On Priests and Imams

Here’s what it’s come to: the banner headline in today’s printed version of El Nuevo Día quotes the Secretary of Justice saying, Quedan protegidos los pederastas (Pederasts Remain Protected).

And here’s what’s worse…

My reaction?

That’s news?

The Supreme Court of Puerto Rico has decided to cave in to the Catholic Church, specifically the diocese of Arecibo, and allow the church to withhold documents requested by the Justice Department related to abusive priests. Why? Because some of the victims chose to tell the church, and all that communication is “confidential.”

Here’s what happened, or at least what I presume happened: some kids got abused, walked around wounded for months or years, and finally got the courage to go to the church and complain. Not surprising, because listening for fifteen minutes to the morning radio shows in Puerto Rico will tell you exactly what you don’t want to have happen to you. And that’s being the topic of the day.

If you know anything about the dynamics of sexual abuse, you’ll know that the victim, paradoxically, usually feels responsible or guilty for his or her own abuse, and that it takes a level of maturity not often seen in kids to have the strength to confront the adult world, especially when that adult world is wearing a Roman collar. So the likelihood is that most of the victims were kids, and most of the victims coming forward were young adults who reported abuse years after it happened.

So the Supreme Court has ruled that a lower court judge has to look at all the documents, determine if the complainant is an adult, and then ask the person if he / she wants the documents released to Justice.

Guys? We’re talking about crimes here.

However, so loopy is our need to “protect” religious freedom, covering up abusive priests may be perfectly legal; here’s Wikipedia on the topic:

A communication is "confidential" if made privately and not intended for further disclosure except to other persons present in furtherance of the purpose of the communication.

Yeah? So if I sit in an office and tell the bishop that the parish priest had his hand on my crotch four years ago, that’s confidential?

Yup, and that’s why we have seven priests in Arecibo who have been defrocked, and who are all walking around, or perhaps lurking outside school playgrounds, reenacting all those lurid 1950’s educational films. And does anybody think out there that those priests got defrocked for something that wasn’t illegal?

It doesn’t stop surprising me, the stuff that religious people get themselves up to, because who knew that the largest chain of charter schools is run—maybe—by Fethullah Gülen, an Islamic Imam from Turkey, now living in the Poconos?

Here’s what the website for the chain’s Texas branch has to say:

Our mission at Harmony is to prepare each student for higher education by providing a safe, caring, and collaborative atmosphere featuring a quality, student-centered educational program with a strong emphasis on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. 

In Numbers:

            40 Campuses (24 T-STEM schools) 

            25,000 Students

            2,276 Faculty and Staff

            Student-to-Teacher Ratio of 14-to-1

            100 percent Graduation Rate for Seniors

            100 percent College Acceptance Rate

Umm… 100% college acceptance? 100% graduation rate?

Well, if true, that would account for the waiting list of some 30,000 kids—more kids than are currently enrolled in the system. And in the video below, the kids certainly look happy, and the school is a knockout. True, most of the teachers are Turkish, and some of them are substantially less fluent in English than I am in Spanish. Which is odd, since some of them are teaching…English.

And that 100% Graduation Rate? Well, here’s one less-than-gruntled account by a teacher fired by a Gülen school:

When it came time for OATs, as they were called then, testing was a disaster. Several Turkish men arrived and pulled “at risk” students from their classrooms, taking them to the moldy rooms in small groups, despite the lack of written documentation allowing accommodations. The week after testing, I went to school on a Saturday morning in order to keep ahead of my planning, and I saw a dozen Turkish men sitting in a classroom with stacks of OATs on their desks. The current principal brought a cup of tea and a plate of cookies to me while I worked alone in my classroom. He said that the men were simply darkening in the answers for students who wrote too lightly.

Right—we all know that kids have an instinctive bent for delicacy, which undoubtedly accounted for those faint markings….

And there have been questions, as well, about how accountable these schools are. Reports have surfaced that at least the Turkish teachers have to kickback up to forty percent of their salary to the Gülen movement. Oh, and what about the question of immigration? Is there really such a shortage of American teachers?  And do these “teachers” have any formal training?

That said, it’s also true that, bar having done if for twenty plus years, I’m completely untrained too, and that didn’t stop me from fooling a passel of students and the world’s largest company into thinking I knew what I was doing.

Nor is Gülen, apparently, the most virulent of imams. Because his message was / is that the Muslim world doesn’t need more mosques and madrasas, but rather schools that focus on the sciences and math. And though virtually a recluse, his movement carries such weight that, in Turkey at least, his opponents fear that he may be planning a coup. 

And the schools—are they really connected to Gülen? They—some of them—say no, others say yes. Why the confusion, or the secrecy?

Well, would you want to be a Muslim in America? And here, I have to say that however radicalized I might be as an atheist, I’d welcome an imam like Gülen who—if true—is a moderate and condemns extreme forms of Islam. We need these guys….

And the charter schools? With their reports of not accepting some students, of kicking out students who don’t perform, of shifting kids around? That’s the negative stuff. But what about all those kids you see in videos who are solemnly swearing that school is fun, learning is cool, going to school is a joy?

Don’t know. But this I do know: if I were a parent, I’d certainly check out the charter schools in my area….

Note to Naïa's Uncles

“Nico told me I should send your blog to Naïa’s uncles,” said Lady, the owner of the café and mother of 12-year old Naïa. “They think I am ruining her….”

“Why,” I asked, ”she seems perfectly fine to me.”

“Well, they say I’m doing a terrible thing by home-schooling her. They say that she needs contact with other kids, and that she won’t get socialized, and I don’t know what all. Anyway, I’m a terrible mother.”

“Naïa’s more normal than I am,” I say. “At least on the face of it. I think kids are tremendous conformists, most of them. Remember that time I spilled something, and we had that argument about the “wet caution floor” sign?”

“Hunh?”

“Maybe you were off painting houses,” I said.

Yes, Lady is also a house painter, but a sensible woman as well. So why get outside and climb ladders in the blazing tropical heat when you can sit at the bar, drink a beer, chat with passersby, and paint little decorative plaster casitas? Lady does good business selling these for sixty bucks or so—given the obvious advantages, you’ve got to be seriously dumb to do the other kind.

“Anyway, I spilled some water, and it was a big thing at Wal-Mart: everyone, even the English teacher, knew that if you spilled water, one person had to stay at the site and warn people, the other person had to get the “wet caution floor” sign.”

“Wet caution floor?”

“What is this, genetic? Or is it a girl thing? Haven’t you ever read your own sign?’

Of course I have to go get the sign—why can’t I back away from a fight?—and we take a look at it. You’ve seen it a zillion times, of course, and if I had Internet—it’s Sunday, so the damn thing is taking the day off—I’d show you a picture of it. But there it was, the yellow collapsible thing that says:

Wet

Caution

Floor

“Caution, wet floor,” says Lady.

Right, Marc is now in complete fight or flight, because guess what? I know the argument, which is that the “caution,” being bigger, means that it goes first. It’s sort of the bully argument.

“Caution, wet floor,” repeats Lady, and you know what? I decide to drop it….

“Anyway, I think Naïa has great social skills,” I say. “Every time someone comes to talk to Neruda, she runs over and gives them an in-service on the bird. Complete strangers, and she’s chatting away. I was seven before I worked up the courage to address my own mother….”

Neruda, at least in the Poet’s Passage, is the green Dominican parrot who, having nothing else to do, squawks at any passerby.

“Yeah?”

“Well, not really, but I was really shy. The point being that Naïa talks to anyone, but she’s also pretty savvy.”

“Well, Nico wants to put her in the Episcopal Cathedral School…”

“WHAT?!”

I see these kids on the bus, and they’re all wearing a little blue uniforms and black Mary Jane shoes. Naïa wearing flowing blouses, pants, and Crocs. If it were the sixties, you’d find her on Haight-Ashbury. The Episcopal Cathedral School is definitely Junior League. 

“Well, she’d get a good traditional education,” says Lady.

“To my mind, she’s already getting a good, traditional education. I’m amazed, really, that nothing seems to have changed in the half-century since I was in school. You know, she has spelling tests—of which I approve, generally—but I really wonder about that. Short of writing thank-you notes to Michelle Obama for a lovely dinner, is she ever going to need traditional spelling? Spell check has done away with that, in a sense.”

“So what would you do?”

“Put a lot more attention on those words like “their / there / they’re” or “adapt / adopt”—words that have to be used correctly, and can’t be detected by spell check. Anyway, it’s incredible, some of the stuff she has to learn.”

“Like what?”

“’Lebanon is a country roughly the size of New Jersey’,” I recite.

“Hunh?”

“It’s one of the sentences I heard her tutor read her, and I thought it was one of the dumbest things I had ever heard.”

“Why?”

“Look, has she ever been to New Jersey? How many kids are reading that sentence and memorizing it, so that they can answer the question: ‘What is the approximate size of Lebanon?’ on the test. Anyway, why don’t they teach her the real dope on Lebanon?”

“And that is?”

“Lebanon was a paradise for centuries, a paradise that is part of the region called the Levant. And it was famous for its civilization, for tolerating all religions, all views, for accepting Jews, Christians, Muslims equally. People walked around, arm in arm, ideological enemies cordially having passionate discourse on the most violence-producing topics, and eating dates!”

“Yeah?” says Lady, who has a good nose for when I go a little off.

“OK, but you know what I mean.”

“So what happened?”

“Exactly.”

“What?”

“You know, that’s exactly the question I would ask Naïa. How, in a remarkably short time, did the country fall into a terrible civil war? What happened? Then I’d go off and write something and she’d research it and come back tell me. But telling Naïa that Lebanon is the size….”

“Hey, why don’t you tutor Naïa?”

“Wouldn’t work,” I said. “First, I’m not good with kids. Second, well, Naïa takes school with all the seriousness it deserves. She wants to be told the approximate size of Lebanon, because it’s perfectly easy to park that fact in her mind just long enough to drive it out onto the test. Remember her answer when I asked her the state capital of Oregon?”

“What?”

“That was last year!”

It’s not just the Levant, I think. How fragile all societies are! How changing one thing would change everything—what if Jorge were not making the coffee and Neruda were not squawking and Lorca, the toy Chihuahua, were not begging for food? Could we have the Poet’s Passage without Naïa, flopped on her tummy, absorbing the fact of the approximate size of Lebanon?

She ain’t going anywhere!

Falling for JiJi

Confession: I have spent a large part of the day trying to make the penguin JiJi go across my computer screen.

I justify this by telling you a secret: unlike a newspaper, which can pile up the bad news until Mt. Everest looks like a sugar cube, a blog cannot. So this evening—no rants about the Catholic Church (give it UP, Marc); no more tales of the byzantine, tropical political schemes (PLEEEEEZE!); no more jeremiads of any kind. Today is a good news day!

And the good news is that some guy in Southern California has got it figured out: most education is based on words, on language. But most students? Well, a significant portion of kids are learning English as a foreign language. Then there are those who simply learn visually, not verbally. As well, there are kids with various learning difficulties, one of which is dyslexia.

That was the case with Matthew Peterson, who suffers from dyslexia, as did, apparently, Einstein. And it was Einstein who said that words played no part in his math or scientific thinking.

Think back to your school—what was happening in the classroom? Well, the teacher was up front, talking and writing on the chalkboard. He or she was teaching, but were the kids learning?

No—according to the video below. Seventy percent of American kids are below grade level in math. So why not throw everything upside-down? Why not get rid of words? Why not advance a little technologically beyond chalk? Why not have the kids play games, instead of giving them homework? And why not have the games be interactive, so that kids get feedback and learn?

“I don’t teach, I observe learning,” I used to say to my students. Or how about this: “I don’t teach, I create the environment to learn.” And that’s why, in those days when I was working at Wal-Mart, I spent a lot of time learning PowerPoint. Because even something as rudimentary as PowerPoint can be powerful.

“Oh, baby, you are zeee BEST,” said a sultry little animation that I borrowed from the Internet; that was when the student got the right answer. The wrong answer? A bomb went off, or a 16-ton weight got dropped on a kitten, or the computer made a disgusted sound.

The games were nowhere as cool as JiJi, I have to say—but they were cool enough, and the students liked them. But the 600,000 kids in 35 states who are involved with JiJi? The numbers are impressive—in some cases the improvement is double or even triple the rate for the control group.

I’d believe it, because there’s something wonderfully addictive about JiJi. Unfortunately, the company won’t sell the games to individuals, but only to schools, since they believe that the presence of a teacher is important.

Damn—I’m already totally in love with JiJi!

Hmm, if I ran up to the local public school and bought the damn thing, do you think they’d let me play?   

Bad Policy

It was a day when nothing much got done. Yes, I wrote a longish post in the morning, and then it was time to go, time to take the train to 42d street, examine the map, and decide that the A train to Far Rockaway was the ticket out of the city. Time to leave, time to go home.

And what had I seen in New York? Oddly, everything was as normal, except that there seemed to be a new breed of poverty and homelessness. There had always been street people, but they had seemed different—maybe drunks, maybe drugs, maybe just crazy. The point was that they couldn’t fit in—that’s why they were on the streets.

There was the woman sitting halfway down the stairs to the 42nd Street subway. She was sitting on cardboard on the landing; the air was a mix of the 40 degrees outside and the 60 degrees inside. Still, it was cold enough that she was bundled up and yet still shivering. And her sign was clever: Donate What You Can to Polish Your Karma.

Nor was she the only one—there were many more people like her. “One in five of our neighbors can’t put food on their tables,” stated the public service ad on the subway. Is it true? What would a Google search reveal?

Well, as usual, the picture isn’t clear. Yes, the rate of poverty in New York City inched up to 21.2%; it had been 20.9 the year before. But Bloomberg came out blazing—he stated that of the 20 largest cities in the country, New York was the only one whose level of poverty had not risen since 2000. It was 21.2% then, it’s 21.2% now. In other words, it’s gotten worse for every other city except New York.

It’s also true that I was in Manhattan all of the time I was there, unless you count passing through Brooklyn to get to the airport. And The New York Times has this to say about Manhattan:

Manhattan retained the dubious distinction of having the biggest income gap of any big county in the country. The mean income of the lowest fifth was $9,635, compared with $389,007 for the top fifth and $799,969 for the top 5 percent — more than an eightyfold difference between bottom and top.

All of this is based on new data from the Census Bureau, which leads me to wonder—how do you count homeless people? And in fact, looking it up, it appears that the Census Bureau itself has come out and said that its count of the homeless for 2010 was off by three million. Not surprising, really, since many state and city ordinances prohibit sleeping, loitering, or camping in public. So there are a lot of people who go uncounted.

The train to the airport had the usual buskers—in this case a really bad mariachi duo (a singer and an accordion) and a good trio singing songs from the 40s. But nobody except for the out-of-towners—maybe Minnesota nice?—seemed to be giving anything. Oh, and there were the people selling candy for a dollar—often their signs proclaimed them homeless or out of work.

It was a study in contrasts. The city has unimaginable wealth, both now and in the past. And I had been staying with my brother and sister in law, who live on Riverside Drive. Their apartment is hardly palatial, neither is it small; but that’s not the point.

And that is? John and Jeanne are living a bit better than their parents did. They had had good public school educations, they had gone to graduate programs, they were now taking vacations and spending in ways that their parents wouldn’t have dreamed of. And that’s good—that’s the way it should be. The American Dream, right?

Assuming a level playing field, yes. But I sat next to a young black woman and her daughter; mother had clearly picked up the five-year old from school. And her first action, on entering the train? Take out and power up a small tablet and hand it to the girl.

Two days earlier, I had been in a bus in Manhattan watching a white mother talking to her son of roughly the same age. No tablet, instead it was questions to the child—what had he learned at school, was his teacher happy with the class, was everybody there? By the end of ten blocks, the mother had gotten the boy to remember the material presented in school, had reinforced it, and had added to it.

Nor is it a white / black thing. There were black guys in very good three-piece suits who were getting on and off the subway in midtown New York. But I would wager any money that their parents had done the same thing that the woman on the bus in Manhattan was doing.

“I am a girl, and I am beautiful just the way I am,” the child with the tablet on the subway began to recite. She was reading a poster on the train. And as kids at that age will do, she started to repeat it endlessly.

I know what the lady on the bus would have done. She would have agreed, she would have probed—what were the best things about you, she would have asked. What things are most important to you? What kind of person do you like and what kind of person do you want to be?

The mother on the train shushed her child up.

Which was a shame, really, because the child was obviously very intelligent. There’s something about the eyes, you know, and the quickness of response to stimuli—you could tell this kid could go places.

“It was my librarian,” said Jeanne, when I asked who had made the difference in her life. Her parents had never read, never even completed high school—but the librarian had hooked Jeanne on books, and gave her the message: you’re sharp, you’ll go far.

Will there be anyone there for the little girl, who is beautiful just the way she is? Or will our cuts in education, arts programs, and Head Start mean that only the rich have a shot at a better life? I wish we could see that neglecting people, and especially kids, has another dimension than morality or equality.

It’s also disastrous economic policy.

On Schools and Teaching

It all started yesterday, when I began to realize that the conservative right—the Tea Partiers who have us by the short hairs and are dragging us ever closer to the financial cliff—have now set their sights on education. And why not? The idea is attractive for many reasons. There’s money, there, for one thing. How much? Well, according to the head of the Chicago Teachers Union, 380 billion dollars.  Oh, and what better time to instill a little conservative ideology? Let’s not forget old St. Ignatius: give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man for life, or words to that effect.

And if you read Diane Ravitch, a professor of the history of education at New York University, you’ll find out: the prevailing theory is that our public schools are failing. But is it true?

Ravitch says no—nor is it an opinion that she’s held long. In fact, she served in the first George W. Bush administration, and supported the No Child Left Behind program. What was not to like? The idea of standardized testing, quantifiable results, strict accountability—wow, great stuff.

So what happened? Well, teachers got the message—better teach to the test, because your evaluation, or maybe even your job, depends on your results. So what happened? The teachers crammed the info into the kids—and what happened to the subjects like art and history and music and science? Sorry—the focus was reading and math.

In addition, there have been reports of…well, Let the Huffington Post tell the story:

The indictment last week of 35 teachers and administrators in Atlanta for manipulating test scores is just the latest chapter in that city's long festering "teacher cheating" scandal. In turn, Atlanta is just one of many cities where evidence has surfaced that educators fudged testing data.

Perhaps the best way to think of these cheating scandals is that they are the result of a natural experiment: What happens when you change incentives so that low test numbers translate into pain and high test numbers translate into rewards?

OK—so teachers will cheat if their jobs depend on it. And why shouldn’t they? Because, according to Ravitch, they’re a pretty demoralized bunch right now. There was a time when parents took their kids to school on the first day of class, and made the following speech to the teacher—though it really was to the kid: “my child gives you any problems, you smack a good one, and send a note home. I’ll beat the tar out of him…..”

And we don’t want to go back there, tantalizing as the phantasy might be. But the larger question is what we are asking our teachers to do, and with what resources? It used to be that kids were generally better behaved, a teacher had broader range of disciplinary tools, and could teach pretty much how she saw fit. Oh, and that was all she had to do. Now, she has to be a psychologist, social worker, nurse, and then—at the end of a long, long school year—get told that her kids didn’t score the additional five points that an educational psychologist had decided was appropriate.

So what’s happened to our schools since No Child? Well, we’ve certainly created a huge testing industry, which has made some people rich. But what has it taught the kids? How to take tests.

Nor is Obama’s program, Race to the Top, much of a change from No Child. It, too, puts lots of emphasis on testing, with the difference that if the school consistently fails, then bam! It turns into a charter school. And according to Ravitch, Race to the Top puts the blame for poor scores squarely on the teacher.

But is that fair? What does a teacher do when confronted with a hungry, sleepless kid who has spent the night in a homeless shelter? In fact, what correlates with poor performance in school? Poverty.

Right—so how does Ravitch feel about charter schools? Well, she’s not impressed. According to her, charter schools tend to “skim,” selecting the best students, and consigning the learning disabled, non-English speaking, to the public system. And why not? They have a product to turn out—wouldn’t you select the best raw material?

Ravitch suggests two things: first, that we get rid of the high-stakes testing, and second, that we regulate charter schools more, so that they admit everyone, not just the best students.

However well or badly the schools, either charter or public, are doing—I wonder if compared to seventy years ago they are much better. I took a 5^th grade test, recently, from 1930, in which I was asked through what bodies of water I would pass if I went by sea from Malaga, Spain, to the Philippines. Errr—don’t think I got full credit on that one….

It can be argued—is it producing anything of worth to know the answer to the question above? Do kids really need to know this, much less adults? Wouldn’t learning how to read a map be of more use?

Yes and no. I think that there has to be a certain amount of basic information that is drummed into a kid’s head. Anybody should be able to figure out a 15% tip in a restaurant, without having to resort to the calculator on his cell phone.

So it may be the work of childhood to learn where the Philippines are, what the capital city is, and the five main exports. But something happens when a child becomes an adolescent: he or she becomes capable of abstract thought.

Tracy Kidder wrote a book about teaching, in which the teacher struggled to get through her curriculum, and in fact never really made it. At one point, the teacher worries that her students are going to go through life never knowing who won the Civil War….

Here’s what I think: in elementary school, you learn the fact: the North won. In short, you learn answers. In High School, you ask the questions: didn’t the South have the right to secede? To what extent was this was based on a principle: the freeing of slaves? Wasn’t there also an economic basis for this war? And what would have happened if England….

In short, you learn questions.

I’m officially on the fence about charter schools. If they work, I’m for them. Having worked for the largest company in the world, I’m a little uncertain that the corporate model is appropriate for education. The only things I am sure of?

That education of our kids is a lot more important than making money. And that any system—public or private—that fosters inequality because of race or socio-economic status is heinous. 

The UPR Blunders Forward

I’m biased, of course, since I spent several decades working as a sort of teacher, but I have to agree with Dr. Manuel Pérez Quiñones, a professor at Virginia Tech, when he says that the worst crime in Puerto Rico has been the savage intrusion of politics on the university system.

This will sound bad—a large part of our murder rate (twice New York City’s with half the population) is drug related. And though the death of any man diminishes me—well, sorry….no. I don’t care if one pusher offs another.

But in the twenty years at which I made a living teaching ESL, it would occasionally occur to me: how can it be that I have this job? Every kid has twelve years in English classes—shouldn’t everybody be bilingual?

Oh, and why was it that I knew the rules for accentuation in Spanish, and they didn’t?

Or there was the time I was buying a $24 product that had a 35% discount. The clerk stood open-mouthed at the register—there was no calculator. $17.80, I told the clerk. Well, we waited several minutes, which I devoted to telling the clerk—once a teacher, always a teacher—the three ways that I had dreamed up to calculate the sum. But it took a manager with a calculator to prove it to him.

I am telling you, then, that we have a serious problem in Puerto Rico. And if we are ever going to get out of this morass, we’ll have to start with kids, teach them, prepare them, and then hope they’ll do a better job than we’ve done.

What Pérez Quiñones bemoans is real. I somehow slid through the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but even I knew that the university’s School of Engineering was very strong. University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez has a school that is just as good, if not better.

According to Pérez Quiñones—well, let the man speak for himself:

The UPR as it has always been, was once again invaded by local Puerto Rican politics. In 5 years at Mayagüez, the campus had 4 Chancellors (i.e., campus president). The turn over in positions from Chancellor, to Deans, to Department heads was so regular, that it was a common joke to ask "who is the Dean this week?" The situation continued to deteriorate. Recently on the press there was an article about the sanctions imposed by NSF to the UPR system after an investigation of misuse of federal funds. The UPR system cancelled the Presidential Fellowships that paid the graduate studies in the US to future UPR faculty. And the faculty at their several campuses continued to either fight for their academic lives or simply hang up the boxing gloves and move on to a better (bitter?) future.

Alert readers of this blog are wondering—what’s the deal with the National Science Foundation (NSF) funds?

If it were irregularities, that would be fine—almost. But it’s much more than that. Which is why in April of this year, the FBI charged onto campuses and locations holding university servings and—reportedly—confiscated a bunch of material.

That’s bad—worse is that the NSF stopped paying 50 million dollars for research projects. Or perhaps it’s 90 million dollars—the Internet is shaky today, and I can’t verify.

Nor is it the case that the NSF simply dropped this on them. The investigation has been going on since 2006, and the university was given the chance to make a Corrective Action Plan (CAP). OK—that was approved, but the university couldn’t follow its own plan.

What was the problem?

Caribbean Business Reports has this to say:

To pay professors involved in research—in addition to their basic salary and a reduced academic schedule—professors are assigned a sum of money from the grants, which can't exceed 30% of their wage as compensation for their participation, according to circular A-21.

The source said the way to report time & effort was out of control, and some professors' salaries had increased by more than 100%. "You could see professors whose basic wages were about $80,000 a year, and suddenly they were earning $300,000 annually."

Right—so you can see why the NSF was a little peeved.

There were other problems, too. Some professors were reportedly receiving money as compensation from funds earmarked for other uses, such as indirect costs.

Well, the university had to get some money from somewhere—so where to turn? To our Government Development Bank, locally called Fomento. So the university submitted a loan application to…

…the wrong people. Somehow, the university ended up submitting the application of the General Fund of the University of Puerto Rico. So they had to do it over again.

Into this comic-horrific scene came the 2012 gubernatorial elections, which the party then out of power won. So what did that mean? That the university’s president had to be changed. And guess what? The gentleman who consistently has assured us that the problem with the NSF has been resolved—only to be told by the NSF that it has not—is now the interim director!

Comic-horrific, I wrote in the last paragraph. Sorry—I’ll take that back.

We’re a strange mix, down here. Half of us don’t work. The other half works harder and often better than anyone else. And our professionals—in general—are more highly trained and educated than any I’ve seen.

They deserve so much more.

On Teaching

For over twenty years I’ve been doing something with no real idea of how I’m doing it, or how it should be done.

Apparently, I do it well, however I do it. Well enough to work 13 years at a language school, well enough to convince Wal-Mart Puerto Rico that it should hire me as a full-time teacher. And well enough that old students, when I come across them, greet me with affection, and tell me they only learned English from me.

For years I felt like an impostor—if they knew that I knew absolutely nothing about what I was doing, they’d have to kick me out, right? And shouldn’t I go to school, since I was pretending to be a teacher, and figure out the right way to do it? How to confess—I have no idea what a lesson plan is, or how to conduct group activities, or how to assess a student’s progress, or lack thereof.

I had vague theories, of course. Nobody learns in a boring classroom. If I’m talking, the students aren't learning. I don’t teach, I observe learning. The teacher makes an environment in which learning can occur.

The above four statements are about all I know about what I do. But it appears that I may be faring slightly better than the men and women who know what they’re doing. Less than10% of Puerto Ricans, The New Day reported yesterday, are fluent in English, despite having twelve years of instruction in the subject.

Say what?

Twelve years is a lot of time. We’re talking, I presume, of an hour-long class five times a week, forty weeks a year for twelve years. That’s 2400 hours of instruction. Could I get a group of kids fluent in English in that time?

I think so.

And the crazy thing, as I read the article yesterday, is that the public school system in Puerto Rico isn’t doing the one thing that I would do, were I in any position to do it. It’s so simple—you want to get out of high school? Then sit down and talk to me in English for half an hour.

That kind of stuff was my metric—could a student go to Bentonville? Could he pick up the phone and talk to a supplier in the States? Wal-Mart made a big deal about “coaching by walking around”—it was abbreviated CBWA. Mine was TBWA—the T being “teaching.” And nothing was more exciting than hearing a student stammer his or her way through a business call in English.

Well, I began wondering about all this last week, when I saw a brief clip of a teacher explaining contractions to a group of students in a summer baseball camp. The teacher is at the board, she is explaining that she takes out the letter “o” and replaces it with an apostrophe.

As a teacher / non-teacher, that made no sense to me. I began to wonder—how would I get that concept across? And that, of course, made me remember the time I taught a seven-year old nephew about negative numbers.

We were in the restaurant Macaroni and Grill, which has good food and terrible service. Fortunately, however, they have paper on the table and crayons. So I began drawing the one thing I can draw, and then, to amuse myself, instructing Luis Enrique about negative numbers. Which happened quite naturally—he had asked me what six minus two was.

OK—it was a test; he had thrown down the gauntlet. Luis Enrique to this day is unconvinced of my general intelligence, and he may well be right. But if a kid asks a question—actually, if any student asks a question—you grab it and run.

Nor was it my intention to get into the negative numbers thing, since I am a complete math idiot. But in seconds we were challenging each other—I replied that 6-2 was 4, now what’s 6-3? He got that and asked me 6-4? And so we got to the question—what was 6-7?

Luis Enrique was stumped. Was it zero? Was 6-7 even possible? I said it was, he was unconvinced.

Without thinking, I drew the famous line with the two little arrows in opposing direction and marked and marked from 0 to 6. And left, of course, plenty of space to the left of 0. And then we repeated the whole thing—what was Luis Enrique doing when he subtracted 6-2? He put his little finger on the number 6, and counted two numbers down to 4. We got to 6-6 with no problem. Then the question became: what to do about 6-7? Instinctively, I grabbed the crayon and marked in the vertical slash for -1.

I didn’t, of course, tell him the number. We had a discussion—what should it be called? When I finally did tell him the name of the number, he got quite easily the hang of it. Which meant that we could tweak it—if he could subtract into the negative numbers, could he add out of them? And then could he do multiplication or division?

In the time it took Macaroni and Grill to cook a pizza, I had Luis Enrique dividing -4 by-2; that’s something that I could barely do, I was learning the stuff as fast as I was teaching it.

Granted, I could do it with one kid—could I do it with 30? That’s a tall order. But rereading Malcolm Gladwell’s essay “Most Likely to Succeed” this morning was revealing: there is absolutely no way of knowing who a good teacher will be until they have taught for three or four years. And the only thing that has been shown to make a difference, academically, to a kid? The quality of the teacher. A good teacher can teach a year and a half of material in one year. 

So Gladwell argues that we should forget about requiring master’s degrees or incorporating technology or lowering class size. Anybody with a pulse and a college degree should be able to teach. Then, we track the teachers and isolate the ones who are great, and these we pay A LOT of money. We can the ones that don’t make the grade.

All of this, of course, will be met with howls from teachers, teacher unions, educational authorities, parents (possibly).

But tell me—does anybody have a better idea?

Royalty on Several Levels

OK—two guys. One grows up in a very poor town in Venezuela, gets introduced to the violin as a child, and goes into an amazing program, El sistema. He goes on to do well, becoming the director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which recently extended his contract. But he doesn’t forget his roots: he’s also the director of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra.

If you know classical music, you know Gustavo Dudamel; if you don’t, you won’t. But the other guy in the clips below you will know: Prince Henry of Wales. Now, as you can see below, given a baseball jersey / t-shirt and crowned Prince Harry of Harlem.

Well, the world needs heroes, and it may be that we need them more than ever. So Harry, along with his brother and sister-in-law, decided to create something called Coach Core, just before the Olympics in London last year. The three turned to an organization called Greenhouse, which works in London’s poorest communities, and which runs programs…well, wait. It’s easier just to copy / paste what they say about themselves…..

Greenhouse puts inspirational coaches into schools and community clubs to work with 8 to 18 year-olds across 10 areas; Football, basketball, table tennis, volleyball, judo, swimming, drama, multi-sports for young people with special educational needs, tennis and athletics.

Great idea, hunh? So now, the Coach Core program has its first  group of coaches: 23 college age kids who are working with Greenhouse Master Coaches to learn the arts and skills of coaching, as well as the fundamentals of child development and how to instill core values. Oh, and also something else—fundraising.

Well, that’s a tremendous story. But watching the clip below, I noticed the banner behind the speakers’ rostrum—Harlem RBI, it said. Right—time to check that out.

And what a find! It all started in 1991, when some volunteers got together and created two baseball diamonds in an abandoned lot. The next year, there was a year-round youth mentoring program for kids at risk, a newsletter, and a summer literacy program.

Important, because kids of middle class or upper class families do all right during the long summer vacations. They either progress academically or at least maintain what they’ve got. But kids in Harlem have nothing to do, and when they hit the classroom in September, they’re one or two reading levels behind. So here’s the deal: the 700 kids in the program read during the morning, and play baseball during the afternoon, for 6 weeks during the summer. It’s first come, first served—and importantly, it’s free.

But it’s not just about the summer program—the organization established a charter public school in 2008, and its kids are doing great. Here are the results:

•   Our fourth graders increased their proficiency in Math by 91%

•   Our fourth graders increased their proficiency in English Language Arts (ELA) by 154%

•   Our fourth graders made the second biggest jump (out of 90 NYC charter schools) in improvement in ELA, and sixth biggest jump in improvement in Math. That's big progress!

•   Our third graders made an incredible showing in their first year of testing, outperforming last year's third grade cohort by double digits.

In both English and Math, DREAM fourth graders outperformed the school district average and the New York City average.

Because the summer program is old enough, the first graduates are coming back and telling the kids: “I was where you were. I buckled down and studied and graduated from high school and now I’m in college and nobody has ever done that before. Not in my family, at least….”

Oh, and how are they doing? Well, as you can hear in the clip below, 100% of the kids in the program graduate from high school, and 97% go on to college. That’s in a community where 50% of kids drop out of high school.

It makes a difference, you know, to see a guy from the ‘hood come back and tell his story. And yes, it’s cool when a British prince comes through the neighborhood, but it might be totally cool when Mark Teixeira comes onto the field. Look, the guy signed a $180 million dollar contract with the New York Yankees, and he’s got a World Series ring (don’t know what that is, but I assume it’s important).

Well, for a lot of kids, it’s baseball that teaches you team building, discipline, getting back up to the plate after you’ve struck out. For me, it was the cello, the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra, and several inspiring men and women—all important.

Something similar happened to Gustavo Dudamel. Here’s his story, taken directly from his website:

Named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2009, Gustavo Dudamel hails from humble beginnings in the small town of Barquisimeto, Venezuela. Born in 1981, he began violin lessons as a child with José Luis Jiménez at the Jacinto Lara Conservatory. He continued his violin studies with José Francisco del Castillo at the Latin American Academy of Violin. His conducting studies began in 1996 with Rodolfo Saglimbeni and, the same year, he was given his first conducting position, Music Director of the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra.  In 1999, he was appointed Music Director of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra and began conducting studies with the orchestra’s founder, Dr. Abreu; a few years later in 2004, Dudamel was brought to international attention by winning the inaugural Bamberger Symphoniker Gustav Mahler Competition. These early musical and mentoring experiences molded his commitment to music as an engine for social change – a lifelong passion.

You know, guys like Dudamel and Teixeira are my heroes, much more than a prince. Oh, but sorry—I’ve forgotten the real heroes, those two teachers in the clip below, who walk into a classroom every day, take attendance, call Billy out for screwing around, give permission for Ginny to go to the bathroom, and then start teaching.

Nobody else in our society is more important.