Perseverance

Perseverance

Today I introduced ten new vocabulary words that were harder than usual because my class likes challenges. The words may be difficult but we shall persevere, both because of their attitude and because persevere is on the list. They liked that word. They felt that it described them and their quest for a GED. All except Willy who announced that he does not persevere when life gets hard.

“If something is too hard I give up,” he told me. “It’s just not worth it.”

It’s not often that someone will admit that out loud. We may give up in our hearts but we usually put on a brave front for the world. It made me sad that this 30 year old man has found nothing in life that he values enough to strive for. I asked him,

“You have never had anything in your life that is important enough to fight for? No friend, no love, no job, no ideal?”

“No,” he answered. “Who needs the trouble? I would rather give up.”

When I asked him how he intended to get his GED if he didn’t persevere in his studies, he told me that he had attended classes before and had dropped out when they got too hard. He told me that if this class got too hard he would do the same thing here as well. Every work-ethic bone in my body rebelled at his attitude. In the US, where we’re all descended from immigrants who never had the luxury of giving up, perseverance is our mantra. When faced with someone for whom giving up was a way of life, I was speechless.

And Willy seemed to echo the limping spirit of our highest level students who had just taken their GED tests and not done as well as they had hoped. We’ve been spending a lot of time these past few weeks doing damage control, convincing them that this was just the first step on the road that they’ve chosen.

Throughout the year I spend a lot of time convincing students to study a little more, write one more sentence, read one more book. Especially the book part because, call me a romantic, I believe in the healing power of words sprinkled across a page. They remind me that there is much in this world that is well worth the fight. And above all it is Mr. William Shakespeare’s words that convince me that, if their sheer beauty can exist in this world, then there is always something worth getting up for.

So when I opened my morning paper to see that William had made the front page, I let my coffee grow cold as I read what catapulted him to the headlines. And as fate would have it, it turned out that old Will has managed to introduce perseverance to teenagers who were ready to give up. Ripeness is all.

The Globe’s Louise Kennedy in her article, Caught in the Act: Juveniles Sentenced to Shakespeare, described how the Bard is being used to turn lives around,
Tonight, 13 actors will take the stage at Shakespeare & Company in “Henry V.’’ Nothing so unusual in that — except that these are teenagers, none older than 17, and they have been sentenced to perform this play.
The show is the culmination of a five-week intensive program called Shakespeare in the Courts, a nationally recognized initiative now celebrating its 10th year. Berkshire Juvenile Court Judge Judith Locke has sent these adjudicated offenders — found guilty of such adolescent crimes as fighting, drinking, stealing, and destroying property — not to lockup or conventional community service, but to four afternoons a week of acting exercises, rehearsal, and Shakespearean study.
The teenagers show up resentfully on their first day of rehearsal. They tell each other that they’d rather go to jail or perform more traditional community service than do Shakespeare. They’ve given up before they’ve even laid eyes on one word sure that they’ll fail. How could they possibly be expected to read Shakespeare let alone perform it? The judge must be crazy. But in the end they do it.
Assitant director, Jenny Jadow explains, “We don’t have a standard we expect them to get to. We say to them, ‘You’re going to do this impossible task.’ And then, by God, they do.’’
It makes me wonder if that is the reason the directors chose Henry V, which tells the story of the Battle of Agincourt where 6,000 British soldiers managed to defeat 36,000 French knights. The play is a lesson in achieving the impossible through sheer perseverance.
Probation officer Nancy Macauley, who has worked with the program since its inception, sees its effects. “It makes a difference in their self-esteem, in their willingness to try something new,’’ Macauley said. “And the beauty of the program too, is that learning the words, and learning the meaning of the words, is something that they’ll have forever. . . . Nothing can take it away from them, which unfortunately is not always the case in life.’’
And so I decide that I will take Shakespeare back to Willy and my class. I will gather his words in my hands and offer them to my students to hold and to keep, so that they will be always be able take them out and dust them off when life gets too hard. And no one will be able to take that away from them.

Grey's Calalmity

Grey’s Calamity

There are times in my life when I’m thrilled to get more anything but most of the time I, like the architect Mies van der Rohe, believe that less is more. I don’t like things when they are overdone, overblown, overdressed. That being said there are still too many times when I get caught up in some ridiculous television series where everything is overdone, especially the melodrama.

The worst offenders are the final episodes, both end of season and end of show. They tend to sink under the weight of their writers’ overwrought imaginations. Last week I was the victim of one such overblown hit-and-run and I was powerless to stop watching. My old curse of having to know how it all turns out did me in.

I’m hooked on the show, Grey’s Anatomy, and thanks to cable have now seen every episode. I know every character’s quirks and every part of their convoluted relationship history. Last Thursday when I read that the finale would run for two hours, warning bells rang in my head. I knew if I was smart I would not watch it. The two hours were sure to be filled with every ridiculous scenario that the writers and their fevered imaginations could come up with.

Unfortunately I finished the book I was reading at about 8:30 and since it was too early to go to sleep I tentatively picked up the dreaded clicker. I assured myself that I would just find something else to watch for an hour and then go to sleep early for a change. Upon grazing the channels surprise, surprise, I happened upon Grey’s Anatomy—and I was sunk.

For those of you who have never seen this show I’ll give you a bare bones summary. It takes place in a hospital and follows the lives of a bunch of surgeons. End of story. But it helps to know that Derek Shepherd (McDreamy) is a brain surgeon and chief of surgery and Meredith Grey (aha now you understand that clever word play that is the show’s title) is a surgeon resident who has had an on-again-off-again relationship with Derek since time began and her best friend Christina is dating Iraq war vet surgeon Owen who might be in love with fellow Iraq veteran surgeon Teddy, who has dated Mark Sloane (McDreamy) who slept with Derek’s wife Addison and is Derek’s best friend and who still loves Meredith’s half sister Lexie who now loves Alex Kerev who has never really gotten over fellow surgeon Izzie who was dying of cancer but is okay now and starring in movies since George got hit by a bus. Any questions?

The finale threw a crazy shooter into the mix. I began the show thinking maybe this could make sense. The shooter’s wife had been operated on by Dr. Shepherd (see above) and something had gone wrong and they had to cut off her life support so of course he comes back to massacre everyone. I could kind of accept that. I watched as this looney-tunes guy randomly shot people if they weren’t nice to him and everyone hid in closets and under beds. And I knew that I was supposed to be sitting on the edge of my bed waiting to see if they were going to kill off anyone really important to the series but I didn’t have it in me.

About fifteen minutes into the show I realized that the reason the show was two hours long was because that there were at least a gazillion commercials between each five minutes of actual show. It became a bit surreal watching five minutes of people bleeding profusely interspersed with suggestions for dealing with “regularity”.

I was okay until the writers began throwing everything at the plot that they could think of. Meredith finds out she’s pregnant—someone gets shot—Christina breaks up with Owen--someone shot—Sloane begs Lexie to come back---shot—Bailey desperately tries to stop a guy from bleeding to death—shot. I could barely keep up. But when the only one who can operate on Derek (who has been shot of course) is Christina, and then the shooter holds a gun to her head while she’s operating and then shoots Owen who can only be operated on by Meredith, I began to get the giggles. Where were the locusts? The tsunamis? At the very least an earthquake?!

When Meredith operates on Owen while having a miscarriage and Bailey drags the bleeding surgeon on a sheet to the elevator where she thinks she can load him up to get him to an operating room so she can operate on him all by herself, I am laughing so hard I can’t stop. And when Bailey sees that the elevators aren’t working, because of course the swat team has stopped the elevators because they’re making it too easy for the shooter to get around, (what he won’t use the stairs????) and the poor shnook asks her if he’s dying, she says yes--then I chime in--Oh yeah big time along with your acting career and this show!

Didn’t anyone check this script for lunacy? Has anyone checked me lately for insanity for watching two hours of commercials interspersed with idiocy? The only surprise ending here is that the show is coming back next season. And knowing me I’ll be back next fall watching. Just call me McNutsy.

Returning

Returning

I looked at our carts brimming with thin, flat boxes and thought about how many times this store had solved our furniture problems. IKEA, I just found a store named IKEA and suddenly that name…..you get the picture. I may make fun of it and claim that the name roughly translated from the Swedish means, thousands-of-screws-and-pieces-of-wood-that-need-to-be-assembled, but the store always comes through for us. Lisa’s rooms are furnished with its wares, our bed gets constant raves and even Mariel sleeps on an IKEA mattress. And now we were trolling its cavernous aisles once more for mom. Because, you see, my mom is finally returning to the U.S. to live and we were busily putting her future home together.

I left for Israel in the fall of 1970 knowing that my parents would soon be joining me. Moving to Israel had always been our family’s dream. The original plan was for us all to go together once I had finished college, but lives change, plans change, different roads suddenly appear and so it was with us. After my first year of college I spent the summer in Israel on my own and fell hopelessly in love with the country, with someone I had met, and with heady, reckless freedom. So I went back to the States in August planning to return to Israel in the fall.

By the summer of 1971 we were all together in Israel though we had picked up another family member—my new husband Mark. It would take us the better part of that year to finally feel that we were home. My parents bought an apartment in the northern town of Nahariya, while Mark and I lived in Haifa about a half hour away. Mom and dad quickly found a wonderful group of friends and settled into their new life.

But we never had our happily-ever-after. War exploded in 1973 and shortly after Mark’s sudden death shocked us. Mom, dad and I spent the year trying to recover. That summer we flew to the States for a holiday and some rest. It was then that Steve and I reconnected. Though I went back to Israel in September, Steve had asked me to marry him and so at the end of the year I returned to the States. Leaving mom, dad and Israel was one of the hardest things that I had ever done. And I would have been sadder still had I known that it was also to be the beginning of a long separation from my parents—almost 40 years of being a long distance family.

None of us ever got used to the separation but that’s the way our lives remained for over 30 years. Then, when dad died ten years ago, I began to hope that mom would join us here. But mom couldn’t imagine leaving her home. Still I kept hoping that one morning mom would wake up and change her mind. I would dream of all the everyday things that we would do, all the places that I would take her, all the holidays we would finally celebrate together.

Every summer when we were together I would ask her,

“Mom, have you thought about moving back to the States? Are you ready? “
And each time the answer was the same, “No, I’m not ready”.

So I would wait and try not to push her because it wouldn’t be fair. I could never force her into anything that she didn’t want just to satisfy a selfish need of my own. But last year, for the first time, I pushed a little harder. And I could hear the anger in my voice when I asked her why she wouldn’t change her mind. And then suddenly she said the words I honestly thought I would never hear her say,

“I’m ready.”

I caught my breath not believing that I had actually heard correctly, but as we talked she told me that she thought it was time for her to join us. She didn’t know that when I hung up the phone I cried. After so many years we would actually live a normal family life where we could see each other any time we felt like it. It seemed like a miracle.

So Steve and I have been spending the last few months getting everything ready for her. It’s been hectic but exciting. We’ve had luck that we couldn’t believe. I truly believe that my dad is overseeing everything that we do. We were able to find her an apartment in a wonderful senior living housing complex just 15 minutes away from us. Mom will have everything that she needs virtually at her doorstep.

The last major thing on our “mom” list was designing her apartment. We spent months poring through catalogues, visiting furniture stores, measuring and arranging and finally realized that IKEA had just about everything we needed and it all fit together with style. So that’s how we found ourselves tracking down tables, chairs, bureaus, a bed and sofa and other assorted household stuff, praying that every piece we had chosen was on the shelves. The store computer claimed that it was all in the store but until we actually loaded it on the cart I couldn’t relax.

Finally we stood there, mission accomplished, and headed for the registers and at least a months worth of furniture assembling. But it’s all worth it because Mom’s coming home.

Confronting the Bullies

Confronting the Bullies

Last week my class discussed the new anti-bullying law. Some of my students had kids who were enduring bullying-hell, others had experienced it themselves. We came to the sad conclusion that at some time everyone has found themselves in the clutches of a bully. They agreed that the experience changed the way they felt about themselves. I had expected that conclusion. What I hadn’t expected was the epiphany.

We had been talking about the suicide of South Hadley teenager, Phoebe Prince and what we thought her teachers and parents could have done to help her. We discussed how she must have felt—terrified, helpless, wondering why she had been chosen. As I listened to my students I suddenly flashed back to sixth grade when I woke up every morning dreading school. I’ve never suppressed that year and have spoken of it often. But it was only at that moment that I suddenly understood that I too had been bullied. All that year I too had wondered, “Why me?”

I had led a normal nine year old life in fifth grade. But sixth grade was a strange new country. Suddenly I was the odd one out. Suddenly I didn’t fit. Suddenly I was the one that everyone talked about behind their backs. They called me a snob—the ultimate sixth grade put-down—and wanted nothing to do with me. And the strange part was that the leader of this group was a former friend, Francine. None of it made sense. But then bullying rarely makes sense.

I remember the slam-book that was passed around at the end of that year. Someone bought a notebook, wrote everyone’s name on separate pages, then instructed us to write what we thought of our classmates. I remember opening it to my name and seeing a page full of slurs and put-downs. All except one line—my friend Doreen’s. She had written only good things. I don’t know why she made the defiant decision to remain my friend. Her loyalty saved me that year.

I graduated and went on to Winthrop Junior High School. No one in that seventh grade class knew me. I became one of the most popular kids in my class that year but I never could believe it. I would wake up each morning with a sense of dread only to remember that school was now safe. I was always nervous that the kids would turn on me at any moment. I’ve held onto those dreadful memories for fifty years yet I never understood that I had been bullied. Even worse is the fact that I’ve learned that even after years of anti-bullying programming in the schools, the problem not only persists but grows. I wonder if the new anti-bullying law will even help since it is already being challenged constitutionally.

Last Sunday the Boston Globe ran a series of articles about education. One of the pieces by Neil Swidey described the dismal ineffectiveness of years of anti-bullying programs.
None of the current anti-bullying programs have been successful in reducing actual bullying among American students in any meaningful way. Researchers from the University of Oregon, led by Kenneth Merrell, conducted a meta-analysis that examined the effectiveness of bullying intervention programs in the United States and Europe across a 25-year period. Their results could hardly have been more depressing. While they found that some programs produced modest improvements in students’ attitudes about bullying and in their feelings of social competence, they found none that demonstrated a significant reduction in bullying behavior. In fact, the researchers found that “the average teacher actually reported more bullying after intervention than before.”
Bullying may not be new but technology has exacerbated the issue and made it more dangerous.
A generation ago, a seventh-grade girl might have dreaded walking into school, convinced that all of her classmates would have instantly heard about some embarrassment she had suffered. That was adolescent paranoia at work. Today her paranoia is justified. By the time she steps off the bus, everyone has been able to read the embarrassing details on somebody’s Facebook wall. Yet most bullying prevention programs are based on research and thinking formulated during the era before the Internet, says Elizabeth Englander, who directs the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center in Bridgewater.
Though we have seen that group programs and whole school assemblies are failures, there is a ray of hope. Research has shown that one way of stopping bullies is to pay attention to their sidekicks, the friends who give them power, and the bystanders who say nothing fearing that they might be the next victim if they speak up.
When kids around the bully intervene, the bullying is much more likely to stop. So the real goal must be to boost those willingness-to-intervene levels among students. Doing it well would require a school staff acutely attuned to the social landscape in its corridors and willing to confront bullying head-on, with a focus on the ring of students most closely orbiting the bully.

You can’t do a few assemblies and workshops and solve the problem. It requires unceasing attention and a willingness of both adults and kids to intervene. It requires that every teacher make every student their responsibility. It means that no one can leave anyone at the less than tender mercies of those that are bigger or more aggressive. Careful attention must be paid or we are all bullies in the end.

Your Own Business

Your Own Business

The other night at a Library Trustees meeting our discussion turned to the issue of privacy. Someone mentioned that a popular blogger in Stoughton had published the salaries of all the town employees and so many of the teachers in town were irate. Betty answered that salaries were a matter of public record so we really couldn’t fault the blogger. While I understand that town salaries are public, it’s still disconcerting to see your salary published on a web site or newspaper. People usually don’t bother to go to the library to look up someone’s information but we all read something that is in front of us.

That discussion led to the fact that starting in May, if you want to manage your library account on-line, you can no longer use OCLN as your pin. Now you have to come up with your own. We groaned at the thought of coming up with yet another password to add to our constantly growing collection but Betty said that she had had her own pin for a while.

“Why?” I asked her, wondering why she would care who saw the books she was reading. But then I remembered the privacy issues surrounding the Homeland Security Act that had government agents demanding to see our reading lists on the assumption that if we read about bombings we were automatically terrorists. Excuse the pun but no one wants their lives to be a completely open book.

The issue of our right to privacy surfaced interestingly this year when an Italian court ruled that Google had violated Italian privacy law by allowing users to post a video on one of its services. New York Times reporter, Adam Liptak, wrote on February 26, 2010 that:
The ruling was a nice discussion starter about how much responsibility to place on services like Google for offensive content that they passively distribute.
But in a deeper sense it called attention to the profound European commitment to privacy, one that threatens the American conception of free expression.
“Americans to this day don’t fully appreciate how Europeans regard privacy,” said Jane Kirtley, who teaches media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota “The reality is that they consider privacy a fundamental human right.”
Americans and Europeans view privacy very differently. Americans think of it terms of protection against government interference in their lives and especially their homes. Europeans focus on protecting people from having their lives exposed to public view especially in the media. In America free expression is codified in the first amendment. In Europe privacy comes first. Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights says, “Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.”
The historical reasons for this divergence are fascinating. According to Fred H. Cate a law professor at Indiana University,
The privacy protections we see reflected in modern European law are a response to the Nazi Gestapo and the East German Stasi, totalitarian regimes that used informers, surveillance and blackmail to maintain their power, creating a web of anxiety and betrayal that permeated those societies. We haven’t really lived through that in the United States.
Lee Levine, a Washington lawyer who has taught media law in America and France adds,
American experience has been entirely different. So much of the revolution that created our legal system was a reaction to excesses of government in areas of press and speech.
The more I think about the issue the more I agree with Judge Bostjan M. Zupancic of Slovenia’s conclusion:
I believe that the courts have to some extent and under American influence made a fetish of the freedom of the press. It is time that the pendulum swung back to a different kind of balance between what is private and secluded and what is public and unshielded.
I would be the last person to lambaste the first amendment, but would a little privacy be such a bad thing in this increasingly naked society of ours? Last month I noticed signs in my gym requesting that people not use cell phones in the locker room. It took me a while to realize that it wasn’t to grant us some peace and quiet but to protect against people using their cell phones as cameras.
I don’t need to know each last detail about every political scandal. I’m not happy that anyone can Google me and find out more about my life than I care to remember. I’m tired of listening in to the world’s cell phone conversations and don’t want to know which public camera is filming me crossing the street.
Last month Mariel taught my students about plate tectonics and volcanoes. Two of my students are Haitian so the class was especially interesting for them. Suddenly Mariel had a brainstorm. She downloaded GoogleEarth and found their houses in Haiti. They couldn’t believe it. Later on at home she showed me our house on the site. It was incredibly unsettling to see our house complete with Steve’s car parked outside. Google’s StreetView service, which provides ground-level panoramas gathered by cars with cameras on them, was just too close for comfort. I find it interesting that the program has generated legal challenges in Switzerland and Germany. I wouldn’t mind a legal challenge here in the US as well. I’m all for the first amendment but I’d like my business to remain my own.