Hildegarde

One of the things I have not been keeping a record of since the first of the year is the magazines I read, and I read a lot of them.

On one level, I hesitate to say I’ve “read” them, because,  unlike books, I don’t read everything inside the covers. 

Instead, I look around in them and see what I find interesting and read that.  Sometimes that’s a lot and sometimes that’s a little.  Sometimes issues get backed up over the course of months because I’ve got too much else to do.

Most of the magazines I read are more or less political, and they come from all sides of the political spectrum.  The standard list includes, among others:  Reason, National Review, Mother Jones, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Weekly Standard, First Things,  The Progressive and The Objectivist Standard. 

If I can get ahold of them–and I can’t always–I like to get in Free Inquiry, The Skeptical Inquirer and The Humanist.

The point, I hope, is to get a look at all points of view.

This month, I find myself in one of those situations that is both annoying and frustrating. 

I have started a book that I ought to find very interesting.  It’s called Gold and Spices, and it’s been hanging around on my TBR pile since 1998.  It’s a history of the rise of commerce in the Middle Ages.  It has the advantage of being about my favorite historical period and about an aspect of that period on which I am not well informed.

And yet, for some reason, I just can’t get myself into it.  I’ve read almost 100 pages, and I will finish it, but I keep finding myself getting distracted.

When I get distracted, I’ve been flipping my way through the magazines at a much faster pace than usual, and yesterday evening I flipped through the one called The Progressive.

The Progressive is, in keeping with its name, a magazine of liberal opinion.  In fact, of largely left-liberal opinion.

It’s probably the magazine furthest on the left of the lift up there, in much the same way The Weekly Standard is furthest to the right.

I’ve got my preferences in issues.  Give me a stack of articles on the sequester, or Latin American, from the left or the right, and my eyes glaze over.

This issue was more interesting than that.  There were articles on unions and unionizing, for instance, and that subject has been fascinating me since the first of Scott Walker’s laws passed in Wisconsin.

I was about halfway through this issue when I came upon an article that was billboarded as being about the kind of place I teach in. 

I stopped and read it because–well, let’s face it.  It was directly related to my life.

And as I read it, it became  more and more eerily related to my life.  The terms the writer used, the descriptions of students and events, all sounded as if I could have written them myself.

Then I got  to the end of the article and read the bio.

I could have written it myself.

The writer teaches at the same place I do, although she is not somebody I know.

But although I could have written this article myself, the chances are almost certain that it is not the article I would have written if I ever decide to write about the place I teach.

It was, to put it bluntly, a Good News Bible.

The writer concentrated on the successes of the system, of which there are, most certainly some.

The successes are why there is not more turnover among teachers like me. 

You go along, convinced you cannot do this one more day without causing harm to yourself or others, because you’re just going to explode some day in front of class, or worse–and then the exception comes along, the one in a thousand who is able to work through the mountain of everything wrong to get out the other side, and you begin to think you’re doing some good.

The article was something of a hat trick.

The writer was able to say what she wanted to say and leave the impression she wanted to leave because the whole thing was an exercise in subjective experience.

She told story after story about students who had not only succeeded, but inspired her.  She provided absolutely nothing in the way of statistics, or description and analysis of the system, or–well, anything.

Everything this woman said sounded very good indeed, unless you knew that the stories represent much  less than a tenth of the reality of what goes on in our kind of place.

I’m not trying to disparage the success stories.  They’re real, and they can get you high for a month when they happen.

The problem is that we don’t know why they happen, aside from saying that some people are just like that.  We don’t know why are small groups of successes succeed.

As things stand now, we cannot use what we know about them to help anybody else.

A few months ago, there was a spate of articles about  how “class” is now more important than anything else in determining who applies to, gets into, and goes to a “decent college,” and who succeeds there once they go.

For  once, the articles really were about class–not socioeconomic status, but the set of habits and atitudes we bring to our day to day living.

Some of those articles made me absolutely crazy.  They were almost always written by people with the tastes and attitudes of the educated upper  middle class, and they kept stumbling over things that anybody with a wider range of acquaintances would have known  without having to think about it–

For instance, that outside the educated upper middle class, family always comes before work, career or ambtion–and if you find yourself in a conflict between work and family, the work goes out the window.

The educated upper middle class sees dropping out of college because  it’s estranging you from you family as a tragedy.  The people who do it see it as the only desirable choice.

All of that notwithstanding, the  habits and attidues that matter to the kids (and adults) who attend institutions like mine are much more basic:  keeping regular schedules, being on time to classes and appointments, turning in work on time and neat and complete, always doing the most and not the least possible.

None of these things depend on money. 

It doesn’t matter how much the one percent makes relative to the rest of us.

Poor people as well as rich people have these habits and attitudes and have had them all through time.

And, in terms of life outcomes, these things matter far more than how much money you grew up with.

The children of the educated upper middle class who  lack these habits and attitudes will fail. 

The children of the lower middle class and the poor who lack these habits and attitudes will crater, and they’ll crater early.

We can pour a couple of billion dollars into the K-12 system, provide all our students with private tutors and affirmative action, screw the entire system by reconfiguring all the standards until we can say more of our students “graduated” from this and “completed” that–

But as long as the kid is twenty minutes late to every class, hands in a handwritten half page on crinkled notepaper instead of a typed three page essay, shows up at  his job interview in a stained t-shirt with the F word on it and a backwards baseball cap–

As long as all that is the case, the kid is going to fail at just about anything we hope to help him to do, and none of the other things are going to make any damned difference.

I think I’d be less of a pessimist  if I thought anybody cared.