Half of Our Students Drop Out Before Graduation

Justice William O. Douglas (1898-1980)

Some time ago, I had a student who was very diligent and hard-working; who always sat directly in front of me in the first seat of the middle row. Then she disappeared for a week; I became worried and sent her an e-mail. Nothing. When she reappeared after having missed four classes, she was wan and pale. After class, she stayed to tell me a hair-raising tale of a drug-dependent mother getting out of rehab but having nowhere to go because she had been in and out so often, no one else but this one daughter would have anything to do with her. After knocking herself out to find a place for her, her mother had taken off and overdosed. It was a long, sordid tale, and it was heartbreaking to see this young woman struggling to deal with it. I spent many hours listening more than anything else. I am not a psychologist and when I hear such stories, I know I am not equipped to help in any concrete way, and I refer them to our student psychological services or another agency in the university that can help. But I always listen.

For the rest of the semester, I would often find her sitting on the chair outside my office door, studying. She felt safe there, she said. I was happy that she felt that way.

According to a report published in U.S.News and World Report published in August, one-third of our students drop out after their first year. Half of our students will not graduate from college. [Dropouts Loom Large for Schools, http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/best-colleges/2009/08/19/dropouts-loom-large-for-schools.html] These are shocking statistics but they are unchanged for three decades. There are many reasons: The loneliness and homesickness of being away from home; the overwhelming financial pressures--even a state university is an expensive proposition, and if you drop out, the debt must still be paid. There are the many temptations and distractions--the drinking that starts on Thursday nights and continues through the weekend so Friday classes are missed and Monday classes are attended through a hung-over haze. Marijuana and other drugs, some of which I have never heard of, flow freely on college campuses. Members of football and basketball teams have punishing practice and travel schedules that interfere with their schoolwork.

Many students come to college expecting a training in a specific skill but lack the maturity to make the best of the resources offered here. Some are overwhelmed and never get a handle on things. And what we in the humanities wish to impart--the skills for lifelong learning--may seem too attenuated to them to have any value. Some of them, like the student above, are dealing with life crises that we can't even imagine.

The financial burdens result not only in enormous debts that burden them long after they have graduated but also require them to work long hours just to keep body and soul together. I have students who come to class bleary-eyed because they worked the night shift and they're exhausted. Others are raising children and get up at 4 in the morning to study for a couple of hours before waking the kids to get them ready for school.

From my perspective, I cannot imagine how they can learn when they have so little time to study. Moreover, they are not trained to study as we were. People can make fun of the hours the nuns had us spend diagramming sentences, but we know our grammar. For me, one of the great joys of seventh and eighth grade was a program called SRA (for Science Research Associates) which was pioneered in the schools in the 1950s. Basically, it was a system of color-scaled cards with reading selections and questions on the readings. The better your reading got, the higher-level color you would advance to. It was very competitive but only with oneself. For me, it was the incentive to finish other work quickly so I could get to the SRA cards. It was fun and I learned about people and things I never would have encountered otherwise. I remember one card in particular about the late Supreme Court justice, William O. Douglas, who was an environmentalist. He had overcome childhood asthma by becoming an avid outdoors-man. If I hadn't read about him there, I might never have encountered him. I went to law school and found him once again, only to find that he was a First Amendment absolutist as well. I guess that information was too political for an eighth grader!

Many of my students don't know how to read effectively. They tell me they hate to read; that the books they read in my classes are the first complete books they've ever read. When I heard that for the first time, I thought, "So what are you doing in college?" I have heard it now so often, that I find myself wondering what has happened in the primary and secondary schools for this to be the case.

A class lecture and discussion will not make them competitive with students who've had the time to put in reading or working in the library. How do you keep from dumbing down your coursework? I talk with friends who teach in the exclusive private schools and they don't have the same issues. The problem is, my students will be competing with those well-prepared students, and they will be laboring under that disadvantage.

Somehow. we have to find a way to bridge the gap.                                         (917) 

 

Maybe History Isn't Everything

My graduate school mentor at UCLA, E. Bradford Burns, used to say, "History is everything." Coming from the rough and tumble world of social activism, I agreed with Dr. Burns and have often said it to my students. History is often ignored by those who know it, manipulated by others, and avoided by those who prefer to operate as if it didn't exist. But last week, I was forced to look at my perceptions of history in a different way; as Salman Rushdie says, "All ideas, even sacred ones, must adapt to new realities."

I was at Cape Cod at the end of August for a last gasp of summer before the new school year, and I had picked up a book which I thought would be light reading. Robert Pogue Harrison, a professor of Italian Literature at Stanford University, has written Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). His opening paragraph affected me like no other in recent memory. In fact, I am reminded of the eye-opening first line of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, which I read at the beginning of ninth grade, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," and the insight it gave me, at 13, to my own family. 

"Human beings are not made to look too intently at the Medusa head of history--its rage, death, and endless suffering. This is not a shortcoming on our part; on the contrary, our reluctance to let history's realities petrify us underlies much of what makes human life bearable; our religious impulses, our poetic and utopian imagination, our moral ideals, our metaphysical projections, our storytelling, our aesthetic transfigurations of the real, our passion for games, our delight in nature. Albert Camus once remarked, "Poverty kept me from thinking all was well under the sun and in history; the sun taught me that history is not everything." (Camus, 7)--to which we could add that if ever history were to become everything, we would all succumb to madness." (Harrison, ix)

I sat back: Wow. Wow. I had worked and worked on that "hard nut" for years, trying to understand what it was that kept people from reading history. Turning it over in my mind for years; trying to understand why it was that some people avoided news programs, newspapers, and other things that would keep them informed. It had always seemed ostrich-like to me, to stick one's head in the sand rather than face the reality in front of you. I knew, of course, that reality can be daunting to face but better, I thought, to face it and perhaps see the truck coming down the road than to be run over never knowing why. I had never thought about the petrifying effects of being hyper-aware of all the bad news in the world, even though I myself reach saturation points during which I turn off the radio and retreat to my garden.

Now I feel like I was examining one tree at a time for the answer that could only be gotten by looking at the whole forest, and Harrison enumerates them as though naming each tree: "our religious impulses, our poetic and utopian imagination, our moral ideals, our metaphysical projections, our storytelling, our aesthetic transfigurations of the real, our passion for games, our delight in nature." In a word, culture. Already I understand better my delight in my fruit trees and my garden. I can't wait to read the rest of the book.                                   (517)

History Through New Eyes

Welcome to the new academic year. I've been away but my classes start tomorrow and I expect to be writing at least once a week. Enjoy!

"It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth." ~Rebecca West


After so many years in the classroom, I think I understand the students who like the study of history. It is, after all, largely narrative. Most students who love history though do not go on to higher degrees in the subject, are those who join the History Book Club, or become re-enactors of the battles of the Revolutionary or Civil Wars, or spend their free time watching the Hitler--I mean, the HISTORY channel. My bank manager, a URI graduate, always tells me about his latest reading for he had majored in history and never lost the love of it. My daughter, a law and public health graduate student loves Henry VIII and the denizens of his century. Bank managers, postal carriers, librarians, lawyers, all sorts of people in many lines of work connect and love the narratives, the stories that humans have told themselves since we were able to talk. Even George W. Bush majored in history, though that hardly recommends it.

What about the students who hate history? Who come to my class and spend half of the semester glowering at me before I finally break down their defenses to convince them that I will not inundate them with names and dates? And they DO glower.

I believe that part of the problem is the way that they have been taught history in the primary and secondary schools. Poor teachers and class size may be part of the problem but the battles over curricula, over what students must learn to graduate really twist the knot and strangle the joy of it all . While the children may be unaware of the ideological battles, they are from the result: a bland diet of de-politicized history. Like white bread, the nutrition has been stripped out and all that remains is the appearance of substance.

Listening to the debate over President Barack Obama's address to our children encouraging them to stay in school and study hard, I am reminded of the zeal with which school boards guard the things teachers are allowed to teach. One complainant was furious because the president's speech had not been sent in advanced to the country's curriculum committees for approval! Apparently her motto is, "The blander, the better." President Obama delivered the most innocuous of messages to school children and some ultraconservatives are actually keeping their children home from school so they will not be exposed to the President’s “socialist propaganda” and to teach the schools a lesson. Oy.

When I was a graduate student at UCLA, I took a colloquium with Professor Gary Nash, a famous--though conservatives would say notorious--historian of United States History. Prof. Nash is the Director of the National Center for History in the Schools which published the extremely controversial National Standards for History, Basic Edition (1996). What could Prof. Nash have done that earned him the hatred of the conservatives and caused him to be labeled a Marxist, among other things? Leaving aside for the moment that conservatives drag out the "Marxist-socialist-communist" labels at the drop of a hat whenever they disagree with someone, they accuse Prof. Nash of emphasizing the "wrong" events and people in American history:

"Well, think of an American history where George Washington, the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address are barely mentioned, while the first nineteenth-century meeting of feminists at Seneca Falls and the rise of the American Federation of Labor are mentioned over eighteen times. J. P. Morgan, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers are not mentioned at all while Harriet Tugman [sic] appears six times. The great speeches of Daniel Webster are never mentioned but students are asked to analyze Pat Buchanan’s speech at the 1992 Republican convention. And then of course there are the truly great villains of American history. Senator Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism are mentioned 19 times..." (http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/onprin/v3n2/thompson.html)

The fact that Prof. Nash's work has been funded in large part by grants from the government really drives his critics over the wall.

Prof. Nash and his collaborators expanded the study of history in the schools to reflect a more balanced view of the government's actions, and to present a more inclusive and representative view of our history. The traditional way of teaching history presented certain famous leaders, almost all exclusively white men with the exception of Eli Whitney and George Washington Carver. For example, I remember my sixth grade history book because it was the first time I had ever seen a picture of an African American in any of my school books. The picture was of an older black man, hat in hand, head bowed, standing respectfully on the side of the road as Lincoln's funeral cortege went by. There is more to the presence of African Americans in U.S. history than old former slaves; more to Chinese American history than coolies building the railroads; and more to American women's history than Betsy Ross and Martha Washington sewing American flags.


You'd think that I'd have less sympathy for those students who don't like history but actually, I have a keen recollection of my undergraduate years, and I understand their antipathy. I did not major in history, per se. I majored in philosophy and minored in classics. Naturally, in the latter, we studied Greek and Roman history. I was drawn to philosophy by an interest in epistemology, that is, the development of human ideas. Until my last semester of college, my only other sojourn into history was a dismal experience with Chinese history (I was defeated by the emphasis on dates and the similarity of the names--Ming and Wing, etc.) It wasn't until my last semester of college when I took Jewish history, that I was enraptured by the subject.

Our professor, Dr. George Lerski, was unlike any of my other professors. A Pole, he had parachuted behind enemy lines during World War II, and he had been scarred by the memories of what he had seen. He was a real, live hero and he lived his commitment to history by taking on an unlikely challenge. Appalled by the hideous genocide of the Jews, he was determined that the world should know the history of anti-Semitism and of the Jewish Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis. He knew little about Jewish history but he decided to teach a class in the history of the Jews; the first time, he said, that a class in Jewish history was offered in a Catholic university. He picked the most well-known of the current histories, Abraham Leon Sachar's A History of the Jews, and told us, "We'll learn it together."

It was thrilling. Instead of a dry recitation of facts and dates, he gave us a sense of the importance of knowing history. We knew that what we were learning was important; that we could make a difference. He not only told us that it was important; he showed us, through his passionate presentation, through the filter of his memories, why it was so consequential.

One of the mantras among college students in the 1960s was that studies should be relevant. Professor Lerski’s commitment to connecting the history on the page to the Jewish people's suffering in the world captured our imaginations and provided the elusive link between book-learning and relevance that we craved. He was passionate and political though not partisan in a Democrat/Republican paradigm.

Forty years later, we are still redesigning curricula, trying to find the right balance between traditional learning, relevance, and a more enlightened 21st century approach to history. It is was Gary Nash does; what Howard Zinn did in People's History of the United States; and Gerda Lerner and a generation of women historians have done in illuminating the history of women.

Finding the relevance to our students' lives is the hard part but we must do it; we can count ourselves fortunate that academic freedom is still protected in this country. God bless the AAUP*.


*The American Association of University Professors is dedicated to the preservation of academic freedom. 

Just Don't Look: The Roots of a Life Calling for a Latina Educator

Miapogeo.com/My Latino Voice publishes my essays on Latino subjects and politics. This essay appeared this week.

http://miapogeo.com/main/content/view/1230/4766/

The nameplate and title adorn my office door.

For a Latina academic, a childhood visit to Guatemala inspired curiosity about the world we live in. 

We wonder how things begin. How did I end up teaching Latin American history? While it’s true that my mother was born in El Salvador and that my father’s parents came to San Francisco during the Mexican Revolution, there are relatively few children of Latin American parents teaching our history. 

My curiosity began at the end of the fourth grade in the summer of 1960, when my mother took us to Guatemala for her first visit since she had left in 1948. 

I loved the fourth grade. Our teacher, Mrs. Gojny, exposed us for the first time to geography and other cultures. We learned about the Emerald Isle (most of our teachers were nuns from Ireland); about Italy’s shape like a boot; about the wooden shoes that the Dutch wore, and their dikes and tulips. We learned about oceans that covered the earth: not just the Pacific Ocean where our parents took us on the rare sunny Sunday in San Francisco, but also the Atlantic, thousands of miles from us but still touching our country; the Indian Ocean and others. We were introduced to maps, and I still love them and use them when I teach. The vast and ancient civilizations of the East were barely mentioned. And Africa, the home of all human life? As we say in Rhode Islandese — “fuggitaboutit.”

Our teachers and textbooks celebrated the cultures of European countries. The textbook barely mentioned Latin America except to describe the original inhabitants as savages. Small wonder that even in our Latin American household, my mother was determined to make sure that we knew that we were Spanish not mixed with “those Indians.” Clearly, she held the same view of them as did our textbook.

My mother’s family was originally from El Salvador but the violent conflicts there had driven them to neighboring Guatemala. My mother had come to the United States from Guatemala in 1948, at first only to visit her older sister. She stayed; she married my father, and had the first three of her four children. Until the summer of 1960, she had not been able to go back for a visit.

Guatemala defined culture shock for me. I was nine, and nothing about Guatemala was like my life in San Francisco. My grandmother, a woman of modest means, had a couple of Indian sirvientas who worked for her. Servants; I had never heard the word and had some difficulty understanding what it meant. It seemed illogical or wrong, somehow. They made our beds, cooked our food, cleaned the house, and washed our clothes by hand in outdoor pilas or sinks.

Except for the center of town where the mercado was and the streets were paved with cobblestones, many of Guatemala’s streets were still dirt roads. At the time of that first visit to Guatemala, my abuelita’s house was close to the center of town. The buses cost a few cents to ride.

Around the corner from my grandmother’s house, there was a commercial laundry where in the window, there was a brazier upon which rested the irons, huge and heavy. They opened up and hot coals were put inside. Then a laundrywoman would lift the iron from the brazier and use it to press the clothes. It must have weighed 15 pounds without the coals. Even to my nine-year old consciousness, I thought it must be backbreaking work, especially working with the heat from the brazier and the hot irons. Then again, watching the servants wash our clothes by hand struck me as being backbreaking as well.

As we traveled around Guatemala, we would see Mayan shamans doing traditional Maya ceremonies on small shrines, often right in front of the Catholic churches. It was not hidden or done secretly. Considering that Protestant Evangelicals and the Mormons had not yet taken hold there, and Catholicism was the only officially recognized religion, it is fascinating that they did their rites out in the open. I had never seen anything like it.

One of the strangest things to my American eyes was that there were soldiers everywhere, carrying machine guns. It was particularly striking to one used to the huge, burly policemen in the United States. Guatemalans are a diminutive people, and at nine, I was already the height of most of the soldiers I saw. Having never been exposed to the violence of the army towards the civilian population (a policy that would lead to the murders or disappearances of 200,000 Guatemalans by the army during the civil war), I would still see them as harmless. Their machine guns were no more frightening to me than the toy guns that my brother played with. In 1960, the United States was training the Cuban refugee troops in eastern Guatemala who would invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. In the midst of the Cold War and the midst of its own troubles, Guatemala could not recuse itself from the turmoil. We knew nothing of that; the pervasiveness of soldiers everywhere in Guatemala was, like everything else that summer, surreal.

When I brought back candy for the servants from our travels around town, I was thoroughly chastised and told not to waste money on them. Unused to being waited on, I was embarrassed by them, and my mother was impatient with my reticence. That was simply the way it was, and I would do better to look at the beauty of the countryside. Did I want to wash my own clothes in the pila? I was, however, a great hit with the servants.

I must have driven Mom crazy that summer. She wanted me to look at the volcanoes, the lakes; and the beautiful ruins of colonial buildings. I saw them but I couldn’t ignore the men sleeping in parks and doorways; the Indian women carrying a baby tied snugly to their chests, carrying another on a hip, with two or three children hanging on to their skirts, all of them dirty, with mucus dripping from their noses. When we would alight from the buses, we would be swarmed by Indian women and their children, all begging. All I could see was the unrelenting, overwhelming poverty: esos Indios sucios, those filthy Indians, spoken of with such contempt that you knew that they must be poor and filthy on purpose. Half-starved dogs meandered in the streets, and occasionally one would see a pig wandering about.

My awareness of poverty, of the difficulty of labor, of hardship, was unusual for a nine year-old. At that time, American children had little exposure to wars and violence in part because our exposure to television was minimal and the offerings, for the most part, were more benign. Seeing all the suffering made me sick at heart and in fact, physically ill; at least that’s what my mother always said. 

Guatemala City is surrounded by volcanoes, including an active one, Pacaya. Since 1965, it sputters continuously, a plume of smoke emanating from its depths in a warning that it could go off any time, and the city is very susceptible to earthquakes. I’m glad Pacaya hadn’t started steaming yet when first I went there. Everything was already so surreal. We visited relatives in the colonial capital, Antigua, or Antigua Guatemala which means “Old Guatemala.” It was originally named Santiago de los Caballeros but after it was destroyed by earthquakes in 1717 and 1773, the crown ordered the capital moved to a safer place, and Antigua was ordered abandoned.  

My first taste of Latin American history was visiting the Museum of Old Weapons in Antigua where my aunt’s father was the curator. I have a picture of my brother and sister sitting in a colonial chair that had belonged to the conquerors of Guatemala. We saw armor, swords and other weapons which, until then, I had seen only in the British TV show, The Adventures of Robin Hood. What were they for, I asked? To kill the Indians, I was told. That was a very confusing answer considering that there were Indians everywhere in Guatemala, dressed in their traditional brightly colored trajes. I guessed that the conquerors hadn’t succeeded in killing all of them. Moreover, killing Indians was something I knew about: I had watched John Wayne’s movies; the Lone Ranger and Tonto, as well as all the other cowboy and Indian movies on television. These Indians didn’t look anything like the fierce, war-painted Indians on television. These Indians just looked small, poor, and dirty, not at all fierce; why did anyone want to kill them?

I fell in love with Antigua Guatemala. I resolved that I would come back to live in Antigua. As I grew older, I dreamed that I would be a writer and I would live in a little house there and write my books. Sadly, I have only returned there to visit. The civil war, from 1960 until 1996, ended any possibility of that dream.

Guatemala made a tremendous impression on me. In the years that followed my first visit, my uncle sent me a book, Los Grandes Conquistadores, which was the first real book I read in Spanish. My vocation was set then. As an adult, I would come to be horrified by accounts of the massacres of indigenous people by the Spanish conquerors, but the landscapes and the downtrodden people I saw that summer left an indelible mark on my heart. At some level, my mother’s love for her adopted country penetrated my subconscious and hooked me. 

We left the country very abruptly. I had been browsing in the stores around the perimeter of the mercadowith my grandmother, and we had just approached a shop with eggs and incubators in the window, where baby chicks were beginning to hatch. I heard popping sounds but thought nothing of it. My abuelita grabbed me, ran into the shop, threw me to the floor and covered her body with mine, telling me to be absolutely quiet. I remember the scent of the sawdust on the floor of the shop. I thought I heard horses’ hoofs on the cobblestones outside but I cannot tell you what happened that day. When the commotion stopped, Abuelita found a back door to the shop, and we ran home. The next day we were on a plane going back to San Francisco.

Every teacher who loves his/her subject passionately is possessed by things they must teach to the next generation. And so it is with me. I have tried to find some mention of what happened that summer, but censorship and repression have worked their magic and there is no trace. I've asked my mother about that day; she says I imagined it. Now that she is deeply lost to Alzheimers, I guess I'll never know, but I have never forgotten the scent of the sawdust.

Beloit College Mindset List

Just a quick note tonight; it's too hot for serious thinking (a record-setting 93 degrees here today!)

The annual Beloit College Mindset List has just been issued. Its purpose is to remind professors that students do not have the same cultural references that we do.   Check it out. 

Check out:

http://www.cleveland.com/nation/index.ssf/2009/08/mindset_list_of_beloit_college.html

History's Dates and People

I have an odd quirk of mind; odd, I suppose, unless one is a professional historian. I remember dates; all sorts of dates. When I graduated from college and left San Francisco, my home town, to move to Los Angeles, I found a little house in a cul-de-sac. I looked at the house number—1453—and I thought, “The fall of Constantinople.” I remember when wars happened; proclamations; constitutions; birthdays of presidents, actors, musical composers, and friends I had in high school and haven’t seen in 40 years. I even remember the date of death of the most notorious head of the Salvadoran Death Squads, the one who murdered Archbishop Oscar Romero, Roberto D’Aubuisson: February 20, 1992. That’s one I celebrate. I imagine him in the first circle of hell, reserved for those who assassinate saints.

Dates are the bane of a history student’s existence. Anyone who has ever taught history has heard the same complaint: It’s all about dates and names and I can’t remember either.  When I am frustrated by my students’ the total lack of a sense of time, I try to remind myself that mine is an unearned talent, like playing the piano by ear or having perfect pitch. It’s just there, that’s all.  But it was reinforced by the Catholic nuns of my elementary school who made us memorize all sorts of things, from the Baltimore Catechism, to long poems like Paul Revere's Ride, The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a special favorite of our teachers), the multiplication tables, and heaven knows what else. Do these young people have to memorize anything?  I sometimes think that by not acquiring this rudimentary skill, they are intellectually short-sheeted. More troubling is the fact that they have no sense of history; no idea at all about what came first. I have been trying to figure out if that is just a function of youth or if something else is going on. From a professional point of view, after all, history hasn’t been just about dates and names for a long time but unless you have a sense of time, it’s all just a jumble.

Comedian Jay Leno used to have a feature on his Tonight Show called, “Jaywalking,” where he and a crew would wander out to talk to people on the street or at an amusement park to ask them the simplest questions or ask them to identify the photo of one of our political leaders. When he would collect the worst of the correspondents to have them compete with each other in the “Jay-Walking All-Stars,” you could just die of embarrassment. How could they be so completely ignorant of history? When he took his show to the UCLA graduation (my alma mater) or to another local university, and interviewed students graduating with education degrees, I could feel my toes curl as the unwitting victims struggled to answer simple questions. http://www.nbc.com/The_Tonight_Show_with_Jay_Leno/video/clips/battle-of-the-jaywalk-all-stars-122/861701/ It was an excruciating experience to watch it, like watching a train wreck. I often caught myself covering my eyes. Presumably, he only picked the least intelligent respondents –they make fun of smart people in other ways. You have to wonder why they would allow themselves to be be broadcast in these demeaning performances.  Is it cool to be on TV no matter the price? Sometimes it’s enough to make me want to hang up my cap and gown for good.

Is it that the past just doesn’t matter to most people? Or to young people? Of course, there are always students who excel at the study of history but how do you connect it with young people who live only in the present?

One thing I do is to try to connect what I’m teaching with their cultural landmarks. I even read People Magazine once in a while just so I have a vague idea of the gossip that they would be familiar with. We live in a culture of celebrity; our students can name celebrities that are completely unfamiliar to me but that are part of their world. How do you make the world of politics and global interests, matter to them?

I’ll take that up tomorrow.

We Are Teachers, Not Police Officers* (In memory of Frank McCourt)

Among the great pleasures of life for college professors are our contacts with former students. Sometimes they send e-mails or handwritten notes; other times they tack notes to my office door; and sometimes we have a serendipitous and unexpected contact in a market or library and I get a quick glimpse into the windows of their lives.

Recently, I had an interesting e-mail from a former student. As a student-teacher in a high school, she has been coming to terms with a teacher's daily strains and workload. She had recently been fooled by a student claiming to be ill, only to learn later that the student had been malingering.

She wrote about that in passing. The real purpose of her letter was that she overheard one of my students boasting about his plan to fool me into giving him a higher grade than the "D" he had earned from me last semester, even as he malingered and claimed to have mono.

This is my reply to her:

Hi there--
YOU are the reward and payoff for me. I have had thousands of students and only a handful keep in touch or thank me for my efforts. But I have the joy of the work itself; of seeing the light go on in my students' faces; of seeing a student care enough to go into the Peace Corps or public school teaching to try to make the world a better place, and sometimes, when I'm lucky, someone like you who takes my feelings into consideration or writes to let me know that I have influenced your life in a positive way.

The world is a harsh place. The people who are the rats, the cheats, the lazy slobs who would rather steal somebody else's work, or the White House for that matter, were young once. We cannot know what forces combined to create a piece of coal instead of a diamond. Ultimately, we cannot take responsibility for them; we are teachers, not police officers. If I had to chase down every cheat or every creep who set out to fool me, I'd drive myself crazy. I can sleep easy knowing that I gave my all in the classroom. We who are the teachers can only do our best, teach our hearts out and believe that most of our students will go on to be good, honorable people who will raise their children to be that way as well, because most of them will. The problem is that the bad apples pollute the air itself. There appear to be more of them than there actually are.

As it happens, I know which student you are writing to me about; at least I think I do. Since I give so few "D's" or "F's" I almost always know who got them. It is because of students like him that I have had to become more suspicious and require doctor's notes. I hate doing it but I always have to figure these jokers into the equation. A student really has to screw up to get a D or an F in my classes: I bend over backwards to be fair. I have trained myself to avoid seeing the name on a class paper or exam until after I've graded it so that I don't favor a student I like or punish one I don't like. If they failed it is due to frequent absences, missed assignments, or excuses, excuses, excuses. This particular student was bragging about this last semester. A student who heard him confided to a male professor who called me anonymously to tip me off. I ended up feeling very suspicious and when one of my students got mono, I was a stickler for the doctor's note only to find that that student really was sick and nearly died.

What can you do? That young man is foolish. I can't take it personally. I wish I could send him to talk to the athlete who failed my intro class, and a year later showed up again but since he missed assignments, missed classes and failed tests, I flunked him again. When he showed up a third semester in a row, I told him to save us both a lot of aggravation, to go take something else. I hate giving failing grades but if they earn 'em, I give 'em. I used to think that eventually, the lying and cheating would cause a downfall but we only have to look at some of the leaders of our government to see how unlikely that is. And like you, I am hurt when someone succeeds in fooling me then brags about it to his friends.

I read once that the best teachers are funny and energetic; that a teacher creates the climate in his or her classroom. So teach, enjoy your teaching and remember that no fool can make a fool out of you; they only deepen the hole they're in. Your students will bless you and if there is a heaven, there's a special circle reserved for teachers. As a student's mother once said to me, teachers earn every nickel. If you want to read a book that will make you laugh out loud about teaching, read Teacher Man by Frank McCourt, the author of Angela's Ashes. I listened to it on CD (borrowed from the public library in Kingston) and it made my commute disappear.

Best of luck to you--
Dr. P
Francis "Frank" McCourt (19 August 1930-19 July 2009) died just a month ago.