Book Review: Bringing Up Boys

Title: Bringing Up Boys

Author: James Dobson

Date: 2001

Publisher: Tyndale House

ISBN: 0-8423-5266-X

Length: 257 pages of text, 11 pages of references

Quote: “Boys, when compared to girls, are six times more likely to have learning disabilities, three times more likely to be registered drug addicts, and four times more likely to be diagnosed as emotionally disturbed. They are at greater risk for schizophrenia, autism, sexual addiction, alcoholism, bed wetting, and all forms of antisocial and criminal behavior. They are twelve times more likely to murder someone, and their rate of death in car acci­dents is greater by 50 percent...There is more.”

What was I doing even reading this book? I bought it, of course, for resale. I don’t have sons. I do, however, have nephews. Their father wasn’t man enough to live with four young children at one time, so they obviously have some genetic issues to cope with...and so I can tell you that Dr. Dobson’s motive, in overstating the problems boys have (and cause), is at least partly to assure readers that the boys we’re trying to raise or teach aren’t all that bad. Most kids don’t actually have any of the problems on the list just quoted. I like my nephews.

A funny sort of synchronicity occurred in between the time I spent writing a review of another of Dobson’s books and the time I sat down to write this one. I was near the phone, not actually hovering over the phone, but sort of waiting for updates on two elders in two hospitals—one not expected to live, one expected to go home for the night. The phone rang. Thinking, “That wouldn’t be about Jane, it’s still visiting hours and her children would still be at the hospital, so it has to be Joe calling from home,” I picked up the phone and heard, “This is James Dobson reminding you to vote on Tuesday...”

It was not, of course, Dr. Dobson himself. If it had been, I’m sure he would at least have been polite enough to absorb the information that I always vote. Most people in Gate City who are eligible to vote are peer-pressured to do so, because most of the old families are related to each other in some way, which means that few of us could get away with failing to vote for any Kilgore who is on the ballot. Regarding other candidates we might get away with saying, “They’ll win without my help; they always do,” but when a Kilgore is on the ballot we’d get, “You mean you think you’re too busy to vote for your own third cousin twice removed? Now that’s just ridiculous. You can’t be too sick to go in and vote. If you’re too sick to drive I’ll come out and take you.” So we vote. I don’t really need to be prodded, even by James Dobson in person, much less by some geek who’s wired a recording of his TV voice into a computer somewhere.

The annoyance of getting a “robot call” is enough to influence my vote—anyone a phone pest wants me to vote for, I’m more likely to vote against—and I’ll wager that, when the “robot call” sounds like some well-known person who’s respected even by the opposite party, it’s actually coming from the opposition party. Dr. Dobson has been on TV long enough, and stayed out of trouble long enough, that the worst thing his enemies can do to him is probably programming his voice into an obnoxious computer-calling device. 

End of rant...back to the book. Do you, as a parent, teacher, custodial relative, baby-sitter, etc., want to read what Dobson has to say about the care of little boys? A summary of what he says may be helpful.

As a family counsellor, Dobson isn’t worried by the appearance of gender stereotypes in rival siblings; he titles one chapter “Vive la Difference.”

He lists a range of sex-influenced mental problems that boys can have but discusses only attention deficiency in detail. Although the others are more common in males than in females, they’re not common.

Like too many authors, he hears loudly and clearly the words of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, “This is for everyone who teased us,” but overlooks the “prescription medication” that was aggravating and distorting the memories of whatever blows to their self-esteem they and the other schoolboy killers had suffered.

He discusses evidence that little boys instinctively crave a father figure and typically start moving away from Mom and toward Dad, unless Dad is abusive, as toddlers.

He observes that most boys are noisy, impulsive, restless, destructive, and competitive, but charitably mentions that about 15% of little boys are relatively calm and quiet and are not likely to grow up effeminate...just intelligent.

He defends the traditional role of fathers as providers, protectors, leaders, and spiritual directors..

He warns mothers that, although disrespect should not be tolerated, most boys are going to have a need to reject or disrespect their mothers at some time in life.

He idealizes the work of a full-time mother, warning that yuppie mothers who worry about getting onto a “Mommy Track” may be merely “chasing the caterpillar” ahead of them, as the peculiarly stupid processionary caterpillar can often be persuaded to do until it starves to death. (I think conservatives are barking up the wrong tree with this one. Instead of nagging women to quit work for the sake of two to five years of full-time motherhood, after which the women's careers may never get back on track, the conservatives would do better to demand that employers rehire women who take time off to be full-time mothers and men who take time off for full-time military service.)

He insists that the origins of homosexuality lie in emotional problems parents should prevent. He observes that, while teenaged girls seem to do just as well or better without a father figure in the house, teenaged boys just might do just as well or better if they lived with their fathers and had no mother figure in the house—this doesn’t happen often enough for anyone to be sure. (I will say that my late lamented Significant Other, as a single foster father, did raise a shining jewel of a Lad.)

He affirms the benefits to children in spending quality time with grandparents.

He advises parents not to try to make boys less competitive, but try to help them win.

He’s concerned that “stupid guy” jokes may damage the self-esteem of little boys. He encourages home schooling as an option for boys who don’t fit into the classroom environment.

He classifies unchristian moral influences, as well as pedophiles, as “predators” likely to harm children.

He encourages parents to enforce rules, while warning them that “rules without relationships lead to rebellion.”

Although a well-known advocate of Tough Love, he recommends relatively mild displays of Tough Love as routine discipline for children.

My concern would be that today’s young parents, lacking historical background, may find some of his advice inexplicably strange. Doesn’t everybody know that nobody can afford to be a full-time mother any more, economically or socially, and society no longer has much use for guys who can’t develop the attention spans and self-discipline and tolerance for sitting still that the girls modelled for them in elementary school, and so on. Well, no; while today’s parents are beneficiaries of whatever the 1970s wave of feminism accomplished, good and bad, Dobson was one of the older, conservative-minded men who never were comfortable with the 1970s feminist movement. A full half-dozen TV stars, including Kathie Lee Gifford, Frank Gifford, Regis Philbin, and Kathie Lee’s first husband, got a huge publicity boost in the 1980s as Dr. Dobson gave Kathie Lee fatherly or pastoral advice to quit TV and try to be a full-time housewife, and her first husband discovered, along with her, that he didn’t want a full-time housewife, and so on. Dobson has lived and learned, and Bringing Up Boys reflects plenty of recent research and awareness of the way things are, but it’s still obvious that a part of him wishes that the “Leave It to Beaver” TV show had ever resembled the way most real families were.

How harmful is this kind of advice likely to be, especially if parents have girls as well as boys? I’m going to split hairs, go out on a limb,  try to think of another metaphor to add to this mix, stick my neck out and say: I don’t think this is the harmful kind of advice from the prefeminist era. The kind of devoted family Dobson has in mind may not be as bland or as smooth as the Cleaver family on television, but neither is it abusive or oppressive.

In the carefully orchestrated trend for people to abandon farms and rural environments and flock into cities, I see a massive male identity crisis: there aren’t a lot of jobs in the city that give men a chance to “win” by using their upper-body strength and physical energy. These things are assets; men deserve to be able to use and enjoy them. I could wish that Dobson had shown more concern about this, and less misplaced concern about stupid guy jokes or girls who excel in sports. 

Women my age learned to base our self-esteem, among other things, on our not acting like the female stereotypes in the dumb blonde jokes, catty brunette jokes, bossy mother-in-law jokes, nagging wife jokes, big-spending daughter jokes, etc. etc. ad nauseam, that men told; if men can’t learn to cope with stupid guy jokes in the same way, they really are inferior. 

But I don’t think there ever was or will be a problem with women lacking respect for Real Menschkeit (as distinct from stupid redneck macho acts). The problem is that not enough men are developing and demonstrating Menschkeit, as distinct from machismo. They probably need to depend on the help of God to become admirable human beings first and let nature take care of the sex appeal (no worries, it will). I think this is the problem Dobson is trying to address, and, to the extent that he or his audience are able to help resolve it, women will not complain.

When Are You Old Enough to Post Your Teachers' Real Names on the Internet?

At a blog I follow, someone posted the names of several former teachers. 

I was tempted, because I do remember all of their names--mine and my brother's.  But I'm not quite old enough yet. Although those of my classmates who became teachers are retiring now, some of my teachers are still alive. 

All teachers had nicknames. Most of these nicknames were just whatever look-or-sound-alike things suggested themselves to childish minds. Relatively few teachers made enough of an impression to earn really spiteful nicknames, and I know for sure that those of mine who were really hated are dead by now. So I suppose it might be safe to reminisce a little if I use their nicknames. 

The point of my e-friend's post was that those who taught baby-boomers got away with lots of things that would get them barred from teaching, or visiting schools, or trading at stores across the street from the schools, now. Punishment was considered an effective teaching technique, because sometimes it was. Most elementary school teachers displayed "the paddle" of their choice at the front of the room and would whack somebody, in front of the rest of the class, during the course of every year. Verbal abuse occurred regularly. Kids were more likely to say more hateful things to other kids than teachers were, because teachers were supposed to show that they were thinking on a higher level, but teachers would tell kids what they thought was wrong with us, loudly and publicly. If they really hated a particular student, teachers might pitch into someone else and then let that person hear them say something nice about that student. 

If they felt totally at a loss, teachers might ignore a student altogether. This was done after the "special" school was closed and most of the kids who were officially considered "retarded" joined regular classes with the rest of us. A boy in one of my classes didn't seem stupid to me, but apparently he had severe dyslexia or farsightedness or something. He came to school almost every day, sat down at the same desk every day he was there, and just sat there, not called on, not given test papers. I never saw him looking at a book or a piece of paper. He was strictly serving time in that classroom, like a convict, although so far as I knew all he'd ever done wrong was to have a learning disability the teachers didn't know how to deal with. 

Peer tutoring was another teaching technique that some teachers thought was great. Meh. I was sometimes ordered to tutor somebody. "Be sure you don't do his assignment for him. Show her how to do the work." Bleep does an eight-year-old child know about how to do that? Most teachers limited peer tutoring to having students mark each other's homework papers, which undoubtedly reduced boredom and eyestrain for the teachers. It also gave smaller, cleverer little monsters a chance to get back at bigger, rougher ones. I enjoyed peer tutoring for that reason but I don't believe I ever taught anybody anything--except, of course, not to mess with nerds, which may have been the point, all along. Some teachers wouldn't even double-check the marks a student put on another student's papers. 

People found ways to game the system. In grade three I was often ordered to "tutor" a boy who was spending the second of three legal years in grade three. He might have already spent an extra year in grade two, as well. He was big enough to have been in grade five, but it was a rare day when he answered any question correctly--if answers were written down and graded. We didn't have a lot of open discussions in grade three, but when we had them, he sounded as if he belonged in grade five. His rate of incorrect answers was so high that the only explanation was that he knew what the correct answers were, and was avoiding giving them. But why would anyone subject himself to that? It all became clear the year I went to college, when he joined the Junior Varsity team. JV was supposed to be for thirteen-year-olds, and he was eighteen. Home team fans loved him. He was the star quarterback all the way through high school. He was too old to be legally allowed to attend high school without paying tuition but nobody paid too much attention to that, especially in the case of the star quarterback.

Anyway, the teachers...I don't remember the substitute teachers. I didn't pay enough attention to most of them to know their names on the days when they were teaching. I do remember a few who filled in for the same teacher for a week or more, or were later offered full-time jobs.

And a note about titles: Teachers were called by titles. Women's titles had to be spelled either "Miss" or "Mrs.", although they were pronounced "Ms." (Nobody at the elementary school was a "Dr.") Janitors, librarians, and secretaries were also called by titles. High school students were called by titles in academic classes, though we could use given names in arts or trade school classes. Bus drivers, whether they were high school boys or grandfathers, were called by given names or nicknames. Cafeteria servers were called by the kind of food they dished out. If there was or had ever been any logic to these traditions, it was never explained to me.

Grade 1. For the first two years students were expected to be so tiny we weren't even required to walk down a corridor to the multi-user restrooms. To keep us out of the way of bigger kids, there were single-user restrooms in each classroom. So we had only one teacher to put up with, all day long, except for the music teacher who visited once a month. Mrs. Fatso was most memorable for locking horns with my Indiana-raised mother about my alleged Northern accent. Mrs. Fatso was from Georgia so her accent might have been rated even lower in status than a Northern one, by some people. Mother "won" an argument with her and I don't think Mrs. Fatso ever forgave me. She was one of the less abusive teachers but she never missed a chance to find fault with anything I did.

I will say, to Mrs. Fatso's credit, that she was the only teacher I ever had who never sent in a substitute. Every day when I was in that room, she was there too.

Also, Miss Music. "Musick" is a local family's real name, but "Music" was the nickname for the visiting music teacher, every year. The one who visited during my first year was young and pretty and nice, the daughter or granddaughter of one of the middle school teachers. She didn't give out grades but just led sing-alongs. Who could have not liked her?

Also, for one and a half marking periods, my grandmother, Texas Ruby, who had also done a teacher training course though I'm not sure whether she was ever employed as a full-time teacher. She married young. Anyway she made sure my education was not neglected while we spent the winter in Florida. Aunt Dotty would later let us be vacationers in peace, but Grandmother had me working ahead of grade two before I went back to grade one.

Grade 2. Mrs. Ratfink really hated that I'd learned to write cursive from Grandmother and spent a good part of the year we were officially supposed to start writing cursive finding fault with the way I'd learned to make every....single...letter. Grandmother hadn't taught me to put enough of a flourish on the ends of lower-case letters like "e" at the end of a word. I am not making this up. Mrs. Ratfink thought her mission in life was to correct students of being too intelligent by making sure we went back and re-learned everything in her way. It did not help matters that this was the year my "celiac disease" started to kick in. I had some sort of cold-and-flu symptom all winter long and stayed home until Mrs. Ratfink warned Mother that if I missed another day I'd have to repeat the year. My favorite part of that whole year was spending two weeks in quarantine with mumps. I didn't feel any pain from mumps, didn't mind if I looked a little worse than usual, was glad of a two-week vacation from Mrs. Ratfink's company, and, on top of everything else, some relatives sent us a tame bantam hen with baby chicks to distract my brother and me from the boredom. Lovely.

Also, Mr. Music. He was an older man who brought the wonders of new technology to the public schools, meaning that he brought tape recorders in and made recordings of our sing-alongs, which would later be broadcast on local radio and used to lead subsequent classes' sing-alongs. 

Grade 3. Mrs. Moose wasn't all that big. I don't remember her being fat enough to have gallbladder surgery, but she did, that year. She had long golden blonde hair with black roots and heavy black eyebrows, which I thought made her look sort of mean, but most of the time I liked her. She let me read chapter books after doing all the homework assignments in class. She also added sing-alongs to the visits from Mr. Music, whose hours and salary were under review.

Also: Mr. Smarter. He read John Holt and did open discussions. Unfortunately we didn't have him for most of the time Mrs. Moose was recovering from surgery. 

Also: Mrs. Failing. She was easy to hate.

Also: Horrible Hornrims. She was even easier.

Grade 4. This was the year Dad taught a trade school course in Sacramento, so we lived out there all year. Grade four still counted as primary school in the neighborhood where we rented half of a duplex house. Kids could walk to and from school--it was one of those suburban neighborhoods Boomers reminisce about--and even walk home for lunch. The school was well funded, with all kinds of sports and playground equipment, and the school even provided books, pencils, and paper, but it didn't have a library. What it had were bullies. This was the year I would still have to say that sending me to that school, which adults thought was an excellent one, qualified as child abuse. Even in grade four kids would make ourselves sick rather than go into the group bathrooms. Enough harassment, if seldom real beatings-up, took place on the playground and in the cafeteria. I thought I was the most despised and persecuted of the victims but, from an adult perspective, I think a few others may have had a worse time even than I had. One girl was picked on for half a day, went home, and never came back.

Homeroom teacher: Mr. Ed., who would probably have been banned from teaching today due to political incorrectness and verbal abusiveness, and was frankly incompetent to teach most subjects, but he did teach all of us all the math we'd need in elementary school or, probably, in adult life.

Reading was taught by a different one of the three fourth grade teachers for one third of the year. The other two were women. I liked both of them better than Mr. Ed. Mrs. Gooey was the old, grim, Slavic one who threatened to knock two boys' heads together if they didn't stop fighting, so they did. Mrs. Snorkeldorf was the one who immersed her homeroom in The Phantom Tollbooth. 

Grade 5. Dad was not asked to teach again. Mother got my brother and me into the Seventh-Day Adventist school, which might have been nice if it had had a bus or a car pool to haul us across the city, but it didn't. Going to school there meant we had to move to Southgate, which, as anyone who knows anything about Sacramento will remember, was a terrible neighborhood. Among other things some older kids, who were Black, knocked my brother off his bicycle and whacked him with picket signs for supporting the protest they were doing. It was September, so they thought we were Mexican. They might have shown even more hate if they'd realized we were legally White.

Anyway, my teacher there was Mr. Tall, one of the few of his generation who were taller than Dad. He wasn't a great teacher but he didn't rely on verbal abuse, and did have a well-filled bookshelf at the back of the room. My brother's teacher didn't have a nickname so far as we knew, because this was a church school. She wasn't great, either, but my brother developed the ability to read large print for short amounts of time in that season, so she claimed the credit for teaching him to read. Grades five through eight also had formal classes in church music taught by the headmaster, who didn't have a nickname either.

Then we inherited the house later to be known as the Cat Sanctuary and moved back home. The principal didn't like us so, right away, I was assigned to the homeroom of Ms. Gooseneck, a.k.a. Old Miss Mean and some other nicknames that were even worse. Everyone really hated her. One way to spot a Boomer in my town was that we all remember her as The. Worst. Teacher. Ever.

In the case of Old Miss Mean ugliness and spitefulness probably were connected--by untreated diabetes. When glaring with special hostility at students she tended to stick out her goitred neck and throw back her head with the chronic scowl on her face. She was hardly five feet tall when she started teaching, and shrank with age. She was flabby. Sometimes she'd take a notion to get fit and order everyone to do calisthenics on the paved parking lot that was what we had for a playground, and everyone would show off how much better they could do all the exercises than she could. Most of us were stronger and faster than she was. Some were taller, and Miss Mean seemed particularly hostile to them. 

She had a classroom rule that seemed as if it would be strictly fair. Everyone in turn, except the "retarded" boy she pretended wasn't in the room all year, was called on to answer questions and demonstrate math problems, going up and down the rows in strict order all morning. That by itself wouldn't have been so bad, although now it's considered emotionally abusive because a student might have to be corrected in front of the class. Hah. Old Miss Mean 's idea of correcting a math or spelling mistake was not just something like saying "No, three fives are fifteen." Punishment for wrong answers seemed to be her favorite part of her job. She was not above dragging a student's personal habits, known or imagined, or family into the verbal abuse. The worst part of grade five was when Miss Mean finally said something nice about me--in front of the class. For the next six weeks everyone hated me, and it was a very brave cousin who spoke to me in a friendly way at school, on a Monday, after we'd shared a particularly enjoyable weekend. 

But the closest Old Miss Mean came to physical abuse, in my year with her, was the day the girl with lovely long blonde hair pleaded that she was feeling too sick to demonstrate a math problem. On went the verbal abuse machine that was Old Miss Mean. "Everyone else is sick of showing their stupidity too. Get up there and do the best you can." So the blonde, whose hair had never been cut and hung down to her waist, went up to the chalkboard, wrote sloppy numbers with a trembling hand--Miss Mean commenting all the way--turned around to explain what she was demonstrating, and was sick. Her breakfast dripped through her beautiful hair. "So, you really are sick. You didn't have to come to school and make everyone else sick too! Go to the nurse's office." Miss Mean made it sound like punishment. When the blonde came back to school a week or two later (it had been swine flu) her hair was short and she was so traumatized that you could induce visible sweat and tremors by looking at her sidewise. I knew this because I was one of the little monsters who did look at her sidewise. She'd try to be brave, saying nasty things that egged me on to repeat the treatment, but in a few minutes tears would well up in her blue eyes. And then the teachers in their wisdom made her repeat grade five, spending another year with Miss Mean as math teacher, only in a different home room. I am not making this up.

If that blonde is still alive somewhere...I thought of most of the hostility I dispensed so freely in school as self-defense, and it probably did protect me from having a worse time than I had and I wouldn't blame or punish a child for doing it today, but the way I tormented you was pure cruelty. It was one of the sins I had to repent of when, as a "cradle Christian," I made my personal commitment to be a Christian adult. I've regretted it for fifty years. 

Anyway: In the middle grades each class had four teachers and each specialized in one major subject, Math, English, Science, and History. Grade five spent the first half of each day doing reading, writing, spelling, and their homeroom teacher's major subject, and the second half rotating among the other three teachers. 

So: Mrs. Brick, who taught science. She was a good teacher. She had all of us drawing diagrams of the inner structures of eyes and ears, synthesizing peat and knowing in theory how to refine a dog dropping into a very small diamond. People who still enjoyed learning and thinking loved her. I did.

Mrs. Smelly, whom I never noticed as smelling worse than other people but who did have a tempting name, taught English. The other possible nickname to go with her name didn't fit; that year, she had a waist but no other visible curves. Next year, as if to prove something, she quit teaching and had a baby. She had no particular talent for teaching and I didn't like her, but she did stock the whole collection of Scholastic paperbacks for the middle grades and spend enough time reviewing things with slow learners to give me a chance to read them all. 

Mrs. Snodgrass--you can guess what her nickname was, she's been dead long enough that there's no real need to use it, and this web site wouldn't display it anyway--taught history. She liked history and geography. The school board made everyone carry around big clunky "social studies" books that didn't teach us much of anything, and for most of the year Mrs. Snodgrass ignored them and drilled us on the facts of history and geography. Peace to her ashes, she defined the facts as including our short answers to the question "Why did the South have better soldiers and officers?" in the chapter on the Civil War, but they also included the dates of important inventions, the names of all the Presidents, and the capital cities of all the States. She even found time to get into a few of the "social studies" issues, such as its being legal to belong to a labor union (and she did), how landlords might balance profitability with decent housing conditions, and how none of us had psychic powers because we couldn't even guess what she was thinking by gazing into her eyes. Not everyone liked her but I did. One of Ogden Nash's more memorable "Nasheries" divided humanity into "Swozzlers" who were greedy and wasteful and "Snodgrasses" who were nice and respectful of others. It always seemed to fit her.

This was the year the school board decided the middle grades could do without Mr. Music. He was still in town but the "enrichment program" the board had voted to use didn't have room for him. It was "enrichment" for most of us to cover up the "remedial" classes some of us had been found to need. I followed the kid ahead of me to Mrs. Brick's room for remedial reading for a month or so before anyone officially noticed me doing this and said "Oh no, you must go to Mrs. Smelly's room for enrichment." I enjoyed remedial reading more than enrichment, though both classes featured a lot of self-chosen reading with shiny new paperback books. Well...in enrichment the selection did include The House of Dies Drear, the most challenging and therefore enjoyable book I'd ever been allowed to read at school.

Grade 6. Mrs. Dunce really did have some sort of neurological issues, and died young. She might have been classified as a high-functioning autistic patient if she'd been born later. She would have noticed me because Mother packed either peanut butter or fish sandwiches every day, and Mrs. Dunce had reactions to the mere smell of peanuts. She didn't like fish, either, but she leaned back and fanned away the odor of peanuts. 

Anyway she started the year trying to kill me with kindness. Among other things she offered to buy me a poster. I didn't want to hang a poster on my wall where it would soon show smoke damage in a wood-heated house, but thought I could keep a notebook-sized one in my notebook, so I chose a notebook-sized poster. "Oh, if you want the small size, you may have two!" So I chose another poster. The posters were meant to introduce art appreciation into a grade where none of the teachers felt qualified to teach "drawing" as required by law; they were prints of photos of famous paintings. The two I chose were of horses. I figured my brother could have one, and I could have one, to paste into the backs of our notebooks and enjoy looking at or copying for a few years. But then for a surprise Mrs. Dunce changed the order to two wall-sized posters. And scolded me, at length, in front of everybody, for not being grateful for this wonderful improvement over what I had actually wanted. For the rest of that year, I'd gone from being her favorite to being her least favorite, and everyone knew.

Mr. Music was restored to the middle school that year, but grades five through eight had a brass band, for those who chose to join. In grade six I wanted to join the band and was issued a French horn and had something to do with the time in between arriving at school and being admitted to the classroom in the morning. I thoroughly enjoyed the band and liked the teacher. Everyone else in my family hated the sound of a brass band, but Mother said the family had to put up with it because playing a brass instrument might help push my front teeth in a little way. They were beyond the orthodontist's hope. What correction they got, which wasn't much, they got from the French horn (and from the early removal of the cuspids, which really did grow in like vampire fangs).

Mr. Gopher taught science. I was never sure whether he had a speech impediment or just thought sounding a bit tongue-tied was trendy and London-esque. I disliked him. It was mutual; he sent home my very first failing grade and my parents made sure I wrote out the answers to his boring "study questions," after that, though as a protest against their inanity I was allowed to use my typewriter and make my snarky answers easy to read. I don't think Mr. Gopher actually read the answers. I think he just looked for some minimum amount of verbiage as a basis for grades.

Coach Smith, whose given name was Gilbert so non-athletes called him Mr. Filbert or Mr. Nut, taught "social studies" from the lame-brained book. I don't suppose it did anyone any harm since we'd already learned the basic facts of US history and geography as they were taught at the time, but it might have been worthwhile to have learned something about the history and geography of the rest of the world. I don't think even Coach Smith cared anything about the worthless contents of the social studies book, though they did include a chapter on the value of formal education in preserving Jewish culture to which he seemed to be paying attention enough to give me peculiar "Have you anything to add?" looks throughout that week. His heart was in coaching JV football. He was indisputably good at that.

Mrs. Staplegun walked us through a review of the math concepts I'd learned from Mr. Ed. and others had been traumatized about by Miss Mean. I remember her class as supremely boring but recognized that most kids seemed to need it. She was there to mop up emotional mess. Sometimes if everyone paid attention and got through the lesson Mrs. Staplegun, who had been a bit of a singer, would sing popular songs to us. Her favorite song, that year, was "Delta Dawn." Parents might not have approved of this choice to entertain grade six, but it was more fun than math.

Mr. Music came back that year and led monthly sing-alongs, having added a transparency projector to his cartload of tapes and tape recorder. Middle grades got to sing along with popular hits instead of Sam Hinton and The Baby-Sitters. The list of songs I learned at school included "Country Roads," "Lonely Teardrops," and "Let Your Love Flow." 

Secondhand: My brother's teachers: Grade 1. Mrs. Snickers. Her daughter was in my class. Neither of us disliked Mrs. Snickers.

Grade 2. Mrs. Yoicks. I had remembered her as "the pretty one" before the school hired Ms. Linda, but by the time my brother came along she'd already become frumpy. She hadn't been teaching long enough to be really tired of it. Neither of us disliked her either.

Grade 3. Miss Window. Grade three had two teachers whose given name was Linda. The one who looked Cherokee was beautiful, popular, and fun, if she did model herself a bit on Buffy Sainte-Marie. My brother got the one who looked White. She was a snippy young thing neither of us liked. "Window" was short for "Do you hate your teacher, dear? Then throw her out the window." She didn't teach long; she latched onto the son of an old friend of Dad's, and no child had to put up with her any more, except that I caught a sort of parting blast--"She asked if you wanted some clothes she'd worn, but they looked too small. What a tiny waist she has." Right. Miss Window was the sort of girl who would make a point of calling a teenaged girl's attention to her having a tiny tapered waist.

Grade 4. Mrs. Potatoes. My brother didn't think much of her, but didn't really hate her either.

Also: Mrs. Whackem. In grade one my brother's commitment to nonviolence was revised and amended by a distant cousin, a hulking repeater who, I reported at home, was at least as tall as I was and quite a bit heavier. He endured some punches and kicks until the day Big Billy the Bully and his little henchboy decided to give my brother a swirly. They had used the toilet first. My brother didn't think they were really going to risk dunking his head in it until it happened. Then he rose up dripping, kicked the smaller boy out of the bathroom, dunked Billy, and had made a good start on mopping the bathroom with him when the teacher walked in.  Later Big Billy grew up, joined the police force, and went on record as saying that my brother had taught him about respect for others. 

But not enough, because later, during Big Billy's second year in grade two, my brother caught him bullying a closer relative, Tiny Tiresome Timmy. My parents didn't have a telephone--even the old durable ones didn't work well enough to be worth paying for--so Mrs. Whackem vented her agitation to me in the cafeteria. "Your brother beat up a second grade boy."

"Why?  Which one? What did the second-grader do?"

"Well, it was Big Billy. Apparently there's an old grudge..."

"Oh, well, that second-grader. He's older than he is and bigger than I am."

"But he is handicapped! He's not bright!" wailed Mrs. Whackem.

Neither of us ever had any respect for her, ever again. Nor did our parents. Beating up Big Billy the Bully was the sort of thing for which boys get told, "Brawling is a very bad habit," and given new bicycles.

Also: Ms. Pain. I didn't hear much about her.

Also: Mrs. Ungodly. Mother used to say "Nobody deserves a nickname like that." Grade four thought she did. She and Mrs. Whackem looked a bit alike--young, slim, with short black hair--and memory tends to conflate them. For the first half of the year my brother said that at least they were easy to look at. For the second half he despised them.

Grade 5. My brother was also assigned to Old Miss Mean's homeroom. He said that by that time she was really sick, and her outbursts of bad temper often escalated into violence. There was a fad for wearing rotten cotton shirts to school; Miss Mean reportedly tore boys' shirts to get their attention. Sometimes, he said, she grabbed students by their hair. On the first day of school, he said, she kicked the biggest boy in the class in the shins. My brother was only the second or third biggest, but he was still taller than Old Miss Mean, and he still reminded her of me. 

So, one day the janitor cleaned the floor while everyone was out to lunch. Finding somebody's homework paper on the floor, he placed the paper on the nearest freshly polished desk. My brother came in and found this paper on his desk. "He got all the answers wrong and he hadn't even signed his name, whoever it was. I wouldn't have wanted to sign my name to that paper either. So then Joe Blow said it was his, and Miss Mean says I was copying Blow's paper." 

Another day some of the boys were scuffling. My brother didn't say he'd picked up his math book to hit someone with, but that seems the most likely reason why another little brat grabbed his math book and threw it out the window. The roof of the school office projected out below Miss Mean's window, flat, tarred, with puddles here and there. "If I hadn't had this cold I would've thrown him out the window after it. In came Miss Mean and said, "You threw your book out there! You climb out and get it!" I said, "John Doe threw it. Make him get it." So they're not going to let me borrow books from the school any more." Climbing out on the roof was perfectly safe, though my brother suffered from vertigo, but he did have a cold and it was a cold, wet day with a lot of water on the roof.

The kids went on strike and refused to do homework or study, hoping to get Miss Mean fired. It didn't work. It was a difficult year for everybody.

Also: The Brick. My brother liked her too. She was a class act. She stayed out of students' personal concerns and stuck to science facts.

Also: Mrs. Newby. Nobody liked her.

Also: Mr. Smarter was hired as a full-time teacher that year. Grade five adored him. 

Grade 6. As a result of having led the strike against Miss Mean my brother was assigned to Coach Smith's Special Class for Problem Boys, which he'd been warned was going to feature severe discipline and football. Coach Smith saw my brother as a quarterback for a year or two. My brother saw himself as a runner--a cross-country runner, not somebody who was going to have to spend the year either running and hiding from, or being beaten up by, or having to learn to fight with, real juvenile delinquents who carried knives. 

So instead he was enrolled in a tiny, not really legal, Baptist school program where his teacher was a church lady I'll call Mrs. Hassle. I don't know that she actually taught anything. I think what she did was check homework papers, the way schools use computers to do now. My brother did well, though, because he was allowed to do independent study after rushing through the homework papers. He made studies of several subjects that were well covered in books at the public library, and did projects, genetic experiments with plants, tutoring, recycling...he had a great year. But all Mrs. Hassle did was step out of his way.

This is long enough for a blog post. Memories of junior high and high school teachers will have to wait for another day. Suffice it to say that although "brick" used to be a slang word for a thoroughly decent human being, and I think the Brick was one, the best teachers I had were my parents. Most of the learning I did, as a child, I did at home, more or less in spite of school. 

I think elementary school did me more harm than good. Dad blamed the virus-laden air for making me unathletic; as a celiac I think that would have happened if homeschooling had been legal in my time. Then again, although I didn't take correction particularly well, I wasn't cruel at home. I'm pretty sure that, if Miss Mean hadn't chosen to subject me to another six weeks of feeling like the most despised and persecuted person on Earth, I wouldn't have found it entertaining to torment a wretched child who probably felt sick when people looked at her for years after grade five...and she was the sort of girl people always had looked at, and always would, which probably made things even worse.

I've often thought that most of my generation's "emotional problems" had less to do with abuse in early childhood (though many of us were at least neglected in early childhood) than with the trauma of being packed together into public schools. Some people may have found some relief in group therapy where they all pretended they'd been abused by family members in early childhood as an excuse for having "emotional problems." I never did. I didn't choose psychology as a major in search of "help for my problems," because psychology, at that time, was not offering any; I knew that because I knew I had problems--with behavior patterns I'd learned at school. Growing up helped. The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense helped. Psychology that focussed on emotions was something I learned quickly and easily, and was able to use to help other people, but it had little to offer me. But my early adult years were still a crash course in unlearning the unhelpful mental attitudes and language habits I learned at school.

I think I feel inclined to mention this because, back in my home town, I know so many people who learned the same bad habits at the same school. They have not lived in a big city and had to work their way out of learned behavior patterns that express hostility, or out of the perception that hostility needs to be expressed, in order to pay the rent. Ooey-gooey, emotion-focussed psychology does not appeal to them and wouldn't help them if it did. Admitting that they may indeed be expressing more hostility than they even feel because they learned the importance of scoring off and putting down, at school, is what might help them. Though of course they can say "Well I'm retired now, and I don't plan to talk to a lot of tourists, and the people I talk to are used to the way I talk," and that's true. All they'd gain by learning to feel and express sincere good will, primarily as the kind of respect that may mean not saying much at all, is that I or someone like me might enjoy their company. "So why bother? I am or have been married, I have children, I have parents--I don't have time for friends" is also true in many cases. But they never know when it might be useful for them to know how to make conversation without hostilely defending themselves against anticipated hostility that might not even exist.

So, to all those teachers...only a few of whom are still alive...Most of you were honestly trying to teach some people something. Most of you would have had something to teach me, if you'd allowed yourselves to get beyond drilling into the slow learners what normal minds absorbed from reading the textbook in the first week of each year. All I can say I actually learned from you was a little math from Mr. Ed, a little geography from Mr. Tall, a little anatomy from Mrs. Brick, and how to play the French horn (badly); but that's not your fault. Wherever you are, I thank all of you for putting up with the little monster I was and the miserable factory-line-based system that made me it. 

Book Review: The Mindset of Focusing for Succss

Title: The Mindset of Focusing for Success

Author: Jane Holder

Publisher: Mixed Bag

Quote: "Time killers are activities that distract us from what we really need to do ."

For some people it's enoough to tell ourselves "Finish trhis, then do that." For some it's necessary to isolate ourselves so that we can finish one thing at a time. For some, the whole idea needs to be explained in a book.

The trouble may be that people who need the explanation can't focus long enough to read a book. 

Holder makes it as easy as possible. This e-book is short. For some specific situations there are specific suggestions, like using apps that limit time spent on social media. Unfortunately the most helpful ways to focus, like getting the material to be learned taught in a completely different way, may be beyond the scope of this book. Still, these suggestions are worth trying. 

How to Get Chores Done with Less Friction

(There's a reason why I was prompted to write this by seeing a cartoon strip, rather than observing any of The Nephews at home. The Nephews were all good examples of how this teaching/parenting tip does work...even if only one of the full-time resident adults in their homes was using it.)

Why Calvin lets a simple request to do a quick chore curdle his experience of his summer vacation...

https://theviewfromladylake.blogspot.com/2025/07/a-vacation-spoiled.html

Well, because he's a horrid little brat, of course. That's the point of the strip. Named for a writer who said that most people just aren't destined for eternal happiness, Calvin just isn't destined to have a happy childhood. He has no friends. Even his own parents don't like him. Even his favorite toy is someone he imagines fighting with more than someone he loves. But Calvin does things real children do when they're caught up in passing clouds of stupidity, so how do we (adults and children) keep simple requests from curdling vacations, or weekends?

Calvin's parents could try considering his personality. Calvin shows little evidence of a moral sense, but he is a self-starter. He doesn't wait for permission or instructions. He has his own plans for every minute of every day. He does not like any interruption of those plans, even when it seems to adults that all he's doing is playing with a toy.

For kids like Calvin, playing, or reading, or listening to the radio, are work; the kids are learning things, even if those things aren't spelled out in the curriculum for their age group. 

So how can those kids do the work they assign themselves while also making some sort of contribution to the family where they're getting free rent, meals, and chances to do their self-assigned work? 

Short answer: Parents need to plan. This is difficult for some parents, like the poor little hypothyroid patient who got so many Calvin-like reactions out of me when I was older and deserved spankings more than Calvin in the cartoons. Whether just screaming for the child to drop everything and do something for you, when you feel like it, is merely an ego trip or is partly justified by somebody's disease condition, it's not going to work well with a child who has per own agenda for the day. Parents can get a lot more work out of the same child if they get up early in the morning, make plans, tell the child what's expected, and let the child make per own plans for the rest of the day--after they've done their chores.

Suppress any urge to yell "Yoo-hoo, Calvin, come and take out the garbage now" unless that's a punishment for his not having taken out the garbage on schedule. Instead, make it part of the family schedule that Calvin will collect and put out all the garbage after supper. 

Forget about "Hey, Calvin, come and peel the potatoes now." Instead, announce at breakfast, "I want to make a stew for supper. If you come in and clean and cut up the potatoes for the stew at five o'clock, Calvin, we might have time to bake cookies." 

If you feel tempted to holler "Calvin, come and tend this bean patch now," punish yourself with a forfeit: You didn't put it on the day's schedule, so you tend the bean patch. Next time you'll remember to say, "Calvin, I'd like to see the bean patch cleaned up by midday," at breakfast. Better yet, by next year Calvin will be responsible for the bean patch; if he loses crop yields to weeds or beetles, there goes his pocket money, without a word out of you. 

Even parents who are bringing up the sort of child who does want to be told what to do, and how to do it, at every step, need to think about whether that's the way to teach the child anything. This child may seem easier to live with than Calvin is; may be more motivated by adult attention rather than by actual learning, or may in fact be a slower learner, but in any case seems more fun to teach things to. But are you actually teaching the child anything? After guiding the child through every step a few times, it's good to let the child remember what to do next. If he forgets to empty one of the wastebaskets into the main garbage bag, he has to go back and do that step later, 

What about the middle school reader who may be saying, "Yes, but one or the other of the adults at my house is too sick, lazy, stupid, disorganized, hung-over, or whatever, to make plans and teach me how to do things on a sensible schedule?" You have my sympathy. My mother was too ill to make plans for a few years. I talked back and acted bratty and felt very sorry for her because I remembered when she'd had more use of her brain. Fortunately I didn't act too bratty to be able to work with and learn from her when she was thinking clearly--after changing to stronger medication, or eventually learning how to get herself off the medication.

(Some kids, like Huckleberry Finn, really do have to leave a dysfunctional adult alone to destroy per own life while the kids find alternative parent-figures. That situation is too awful to be addressed in a random blog post. We are talking here about adults who are basically competent, but, perhaps because nobody helped them form the habit of planning the day's chores in the morning, aren't doing that for you.) 

A better plan than whining and acting bratty would be to take over part of the adult's role on behalf of this unfortunate adult in your family. If person is hypothyroid (or hung-over) person probably sleeps later than you do. Practice getting up very quietly so you can tidy up the mess person very likely left in the kitchen and cook breakfast, or go out and pick the vegetables in the garden, or whatever you know needs to be done at your house. Get it right: your sick relative is likely to feel very defensive when you act more like a responsible adult than person does, and may try to defend per ego by whining that you've done the chore all wrong. If what needs to be done is something you've not done before, let the adult show you how to do it, on whatever schedule person is capable of moving on. It will probably be enough of a good healthy shock if you bring the adult breakfast in bed and say "Could you show me how to fix the porch steps today, please?" 

In any case, your strategy is to do more useful work around the house all by yourself than person can get out of you by nagging and spoiling your day.  

Status Update: Pris Mulls Continuing Education

Katydids are singing. Summer has passed its height. The hottest heat wave of summer, like the coldest freeze of  winter, often comes after the solstice and this week is expected to be the hottest week of summer...

Kingsport, the small city to which I could still walk if the side of it facing me hadn't become a slum, is bracing for brutal heat. Life-threatening heat. Don't walk or work outdoors if you can possibly avoid it, people are being told. Stay inside air-conditioned buildings. Drink lots of water. Check on older people daily.

At the Cat Sanctuary, the worst heat wave of summer might cause me to shut down the computers and take a siesta, or, if the temperature stays above 90 degrees longer than I can sleep, clear out the spring branch. This is a fun job, with which help from any or all of The Nephews may add to the fun but will not be necessary. 

In Kingsport local warming could easily push the temperature above 100 degrees. By focussing on whether people do or don't believe in global warming and ignoring the causes of local warming, in theory Kingsport could, as some places in Africa did in the 1930s and 1940s, see officially documented temperatures in the 120s and 130s Fahrenheit--officially measured in the shade, not near pavement--push up to privately observed temperatures of 140 Fahrenheit in crowded paved areas. Oldtimers who remembered a 140-degree day used to be told that the official temperature had peaked at 131 degrees in 1931 and say, "But we were not at the weather station. We were not in the shade." 

(Buy large cups of ice chips, replacing as necessary. Forget about formal dinner-party etiquette. Eat that ice. Let individual chips melt in your mouth, on your head, and down your shirt. In the US eating or playing with ice is thought to indicate cravings for physical sensations, i.e. more and kinkier sex, when it's done at normal temperatures in the 70s and 80s. At temperatures above 100 it indicates a will to live and is perfectly polite and proper. Applying ice chips to friends and pets indicates a preference that they also survive, and is also polite and proper, and is done by diplomats in Washington when they stray out of air-conditioned buildings. The proper places to apply ice are the top of the head, the back of the neck, the wrists, and any skin that has actually been burned. What is impolite, at temperatures above 100, is putting other people to the trouble of treating you for heat exhaustion in a hospital, when you could have stayed cool by using ice as nature intended.)

It's instructive, though annoying, to Google heat records in Africa. Some localities did set new ones last summer and may set new ones this summer, though that would be records for the highest temperature on a specific day. No recent temperature has broken the 131-degrees-Fahrenheit-in-the-shade record from 1931...yet some people want very much to focus on last summer's relatively mild 124 degrees in the shade in Algeria, because it fits into the "global warming" narrative. "Human-induced climate change!" they squawk hopefully, like parrots who want crackers. It is human-induced but it is NOT global. Global warming is a theoretical possibility that would be difficult to verify and would have to be consistently verified over more years than Al Gore has lived, or can live. What northern Africa had survived before and is surviving now is human-induced local climate changes. We can and should try to avoid contributing to global warming, but what threatens us personally this week is local.

There are remedies. Kingsporters should be in a mood to think about them, this week. They include dispersing people away from densely populated areas, reducing pavement and motor travel, maintaining more green trees and green space between houses. Buildings with floor space higher than 20 feet above the ground should be used as storage barns, not home or work spaces for human beings. 

"Walkable communities" form naturally when zoning regulations are not written to favor motorists over ordinary people. With no interference from "planners" or governments, people naturally like to build houses at the corners of farms where they can see neighbors' houses, at least if they go out and look, and put markets, schools, churches, and shopping zones in space that feels central to a few dozen households. That's how a walkable community comes to exist. What "planners" need to do is get out of the way and let walkable communities rebuild themselves in small towns and suburbs.

"Smart cities" are an abomination. The human body was not built to live in cities. Cities have always been breeding grounds for diseases and wars. Intelligently planned cities are, like Washington, planned to be nobody's permanent home, to lack representation in a democratic government because the people spending time in the city are supposed to be the representatives of their own small towns and farm communities. That does not rule out monitoring traffic or policing public gatherings, but it does mean that cities are where people stay temporarily to do jobs, coming in as representatives of other places and returning to those places when the jobs are done. Washington was meant to be a ghost town at this time of year. The homeless bums should have hitchhiked out of there last week. 

Your Members of Congress should be touring the leafier, shadier, cooler parts of their districts now. If they're not, remind them that this is their duty. You don't need them to be damaging their brains in the city's heat. You need them to be connecting with their rural voter base, and this is the time of year when they're meant to do that.

There always have been and always will be summer heat waves. The foolhardy and the very unfortunate have always died during summer heat waves by spending too much time out in the sun. Humankind has always survived by resting from heavy labor, dispersing ourselves in shady places, dipping ourselves in water to maintain normal body temperatures, fanning ourselves, and pitying the fools who go out in the midday sun.

Anyway, traditionally in these United States the big bad heat wave of late July, sometimes into early August, is when schools are closed but stores start advertising back-to-school sales. Shrewd merchants know that people like this reminder that the heat wave lasts only a week or two, that it will soon be over and people will go back to their regular jobs or studies. 

So I was near a television set at some time last week, and it was blaring about a new division of the University of Maryland, called the University of Maryland's Global Campus, open to anyone who has a computer in the United States or any allied country. 

Hmm. In Virginia we think of the University of Maryland as a bit of an intellectual lightweight. Virginia students traditionally start school earlier (in the term during which the child's sixth birthday falls, rather than seventh) and are expected to absorb more information in each year. But wottha--I'm an adult, anyway. I'd have the advantage of forty years of self-education over any normal undergraduate anywhere. I've always thought a BS, or even MS, would be a nice addition to my trade school certificates. And I remembered having learned, through research for a writing job about ten years ago, that many online programs are available free of charge to people over sixty. Hey...I may actually be over sixty now, or some time in the next few academic years, in real life. Old enough to Zoom in from a community college computer center and be the "Go Granny Go" student who keeps the kids on their cute little toes, anyway. 

Grandma Bonnie Peters didn't go to college until she qualified for free tuition as a senior citizen, so community college courses were just right for her. Everyone enjoyed the idea of her going to college enough that it provided some natural, sustainable economic stimulation for the community. Her children went to a few classes with her. The school sent out a minibus to bring her and some other students onto campus for classes and take them back home. People treated her to lunch, and she treated them back.  She bought books and art supplies. She took painting for her arts requirement, and actually had her work shown in a gallery where she sold some paintings and got some commissions. Well, she had her talents and I have mine, but in any case she had a lot of fun. So did the classmates and teachers who remembered her thirty years later.

Meh. I remember trying to run this web site from the community college's computer center. Excellent computers. Delightful people. And what a time I had getting there and back again. The worst weather is of course the worst time to rely on a car pool. Some days I had a reliable ride back but not a reliable ride to campus, so I'd walk a few miles out the highway before someone going the right way stopped. 

Often people in Gate City would say "I can take you to Duffield," which I learned was not a good idea. People I knew from Gate City or Big Stone Gap did not stop at any of the truck stops in Duffield every day. The thing about finding a ride in Duffield is that anyone who doesn't know you personally naturally assumes you've just been released from jail and are interested in doing something that might get you back in there. Nobody believes an adult trying to join a car pool outside the county jail is really interested in doing legitimate academic work at a college eighteen miles up the road. So you might as well start walking, and whether you walk toward Gate City or toward Big Stone Gap, you're likely to lose the day's supply of time and energy on the road, and quite possibly be harassed or insulted, before you get to either town. The misery of having to turn down offers from the jailbirds and the wrong sort of truckers outweighed the rare prospect of being able to join a car pool with friends. From Gate City it looked as if it would be easy to join a car pool going to the college from Duffield, but in practice I remember that actually happening--twice, both times involving one retired couple. Usually if my feet touched the ground in Duffield the day was lost.

And, having done those two years at the overpriced church college, I didn't have a lot of community college courses left to take, unless we count the trade school programs taught there. I have thought seriously about taking the electrician's assistant course. If my Significant Other hadn't become ill when he did, if we'd gone on renovating and reselling abandoned houses, we might have been able to write it off as job training on his business taxes. Of course the classes meet on winter nights when the school never did offer bus service. Of course I no longer have a more experienced partner in home improvement, though as men my age are being laid off and "retiring' I'd like to meet one--if there were men my age who didn't already have families or obvious reasons why nobody will ever marry them.

Oh, the days, and the nights, of commuting to and from the college. The missed car pools! The road harassment! Tourists walking around the towns of Duffield and Clinchport are welcomed, but anyone walking along the highway near Duffield is presumed to be a jailbird at whom some people throw garbage; I was hit squarely on the back of the head with a half-full Big Gulp cup, once. I walked twenty miles when the temperature stood at twenty degrees Fahrenheit, once, in falling snow, in comfortable but uninsulated canvas shoes. I walked twenty-two miles in the rain, another night. 

A Lee County policeman once informed me that, whatever the law said, he reckoned walking on the part of the highway that runs through Lee County at night was evidence of insanity, and he would arrest me and keep me at the Lee County jail until someone from Gate City came to take me home in a car, if I walked through Lee County again. Seriously. I might not be chargeable with any offense but that officer was not going to let me walk in peace. And I hate to say it but he does have a point. The part of the highway that runs through Lee County was built to discourage foot traffic. There are places where your options are walking in a full speed traffic lane, or literally hand-over-hand along the guard rail along a bridge, and motorists coming down the hill toward the bridge tend to pick up speed, too; I never felt exactly safe on the outside of the guard rail, having seen speeding vehicles slam into those rails. I did walk home from the college again, though...because Lee County does not put policemen on the highway very late at night, and if I walked all the way from Big Stone Gap, by the time I reached Lee County the local police had gone home to bed. And the late-night truckers and worse types of people on the road knew this, and drove accordingly.

A Wise County fireman reckoned that my walking home from the college at night was dangerous enough to justify deployment of emergency vehicles, and even threatened to complain to Delegate Kilgore about it. The last thing I want to do is be used by the opposition party to complain about Delegate Kilgore's voice of frugality in the State budgeting process. 

And the really galling thing was that I had sponsors who were willing to pay anyone taking evening classes, or even regular afternoon classes, for adding me to a regular, reliable car pool. I even had one sponsor who had a divorced twenty-something daughter living at home, taking community college courses, who told daughter and me in no uncertain terms, "My daughter WILL bring you home after her evening class on Mondays." Daughter was a nice kid, as her generation go. She did take me home after one or two classes. Along the way she explained that she thought of long drives as her "me time" when she liked to smoke cigarettes, blast rock music out the windows, and brood about her life. Also her course did not require her to show up for more than the two evening classes, and after those two evenings she never did. I advertised. Didn't students want to earn gas and meal money? Well, it seemed, they didn't. The community college doesn't put that much financial pressure on them. Apparently they preferred to drive alone and be free to make side trips of their own when they felt like it.

Meanwhile, what had happened to the college bus service? A horrible fascist ("public-private partnership") operation had eaten it up. According to their web site, "Mountain Empire Older Citizens" now runs "Mountain Empire Transit," which provides transportation for anyone in any part of Scott, Lee, or Wise Counties, for fees that completely submarined the local taxi services in which so many housewives, young people, and retirees used to earn their pocket money. I believe in public transportation so I really tried to support that DISservice, in the past. I just can't. For one thing they want to offer "need-based" transportation, for which they can beg rich sponsors for more actual money,. rather than ordinary fee-based transportation like an ordinary city bus service. They don't want to say "We have a bus that stops at point A at eight o'clock and reaches campus at nine, and a bus that stops on the campus at four o'clock and reaches point A again at five." Oh no, that's not the way their system works. They want to ask lots of questions about who you are and what-all you "need" and how they can "take care of you" by meeting you at your door, even though in practice they have exactly one bus that runs from Scott County to Wise County, anyway, and it's a real milk run that takes more than two hours to bounce around back roads and collect a lot of mental patients who work at some sort of make-work program in Duffield, and they don't like or have room for normal adults on that bus. A person riding that bus to the college would be unable to attend most of the classes taught, would not get a very long work session in the computer lab either, and would spend more time being annoyed by mental patients on the bus than getting any kind of useful work done. 

And the employees gossip about paying passengers; you might be familiar with city buses and be prepared to pay your fare, sit down, and read, knit, or look out the window, but the bus drivers are prepared to ask lots of questions about you so they can, among other things, be sure you know which other passengers are going in for dialysis or for addiction counselling, and which are mental patients, and who's "gay," and on and on...They don't like people who don't chatter and gossip with them, either. I had one frustrated extrovert deliberately drive past my stop so that I had to get off the bus at a place where the road had no shoulder at all, where I had to scramble down over rocks. I complained to the office about that one and got, "And what would the driver's race have to do with this?" I said, "Well, I'm  comparing his job performance with Greyhound drivers and DC Metrobus drivers." The office idiot said, "We are not Greyhound or Metro, and we never will be." This is all too true. That would-be-nanny company's shabby excuse for a driver would never have got behind the wheel of a Metrobus. Probably most of the drivers they employ wouldn't.

So regular use of the community college is just not a sustainable plan for me, or for any non-driver from Gate City. Until we can cut out the festering sore of "public-private partnership" and have a sustainable mix of tax-funded (school bus) and for-profit (taxicab) transportation, Scott County has access to a community college only for those who choose to drive thirty miles each way in their own private cars.

Zooming into online classes, however, might still have possibilities.

Well...what kind of classes would I want, anyway? Writing would be a logical choice for a writer, but does the MFA degree really teach writers more than writing for publication does? I feel about it the way C.S. Lewis did. (I have a samizdat copy of his portion of the Oxford literature course.) People who ought to be writers want to read as many of the books on the Oxford reading list as they can get, and I do, and I have done, but they need a college course on those books only if they're young writers who want to build a network for a teaching career. I'm not young and the world has plenty of young people who want to teach English in public and private schools. 

A recent poll found that a slight majority of today's adults feel that online video games ought to be taught as a college course. Meh. I don't think I'm visual enough to do well in that sort of course and, in any case, I'm too old to use video games to learn how to fly a fighter plane. 

I am a Christian and I'd like to write Christian books. For that certification as a Bible teacher might help my career. Liberty University is practically local and I might be able to Zoom from a local Baptist church. But, again, do I really need a degree for writing? It's not an option I want to close off completely but there's another option that feels more radical and more fun.

I saw the idea first in an ad for a writing fellowship program in Canada: Take biology courses, teach a freshman biology class, and publish a book about something related to ecology, sustainability--something Green. I know there's a lot of Poison Green in the Canadian school system these days, probably even at McGill, although McGill offered some of the most attractive fellowships and I have a lot of respect for my husband's school. Nevertheless.

I would like to learn more about biomass, about ways to keep those sewers local people thought they wanted so much from polluting our lovely aquifers and all those rivers south of us from which so much of Tennessee gets their drinking water. 

I would like to have enough formal education in entomology that my being asked to write articles about the Hemileucas, or about nicer insects I'd rather look at, wouldn't feel so much like a bad joke about the quality of Wikipedia or the Internet generally. 

"The world needs more entomologists," one college I Googled said, "particularly in Africa." We've seen in the Butterfly of the Week posts here how many African and Asian butterflies remain to be documented. Insects with more pressing economic significance need to be studied, too. I am not the one who needs to be doing those studies. Africa and Asia need no more Anglo-American "saviors" coming in to tell the people how to live with their wildlife. African and Asian people need to be studying their own ecology, down to the insects and the algae. I could help them write their theses and publish their studies, but that would be more editing than research.

I'd be interested in biology generally. Though I'm not a great gardener--the secret of what success my garden enjoys is its emphasis on hardy native species--I actually like plants more than insects. I like cute little woodland creatures, too, as can be seen from my one-way instant bonding with Jimmy Skunk (I was afraid he'd been poisoned last winter, but he's still alive!) and Dawn Possum. 

I'm probably too old to be hired as a park ranger but I'd like to be a more informed and informative writer about this land that I love.

So...The University of Kansas offers free mini-courses in entomology for everybody, probably aimed at people with a sixth grade education. Beyond that? As regular readers remember, I have a lot of respect for Purdue, enough that I chatted with them first. Purdue has no free senior courses and recommends none; they have online courses for about $500 per credit-hour, $250 for veterans--I'm not one. 

The University of Florida has an impressive entomology program, with the butterfly museum from which this web site's got several photos. If only their biology department did not include Kevin Folta. I don't think I'd ever be able to work with him. I'm not sure I'd want to work with people who did. All scientists make mistakes. Usually there's no shame in it, but usually scientists' mistakes are not based in hate and contempt for the people who have been physically harmed  by those mistakes. Anyway Florida's web site didn't advertise free senior courses.

The University of Maryland has an undergraduate biology program with graduate studies in entomology and does advertise free senior courses...but I think they require residence in Maryland. In the absence of a trusted Nephew to run the Cat Sanctuary, I couldn't really reside in Maryland any more. 

I'm still checking other universities' online programs. I might not go back to virtual school this fall, anyway, but it's a thing I'd like to do.

What Would Schools Look Like Without a Federal Department of Education?

In the Powell Valley News for 10.2.24 a man from Kentucky describes "what education was like...before the [federal] Department of Education was established in 1980." Reading his list, I see at once that he's speaking for his Kentucky self, and he's also older than I am. By comparing memories with him, I think we can get a clearer picture of what modern education might be without a federal Department of Education.

Bottom line: in all but the very poorest areas, for which aid funds might be established, schools would be about as well funded as local people thought they needed to be. They'd lose some frills that local people think they're better off without. Funding is not, however, what makes a good school.

Here are Dave Jones' ten memories, compared and contrasted with mine. He's talking about a school in Kentucky in the 1950s. I'm talking about a school in Virginia in the 1970s. In each case I'm condensing his words.

1. DJ: There were no school buses. Kids walked to school, or Mum drove you if the weather was bad.

PK: There were school buses. Because it was the baby boom, there were not nearly enough school buses for each child to have a seat. Three or four bodies on a seat built for two was the norm. The bus stank of already breathed, deoxygenated air, and often worse than that, as a direct consequence of everyone breathing each other's breath. One thing that probably contributed to some bus drivers' turning against children was having to clean the seats and floors where kids were sick. Kids could be motivated to do a lot of things by a rare chance to walk to or from school.

2. DJ: There was no school lunch program. You brought your lunch, or walked home. There was no free lunch for low income kids.

PK: There was a school lunch program. Some items, like hot dogs and cookies, appealed to children who asked their parents to send lunch money. Most school meals disgusted children and, if their parents sent lunch money, most of the items on most of the trays went straight into the garbage bins. I often found it difficult to eat the lunch I'd brought from home amidst the clamor and odors of the cafeteria. Subsidized lunches and milk were available for children whose parents fitted inside quite liberal guidelines. My brother and I were registered for subsidized milk, so we could have fresh cold milk with lunch, but were always supplied with our own sandwiches and fruit. After a few hours in a stuffy classroom a sandwich on dry, hard, wholemeal bread and a piece of fruit that had had the peeling cut open for eating without a knife tended to lose any appeal they'd had, so even they often went into the bins. After a few years we were informed that we could eat cafeteria lunches any time we wanted them, although that was what our health-conscious mother wanted to avoid. What would you expect children to do? I never asked for a free bowl of broccoli to replace a dried-out peanut butter sandwich, but I'd take a hot dog or a cookie if those were offered. However, after grade five I was trusted to sneak into the school library alone and enjoy a good book at lunchtime.

3. DJ: If a kid had a disability, that kid did not go to school. The students' toilet was in the basement and was not accessible.

PK: The buildings were accessible to crutch or cane users, less so to wheelchair users. Disabilities were handled on a case-by-case basis.  My brother and I were aware of having more classmates with disabilities than students in the past would have had. "Progress" meant more adaptive technology allowing more people with disabilities to participate fully in social life.

4. DJ: If a kid had a learning disorder, that kid just fell behind.

PK: That had happened. Notoriously it had happened to the beekeeper with whom my brother studied beekeeping. He was the youngest of six brothers, all self-employed professionals, and he could have done any of the jobs any of them did. Built his own house, had an impressive private library, could discuss the books...but he only ever said he was storing books for his brothers. Because, due to an injury in early childhood, he couldn't speak or swallow solid food.  So he didn't learn anything in primary school and was classified as an "ineducable moron." My generation heard "retarded" as a relatively respectful and accurate word for someone who actually had a brilliant mind, but failed to show evidence of its development during a few critical years. Anyway he made a good living "being retarded," and although it was technically welfare-cheating I've never really blamed him for it. He would have been a little younger than Mr. Jones. 

Teachers were actively learning about learning disorders. A lot of people did fall behind. People in my neighborhood still employ laborers who "can't read" because of dyslexia, have speech impediments, and other things that were allowed to derail their education. But this was visibly happening to fewer people every year. Principal Oscar Peters, whom my brother and I so deeply detested, was a hero to people like the writer known as Shalecka Boone because he advocated for funding to get "homebound tutors" to visit people like SB, who he argued had a brilliant mind despite being wheelchair-bound. (SB was closer to Mr. Jones's age; her baby sister was about my age.)

5. DJ: There was no supervised physical education, art or music in elementary schools.

PK: There were supervised physical education, art, and music in elementary school but the first two depended on the individual classroom teacher's abilities. In grades one and two the teachers would let us do one or another of those things whenever we got too wiggly for other lessons. Mrs. B. in grade three actually taught p.e. on wet days; all year she dangled the promise to let us play baseball in front of us but only on the last day of school did she get permission to do it, and most of us never got a turn at bat. I'll never forget the disappointment in grade four, which I did at a different school, where they played softball regularly and I was so far behind everyone else that I never did learn to play a game I'd been led to imagine I'd like. Mrs. B.'s idea of teaching art was teaching us to maintain tidy little pigeonholes in a cardboard box she'd built for us to store crayons, glue, and scissors in. Next year Mr. Ed. in grade four took away art time if people were unruly, although the school supplied tempera paint and coarse paper, and when we did get art class Mr. Ed. usually said we had to copy one of some big cartoons that stayed on the bulletin board all year, so he could test our progress. He showed us a movie about shading our drawings but he was unqualified to teach the skill. Miss Mean in grade five didn't try to teach art at all, but did lead us in calisthenics for a week or two in spring, during which every one of us did the exercises better than Miss Mean. Mrs. Dunce in grade six didn't try to teach art or p.e. In all grades music had its own teachers and was offered more or less regularly, though not every single week unless your parents paid for piano lessons (which started in grade two) or you made it into the Beginner Band (which started in grade five), both of which brought music into your life four days a week.

6. DJ: Third and fourth grades, and fifth and sixth grades, were in one room each and had one teacher each.

PK: Each grade from kindergarten to grade six had over 100 students divided among four classes, and each year's class assignment put different people in the same homeroom--the idea was that everybody would have been everybody's classmate for at least one year. Because promotion to the next grade depended on having learned something in the grade before, grade seven had about 150 students divided among five rooms and grade eight had about 250 divided among ten. 

7. DJ: Some kids had to miss school during January and February because they did not have good shoes or coats.

PK: In Virginia everybody had shoes and coats. Not that everybody thought they had good ones, there was plenty of room for label envy, but if adults didn't think a child was bundled up to local standards they would have brought that child a coat and ordered the child to wear it.

8. DJ: I was in an all White school. Black kids went to a separate school.

PK: Grade seven still had copies, on the back shelves, of old history books that printed the old law that White and Black children could not be required to go to the same schools. (In Virginia they could choose to go to integrated private schools, unlike in Kentucky, where Berea College was forced, under protest, to segregate the dormitories.) Gate City had had segregated schools until, early in Mr. Jones's school years, the Supreme Court had legalized integration. People had seen the financial benefit of integrating the schools and done it promptly, mostly with a good will, apart from a few teachers (mostly from the Black school, of course) who had to find different jobs.

9. DJ: There were no organized sports programs until the ninth grade, then only for boys.

PK: Oh, mercy. We already had a reputation to maintain. Team sports started with boys' football, boys' and girls' basketball, in grade seven. Track meets started in grade four. The name "Blue Devils" traces back to the Great War in the 1910s but my understanding was that Gate City adopted it, a little later, in honor of the Duke University team on which some people hoped one day to play.

10. DJ: In elementary school there was no school library, nurse, or counsellor. In high school there was a library, but no nurse or counsellor.

PK: Every school had to have a library and a nurse, but baby-boomers were saner than subsequent generations and didn't have to have counsellors until grade eight when we had some choice of which classes to take. The school I attended in grade four, in California, acquired a counsellor in the middle of the year. Apart from the day he came into class to tell everyone where to find his office, when I remember thinking he was trying to imitate Morgan Freeman's character on "The Electric Company," I never saw him and don't remember his name, but a few kids went to his office regularly because they said he was cool to hang out with. 

So. Quite a range, and plenty of schools were better funded than either of ours, and plenty were worse run. Our Adayahi seldom talked about his school memories, which were not a pleasant subject; he was a war baby, not a boomer, and grew up in a mining camp where he said the school emphasized delousing more than actual education. He remembered outhouses at schools. I think all schools were required to have water-flush toilets after about 1950. 

Would more of the luxuries seem like necessities in a United States without a federal Department of Education? Probably. Would people end up paying more school taxes on the state, city, or county level to provide the kind of luxuries they thought their schools needed? Very likely. The benefit of dismantling the DoE would be more local control over, e.g., the amount of content that was there to promote p.c. attitudes rather than teach facts and skills in the local school curricula. It would be more likely to ensure that any Gate City student who went to e.g. the University of Maryland or East Tennessee State University would feel that freshman and sophomore classes at those universities were reviews of what Gate City did in grade nine. Or, if universities were required to allow students to test out of classes when they already knew the material, our students could save a fair bit of tuition money.

Because we don't need all that funding to do things better than people at other schools, that's why.