Our Children’s Ethics – and our Own

Our Children’s Ethics – and our Own

This was a response to a Facebook Post reporting a recent assault, in Central Park, on a 31-year-old jogger by four teens and a twelve-year old, being part of a recent pattern of targeted violence there.

These kids are criminals. But one should also ask oneself what kind of society produces such criminals. In India, there has been a spate of horrible rapes and now a strong public reaction against this. But as in here, the questions regarding what brought this about, what are the social conditions that led to this -- these questions are rarely asked. This is not to excuse the criminality, but to seek to cure it and prevent it by looking at its causes, as one should do for any pathology.

The social and economic situation, and the social ethics, in the parts of India where the rapes mostly occur are different from other parts, as they are from here. Turning to our own culture, why is there such a resistance against strongly condemning (I am not speaking here of banning) the extreme and unnecessary violence portrayed for so long on screens and the extreme misogyny accepted as cool in certain forms of music? Shouldn't we teach children, including by example, to turn away from such things, to despise them?

These are highly lucrative businesses, and those dollars are coming from people watching and listening to these things, accepting them as normal and shelling out cash for them.

Of course, violence and its celebration as well as misogyny have been part of many cultures, and ours has never been an exception in this. I am against political correctness and all for free speech, but the transmission of ethics to the young, along with the awakening of empathy, compassion, kindness and gentleness have always been, in most human cultures, a part of the perceived duty of parents and adults, best set by contact, caring and example.

These include (and may be most clearly evident in) those cultures we (most mainstream civilizations, including Indian) arrogantly view as "primitive" -- such as those of hunter-gatherers, even though (or perhaps because) the killing of animals and, in certain cases, of plants, is something the tribals have to do themselves each day in order to survive -- rather than having these things done for them in mass slaughterhouses and farms, as with us.

I would not necessarily tie this particular incident to the culture that is transmitted and commercially exploited by our entertainment industry. But we are exercising, at best, a double standard here by accepting and even promoting that debased culture. This includes, by the way, the "I, me and myself !" (or "Me and mine -- and f**k the rest of you!") ethos.  This is flaunted by many of our screen heroes, both in their screen personae and in their personal, too often public, lives.  And this is part of the reason they are admired, even worshiped. And yet we find this attitude disturbing when we see it evidenced in the way our children, neighborhood youth or students speak and act.

In the absence or dissipation of the traditional cultures, with all their problems but also their basic values and their histories and mythologies, what many of our young imbibe is the culture (and manufactured mythology and history, from Disney onwards) transmitted by the entertainment media, along with, from their peers and older children in their neighborhoods and schools, a "street culture" that is also degenerate, even depraved.

So we have a disconnect between the generations, between working parents too busy, unable or unwilling to teach their kids what humans have always taught their young, and children who run wild, with their own (to us) strange ethical rules and attitudes. The schools aren’t usually able to bridge that gap, and this isn't even considered to be one of the duties and rights of teachers.

I have to be careful, except with freshly arrived ELL (English Language Learner) kids who tend, in many cases, to be more receptive to such things, with less hostility towards and distance from their teachers, viewing us more as humans like themselves, gifting us with good intentions, sometimes undeservedly -- I have to be careful, with the rest, of ever venturing, even by example, let alone speech, into areas of right and wrong, or of duty and responsibility. I know I will be quickly disciplined by the call, "Just do your job -- teach!"

For teachers’ assistants (paraprofessionals) such a venture is even riskier.
 
I have long believed that, especially for high school regular ed. teachers with up to 170 students to teach each day (or more, each week, if one is a science teacher with many labs), that our main concern, as teachers, should be the subject (or, too often, subjects) we teach.  To say otherwise may often be mere pretense. 

But we cannot be oblivious to the human side of our job.  We need to notice what's going on with our students, at least in the classroom and with homework, and that cannot really be isolated from what is happening in the rest of their lives.  

Even basic teaching and learning cannot proceed without an atmosphere in which there is some degree of mutual respect and some commonality of ethical culture between the students and between students and teachers.  I need not go into the details of all that transpires, making teaching and learning impossible, when these things are absent or badly frayed.  It has been accepted that the establishment of this atmosphere is primarily the job of the teacher. I would differ with this, along with most other teachers, and say that the students have at least a shared responsibility, as do parents.  So does the larger community, if such a thing exists in any coherent form.

If we have a situation in which some of the same things we find objectionable in students are also present in many teachers, then those of us who cannot deal with this have little choice but to leave the profession as fast as we can without landing up, quite literally, on the street. 

Perhaps such teachers (who have imbibed the same popular mores as the kids) will find some commonality with their students, and so succeed.  It will become, even more than it has been, all about the dollar and the show, like much of show business is, and school will become, even more, a place where only the savvy, slick and hard-hearted can hope to survive.  And, even more so than now, it will be those who are best at this who will climb up and dictate to the rest.
  
If this isn't what we want, then it is up to us to publicly voice our concerns. Not to do this is to be as derelict in our duties as not bothering much about really teaching the subject or helping the kids learn it.

I had noted, in earlier posts and writings, that there are two main sets of issues that have plagued the schools, long before the current punitive reforms and the testing mania and privatization hit us. 
    
One of these sets contains the structural issues, over which we have some control, if not as individual teachers then collectively, although some would deny that.  These include issues of purpose, choice, background, resources, sequence, pacing, time, focus, feedback, familiarization, habituation, success, diligence, confidence, application, connection, exploration and questioning.  I will not elaborate on these again here.  And there are other things one could add to that list. 

This is not yet another list of what a teacher has to incorporate into a lesson, although some of these things do need to be considered in a unit plan.  It is more the structure that the system itself has to at least acknowledge, consider and try to provide so that teaching and learning can proceed without the heartache, failure and misery that is so prevalent.
  
But there is also the set of social issues, over which we have far less control. These are the ones that have been primarily responsible for wrecking the schools. The chaos and tension they create do not allow the structural issues their due attention. On the social front, the most we can do is publicly voice our concerns, both individually and collectively.  This does make a difference.

On both the structural and the social issues, no worthwhile, meaningful progress will be made unless we, the teachers and others in the schools, along with concerned parents and sincere students, bring these to the forefront.

Despair and Hope (Preface to "The Job")

Despair and Hope (Preface to The Job)

I despair at times that there will be any worthwhile changes in the schools here (and perhaps elsewhere) -- changes that bubble up, instead of being imposed with deafness and blindness from above, as they usually are, with all the damage that does.  I know it will not happen during the time I have left in the schools, but what bothers me even more is the realization that it may not happen for generations to come.

That doesn't mean one should not keep working towards that, in whatever minor way one can.

After all, it took hundreds of years before the transatlantic slave trade was abolished, and the repercussions of that trade are still visible to this day on both sides of the Atlantic. But at least it was abolished, and the slaves themselves played their part in that, however voiceless and disempowered they had been.  And even the mighty colonial empires receded, at least to some overt degree, and not from the kind volition of the imperialists.

In the link below are some personal reflections on my decades spent working in the schools.

The Job 

But let me salute here those who persevere in working towards those worthwhile changes, in very difficult circumstances -- and all of those who tried to accomplish this in the past.
 
Arjun  
  

Walking to Work and Back, 2014 (Preface to Two Beings)

  
Walking to Work and Back, 2014 (Preface to Two Beings)
  
I have often marveled at those who not only work full-time in the schools, but also do second or even third jobs.  I would count the duties at home, of those who are raising children or taking care of elders or the ailing, as at least another full-time job. This burden, that has its joys as well as its sorrows, appears to fall most heavily on women, who make up much of the teaching staff, especially in the lower grades. But many men also carry this weight, in addition to their workload from their teaching jobs.  

For both men and women teachers, the job-related work often eats up many hours beyond the official work-day and work-week.

The travails of teaching in the public schools of a city such as New York may or may not be known to the general public in this country or abroad. It is often a difficult job, to put it mildly -- some would say an impossible one. And experience does not always lessen the difficulty or reverse the impossibility. But teachers adapt and even find sustenance from their work -- and not just financially, vital as that is.  

If they are unable to do this, they quit, are forced out -- or somehow continue to teach, finding solace in other things. Of course, many successful teachers also fall by the wayside, increasingly so as the pressures mount on the schools. And success can be a transient thing, especially in a profession where so many changeable factors are outside one's control.

I describe, in these verses (in Two Beings), my own walks home after work in the evenings. For many years, I used to travel back and forth from work using public transportation, spending an hour and a half, on average, each way. I was younger then, and I was able to cope. 

At the time, I was teaching my own subject (physics) and I felt that what I was doing, even with less effort than I now put in, was more meaningful and helpful to the students.  So going to work and back used to be different, for me, than it is now.  The morning commutes, mainly by bus, were relatively peaceful, with my mind settling on what exactly I was going to teach that day, and how I would go about it.  The long trek back was fatiguing.  

But things do change, for all of us.  

Over the past several years, I have worked closer to where I live, walking just over a half-hour each way. 

The walks back home in the evenings, even in the darkness and cold of the winters, are now relatively tranquil (as the rush back home may not be for those with major family responsibilities or a second paid job).  The walks to work in the mornings, even in the brightest of seasons, are very different. 
  
In the evenings and nights, I walk through the city streets, tired from a long day at work, trundling my school things.  But I notice many things, especially the changing skies and the trees.  In the mornings, I manage to munch on a bagel and sip coffee while waiting at intersections.  But my mind is cluttered, racing, preoccupied and confused.

At work, the teaching instincts and habits take over, and I do what many school-teachers do, seeking to notice and attend to the students while still trying to maintain focus on the subject matter. But it is a sad, mad rush, and, increasingly, a cruel, even criminal business, despite whatever extraordinary efforts students and teachers may put in.

We are all different, and so no two teachers are alike. But there may be some things that many of us have in common or may at least empathize with. So here's one old teacher walking back from teaching, late in the evening, and then going back to work early the next day -- and what he sees, feels and thinks as he does this.  Perhaps we shall hear from others. 

Two Beings 

http://thedailypoet.blogspot.com/2014/04/two-beings.html
   

To Andrew Cuomo

     
To:  Andrew Cuomo, Governor, New York
From:  the Labor
Re:  Efforts and Results
Date:  February 26th, 2014
-------------------------------------------------------
To Andrew Cuomo

You lord about in limousines
As you had done before.
And then you bellow, bellicose,
Demanding more and more.

You dance around with denizens
Of regions that are tony.
You coddle them and bully us
With “reasons” that are phony.

Oh step out of your limousine
And fancy tie and suit.
Come shovel muck like workers do,
In dollars’ grim pursuit.

Oh Andrew, leave the Kennedys
For dinner at our “diner”.
Come eat it standing on the street,
And do not be a whiner.

An office?  Tie it on your back
Or cart it on a wheeler.
A desk?  A phone?  Remember, you’re
No more a wheeler-dealer!

Give up on sleep, oh Andrew, and
Work night and day – and harder.
And then perhaps you’ll understand
The viewpoint of a worker.

And when you’ve slaved enough, you’ll find
In your mailbox, see – a letter.
“Trying is nice, efforts are nice,
But results, oh slave, are better.”

And when you're fired, you could throw
Another temper-tantrum.
But you're no longer money's boy.
So try another mantram!

2014 February 26th, Wed.
Brooklyn, New York 
-------------------------------------------------------
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/12/nyregion/new-york-officials-stall-plans-to-tweak-teacher-evaluations.html

Re: Work in the name of love

  
Re: Work in the name of love 
  
Thanks, Steve. I read the article (at the link at the bottom). It is definitely worth reading.

While it is of course true that it is desirable to find a livelihood that gives one some enjoyment and satisfaction, the sad truth is that, in the setups that prevail in most economies the world over, most of us -- indeed, the overwhelming majority -- have to labor at jobs or in enterprises that offer little of either.

Given this fact, it is important that those who work have some collective power to influence the conditions under which they work, to limit the amount and pace of the work  that they do and to ensure that the compensation they get is fair and something they can survive upon. (The word "survive" may be argued about.  I suppose the best way to understand it is to imagine oneself and one's family in the worker's place.)

When this collective power is achieved, workers then have the leisure to attend to their responsibilities to self, family, friends and the wider community, and to explore and indulge in activities that are more fulfilling.

This also provides those who work the chance to do their jobs well, attending to details, paying attention to beings and their needs, and being creative, rather than doing things in a rush, cursorily or "by the rules". This gives them some measure of enjoyment and satisfaction in the work that takes up a major part of their lives on our planet. 

Unfortunately, we see that workers have, all over the world, grown increasingly disempowered.  Here in this country, over the last three to four decades, the amount of work each (average) worker does has expanded, and the pace of work has correspondingly increased.  Work is carried over, in many cases, into after-job-hours, being basically work done out of obligation or pressure, for free.

Slogans that sound appealing, such as the one this author discussed, have only furthered this disempowerment.

It is the focus on the individual to the exclusion of the collective, which is the bigger picture, that lies at the root of this. Those who are focused only on themselves may still thrive in such an environment, because they feel little obligation towards others, especially the ones that need the most help -- such as elders, the disabled, the ailing and children -- and so do the minimum, efficiently, by the rules, making sure they look good and rise up. They may even have more than enough leisure for other things.  Those with a conscience or those who by habit attend to details suffer most.

 In all things, there is a balance. It seems to me that the balance has shifted in a direction that has been atomizing our societies and even our families, putting impossible pressures on some individuals while allowing others to avoid their basic responsibilities.  I do not think that this is a prescription for the long term survival or well-being of our species, let alone of other species on this planet.

I recommend this article (reachable via the link below your note) to others. There are insights and facts there that I have not gone into in my long preamble above.  While both the author and I have had this country primarily in mind, the situation in other countries should not be ignored. The author does draw some attention to that. Those in academics might also find this article relevant.

-- Arjun

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Brown <>
To: sjanah <>
Sent: Sat, Feb 1, 2014 9:53 am
Subject: Work in the name of love

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/do_what_you_love_love_what_you_do_an_omnipresent_mantra_that_s_bad_for_work.html

Much here that I have not thought about.

A retired teacher on fads (Washington Post)

Dear Steve,

Thanks for this. Given the distractions that teachers and their students face, both those that come from students who misbehave, perhaps because they know no better, and from adults (like superintendent Sherman) who should know better but do even worse than those students, it is a miracle that teaching and learning continue in many of our classrooms -- or at home, where more distractions abound. 

What keeps teachers going?  For many high school regular ed. teachers, Patrick Welsh, the author of the Washington Post article you forwarded to me, sums it up. 

A passion for communicating one’s subject matter to the next generation isn’t among the 74 items on Alexandria’s Curriculum Implementation Walk-Through Data Collection list, which Sherman, who left Alexandria schools last month, used to evaluate faculty. But it’s what all great teachers have in abundance. And it’s what will keep them going when the next wave of reforms comes rolling through.

But then, he taught for over forty years. So he must be yet another know-nothing, as per Bloomberg, Klein, Rhee, Duncan et al.   

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/four-decades-of-failed-school-reform/2013/09/27/dc9f2f34-2561-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story.html

Note added:

I only take issue with the adjective "great". The mythologies surrounding the "great teacher" are counterparts of that surrounding the "bad teacher".  There has been as much time wasted and chaos sown searching for the former as there has been in attempting to weed out the latter. Central to all of this is the idea that the "bad teachers" are the problem.  This assumption has never been challenged publicly by our teachers' unions, working with parents to draw attention to the real problems that plague the schools.

Those of us who have taught for a while in different circumstances have learned humility.  Our performance has varied widely, depending on a host of circumstances, which include:

•  the subjects and levels taught (often far from that for which we were certified);
•  the student body -- with all its varied strengths and deficiencies, including many with zero knowledge of English in language-intensive classes;
•  our administrators and the policies that were rammed through, often punitively, that we had to accommodate to varying degrees;
• the time available to teach the content;
• even the number and type of rooms we taught in -- often on different floors;
•  the resources available (including appropriate textbooks, review books, a sizable chalk or white-board , this being a threatened commodity in many schools of late, and the machines to print out the handouts that so many of us have to painfully create and self-publish, continually reworking them over the years, as what is available fails to meet the ever-changing needs of our students); 
• and our own personal lives, including caring for family members and being short of sleep -- the quantity and quality of sleep being, in my experience, often a better determinant of how the school day goes than any amount of lesson planning, matched only by the resources available. 

All of us have had "great teachers" and ones not so great when we were students.  But we realized that, given the resources made available traditionally to students (textbooks being the primary one), we were responsible for our own education, through our own work, in school and at home. So we learned not to wait for "great" teachers to get educated.  Provided the teacher knew his/her subject (which was usually the case) and cared, we were satisfied.  We regarded parents in the same light, cutting them some slack.  Were our parents "great"?  Some of them, some of the time.  But they mostly did what they had to do, often under difficult circumstances, and we were grateful for that.

Arjun

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/four-decades-of-failed-school-reform/2013/09/27/dc9f2f34-2561-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story.html 

   

On Discipline

  
On Discipline

Hello Vonny,

Thanks for reading my stuff, for replying and for your comments, which are of course valid.  Let me explain why I did not explicitly list and discuss discipline.

I mentioned, in my sending, that the the reasons for the twin tragedies in K-12 education include:

(1) social problems;

(2) structural problems.

(Blog readers:  Please see the post, The Two Tragedies of K-12 Education and their Causes , which is at:

 http://subject-teacher.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-two-tragedies-of-k-12-education-and.html . )

I then went on to say that I would address, in that sending, only the structural problems.

I did this because to attempt to address the social problems would have taken too long and would have diverted attention from the structural problems.  I personally think that the social problems are the hardest to deal with, and the primary reason why schools are failing.  But the structural problems also have to be addressed. It is like a car -- it won't run without tires -- but you also need gas in the tank.

Social and structural problems cannot be completely separated.  But we may do so for purposes of analysis. It is like the human (animal) body -- the organ systems are ways in which we artificially divide up the complexity.  Although one cannot really separate organ systems in practice, either anatomically or physiologically, they are useful conceptual divisions, with a lot of accumulated knowledge organized around them.  They are useful for physicians, as well as for patients and their relatives.  

The conceptual division of the complexity of the vertebrate body into organ systems is also useful for students learning biology.  Indeed, especially given that textbooks still organize much of their material around this, I would venture that it is essential.  But this is a point completely lost on the designers of the "Living Environment" curriculum that has replaced the traditional Regents Biology one in New York State, with organ systems almost completely stripped out of the syllabus -- along with much else. 

Now there's a structural problem in K-12 education, festering now for more than a decade, with no resolution, or even acknowledgement, in sight!  (This is not to say that the prior syllabus was optimal, especially given the impossibly tight time-allotments for science in this country.)  Similar situations may be found in mathematics curricula and elsewhere.

I left out discipline (although it comes under the purview of focus, as lack of discipline dissipates focus) because I could not begin to address it without bringing in the social problems.  And in this country, this issue is tied up with issues of race and class (although the issue cuts across all these boundaries) and one cannot talk sensibly about it without running into all manner of defensive reactions and arguments without end.

That said, one has also to address the social problems -- and discipline belongs more squarely in that discussion.

I had mentioned the primacy of informal education -- which included not only the first spoken language, which all of us appear mercifully to master unless we have severe problems -- but also, as I mentioned, ethical understanding.  In this area, many of our students appear to be lacking -- or operating from a different set of ethical principles than, say, I do -- based more on satisfying the immediate or apparent needs of the self, with little regard for the rights of others or for one's own responsibilities.

When ethical understanding is present, one can appeal to it -- a mere momentary pause or a gentle look suffices. When it is absent or perverted, discipline has to be enforced, ultimately by intimidation.  And this is a losing battle, with the teacher placed in a most unfortunate position.