Virtue signal

Fahrvergnügen

It can’t all be about subjects of great political and social import. Today it’s about cars.

My dad was car crazy. In the baby book my grandmother kept, she noted that when he was 2, they were driving past a car dealership when he looked through the window at the cars in the lot and exclaimed “I’m going to need to get me a car.” His dad was a Ford mechanic who built and raced stock cars on the side, so I guess it was in the blood.

As for me, I learned how to change the spark plugs in my dad’s Mustang before I learned to ride a bike. Spending all my time in the garage meant I didn’t have to help with housework. Double win. I’ve owned a lot of different cars. Each of them I’ve loved and hated. Each time one of them left my life, I felt like I was saying goodbye to an old friend. Probably the hardest was losing my Jeep Cherokee. I named it J.P. Creek, and we’d had so many great adventures together. I’ll never forgive that soccer mom who ran a light and broadsided it. I cried when I went to the police impound lot to gather my belongings and say goodbye.

My current car is a VW Jetta. I bought it lightly used, and it was love at first sight. It’s a standard, of course, always my first choice. Over the months, as I’ve driven it, I’ve learned its personality and idiosyncrasies. Somehow, this little white car embodies Germany and German-ness in a way that’s hard to describe.

There’s the lack of aesthetic, for one thing. It’s not an ugly car, but it’s not pretty either. With Volkswagens, form follows function, every time. This is not a car for someone who wants to impress the neighbors. I’d lose it in the parking lot every day if I didn’t have bumper stickers on it.

But the beauty is there, for someone who appreciates automotive design. The gears shift with just the right amount of resistance, neither silky smooth nor clunky. The dashboard is well laid out, including a tachometer of course, which serious drivers demand. The steering is responsive – there’s no play in the steering wheel, this car knows what you want as soon as you do. The engine is efficient but eager, geared just right for a daily driver, quiet but not too quiet, smooth but with just the right amount of vibration so that you can feel the mood of the car. The cabin is sized for four average sized people; We’re not throwing parties in here, we’re going to the store or the office. Of course, there’s that fold-down space in the middle of the back seat so that your skis can fit through, a requirement in any German car.

When I drive my Jetta, I am enveloped by German competence - engineering prowess coupled with practicality with a nod to the enthusiast. When I get into a German car, there is no hesitant fumbling for knobs and buttons. Everything is where it should be, with a gentle smile to any fool who would ever think to put it somewhere else.

I thought it is the opposite of my old Jeep, but then I realized I was wrong. They are both absolutely perfect for what they were made to do.

So maybe there is a deep thought in there somewhere, but I’ll leave it up to you to decide what it is.

Get over it, corporate America

After a lay-off, my daughter spent two months job hunting. Which means I was job-hunting with her by proof-reading cover letters, offering advice and encouragement, and passing along interesting leads. Nothing is more soul-sucking than looking for a job while you watch your checking account dwindle to nothing.

There’s an interesting phenomenon in the world of recruiting, where applicants for entry-level, dead-end jobs are expected to not only be overqualified and willing to work for peanuts, but they must also convincingly profess their undying love of the company and the position.

Recruiter:  Why do you want to do customer service at XYZ company?

Honest answer:  Because I need health care and to not live in a cardboard box.

Expected answer:  XYZ company is the most amazing company ever, with offices in 5 exciting cities and the best quality products on the market today! Working for XYZ company is what I’ve dreamed of and worked towards since I was 16!

Okay, I do recruiting for my company, and I’ve interviewed a lot of folks. When I ask “why are you interested in working for us?” I get a variety of answers, and you know what? None of them has caused me to say “Nope, not this guy.”

Which doesn’t mean that there isn’t some of that weird “we’re the best” mythology going on at every company. Clearly they can’t all be the best. In fact, most of them suck. But if they can convince their employees that they’re members of an elite team of super-stars, then they can get a lot more unpaid labor out of them before they burn out and leave. They call it “esprit de corps.” We had that in the Army. It is helpful in ensuring that soldiers shoot the enemy instead of each other, and keep fighting even in hopeless situations. Ask MacArthur about that.

But in the corporate world, that three musketeers bullshit is extremely toxic, both to the employees and eventually to the company itself. If everyone must be amped up cheerleaders for the firm, then dissent is suppressed, contrary opinions are silenced, whistle-blowers are fired, and non-conformists are sidelined until they leave in disgust. I’ve worked at enough different companies in different industries to say with complete confidence that most of them, even quite profitable ones, have crap products, crap processes, and crap service. If they can convince enough customers that isn’t true, they can make some money, and everyone goes home happy. Except for the misfits of course. Those annoying people who want to make things better, who want to tinker and try new things, who are brave enough to tell you that something is crap.

There’s no perfect employee and there’s no perfect job. There’s just a temporary arrangement of mutual benefit between a company that wants to be profitable and a human being who needs to not live in a cardboard box. Get over it.

Tales from the schoolhouse 6

I have so much more to tell you about my time as a teacher.

The 6^th grader who stole a car.

The girl with the blue hair.

The mother who told me in conference that her daughter was regularly beating her up.

Teaching “reproduction” to my daughter’s 7^th grade class.

But, there are other things I want to write about too, so I’m going to wind down the schoolhouse stories by telling you how my teaching career died.

I had “alternative certification” which means that I got an interim teaching license by doing a background check, having a college degree, taking a test, and paying some fees. In states that have this certification model, alternatively licensed teachers are evaluated and required to complete some course-work and be assigned a mentor for their first year. Many schools do not want to hire these teachers because of the additional overhead involved, so naturally those schools who have the hardest time filling positions are the ones who grab them.

I started my first year teaching under this system in an inner city school. I was teaching German. Yay, an elective class! I’ll only get the students who WANT to learn German! Uh, nope. In this school, the kids didn’t actually pick their electives, they just got a schedule with their electives picked for them. I didn’t have my own classroom. I didn’t have textbooks or a curriculum. I didn’t have any computer resources for the kids unless I took them to the library to use the laptops-on-a-cart there. I’d never taught foreign language before. I struggled to piece together a teaching plan based on my own old textbooks and online resources.

My mentor was a chap who was no longer an active teacher, although he had taught German once, and he didn’t work at our school. He was at the district office. I saw him once every 2-4 weeks. He gave me some old books and then left again.

With this scant guidance and a rolling cart equipped with a few supplies, a Collins dictionary, and no clue what I was doing, I attempted to teach the fundamentals of German to 150 middle school students who were mostly recent immigrants from Mexico.

I admit that I struggled. Somewhere during the year, I realized that I wasn’t going to succeed in teaching them even basic conversational German. I simply didn’t have the resources, and they didn’t have the motivation. Electives were supposed to be “fun” and they deeply resented my asking them to do anything resembling work. So, I taught them some geography and history. We made a “Berlin wall” and then tore it down again. We learned about that crazy radical monk, Martin Luther. (They were really surprised that there was more than one Martin Luther in history.) I spent all my money on school supplies and all my time off either grading papers or creating lessons. My children learned how to cook or they’d have starved that year.

At the end of the year, my principal did not recommend me for certification. She told the district I needed another year under supervision. This basically made me unemployable at any other school, and I was not going to do another year where I was.  I went home and thought about it over the weekend. And then, I thought, what the hell? I have nothing to lose. It might not make any difference for me, but it could make a difference for other teachers in the same boat. So I wrote a letter detailing my experiences with the alternative certification program and the downsides of the process, which put teachers completely at the mercy of an individual school with no coordinated oversight. I refrained from mentioning some of my principal’s more egregious, personal attacks on me and focused more on the process. Then I mailed copies to the state department of education, the Oklahoma City superintendent, my mentor, my principal, and the president of the Oklahoma AFT.

There were only a couple of weeks of the school year remaining. I knew when my principal got her copy of the letter, because she came to the door of my room on some pretense or another. Her eyes were sparking; she literally looked like she would gladly kill me. I responded to whatever her query was calmly, giving her fury no purchase. Reluctantly she stalked away. I had no more interactions with her. I finished my grading, turned in my final numbers, packed up my dictionary and books, and went home for the summer.

About 2 months later, the state of Oklahoma mailed me a full teacher’s certificate with no restrictions.

I never went back to the classroom. I took an administrative job with a little company in Shawnee while I worked on getting my PMP certification. And I started homeschooling my own children.

I heard later from my fellow teachers that the principal was fired from the district before the next school year began.

Tales from the schoolhouse 5

Today's tale starts back with my McLoud subbing adventures.

They really loved me as a sub because I was willing to teach junior high and I was willing to teach special needs students. Many of the other subs wouldn't go near the junior high. They do get kinda crazy at that age.

There was a resource classroom that I frequently subbed. That was absolutely the best. I just sat in there all day, and kids would come to me from other classes for extra help with their assignments. I’d sit at a half-round table, sometimes with just one student, sometimes 2-4. Basically, I was a tutor.

One little girl who came to me pretty regularly was very sweet but struggled with everything. She could read at an elementary level but really had difficulty with retention, and she was completely lost when it came to finding specific information  in a book. Tables of content and indexes were a complete mystery to her.

One day she came down to see me with her health class assignment. I was unfamiliar with the heath curriculum, having never subbed that class. She sat down and I read through her worksheet. They don’t really teach sex ed in Oklahoma, but the worksheet was for what passes for sex ed there.

One of the questions was about preventing sexually transmitted disease. I took the book and glanced through the chapter. Then I turned to the index and read that. I closed the book and pushed it aside.

“This book is worthless,” I told her. “For people who have sex, the way to prevent STDs is to use condoms.”

She giggled and looked down at her worksheet.

“Do you know what condoms are?”

More giggling. A nod.

“You can buy them at Family Dollar,” I told her. “They prevent pregnancy too. But they only work if you use them every time.”

“Okay!” she said, giggling some more.

Is it any wonder Oklahoma has the second highest teen pregnancy rate in the country? If the administration had found out I had conversations like that with kids, they’d have thrown me out on my ear.

Fast forward to the middle school in Oklahoma City where I taught the next year. I had morning duty at the metal detectors pretty much every week (see previous post - why the principal hated me). I found out that you actually can smuggle a cell phone through a metal detector if you have large enough boobs. But what usually triggered it was foil gum wrappers. Kids would hide gum in their shoes because they'd figured out that their shoes set off the metal detector anyway. But the 8th grader who set of the detector one fine morning in March didn't have any gum. He had a condom in his wallet. Guess what? They have foil wrappers too.

"Son," I told him sternly. " You really shouldn't carry condoms in your wallet. It can get easily damaged in your wallet, and then it won't be effective. You don't want that to happen!"

"No ma'am," he told me in surprise.

"So keep your condoms in that pocket in your backpack instead," I suggested.

"Good idea!" he said cheerfully as he trotted down the hall.

Now honestly, I don't know if he was using condoms or just carrying one for the glamour of it.

But I bet he remembered not to keep them in his wallet.

Tales from the schoolhouse 4

Today’s story is about a boy.

A quiet, plump, shy boy who always sat in the corner of the room and hardly ever spoke a word. He did his work (not well but he tried), and never caused any trouble. In a room full of loud, boisterous 7^th graders, he was easy to overlook. It was easy not to notice that he was gone for a few days. Or that he was even quieter than usual on his return.

It was hard not to notice that he turned in his final exam blank. Just his name on it. I’d been ordered not to fail any students. I wasn’t going to follow those orders. But I also didn’t want to just let this guy fail without understanding what was going on. I had no classroom of my own, so we met in the hallway.

“Is something going on?” I asked. “It’s not like you not to try.”

He looked at the floor. Finally he said “It’s just been really hard since my mom died. I miss her so much.”

Why the fuck didn’t anybody tell me this?

We’re not allowed to touch the students. I wish I could give him a hug. He’s crying.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“It was two weeks ago. That’s why I missed those days.”

“You know, my father died when I was your age,” I told him.

He looked up.

So we talked for about half an hour. His mother had been disabled, in a wheelchair. He loved his dad but it was his mother he could talk to. His whole world was just shattered. I couldn’t do much except let him know that I understood by sharing my own loss and listening to his.

Eventually I said “If you’d like to take the test again, I could set that up for you.”

“Yes, please,” he told me.

So he retested. It didn’t matter what his score was really. I wasn’t going to fail him because he had the courage to try. Then the semester was over and he moved on to other classes. After Christmas, I got a call from the office that a parent wanted to speak to me. At that school, it usually wasn’t a good thing when a parent wanted to talk to you. Sometimes they just cussed you out. Sometimes they threw punches.

At the office was a small, sturdy Hispanic man holding his hat.

“I just want to thank you. You were so kind to my son. He told me all about it. He told me none of the other teachers noticed or cared. It meant so much to him.”

Literally, I had done the absolute minimum that any decent human being would do. At that school, parental deportations, arrests, and deaths were not all that uncommon. I guess people just get numb after awhile. But it was sweet of him to thank me. I’ll never forget his gentle sad face or the effort he made to seek me out.

Tales from the schoolhouse 3

There are so many stories to tell that it’s hard to sort them out in my mind. Today I’ll tell about the beginning of the end of my teaching career. 

It happened shortly after I started my first (and last) year as a full-time teacher. I had interviewed for the position of 7^th grade science teacher. I was really pumped about this, because from my subbing experience I knew that science was my favorite subject to teach. However, the school administration instead hired a combat veteran suffering from heavy-duty PTSD to teach science and decided that I should teach German!

I should have run away screaming. But I really needed the job.

No text books, no classroom, and no idea how to teach German, especially to kids who were already functionally illiterate in two other languages. But, more about that later.

Today’s tale starts with a lock-down. Another school in our district had a child bring a weapon to school, so every school went into lock-down. I hadn’t been instructed in lock-down procedure, but the teacher with whom I shared my room was familiar with the process. Doors locked. Window shades drawn. No one allowed in the hallways. Wait for the all-clear announcement. But you know how it is with kids. There was a bathroom emergency. Not in my room, but apparently another teacher let a child go to the bathroom rather than wet himself. The principal got on the intercom with an extremely rude and condescending announcement publicly shaming the teacher. I was appalled. She could have been stern, she could have reiterated the procedures, but instead she mocked her faculty in a tone of complete disdain.

Later that day, I listened to my fellow teachers in the break room complaining bitterly about the principal’s behavior. So I drafted a rather meekly worded email to the principal, asking that she not publicly shame teachers as it had a significant impact on student respect for the faculty and classroom management.

She called me into her office during my planning hour. Her office was at the opposite end of the school from the main school office and other administrative staff. Rumor had it that she requested that separation because she spend all day working on her PhD instead of doing her job. I sat down at the round table in her office.

“Where do you want to teach next year?” she asked me.

I thought it an odd conversation starter. I looked at her face and saw that she was seething with rage. I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but I could see that I was dealing with a total bully.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I haven’t thought about it.”

She launched into a tirade. I wish I had a recording of it, but the gist was that “I’m great and the students are great but the teachers at this school are a bunch of incompetent losers who make all of the problems around here.” This went on for a while. She wanted to make me angry or make me break down. If I yelled back, she would have grounds to fire me. I knew she wanted to. If I cried or apologized, I’d be forever under her tyrannical thumb. Amazingly, I managed to stay totally calm.

“I don’t agree,” I told her. “I haven’t been here very long, but all the teachers I’ve met are really caring, smart professionals who are trying their hardest to do a good job. They deserve respect and support for that.”

“You’re wrong!” she yelled at me.

I honestly don’t remember how the meeting ended. Clearly not the way she wanted it to, because I simply refused to play her game, which gave her nowhere to go. Of course, from that day onwards, I was a dead woman walking. Not that it really made any difference to me. The job couldn’t have been any worse.

Tales from the schoolhouse 2

My tale today is about basketball.

In McLoud, there wasn’t really a PE class at the junior high. The kids who didn’t play on sports teams got little organized exercise. However, during the long lunch hour, students who were so inclined would toss a football, play basketball, or just fool around.

As a substitute, I had a little more leeway than a regular teacher, so I would sometimes take my students outside on nice days for a few minutes at the end of a long 1½ hour class. Inevitably, the girls would sit on the benches and picnic tables and the boys would grab a ball and play a pickup game on the basketball court. Gentle encouragement to get the girls to participate fell on deaf ears, so I figured to lead by example and joined the games myself. So there I was, a mediocre-at-best ball player, playing rough and tumble pickup games with a bunch of teenage guys. I managed to hold my own, earning their grudging respect, but not one of the girls ever joined in. And let me tell you, those well-fed Oklahoma girls could have sure used the exercise.

Fast forward to the Oklahoma City junior high where I taught full-time the next year. My students invited me to join the after-lunch shenanigans on the basketball court. Only this time, the court was filled with black girls playing horse, and they absolutely put me to shame. I couldn’t begin to mimic the amazing shots they pulled off. Afterwards, they shook their heads sadly and said “Miz Mongold, you’re real nice, but you’re a terrible basketball player.” I couldn’t disagree.

What it is about places like Oklahoma, where white girls are socialized to be completely sedentary by the age of 13? Considering that 34% of Oklahoma adults are obese and almost 10,000 Oklahomans died of heart disease in 2014, it seems that this is a thing worth trying to change.

Tales from the Schoolhouse 1

Sometimes I get into a funk and take some time off from creating things. I almost always find that when that happens, I have to branch off in a new direction to re-light the fuse.

With all the teacher walk-outs, the state of education is much in the news. I have some opinions about that, having been a teacher for a short, weird period of my life. So, branching off, I’m going to tell a few tales from those days. Bear with me, because I’m not going in any particular order, and I’ll probably meander around.

I’ll start with a 3-month gig I had as a long-term substitute in McLoud Oklahoma. The special needs math teacher was out on maternity leave. I knew this would be a challenge for me, having never been particularly genius at math. I had gone through the para training and alternative teacher certification by that point, but wasn’t really educated on this kind of teaching.

I walked into the classroom at the end of the hall and took stock. I would be teaching kids at several different levels, primarily from a basic mathematics book and a pre-algebra book. McLoud had 4 classes per day instead of 6, and the students were expected to do their schoolwork in class, so I only needed enough books for the classroom, not for each student to take home. I had one ancient student computer on a desk at the side of the room. I had one cabinet of supplies, mostly holiday decorations for the classroom.  There were scented candles and Jesus things on the teacher’s desk, and a broom in the corner, which I soon discovered was a necessity since many of the kids came to school straight from their morning chores in the barn. Yuck.

The lovely thing about teaching special needs classes is that class sizes are quite small – as legally required. So you do have a little more time to work with individual students, and classroom management is much, much easier. I had students who ranged from one boy who couldn’t tie his own shoes, didn't smell very good, and only knew how to calculate on his fingers to the quick-witted 7^th grader who seemed to be in special needs class only because he wasn’t at all good at sitting still or keeping quiet. There was also a skater dude who would bring in his skateboard and park it behind my desk, sit down in the back of the room, and promptly go to sleep, every day.

As I tackled the challenges of teaching math to these kids, I cast back to my days as a volunteer in my daughter’s classrooms in Oregon. There, the teachers relied heavily on “manipulatives” to teach math theory. From there they progressed to word problem solving, and THEN to what most of us think of as math, problems written in math’s symbolic language. It was a consistent and orchestrated approach that all the teachers in all the grades utilized. I quickly came to realize that these Oklahoma students had never been taught the concepts behind the math problems. They were unable to equate the symbols on the page to anything. It was purest luck that any of them could go beyond calculating on their fingers.

With no budget and no teaching supplies besides the textbooks, I turned to Google for inspiration. By luck I found a thing called “algebra cards.” Cardstock, scissors, a sharpie, and a Saturday’s afternoon work, and Monday morning I faced my class armed with my new tool. The cards are used to lay the algebra problem out on a table top. The students can then solve the equation by adding and removing cards, keeping the equation balanced as they isolate the variable. After we worked through several problems together, a light bulb started to go off. From then on, my algebra students regularly grabbed the cards and stood at the table, working together to solve the problems.

In that moment I realized that it was a GIFT that I am not great with math, because I could see and relate to the struggles of my students. Being able to figure out how to teach them made me realize I was not bad at math at all, I was just bad at doing math the way it had been taught to me. It helped me to see my students as people who were unconventional learners and started me down a path of discovery that led, eventually, to the democratic schooling movement.

But, back to McLoud. My methods worked really well on some students. For the ones who had severe learning disabilities, not as much. Perhaps with more time and support, I would have figured out how to tailor my instruction to every student. But the end of the semester came and the regular teacher returned. I went back to sporadic substituting for the remainder of the school year. At one point the teacher I had replaced sought me out and asked “What are these algebra cards the students keep asking for?” It was clear that she was not at all pleased that I had introduced this new method to her students. I explained them and gave her my cards, but I later found out she never used them. It was clear to me that neither she nor the district really cared about helping these students find their individual level of achievement. They taught them because they were legally obligated to do so, but there was no creativity, passion, or empathy in the process. I always wondered what happened to the clever, restless boy, or the skater kid who couldn’t stay awake. One does, you know.