Teaching Nothing to Nothings

Everyone gets their fifteen minutes of fame, although W. S. Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan fame (actually Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, to be precise) once said, “When everyone is somebody, then no one’s anybody.”  That seems to be so.

 

My fifteen minutes came in late 1981 – a two-page newspaper spread in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, with photo.  But fame is fleeting.  The Herald-Examiner was Los Angeles’ last afternoon newspaper – there used to be such things – a Hearst rag formed in 1962 by the merger of the Herald-Express with the Examiner.  But it’s long gone – the last edition was published on November 2, 1989.  There’s nothing online.  You could look up my brush with fame on microfiche at the LA Public Library, perhaps.  It might not be there.  Back to anonymity, and all that.

 

William Randolph Hearst didn’t fare that much better, in spite of what some consider the best movie ever made and his famous castle.  Hearst founded the Los Angeles Examiner in 1903 – he thought it would help in his campaign for the presidential nomination on the Democratic ticket, and that it would nicely complement his San Francisco Examiner.  Nothing works out as planned.

 

But you do your best.  The Los Angeles Herald Examiner building, at the southwest corner of Broadway and 11^th, was designed in 1913 by San Francisco architect Julia Morgan, who was also commissioned to do the Hearst Castle.  It’s an ornate Spanish Colonial Revival thing with Moorish details - yellow and blue mosaic domes, towers flanking the entry and curved archways.  But from May 22, 2006, the news was that the building, empty since 1989, is being “repurposed” –

 

Construction is scheduled to start in December on developer Urban Partners’ transformation of the former home of the Herald Examiner afternoon newspaper into 29,000 square feet of office space and 39,725 square feet of retail. The first phase would construct a 24-story, 260-unit building at 1108 S. Hill St. and finish in 30 months. A 33-story, 330-unit tower would also be built at 120 W. 12th St. Architect Brenda Levin will oversee the rehab of the historic building; the ground-up elements will be designed by Thom Mayne.

 

Sic transit Gloria mundi – this old postcard shows what the Examiner building looked like new and this recent photograph is just sad.  Brenda Levin has her work cut out for her, but then her firm is the very best at this sort of thing.

 

Now about those fifteen minutes of fame in 1981 – there’s not that much to say.  Some features editor was running out of ideas and decided to do a series on teachers who had left the profession.  I was one of those, and it was nice that someone called teaching a profession.  The features editor decided the “big questions” were why do teachers leave, and what will happen to our schools if anyone with half a brain sees that you get a thousand times more respect and two or three time the money working in “the real world.”  You know that line from Annie Hall (1977) – “You know, we had a saying, uh, that those who can’t do, teach, and those who can’t teach, teach gym. And, uh, those who couldn’t do anything, I think, were assigned to our school.”  Woody Allen wasn’t helping.  The features editor found an eager young reporter and sent her off to see me, with her scruffy-looking photographer.

 

The two of them found me at Northrop – in my office where I was assigned something to do with “Training and Organizational Development” work, which was a lot like teaching.   Actually it was teaching – everything from professional writing to how to be an effective supervisor (or at least not a complete asshole).   It was aerospace work – without the aerospace part – and it paid, to start, two and a half times more than I had ever earned as a teacher.  And it was beyond easy.  After spending most of the seventies teaching English and a bit of music at an upstate New York private school, to the troubled teenagers of the very wealthy, who were for the most part quite sharp, this was a bit different – but not that much.  The young engineers with their technical PhD’s were pretty cool and at the time Northrop had hired a lot of them from schools in Northern Ireland (they wore orange, not green, on Saint Patrick’s Day and we’d chat about the Glorious Revolution of 1688).  It was fine.

 

The Herald-Examiner folks had tracked me down through the UCLA Extension program – a friend was teaching a Saturday seminar for public school teachers on how to get the hell out of teaching and I was one of the guest speakers, an example.  I had to explain how I managed it and offer tips.  It seemed best not to mention that a lot of it had to do with the fact my first marriage had ended, there were no kids, and with a brother in Cincinnati and a sister in Los Angeles, it seemed time for a change – and I pretty much faked the rest of it.  And who wants to spend the rest of their life in Cincinnati?

 

But there was the matter of guilt.  Those teachers who had skill and talent could, with some effort, indeed get the hell out.  But what happens to the system when those who are left remain behind simply because they don’t have a whole lot of skill and talent, or ambition (or wanderlust)?  Yes, there is a core of those who are gifted teachers, who could thrive in the world of business and industry, but who know their real gift and stay, at low wages while the parents of their charges smirk at them – the idealists, who know the work is important and are proud of it.  There are those teachers.  There aren’t that many of them.  Woody Allen was onto something.

 

So what is one to do with this guilt that’s been hanging around since 1981 or so?

 

Ah, one can find evidence that staying in teaching would have been pointless.  Not only is teaching a dubious “profession” – the word is most often used with a pat-on-the-head patronizing shrug – but American kids may be dumber than dirt and the next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in US history.  Mark Morford’s Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on in the Datebook section of the San Francisco Chronicle, and on Wednesday, October 24, he argued that is exactly the case.   Good teaching is wonderful, but the raw material in the process – the kids who we need to learn some things – are hopeless.

 

Morford frames this by telling us he’s been having an ongoing discussion with a longtime reader, a longtime Oakland high school teacher, who he says is a wonderful guy who’s seen generations of teenagers come and go, and who has “a delightful poetic sensibility and quirky outlook on his life and his family and his beloved teaching career.”  There are those teachers.  There aren’t that many of them.  He seems to be one.

 

As one might expect, in all their back-and-forth on “today’s youth” – what gets in the way of these kids leaning anything, from junk food and whether cell phones are melting their brains or whatever – the question came down to what can be done and just how bad it might all be.

 

The teacher’s professional response – “It is not bad at all. It’s absolutely horrifying.”

 

Morford –

 

My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom. He speaks not merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy slackerhood, or the fact that cell phones and iPods and excess TV exposure are, absolutely and without reservation, short-circuiting the minds of the upcoming generations. Of this, he says, there is zero doubt.

Nor does he speak merely of the notion that kids these days are overprotected and wussified and don’t spend enough time outdoors and don’t get any real exercise and therefore can’t, say, identify basic plants, or handle a tool, or build, well, anything at all. Again, these things are a given. Widely reported, tragically ignored, nothing new.

 

No, my friend takes it all a full step - or rather, leap - further. It is not merely a sad slide. It is not just a general dumbing down. It is far uglier than that.

We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.

 

Is it that bad?  We discover that Morford’s friend is nearing retirement and is seriously considering moving out of the country – “to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking - and nearly hopeless - dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.”

 

And this is not a tired old teacher who stopped caring long ago –

 

Teaching is his life. He says he loves his students, loves education and learning and watching young minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it. It’s a bit like the melting of the polar ice caps. Sure, there’s been alarmist data about it for years, but until you see it for yourself, the deep visceral dread doesn’t really hit home.

 

Everyone knows the studies, reports, hard data, on “the appalling effects of television on child brain development (i.e.; any TV exposure before six years old and your kid’s basic cognitive wiring and spatial perceptions are pretty much scrambled for life).”  And there is all the mandatory testing teachers are now forced to incorporate into the curriculum – thanks to NCLB (”No Child Left Behind’).  It seems that of the 182 school days in a year, there are 110 when such testing is going on somewhere at Oakland High School.  One of this teacher’s colleagues put it this way – “It’s like weighing a calf twice a day, but never feeding it.”   Some of us, no longer in teaching but watching from afar, call it “No Child Left Alive.”

 

But then the real problem seems to be the students.  This teacher says that year to year he sees rather obvious evidence of decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas.  And he was recently “distressed” that the kids were unable to even define the words “agriculture,” or even “democracy.”  It seems not a single student could do that.

 

And it gets worse –

 

My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he’s taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.

 

It is, in short, nothing less than a tidal wave of dumb, with once-passionate, increasingly exasperated teachers like my friend nearly powerless to stop it.

 

Well, that helps with the post-1981 guilt.  Why stay?

 

The rest of what Morford says is about how we got into this situation. It’s not the kids’ fault.  They’re merely the victims of a horribly failed educational system.  But you already know about “the lack of need among the government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly effective educational system, one that actually generates intelligent, thoughtful, articulate citizens.”  And you know the logical reason this is so –

 

After all, the dumber the populace, the easier it is to rule and control and launch unwinnable wars and pass laws telling them that sex is bad and TV is good and God knows all, so just pipe down and eat your Taco Bell Double-Supremo Burrito and be glad we don’t arrest you for posting dirty pictures on your cute little blog.

 

There are the counterarguments of course – “kids are no scarier or dumber or more dangerous than they’ve ever been” and that “maybe some of the problem is merely the same old awkward generation gap, with every current generation absolutely convinced the subsequent one is terrifically stupid and malicious and will be the end of society as a whole.” That could be.

 

And there is the counterevidence Morford cannot ignore–

 

I keep being surprised, keep hearing from/about teens and youth movements and actions that impress the hell out of me. Damn kids made the Internet what it is today, fer chrissakes. Revolutionized media. Broke all the rules. Still are.

 

Hell, some of the best designers, writers, artists, poets, chefs, and so on that I meet are in their early to mid-20s. And the nation’s top universities are still managing, despite a factory-churning mentality, to crank out young minds of astonishing ability and acumen. How did these kids do it? How did they escape the horrible public school system? How did they avoid the great dumbing down of America? Did they never see a TV show until they hit puberty? Were they all born and raised elsewhere, in India and Asia and Russia? Did they all go to Waldorf or Montessori and eat whole-grain breads and play with firecrackers and take long walks in wild nature? Are these kids flukes? Exceptions? Just lucky?

 

Well, yes they are –

 

Lucky, wealthy, foreign-born, private-schooled … and increasingly rare. Most affluent parents in America - and many more who aren’t - now put their kids in private schools from day one, and the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no video games. (Of course, this in no way guarantees a smart, attuned kid, but compared to the odds of success in the public school system, it sure seems to help). This covers about, what, 3 percent of the populace?

 

Ah, such fond memories of that three percent suddenly pop up!  But that hardly matters –

 

As for the rest, well, the dystopian evidence seems overwhelming indeed, to the point where it might be no stretch at all to say the biggest threat facing America is perhaps not global warming, not perpetual warmongering, not garbage food or low-level radiation or way too much Lindsay Lohan, but a populace far too ignorant to know how to properly manage any of it, much less change it all for the better.

 

What, too fatalistic? Don’t worry. Soon enough, no one will know what the word even means.

 

Okay – the post-1981 guilt is gone now, completely gone.  Resistance is futile?  Maybe it is – but now teaching certainly is.