Paper Blues

I’ve got the blues about paper today

I walk around my house examining notes, short stories,
papers from high school written in long hand

looking through papers to throw away

Thinking about days long gone when we learned to write script

My mind jumps ahead: future generations where no one will know how to write script. Writing by hand will disappear except for a few who carry on. Handwriting will become a fine transcribed art that no one teaches and that no one knows how to do anymore.

My cabdriver explained how now-a-days, children do their assignments online on the computer so they don’t write anything down at all anymore not like we did back in the day. He said they barely learn print, they type everything on the computer.

Columbia forced me to buy a typewriter in 1978. They said hand written assignments get lower grades. Hasn’t anyone explained this to you before? I mean I ‘m sorry to break it down to you like this and feel bad no one told you before that at Columbia. Miz. Leftow, you already lost one grade this term by handing in hand-written homework. You would have gotten a B+ but because it was hand written you only are due a C+. Sorry…

When I explained how poor I was she said you’re smart, you’re here at Columbia so you’ll figure out a way to survive.

Back then all I had was two pairs of jeans a skirt a few blouses and one sweater from the $10 store. I had no money to spend but needed that typewriter. Back then I couldn’t conceive a typewriter had a memory so you wouldn’t have to typewrite the whole page if you made a mistake.

My cabbie ‘s conversation brings me back. He’s telling me how hard it is to get by with four children, two are teenagers. "The only way we get by is because my wife lies and says I don’t live there so she can get food stamps Medicaid and section 8," he said as he drove his Lincoln Town Car, working and paying for High Class radio service trying to make a buck. "It ain’t easy out here and that rent we pay would cost us 2100 instead of the 900 we pay and in this way we get by," he confided.

"Four children and us and two cats. I show the vet our Medicaid card," he continued, "and then we don’t pay. Medicaid for cats is good," he said. "We’re doing the best we can to get by and she works on the side too. My wife’s a certified home health nursing aide and she gets work a few days a week at a hospital up in the Bronx. After they take out the taxes it’s about 50 bucks for a 12-hour day then she got to make sure it don’t get in the way of watching out for our children so thank God she doesn’t work everyday."

"It gives her time off to cook and clean house and watch over our teens and younger children. We pay for catholic school – and they have to go to college. There’s no jobs out there you know. We try to get by – but it’s hard to qualify. That’s why she wants to work too. She works off the books. There’s just too many bills to pay. You know growing children need clothes and shoes - those are expensive."

"It’s a different world out there," my cabby alerts me that the ride and story have come to an end. I look around me at all the paper, the notes and each piece of paper seems to have so much meaning I don’t know how to throw it out.

They don’t do things the way they used to. My cabbie is a young man. He’s only 42. His radio comes alive. A voice asks his location in Spanish.

It’s a lot to chew on. I think about all the finagling I did to get by twenty-two years working professionally to help our young – a noble job made harder by the huge bureaucracy I functioned in.

I wanted a house but it went into foreclosure but I still have my state subsidized Mitchel-Lama. They’re hard to come by now-a-days and they don’t intend to build more. Now the Mitchel-Lama rentals are so high that when people don’t lie andtell the truth about who lives where, no one can afford to live anywhere anymore.

In Washington Heights where I live most of the people survive on a lie because otherwise they’d live so poor they’d be in deep shit .

Worked hard for that money and still

Can’t get me no no no no - satisfaction

What’s wrong with me?

I only want to read about misery spite hate crime. I never wanted to read about rabbits talking to badgers. Why would I want to read about that since all I ever lived were crimes and passions, the wrong way to live.
That’s me! Always in the wrong place at the wrong time even born the wrong side of the track.
I’m always wrong. What’s wrong with me? Everything’s so god damned hard and for once why can’t I have it easy. Is it wrong to ask to expect for once in a fucking moon something good and unexpected - for something fortuitous to happen.
I guess that’s why I don’t want to read about happy bears. I hate fantasy creatures and animated films. I can’t relate to talking to happy bears or some other creatures. It’s lonely out here. What’s a sister got to do to help you understand her?
It’s hard out here. Maybe it’s hard out here for you too, down on your luck or things got you down or you’re tired of fighting about or for things that shouldn’t need fighting for. So am I when you get down to it.
But a sister’s gotta do what a sister’s gotta do to survive; you know what I mean.
A sister’s gotta survive never consider suicide it’s not an option
because a sister knows that there are others just like her who have been through more than her too. A sister has got to survive to show others it can be done and then teach them how to survive too. It doesn’t matter how much you hate this system you gotta learn to fight your way through it to survive. Even if you’re not in some perfect god damned family I once imagined existed before I turned my mind away from fantasy of nice stories about nice people and preferred to expose myself to books about mind mystery and crime.
Sister let me show you your way through this torrent of events, cause a sister’s gotta survive. Our children need raising. It would be worse without you there. God forbid my children grow up like I did. A child’s not meant to see all the things I saw by choice cause I’m a Buddhist or by coincidence, who knows? – All depends on your view of it, your belief system. You can win some but you can’t win them all.
A vivid memory captures me walking across Columbia’s campus in a driving icy winter rain with some crazy heavy set woman pushing a wagon full of books. She sat near me in class and one day invited me to a campus movie and I came so I felt the least I could do to repay her would be to walk her slow pace in that horrid rain.
“Where you headed,” she conversed, “to your next class or where?”
The wind whipped my face.
“I’m going to Lewisohn Hall like you are.”
“Oh,” she said, I’ve never seen you there before.”
“Likewise,” I replied. I’ve never seen you there before either.”
“So where are you going?”
“To drop off papers for financial aid.”
“What the fuck,” she said, “I’m a nurse and I gotta save my money and pay my way through here and I come here and then I’m paying for you too - you getting money to come here and I have to pay my own way.”
I opened my mouth but instead walked away. I pretended she didn’t exist though she was in my class. It was as though I had stuck her in a glass jar and covered the top with a net so she could breathe but not bother me. I could pay attention or not. She couldn't hurt me anymore. I was just glad I didn’t have to pretend to be her friend again and walk slow with her in another downpour.
Poor woman! What made her so hateful so unwilling to see -so hurtful? Didn’t she see that what happened to me can can happen to anyone?
Hmm, I guess she must have her own misery.
Don’t we all?

Reading writing ... equals literacy

The recent article I wrote on my blog, Our Educational System, spurred me on to re-examine how this system affects our young students and their skills. As a social worker who worked in our system in public high schools with teens from 13 to 21 years old for 16 years and then worked with pre-k children for another 5 years, I’d like to share what I learned about our children and their skills. This necessitates a comparison.
Back when I was in school we had five classes per grade, beginning with the number 1 class and proceeding to the number 5 class. Thus, there was 1-1, 2-1 etc. Logically speaking one would have thought that the 5 class would have been the slowest and the number 1 would have been the fast learners, however in my school, the 1 class was the “quick learners” and the number 2 class was the "health education class," which included wheelchair bound children and very slow learners. What really was strange was that everyone knew how to read albeit some read more slowly than others. Also everyone eventually learned to write as well. The slower learners weren’t as good with grammar and spelling and for many of the slower learners, spelling and grammar problems remained. I was always in the number 1 class as I was very precocious and generally learned anything to do with reading or writing very fast. My deficits were about where things are, so maps and map memorization was a problem for me. There were always more than 30 children in each class. In those days, my neighborhood, Washington Heights, (now called Hudson Heights by all the realtors) had many foreigners. The difference is that they were from many places, not like now when there are a handful of Russians and mostly Dominicans. There was a great influx of Puerto Ricans and Greeks to my area, and people from Russia and other Slavic nations (the nations now have since changed names). From the time when I was very young, all my teachers complained that I couldn’t keep quiet. Any foreigner was seated next to me and usually learned English quickly as I would share my notes and help them. This situation also seems unique now.
The first 5 years I worked with pregnant teens in high schools, I learned that over half of our students could not write a proper sentence. About half could write within two years of their grade level. About another quarter could write with many spelling and grammatical errors but the words would make sense. And the last quarter or 20% could not logically string one sentence to the next to write a cohesive paragraph on any given subject matter – even on one they know about. For example, if they were asked to write a paragraph on who is their favorite rapper and why, only half of them could do this successfully. I was dismayed to observe how poor their writing, reading and comprehension skills were. Teenagers 15 years old were writing at what I judged to be a second or third grade level. At this time, some of the high schools I worked at tried to get around this issue by teaching their youngsters to think and to argue out a point verbally. The principals applied for waivers from the state so the children could do a series of oral defenses and speeches instead of taking regents, where they learned to argue a thesis from beginning to end. I was impressed by what I saw but still, again, there was at least 40% who could not keep up to the regiment or structure and this was in spite of the judges trying hard to be very lenient. I wondered why our society had changed this much from the time I was a teen to now and I still don’t have an answer. I have met writers too who are good writers, and they cannot spell and don’t know proper grammar. Professional agents and book companies have told me, that they feel basic academic writing skill is unnecessary and unimportant. They say, what is important is that the person write well or rhyme well. I can round this out by adding that they will further say that's why they hire someone like me to do the editing and clean it up. And the weird thing here is that I know how to make street lit sound street lit enough and put in enough modernisms to make it a go on both sides too. White people and everyone else in the public schools now write Ebonics if they write at all. Proper writing is a dying skill today.
A few years back, a young man was sent to me from 9th grade. I was told to find out how he had gotten to this grade and couldn’t read or write at all. I did as I was told and apparently, he was such a sweet personality, that no one had paid attention to the fact that he couldn’t read an entire sentence. Even when given a children’s book for 5 to 7 year olds, he could barely read any of the words. OK, I admit this is unusual, but not as unusual as it seems. I have also met special education students who could barely write, but who could spout beautiful rhymes instantaneously apparently effortlessly as well.
I grew up without a television. Our radio broke when I was about 6 and wasn’t replaced for a few years. Books was my only entertainment, without which, I would have suffered even more than I did. As I tell everyone, my childhood was fraught with anxiety and despair. My mother was diagnosed with cancer when I was a few months old and the first year of my life welfare sent a series of caregivers to care for us so my dad could go to work. My mom was in hospital for about 6 months. We were have-nots in every way. I had two dolls which I had been given after I’d turned 6. I washed my own clothes and ironed them at 7 years old. Sorry, I wish I knew what childhood meant. One sister liked to play teacher and I learned to read and write to please her originally. I was reading and writing at 4 years old. I read and wrote for love.
Obviously I have no idea where this dilemma of our literacy is headed but one place it is headed is to put the entire onus for literacy on the teachers in the way of statistics like I described in the previous article. I also think that perhaps our society is going to return to a previous age when letter writers got paid and people got paid to read to others too. In the middle ages there was a particular class of people that were paid to perform this service for the general populace. Hey if I live long enough I can be one of those people. I urge you to talk to our teachers about this, talk to each other – you’ll see I’m not exaggerating.


Also check out this fascinating stuff:
John Taylor Gatto and his official website

Our Educational Sytem

Lorraine Kashdan got me started this morning on this educational memory lane tangent. I have a long history with the old Board of Education of New York City and the new Department of Education of New York City. Different names to feed us a new line of shit. I don't know how the educational system is in the UK but as the mom of an LD son and also because I worked (past tense) in our school system here for 21 years, I can tell you a lot. The system is a lot of bullshit and does not work to help you get what you need. Lorraine you touched a nerve! Ouch!
Our schools here in New York City have experts from UK visiting here to rate us and tell our administrators how to improve - but are UK success rates that much better? Not really if you do some research.
Our system here is about paperwork - not children's needs. Here you have to be an advocate for yourself and your children's needs. If you’re not – your children will fall through the cracks. Been there and done it and glad to be out of it on all counts ... professionally and personally - well not quite yet – as being involved with DubbleX means being involved with his son’s educational needs too.
I’ll give some history here then come back to my original thesis of how educational values are going down the drain and statistics are the on board values of the day and how now, raises will be given to those who have good statistics.
Back in the old days with the old board, my son was given several labels and diagnoses. As his condition changed and improved over the years he outgrew his diagnoses. The point is these diagnoses are all bullshit. The things to think about and work on are the child’s deficiencies. Once you have a clear idea of these deficiencies, it is easy to devise or find someone who can devise a series of instructional lessons developed to meet these deficiencies. My son’s educational deficiencies were in reading/ writing and math. My help came from an older sister who told me to use phonics to treat the first and gave me specific instructions. She said start with the letters AT then move through every letter of the alphabet and put it in front of the AT. This was only for starters. Eventually through this system you’d work your way through every vowel. OT, OB, OD. The point of this is that I sat with my son with a notebook. I divided the pages into 4 columns. The other first columns are the original columns we created together and afterwards he copied each word to the other three columns after we had practiced saying them several times.
Following is a short example of how my son and I worked together. I’d sit with him. We’d both have our own notebook and I’d kick off our learning session, “AAT is not a word, what about BAT? And I instructed him on sounds of each letter. After I wrote it on my own pad I’d wait while he copied in his first column. Then we’d go to C. CAT, etc. No doubt this was tedious but by the end of a summer following this routine my son’s grade level went up over 2.5 years. I also bribed him with whatever he wanted. Sometimes it was a special treat like burgers and fries at the local diner. Sometimes it was a comic book from the store. My sister ridiculed me when she found out I supported his love for comics and insisted he needed to read the classics. I read him Treasure Island. Honestly I didn’t remember this detail but my son happened to remind me of this the other day.
The math thing was very similar, beginning with the number 1 and adding 1, then 2 then 3 to the number 1 up to number 10 and copying it over 3 times. Eventually we got to 10 plus 10. The minuses go the same route. 10 minus 1, 10 minus 2, 10 minus 3, etc.
There was a clear parallel development between my inner growth and development and his. The more I learned about how I could parent him without losing my temper and by using a series of tactics and maneuvers to get him to do what I wanted the more I could move things along for both of us. I developed as a parent as he grew and developed.
Later when he was older we memorized the times tables with great difficulty and eventually he was permitted a calculator in high school. He was permitted to substitute a computer course for Spanish since that seemed to be undoable for him. Strangely, he took a liking to sign language and learned some from a friend of mine quite easily. Pity, that wasn’t an option for him. Obviously his mind works differently and he has developed a different pattern of intelligence.
My son not only graduated high school with honors, when he was in 7th grade, his nation wide testing scores proved how much this had helped him. His reading level tested at 12th grade level. Comic books are a mother to read – try it yourself sometimes – comic book writers have a great vocabulary. My son is a college graduate. We accomplished this with the following tactic. He dictated while I typed. It worked better this way for the papers he was required to write on various subjects.
I am very disappointed in the value of the educational system. A close friend, a history teacher, told me the other day that he was put on the carpet about his regents stats not being high enough. Even when students come from another school and he has never met them before, or students he hasn't taught for several years, show up and take the regents in his school he is responsible for their grades on the regents. Tell me anyone – does this make sense?
After this, his principal met with him and wrote him up for not having high enough pass stats. This teacher wrote a reply saying that his scores were 15% higher if you took out the children he never met before. When you took out the children who he met but it was over a year ago, then it came up another 5%. Still 68% rate is not good enough. These are children who may miss a day or 2 or more each school week.
Then the principal followed this up with that he has to see every test this teacher gives the class at least a week in advance. This particular history –social studies teacher makes up weekly quizzes for each class. He was further instructed by his principal to write every question on any of his quizzes from recent regents exams given over the last 2 years. This teacher went and bought half dozen regents prep books and began reading them so he could do as he was told.
This high school social studies teacher couldn't believe that the word holocaust is never mentioned or that it is only called World War II and makes no written mention of the word Nazi. This teacher really lost his mind when he saw that none of these books made any written mention regarding the 6 million Jews who were killed. What is written instead is "many people were killed". Yes indeedy, many people were killed along with 6 million Jews, gays, Asians, Gypsies and all ethnic types mixed race/religion bloods. Our educational system is becoming a system of systemically fed mistruths or partial truths feeding our children a very watered down version. Teachers are going to be rewarded for good statistical reports - not well educationally rounded children. Our educational system is turning our future, our children; into insipient, easy to control robots while the rich and powerful continue take control. Our children won't know our past, which is necessary to creating a new future. Those who are in charge - including Obama - don't have their children attend our public schools! Our entire educational system is a political challenge to an endangered species - us.