has demanded. Take to the streets.

This would not be the approach if democracy and capitalism were as synonymous as idea-crafters often make them out to be. I say this even given an important caveat that we are not a pure democracy, but a democratic republic in which we are represented under different rules under different interpretations in different institutions and states, such as between the Senate, in which representation by population does not count, and the House of Representatives, where it does; or in the Electoral College, with its winner-take-all states, whereby a majority win takes all a state’s electors, as in Washington State, or with its alternative, whereby electors are chosen by local districts, as in Maine. Furthermore, we are note purely a democracy because we have built constitutional protections to curtail the will of the majority if the popular will becomes totalitarian in impulse. This is called the Bill of Rights. Perhaps the more important caveat is that we are not a purely free market: we have a social safety net, a socialized military, state-run roads and police and schools and parks and more; and we additionally create massive incentives and disincentives for certain corporate and civic behaviors through the use of targeted taxes, fees and direct regulations.

Nevertheless, it is helpful to talk about democracy and capitalism, because their essential ideas justify so much of what we do: in our democracy, every enfranchised citizen has a voice. The idea that personal interests will end up pushing forward the ideas that will best suit us together as a community is stated by Alexis de Tocqueville this way: “The citizen looks upon the fortune of the public as his own, and he labors for the good of the state, not merely from a sense of pride or duty, but from what I venture to term cupidity.” (5) This idea is very similar to capitalism: the law of supply and demand suggests that desires and needs will get fulfilled, as long as all are free to buy and sell what they want. Both of these ideas, democracy and capitalism, rely closely on ideas of individuality and freedom, in ways that, from this level of abstraction, seem almost identical. But they are not. Seen from the concrete lens of history (and I’m perfectly aware this is the tack that Marx takes) and what actually happens, capitalism does not require everyone to win or benefit. Exploitation, slavery, extortion and other nakedly dehumanizing and wrong behaviors from our recent past and today are not behaviors theoretically out of bounds of the laws of supply and demand. Taking hostages creates demand: the fact that this is against the law is besides the point. Laws are a modification of pure capitalism. And while we have such laws and modifications, the biggest idea remains: profit and wealth are the ends, and getting others to pay as much as they can while outlaying as little cost as possible are the means. In a society where everyone is born to the same advantages and temperaments, perhaps capitalism and democracy could be similar ideas. But when capitalism flies on advantages and exploits disadvantages, by definition, not everyone has an equal voice, as they are supposed to in democracy. Democracy and capitalism are different.

When we equate the two, we privilege the ideas of individuality and freedom, and indeed, these are the concepts we shout during speeches; but beneath this equation are the increasingly unequal voices in our democracy: those rewarded for their advantages in capitalism are gaining disproportional influence on those we elect to represent our concerns. While most everyone is equally free to speak and to vote, because of laws of supply and demand, more people depend on those who run corporations, and so, representing more needs, we confer on them a special status, as demonstrated in the phrase “job creators,” a term that lays bare such dependencies.

Yet one of the deep ways that the profit motive has proved harmful has been on our democracy itself. Corporate lobbying and the proximity of K Street to the U.S. Congress has been well documented. Meanwhile, the correlation between the amount of money raised by political candidates and their chances of success is not perfect, but it is consistent. Money determines viability, and often enough, the advertising and marketing blitzes it provides put a candidate over the edge. The Supreme Court ruling favoring Citizens United—unlimited, undisclosed funds—opened the floodgates to corporate influence and demolished practical campaign finance rules (6) in a way that cements the absolute necessity for politicians to go to the rich for help forevermore.

Rick Perry provides a useful case in point. First, he became a millionaire only after he was elected into office: records show his biggest real estate sales were made to political allies and friends while governor (7). Second, the unlimited fund-raising Super-PAC “Make Us Great Again” is officially independent of Rick Perry, as required by what now stands in for campaign finance regulation, but the governor’s picture and record are all over it, and it is run by the man who was once Perry’s chief of staff, a man who co-owns a New Hampshire island with Perry’s campaign strategist (8). Third, while Perry shrugged off Michelle Bachmann’s accusation that he mandated the Gardasil vaccine as quid pro quo for Merck’s campaign donation, declaring, “If you’re saying that I can be bought for $5,000, I’m offended,” a very quick investigation suggests that, in fact, Merck had to buy him for quite a bit more—$30,000 for him and $380,000 for the Republican Governors Association which he came to chair (9). The larger point is that money not only influences whom Americans choose to vote for, it skews the way we are represented, favoring in a craven and obvious way corporate and individual wealth. Rick Perry is only the latest example of corporate interests rewarding politicians and politicians rewarding corporate interests.

The sheen of corruption here suggests the vulnerability of our democratic system. And if we can’t trust our democracy, if our elected officials have stopped listening to the drumbeat of frustration, if our elected officials aren’t aware that these sickly bargains they’ve been making to retain office are beyond the pale, then we take to the streets to remind them.

The profit motive has an inappropriate primacy in American institutions, beliefs and society. Look at what’s happened to our workforce. To maximize profits, many corporations have outsourced or relocated to other countries or free trade zones; and then they apply pressure to state legislatures to relax taxes and regulation so they can compete with companies overseas where capital and labor costs are so much less. Either way, the downward pressure on wages and the health and safety conditions of workplaces has not been counteracted by tariffs or trade restrictions on the part of our government; it has instead opened further free trade zones and competed, state to state, to provide the most business friendly environment, as when Boeing left Washington state for South Carolina’s no-union state (10). Wal-mart, when its workers threaten to unionize, simply closes shop and leaves rather than concede to demands for reasonable benefits (11). The political attempt to villanize unions is a step towards exposing Americans still further to the downward pressure on wages and conditions, and taking away the one lever workers have to tilt the law of supply and demand such that it accounts for their value. Workers’ rights need protection; instead government has been working in both direct and indirect ways to award businesses the freedom and power to exploit them.

The profit motive has been bad for the environment. After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the hue and cry for change was persistent and loud. No one outwardly defended the shoddy oversight that led to the largest oil spill in natural history. It was the kind of event that might remind our government of its custodial relationship to land and water and remind it to demand effective mechanisms to prevent (if not entirely avoid) such disasters. What government did do was place a six month moratorium on offshore oil drilling. After that, the only policy change in the regulation of oil drilling was that Florida Governor Charlie Crist called for a special session to ban offshore drilling in state waters. The legislature rejected it (12). In other words, despite the fact that no one openly defended the poorly regulated conditions that led to such a disaster, and despite the fact that voters were furious, aggrieved or paupered depending on their locale, nothing changed. Not only does offshore drilling continue, but oversight was in no practical way improved. The profit motive quietly but steadily urged companies to make money, with as little cost as possible, off the supply of oil so in demand.

The profit motive has destabilized money itself. After the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1987, banks were given free reign to take enormous risks with other people’s money, reaping the rewards of such risks without incurring the costs, which would be absorbed by Federal Deposit Insurance (FDIC). As the riskiest investments can realize greatest returns, banks turned to ever-riskier financial innovations, now a hitlist of stupidity: mortgage-backed securities, sub-prime loans, collateralized debt obligations, structured investment vehicles. Despite the housing collapse that resulted, deepening the recession and causing an entire market to compete with foreclosure prices, the only return to banking regulations and protections such as we once knew is a weak Volcker rule coming out this week, which seems to allow the conflict of interest between lending and investing to continue (13). Why isn’t the government pushing harder on something that continues to wreak havoc on our economy? The answer, of course, is It’s complicated, as all the strange terms in this paragraph indicate, an answer that provides great cover to keep the regulatory checks loose.

Health care is perhaps the most obvious example of a profit motive where it doesn’t belong. If an insurance carrier is to make a profit, it does so by taking in more than it gives out. In practice, it does so by shutting out the sickest patients and denying coverage whenever possible. It does so by raising premiums when people get sick, or by canceling a policy altogether when it’s needed most (14). This is theoretically the best way to make a profit in the industry, and the best way to provide stockholders, who expect growth every quarter, a good return on investments; and in practice it happens all too often. One can imagine the kind of urgency that life or death situations have on the law of supply and demand, and health insurance and drug companies take advantage. While medical problems account for more than sixty percent of American bankruptcies (15), health insurance companies are “into a third year of record profits.” (16) Yet attempted adjustments have been decried as assaults on liberty: Senator Ron Johnson, for example, called “ObamaCare” “the greatest single assault on our freedom in my lifetime.” (17) But capitalism is not democracy, and it needs its curbs. If insurers could make a small profit while ensuring needed access to otherwise out-of-reach medical treatments, then perhaps our nation’s citizens could stand idly by; but that’s not what’s happening.

Corporations are under incredible pressure to turn profit and the wealthy are lauded for cultivating the profits they earn. But profits should not be the keystone to our society. While profits do indeed do many of the things we want them to—rewarding innovation and hard work, filling needs and fulfilling desires—the profit motive should not go unchecked. On its own, it has proven harmful to our citizens and our country in so many ways. The solution is the invisible hand must not be a free hand, but one guided by conscious, collective interests. The government must provide regulation, targeted taxes, tariffs and, at times, laws to provide this guidance. Otherwise, the invisible hand too readily becomes a claw, snatching what it can.

Right now our government is too tightly in the thrall and grasp of this hand. I support Occupy Wall Street because I want our government, finally, to recognize that profits are not people, and that it’s the people who deserve the government’s protection and aid.

ENDNOTES:

(1) Gilmore, Susan. “County expects to save millions on health-care.” The Seattle Times. 21 September, 2011.

(2) Hunnicutt, Benjamin Kline. Kellogg's Six-Hour Day. Temple University Press, Philadelphia: 1996. Back cover. Print.

(3) "Fast Facts." National Center for Education Statistics. U.S. Department of Education, 2011. Web. 16 Oct 2011. http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=37.

(4) Hamby, Peter. "Senator Calls Obama World’s Best Salesman of Socialism." CNN Politics. CNN, 27/02/2009. Web. 16 Oct 2011. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/02/27/senator-calls-obama-world’s-best-salesman-of-socialism/.

(5) Tocqueville, Alexis de, and Thomas Bender. Democracy In America. McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages, 1981. Print. 136.

(6) "Editorial: Beware the super PAC." Washington Post. 2 September 2011. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/beware-the-super-pac/2011/08/31/gIQAdGB5wJ_story.html.

(7) Fitzgerald, Alison. "Perry Made More Than a Million on Real Estate While in Office." Bloomberg. 18 August 2011. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-19/perry-made-more-than-a-million-on-real-estate-while-in-office.html.

(8) Isikoff, Michael. “’Independent’? Maybe, but Super PAC Heavily Backs Perry.” MSNBC.com. 17 August 2011. Web. 16 Oct. 2011.

(9) Eggen, Dan. "Rick Perry and HPV vaccine-maker have deep financial ties." Washington Post. 13 September 2011. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/perry-has-deep-financial-ties-to-maker-of-hpv-vaccine/2011/09/13/gIQAVKKqPK_story.html.

(10) Radil, Susan. "Union 'Hostage Situation' Prompted Boeing's Move To South Carolina." KUOW. 26 September 2011. Radio transcript. 16 Oct. 2011. http://www.kuow.org/program.php?id=24664.

(11) UFCW. "Wal-Mart Closes Store to Avoid Union." Political Affairs. 12 February 2005. Web. 16 Oct 2011. http://www.politicalaffairs.net/wal-mart-closes-store-to-avoid-union/.
Olsson, Karen. "Up Against Wal-mart." Mother Jones. March/April 2003. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. http://motherjones.com/politics/2003/03/against-wal-mart.

(12) Walsh, Bryan. "The BP Oil Spill, One Year On: Forgetting the Lessons of Drilling in the Gulf." Time Magazine. 20 April 2010. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2066233,00.html.

(13) Farrell, Maureen. "Volcker rule raises more questions." CNN Money. 11 October 2011. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/11/markets/volcker_rule_banks/index.htm.

(14) Vick, Karl. "As 'Rescissions' Spawn Outrage, Health Insurers Cite Fraud Control." Washington Post. 8 September 2009. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/07/AR2009090702455.html.

(15) Tamkins, Theresa. "Medical bills prompt more than 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies." CNN Health. 5 June 2009: n. page. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. http://articles.cnn.com/2009-06-05/health/bankruptcy.medical.bills_1_medical-bills-bankruptcies-health-insurance?_s=PM:HEALTH.

(16) Abelson, Reed. "Health Insurers Making Record Profits as Many Postpone Care." The New York Times. 13 May 2011. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/14/business/14health.html.

(17) Johnson, Ron. "ObamaCare and Carey’s Heart." Wall Street Journal. 23 March 2011. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704662604576202203050970010.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop.

First Day of School

All the kids jumped out of bed at six today. Sophie starts middle school for the first time, popping right into seventh grade. Amelia moves into a classroom where she knows only two people. And Maisie has been directed to stop sucking her thumb. But they're all flying.

They managed an entire year in a classroom where no English was spoken, and more than anything else anticipating our year in Hungary, this was the thing that worried me most. The level of stress that goes with any change, any new situation, any encounter with strangers is difficult--but no English! One of the great things I learned in Hungary was a deep respect for the resiliency of children, and for the reserves of adaptability and joy in my children in particular. They never became stressed by the move, they never got homesick, they never wished to leave. They came home from that first day of school in Hungary exuberant and ready to play with each other, as always. And even before their vocabulary grew, they cobbled together communication and were happy members of the school community.

After all that, I'm still nervous about today, especially for Sophie in middle school (middle school!), for whom we partly engineered an escape from the country just so she could miss the devastations of sixth grade.

As for me, I'm writing in my classroom at 7:08 am. In 50 minutes, I'll have my first classes in America again. When I first returned from Hungary, I had a difficult time getting my head around the old job. One of my goals in Hungary, after years of working tremendously hard as a teacher, was to go out, slow down, and get a new perspective--to realize I didn't have to work as hard and as feverishly and numbingly as I had been doing. Instead, from Hungary, from a foreign language position with minimal meetings and planning and almost no paper grading, as well as exponentially fewer hours, I looked back on my Roosevelt job and thought, man, that is a huge job.

My first contact with the old work this summer was a training at the university, where my brain was sluggish and resistant. The instructors were asking us to be so intellectual, purposeful, and creative in our teaching, and the acronyms were back. My second contact was a training at district headquarters, where I hurt my brain and maybe my stomach too. But the next move was at Roosevelt itself, where the landing has been happy and soft, good colleagues and a good community and an energy of welcome and spirit.

It's my first day of school again, and I'm flying.

Mt. Rainier with Aunt Donna and Uncle Phil

Pictured, in order of appearance:

• Cows
• Aunt Donna and Uncle Phil
• Uncle Phil and Amelia
• My sister, Lauren, and her daughter, Maude
• Sophie, Maisie, Amelia, Phil, Maude
• Maisie, furious
• Stephanie, Maisie, Sophie
• Maisie, Amelia, Lauren, Maude, Donna, Sophie, Stephanie
• My brother-in-law Jeff, Lauren, Maude, Maisie
• Lauren and David
• Road crew, who stopped us for a total of three hours in one direction and and the other and who were the sole occupants of the lodge other than us and who made a bonfire and gave us fresh salmon
• Amelia and Sophie (twice)
• Jeff and Maude (very tiny)

Cruise ship to Alaska

This morning, we disembarked from a 12-story cruise ship after a week sailing up the Inside Passage of Alaska and back. And by we, I mean, not Sophie, Amelia or Maisie: Stephanie and David--no kids; Mickie and Bruce, Stephanie's parents; and our sister and brother-in-law, Karen and Dan. The whole thing was Mickie and Bruce's treat, and frankly, I hadn't put much thought into it; if anything, I was a little concerned about being trapped with a boatload of octogenarians eating eight five course meals a day. But after several lines snaking through the port and numerous Texans and Carolinians and boarding the ship and thinking here it is, we had a honeymoon of a week, from the very start. Part of it was that Bruce sprang for a drinks package for each of us, and we had to put our bellies to work to make it pay. Part of it was being served and pampered for seven straight days, an experience I thought I'd resist but sank into instead like a soft feather pillow. And part of it was the company, time with family after a whole year apart, a group intent and ready to enjoy the moment. Stephanie and I spent the whole week at each other's side, listening to music, watching shows, biking to glaciers, writing in notebooks, feeling the wind at our cheeks, and it was lovely.

Many people told us how wonderful our city was. We didn't meet anyone else from Seattle, and heard about only one other from the state of Washington. But when a heat wave is frying the rest of the country, our struggle to reach 70 degrees was welcome, and people were telling us how much they envied our climate here. Looking at the skyline from the cruise ship also made me see the city in a loving way. I was already feeling tenderly towards the city, being away for a year, but from the top deck it looked magical times two.

The ship was incredibly well-appointed. There were also two workers for every guest--800 to 2000, I think. This meant that we were in for a week of absurd luxury. The workers--the attendants, butlers, waiters, sommeliers, maids--everyone, were always so welcoming and gracious, engaging and pleasant, they gave one the very pleasing impression that they were happy to be there. Everyone wore a pin marking both a name and also home country, the global mix a point of pride. People worked for six month or year long shifts, often leaving babies or children or families at home, but they said this was a great opportunity in the long run. So is this just part of the fantasy? It may be. I know what I wanted to believe, though, and helping me do this were Facebook images of my former student, Sally. She moved to Canada to skate and ended up doing cruise shows, and all the pictures and commentary posted made her tours seem like an unending party. I know different workers have different levels of drudgery they face, but I hope the separation they maintain and the quarters which they secretly keep are not terrible. I hope the illusion is not too much of an illusion.

Another surprise was the entertainment. It was good! Their comedian didn't make me feel embarrassed and their magician made me wonder and their show tunes dancers were energetic and graceful and hard-working (though they were always show tunes people, with one very unfortunate Westend production about the Seventies). What I really looked forward to, though, were the aerialists, Jocka and Maria. Jocka had been a seven year national champion gymnast in Portugal, and Maria, before she was a cheerleader for the Philadelphia Eagles, was a gymnast and dancer. The two of them would climb up woozy strips of silk and dance in the air, curving and bending and sailing like branches in the wind. It was moving. The fact that they were sailing over a stage carved in a boat in the middle of the ocean wasn't something that easily remembered. I had a total crush on them both.

Before we left, I posted my weight to some friends, fearing that the pounds I was starting to lose after returning from Hungary would shoot right back up and then more. It happened. I ate and I ate, not out of boredom or because fatty dishes were shoved before me in meal after meal, as I had feared, but because there were so many new things and special items I wanted to try. Not only did I try many new cocktails and wines from around the world, I ate things that made me laugh to try them: snails and frog legs, steak tartar, quail. Below are pallets of food in preparation for the week, the quantity of which, while stunning, represents a fragment of what ended up on the boat.

Two of the meals, each following a day without shore leave, were formal. And one evening, Karen and Dan treated us all to an on-board restaurant whose service included table-side flambeaux cooking and all six of our dishes placed or lifted in simultaneity, but most of all, exquisite presentation. Here we celebrated my fortieth birthday (occurring tomorrow, damn it).

Our favorite part of the boat might have been the upper deck, within which we could take in the wild Alaskan skies and mountains. Karen and Dan spent most of their time here, walking, sitting, watching: they saw many whales, and Dan described the setting of a red moon with awe.

Our first port of call was Ketchikan. To the right is a picture of Bruce waving to us from his veranda. Stephanie and I were joining Karen and Dan, who were meeting with their friend Bob. Bob lives half of the year with the rest of his family on Whidbey and the other half here in Ketchikan, where he is a pilot for giant ships like the Celebrity Infinity. Bob took us to his home off a gorgeous coast, and then jetted us out in his boat, where we took in what was described as one of only two days in any year it's sunny, and incredible coastline and distant peaks. From his house and the pitch of stairs down to his beach, we could see another life we'd like to try. On a tree by the house, an eagle perched, and another; and around the corner was a full waterfall dipping into a wooded basin.

 

At some point, Dan, who had just returned from a Ketchikan fishing trip on this boat with Nate, Bob and a few others, picked up a pole, and within moments caught a rockfish. It didn't take long to snag four others, and a sea cucumber.

 

We ended up eating one of the rockfish. Dan clubbed it over the head, and a few minutes later, it was breaded and gone. Here's a picture of Bob:

We also ate wiggle-fresh shrimp. Bob had two shrimp pots on the other side of the bay, and he pulled out a haul that made Karen drool. I'm not a big shell-fish guy, but I had a few--popped the heads and peeled the tails and ate the rest.

On the way back to Ketchikan, in addition to seeing the salmon run under this street of houses once run by comfort women, we went to the Saxman Totem Park.

Below right we see the Killer Clam Totem, which tells the story of a boy who drowned. The story involves getting caught in the mouth of a clam, but what you really feel is what it takes to keep telling the story of a boy's death, a mother's son. 

The next morning we floated all the way to the Sawyer Glacier at the end of Tracy Arm, a stunning fjord I have very little need to describe. We moved slowly slowly and we were still afraid to move from our lookouts on the top deck, afraid of missing a second. 

The only thing I am going to write before letting the pictures speak for themselves is that a man hung out with us for at least twenty minutes by soul virtue of my hat--the beaver cap Stephanie bought for me in Slovenia. This guy said it made him feel better about his own flop-eared monstrosity. You be the judge.

Below, the Tracy Arm.

That day we arrived in Juneau, my favorite town in Alaska when I visited it last. Stephanie and I paid for  an excursion called Bike and Brew, Mendenhall View, and it was billed as a strenuous activity, reinforced when we arrived and our leaders told us we'd be climbing a hill, so be ready. Stephanie was nervous. But it never came to pass: we were already over the hill when I asked when we'd reach it. The main thing was that it was a pleasant expedition and we met a few nice people, including some Australians on the continent for a wedding, and we got to see both sides of the Mendenhall Glacier. I was glad we did too, in part because I remembered seeing the glacier in 1992, and it looked to have shrunk to half its size. When we biked around to the other side of the lake, however, I was relieved to see that the ice still met the water, and while it was indeed much smaller, it was no ice cube.

 

 

Afterwards we sampled beers from the Alaskan Brewing Company. The samples weren't sample sizes. We had to drink fast before the next pour.

Our third stop after Ketchikan and Juneau was Skagway. Karen and Dan had told us about the train for days, and what a terrific time they'd had with the kids. In the end, Mickey and Bruce took the train, which they loved, and the rest of us rented bikes. We learned about all those men who took the boats to Skagway and climbed the White Pass on the start of a 500 mile journey to the Klondike in their search for gold, or sailed instead to Dyea, where we ended up this day, taking their thousand pounds of equipment up the ice stairs, taking months and months. When finally the few who made it reached the Klondike, they found a whole town there already, even a show touring from New York, and all the gold claims were already staked. Ha ha. 

In any event, we didn't know what to expect in Dyea. Dan and I thought we might buy some snacks there. Karen said she didn't think there was anything left but a ghost town. What we found, though, was a piece of timber that the park called "Site of a Warehouse," and that was about it. The train up the White Pass from Skagway and its deeper harbor totally wiped out what was for a shining moment a thriving community in Dyea, and the way the land reclaimed the soil and sea as its own since then was astonishing for us. Anyway, we brought our own snacks.

We also visited a cemetery for 60 men who died in an avalanche during the gold rush on April 3, 1898, a quiet spot in the woods spiked by thin boards.

Most of all, we had ourselves a bike ride. The roads were half-paved, half wiped-out, and we had to make use of all our brakes and gears. When Karen suddenly discovered the small chain rings on the front derailleur, the world was made new. We had the mountain and green waters all to ourselves, and it was a delicious day, ending with chili and chili dogs and salads and fries. Oh, and one harbor seal.

Our final evening, we four young ones walked around the harbor to downtown Victoria. 

We spent most of our time in the Empress Hotel in a First Nations Art shop, where Stephanie and I learned a whole lot we didn't know. Karen and Dan are already pretty knowledgeable. We learned about the Kwakwaka'wakw, who I knew before as the Kwakiutl from a book I once taught, I Heard the Owl Call My Name, and we learned about an artist named Tim Paul, who owns a particular shade of blue, as well as the artistic use of the blue raven. The blue raven exists in stories passed down by his family and no one else's; and if anyone other wants to use his blue, they have to get it in a potlatch or get it gifted to them. The work in the room was beautiful, and the more we learned, the more precious and intricate it all became.

Thank you, Mickie and Bruce, for a surprising and joyous holiday. Thank you, Karen and Dan, for excellent companionship. And, thank you, Stephanie, my lovely bride: I come out of this week by your side just wanting more time to share with you, overjoyed that I can have it.