The Spirit Blows Where It Pleases
“The spirit/wind blows where it pleases; you can hear its sound but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born of the spirit.” John 3:8 (New Jerusalem Bible)
The note on this verse from the Gospel of John in the New Jerusalem Bible reminds us that the Hebrew word for spirit and wind are the same – ruach. It also means breath and mind. When written in conjunction with the various Hebrew names for G-d, it means the spirit of G-d and usually indicates the active divine creative power.
This verse ran through my mind today as I left church this morning. I was reflecting on the column in the Richmond Examiner by the Assemblies of God layman columnist I read regularly these days. He had spent three serial columns trying to explain away the pagan aspects of Christmas, an apologia for the trite maxim “Jesus is the reason for the season” that fundamentalists love to toss around as if it were historically accurate and true beyond question.
Like my undergrads, this columnist has trouble with the notion of syncretism, a point I find myself returning to over and over in class. My students want to believe that there is a pure Christianity that has been in existence from the beginning that has over the years purified itself of all outside influences that would corrupt it. Alternatively they want to believe that the pure religion was always there, it just took awhile to fully reveal itself, a view fairly consistent with many that of many theologians historically. Either way, such visions evidence a lack of understanding of the tradition’s history and development.
I am prone to note in class that the Christian faith has historically been like a sponge, sucking up the cultural contents and ideologies of the places where it took root. A prime example of that is the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Aztec goddess cum Virgin Mary of Tepeyac, Mexico. But it’s just as easily seen in the austere, left-brain, word-driven religion of the sober cultures of northern Europe. It’s precisely the values and understanding of the Enlightenment that give rise to a 20th CE Protestant West whose self-affirming designations of orthodoxy and the designations for all disaffirming others – heretics – are tossed around as if they actually mean something to anyone outside their narrow circle of the likeminded. As Durkheim observed a century ago, religions tend to be society writ large.
On this fourth Sunday of Advent, which falls on the eve of the winter solstice as well as the Feast of St. Thomas (as in Doubting Thomas of John’s Gospel), this Episcopal priest celebrates the 15th anniversary of his ordination to the diaconate by attending eucharist. At the end of the day he will light the equivalent of a Yule fire in his fire pit in the back yard to welcome back the light to a darkened world. On the counter of his pass through to the kitchen, an evergreen wreath from Roman and Germanic tradition surround the candles of Advent, the church’s season of reflective watching and awaiting of the Christ child. Some might ask how these celebrations of my stated religious preference could possibly be tainted with the practices of other, older traditions. And why do these observances occur in the same season with the flickering candles of Hanukkah and Kwanzaa?
The answer was floating around in my head there in the parking lot at St. Richard’s this morning, coming straight out of John’s Gospel: The spirit blows where it will. I am prone to remind my students whose best laid plans have run afoul, usually around finals time, of the old rabbinical proverb: If you want to make G-d laugh, tell G-d your plans. If you want to make G-d really laugh, tell G-d G-d’s plans. Spirit cannot be contained by human systems. Like the breath escaping our nostrils, spirit is elusive, surprising. It bubbles up in unexpected places and takes on unanticipated configurations. And it readily combines with other manifestations of spirit to offer a new vision of spirit, hence the phenomenon of syncretism that is the rule, rather than the exception, of Christian – and ultimately all religions’ - history.
As I listened to the collect for "pure minds that we might hear the truth of the Christian tradition" this morning, I found my mind wandering, wondering how to make sense of such a statement. The reality is that when it comes to spirit, human beings don’t need pure minds, they need open minds. More than that, they need eyes open to see the spirit which surrounds them all the time but rarely is recognized for what it is.
This obsession with “the truth” that belief-driven religions tend to manifest more often serves as an impediment to spirit than a conduit. On a good day, the search for truth provides the best effort human beings are capable of conceiving regarding spirit in a particular time and culture. But we humans seem to have an inevitable propensity to concretize those understandings, ascribing to them qualities of absolute and eternal where tentativeness and the recognition of their partial and evolving qualities are the best those constructions merit.
Increasingly, I have come to see notions of orthodoxy as little more than the work of human hands which, when mistaken for the ultimate to which they would point and becoming the object of worship in themselves, amount to little more than idolatry. Accusations of heresy amount to little more than charges of contempt of the accuser’s idol and contempt for the disaffirming other.
Of course, the defense of idols will always be immediate, vehement and aggressive. Constructed notions of spirit purporting to be absolute, ultimate and eternal are by definition brittle and vulnerable. They are also fairly easily seen through by those with open eyes to observe them and open minds to critically consider them.
Ironically, while the self-appointed defenders of heresy would readily quote the verse from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians 6:7 “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked…” when challenged, what could be more of a mockery of a G-d who is beyond all human understandings than to be reduced to a single understanding in a given place, time and asserted by a given subset of humanity which is seen by them as somehow normative for all human beings in all times and places?
So, why is there syncretism? Simple. The spirit is too large to be contained by a single human system, particularly left-brain driven systems made of words. Spirit is too dynamic to remain static and thus absolute and eternal. It blows as it pleases. It may be comforting to believe that what we believe today is “as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen (so be it!).” But, ultimately, it is but one of many human attempts to describe the ultimately indescribable and to contain with our human boxes that which is incapable of ever being captured.
That being said, human beings have historically demonstrated a need for systems of explanation to anchor them, to help them make sense of that which lies beyond total understanding. All human knowledge is socially constructed or that which would be known would remain beyond the grasp of most human beings. It is when we confuse the finger pointing toward the moon for the moon itself, to borrow from a Zen koan, that our best laid plans run afoul.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Monday, December 21, 2009
Friday, December 18, 2009
When ???
As I am going through the calls from today whose numbers are listed on my home phone, I suddenly realize that of the 12 people who called me today, only two are people I know or want to talk with. The other ten are numbers for people who either intend to remain unknown – e.g., AACC or the FOP Fdtn (now what the hell might *that* be?)– or those who clearly have called me to seek profit from me – Monumental Life, the State of California (Arnie’s calling me? Does Maria know?), Florida State University (I’m guessing they are seeking my opinion on who the new football coach should be given that anything else at FSU is clearly trivial in comparison).
As I spent the latest round of at least 5 minutes needed to remove these calls from my phone, it dawned on me that my phone messages bear a strong resemblance to my emails. Between the poorly written scams from people who say they are in Africa seeking to create accounts so they can deposit moneys coming to me (right, buddy!) and the million and one messages one gets if they have ever had the temerity to actually donate to an animal rescue or wildlife protection agency or comment on a story in a daily newspaper online, it’s pretty clear that email is not designed for the personal use of the owner of the account. It’s really designed for commercial use in which you are merely a means to an end, that end being someone else’s profit.
As I walked away from my mailbox today, a couple of Christmas cards mixed in with about 20 pitches for donations to charities and advertisements for periodicals and consumer goods I simply won’t be able to live with myself if I don’t purchase before Christmas, the realization began to grow. This may be your home. But it's not about you. As the lyrics to The Hotel California (Eagles) observe, “We are all just prisoners here of our own device.”
I guess I just wonder this: When did I ever agree that my telephone, mailbox and email were simply one more arena for the fundamentalist free market consumerism that devours every other aspect of my life including my workplace? When did I agree to become a potential buyer for every commodity or service offered via telephone until 10 p.m. each night, the last call coming as I am brushing my teeth to go to bed? When did I ever consent to being badgered by every communication device created by humanity to engage in more and more consumerist activity rather than using it for actually communicating with people I wish to communicate with? When did I agree that if you can’t sell me something by phone, email or US mail that you could actually come into my yard, stick advertisements in my door or ring my doorbell and wait for an answer hoping to make a sale.
WHEN DID MY HOME BECOME AN EXTENSION OF THE FREE MARKET FUNDAMENTALIS MARKETPLACE? WHEN DID I AGREE TO THAT?
WHEN??????
[Yes, the all caps SHOULD be recognized as denoting anger!]++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
As I am going through the calls from today whose numbers are listed on my home phone, I suddenly realize that of the 12 people who called me today, only two are people I know or want to talk with. The other ten are numbers for people who either intend to remain unknown – e.g., AACC or the FOP Fdtn (now what the hell might *that* be?)– or those who clearly have called me to seek profit from me – Monumental Life, the State of California (Arnie’s calling me? Does Maria know?), Florida State University (I’m guessing they are seeking my opinion on who the new football coach should be given that anything else at FSU is clearly trivial in comparison).
As I spent the latest round of at least 5 minutes needed to remove these calls from my phone, it dawned on me that my phone messages bear a strong resemblance to my emails. Between the poorly written scams from people who say they are in Africa seeking to create accounts so they can deposit moneys coming to me (right, buddy!) and the million and one messages one gets if they have ever had the temerity to actually donate to an animal rescue or wildlife protection agency or comment on a story in a daily newspaper online, it’s pretty clear that email is not designed for the personal use of the owner of the account. It’s really designed for commercial use in which you are merely a means to an end, that end being someone else’s profit.
As I walked away from my mailbox today, a couple of Christmas cards mixed in with about 20 pitches for donations to charities and advertisements for periodicals and consumer goods I simply won’t be able to live with myself if I don’t purchase before Christmas, the realization began to grow. This may be your home. But it's not about you. As the lyrics to The Hotel California (Eagles) observe, “We are all just prisoners here of our own device.”
I guess I just wonder this: When did I ever agree that my telephone, mailbox and email were simply one more arena for the fundamentalist free market consumerism that devours every other aspect of my life including my workplace? When did I agree to become a potential buyer for every commodity or service offered via telephone until 10 p.m. each night, the last call coming as I am brushing my teeth to go to bed? When did I ever consent to being badgered by every communication device created by humanity to engage in more and more consumerist activity rather than using it for actually communicating with people I wish to communicate with? When did I agree that if you can’t sell me something by phone, email or US mail that you could actually come into my yard, stick advertisements in my door or ring my doorbell and wait for an answer hoping to make a sale.
WHEN DID MY HOME BECOME AN EXTENSION OF THE FREE MARKET FUNDAMENTALIS MARKETPLACE? WHEN DID I AGREE TO THAT?
WHEN??????
[Yes, the all caps SHOULD be recognized as denoting anger!]++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Thursday, December 17, 2009
End of the Year Musings – I
This has been a trying year. But it has also been a good year. And so, during this time of Advent quiet, I would like to lay out some of the things that I have been reflecting upon this very taxing but rewarding year. Here’s the first.
The End of Old Florida
Andy and I spent several years in Vero Beach back in the late 70s and 80s before and after my time in law school. For about a five year period, I considered Vero Beach home, even when I was far away in the arms of the jealous mistress of the law (school) in Gainesville. I have been fond of Vero ever since. Hence the reason my return to Vero for a weekend sojourn there this fall was so disappointing.
In all fairness, Vero has always been a town of extremes. As a wealthy piss-elegant queen decorator there once said, “You’ve got all the good people living on the beach, all the shit kickers in their pick-em-up trucks out on the west side of town and not much in between.”
Of course that “not much in between” included the two of us. Andy worked for Piper Aircraft out at the airport just down the road from Dodgertown where Tommy Lasorda and his LA Blue trained each spring, occasionally getting to take new models out for a spin. Meanwhile I taught emotionally disturbed kids up in Gifford, the little pocket of the third world just north of town that most of its white residents pretended did not exist.
Though I tried, I never fit in Gifford. I was too white, too well educated (at that time, with only my BA in History/Secondary Ed) and too middle class. These folks were desperately poor and most scratched out meager livings in the local citrus groves and packing houses, one of which bordered the middle school where I taught. It was always clear to me that while I could go into Gifford during the day, love my students (because, frankly, most of them had no one else to really love them, much less defend them from the brutal lives they were facing) and even party with my friend, the music teacher who lived on the edge of Gifford, at night, I always had the option - if not the obligation - to go home at the end of my time there.
I also never fit into the wealth ensconced on the beach, not that I ever particularly wanted to. The level of self-awareness and corresponding dismissal of those who were inevitably seen as NOCD (Not Our Class, Dearie) was palpable, even at the many dinner parties Andy and I were invited to attend over on the beach. The beachside was lovely as was much of the downtown areas of Vero Beach with streets lined with royal palms framing Florida boomtime stucco homes. But, as I’ve learned long ago, the beauty of a place must be matched by the internal beauty of its inhabitants to be a place I would consider truly habitable.
Since we left Vero Beach to move to Orlando in 1983, much has changed. Gigantic gated communities have consumed much of the former wetlands bordering the Indian River. The realm of the “shit kickers in their pick’em trucks” has been steadily pushed westward into the former grove land and south into blue collar St. Lucie County as gated communities have competed with retirees in trailer parks and strip malls for the remaining land. Vero has become a reflection of Florida at large with its out of control growth, its pampered retirees and its large group of peoples left behind.
I set out for Vero in the week I had off prior to the fall term, seeking some down time, some quiet and, hopefully, a little peace of mind before the onslaught of fall term. At heart, I hoped to reconnect with a little of the Vero I knew, to hopefully engage a piece of my past that I remembered rather fondly. What I found left me angry and grieving for a life – and a state – now gone.
I stayed at the Holiday Inn on the Beach, a decent 1960s era hotel with a large lounge and restaurant full of noise, smoke and tourists from the northeast. I walked down the beach as I often had to Waldo’s, the old hotel assembled in the early 1900s by Vero eccentric millionaire Waldo Sexton, and filled with antiques and historical artifacts from all over Florida. Waldo's has decent though overpriced drinks, mediocre food on a good night and a young crowd. But it also has an ocean side deck with a sweeping view of ocean complete with the wreckage of a turn of the century steamship which went down on the coral reefs offshore and which still appears at low tide, today an attraction for divers.
After a couple of drinks I decided I’d head down to one of my old haunts, Crustie’s Pizza, right on the beach by Humiston Park. I’ve spent a lot of nights in Crusties (nee Patricks Pizza when we lived there) comsuming copious quantities of cheap beer and eating so-so pizza, all the while listening to the ocean roaring right outside the window and screaming over the roar of football on the television monitors all over the restaurant. This pizza joint held a lot of memories for me. I’d hope to go relive them one more time.
But, alas. Crusties is no more. The one-two punch of Hurricanes Francis and Jeanne in 1994 did the place in and, unlike the Ocean Grill, the social gathering place of beach elite similarly perched precariously over the beach on stilts such that the ocean comes roaring beneath it at high tide, Crusties was not to be rebuilt after the storms. In its place, a chain link fence stretching across the dune line to the beach below delineated a construction site where a new condominium would soon take its place. The last outpost of the locals across the bridges in mainland Vero was gone. Even that small spot would now go to the wealthy snowbirds who visit during “the season.” Old Vero was no more.
The final nail in the coffin came the next day as I was leaving town to catch I-95 north back to Orlando. I stopped at Starbucks at the Vero Mall just before the interstate to get some reinforcements for the long ride back up to Orlando after a long night at the Ocean Grill. All I wanted was a half-caf to go. Famous last words.
The woman ahead of me in line, a local retiree no doubt from one of the many gated communities squeezed between trailer parks and the Our Lady of the Corrugated Steel Building megachurches on the edge of town, had arrived in her Cadillac. As she gave her order to the young college boy home for the summer break, she let him know through her tone, affect and words that she clearly considered him hired help and below her status. After nearly 10 minutes of negotiating and renegotiating the temperature of her drink and the amount of foam (and I thought the undergrads were bad!), I finally was able to get to the counter, order my coffee and make my escape. The old coot actually scowled at me as I went out the door. "And also with you" ran across my mind but fortunately my Mother's voice reminding me "Don't be ugly, son" restrained me from verbalizing that thought.
As I headed out SR 60 to the Interstate that morning, I was very clear about one thing: the place I had loved and considered returning to in retirement no longer existed. What has taken its place is nothing I would ever wish to deal with again. The Vero I knew is dead and buried. May it rest in peace.
But all is not lost for this fifth generation Cracker.
Two weeks later, on Labor Day weekend, I went with my sister, her boys and my Dad over to Passe-a-Grille, an old beachside community on the south end of the Pinellas County peninsula jsut across the bay from Tampa. I had spent a couple years of my life in Clearwater, just a few miles to the north, during kintergarden and first grade. Having always grieved being taken from that place to grow up in rural Sumter County, I am always delighted to have a chance to be back to one the increasingly few places I consider my old Florida “homes.”
The hotel in which we stayed was an old 1950s era hotel which had been fairly recently revamped, with decking and a hot tub. It was across the street from the Gulf, a warm, salty bathtub on a good day and the place where the sun daily makes a hissing noise as sit drops into its waters (or so I’m told by the locals in Key West). The hotel is now operated by a middle aged, mixed race couple from New York. It was low key, simple but clean and comfortable. It was perfect.
Passe-a-Grille has prohibited building condos on the beach itself. All development is at least 50 years old or older and sits across the street from the Gulf, separated from the street by on-street parking, ramps over the dunes and a good 300 foot stretch of sand and sea oats. It was beautiful. Indeed, after my experience in Vero, it was heavenly.
Perhaps even more beautiful, from my perspective, were the locals. These were folks we’d have called Conchs had they lived in the Keys. MIddle aged to elderly, skin the color of your dog’s chew treat (and largely the same texture), wearing tie-dyed bikinis and shorts that looked like they had just barely escaped from the 60s, these folks had lived here much of their lives. Their modest homes brimmed over with tropical plants, a couple of seeds and cuttings of which made their way into my own yard at the end of this trip. (I wonder how that happened!) They often smiled and nodded hello as they passed. And the women at the corner store called me "honey" when I bought the overpriced six pack of wine there.
There was little traffic on the beachside streets and even less on the beach itself. We took a long walk on the beach after dinner, flashlights in hand, just like when I was a young boy there in Pinellas County. Within yards of our passing, fish and dolphins jumped in the inky Gulf waters while overhead a large pelican floated on the warm breeze, periodically diving into the sea for her dinner. We walked along the sand, flash lights in hand, periodically stepping over sand castles from the day past, a small, moving island of light and joyful laughter in a sea of darkness. Up the coast the lights of the condos and hotels shone brightly. Overhead, all the constellations visible in the early fall sky twinkled. It was magic.
My father, a second generation Floridian, and my sister and I, fifth generation Crackers (on our mother’s side) all remarked that this was the old Florida we remembered. It was a very happy weekend and a wonderful way to celebrate my 56th birthday. I came away from our little weekend jaunt thankful to my sister for putting together a brief sojourn in a little corner of the state which still looks a lot like the Florida I once knew and loved.
As I left that Sunday, I noticed that down the beach, the city limits of Passe-a-Grille are strikingly evident by the sudden jump in permitted building heights to 20 story condos. Passe-a-Grille is a bubble of low key, old time Florida surrounded by the relentless forces of development. No doubt the bulldozers and draglines are in a parking lot nearby warming their engines as we speak. Even so, it's nice to know a little piece of old Florida still exists even as the local self-described "developers," temporarily deterred by the real estate bust, await their turn at destroying yet another corner of a beautiful state once known as…Florida.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This has been a trying year. But it has also been a good year. And so, during this time of Advent quiet, I would like to lay out some of the things that I have been reflecting upon this very taxing but rewarding year. Here’s the first.
The End of Old Florida
Andy and I spent several years in Vero Beach back in the late 70s and 80s before and after my time in law school. For about a five year period, I considered Vero Beach home, even when I was far away in the arms of the jealous mistress of the law (school) in Gainesville. I have been fond of Vero ever since. Hence the reason my return to Vero for a weekend sojourn there this fall was so disappointing.
In all fairness, Vero has always been a town of extremes. As a wealthy piss-elegant queen decorator there once said, “You’ve got all the good people living on the beach, all the shit kickers in their pick-em-up trucks out on the west side of town and not much in between.”
Of course that “not much in between” included the two of us. Andy worked for Piper Aircraft out at the airport just down the road from Dodgertown where Tommy Lasorda and his LA Blue trained each spring, occasionally getting to take new models out for a spin. Meanwhile I taught emotionally disturbed kids up in Gifford, the little pocket of the third world just north of town that most of its white residents pretended did not exist.
Though I tried, I never fit in Gifford. I was too white, too well educated (at that time, with only my BA in History/Secondary Ed) and too middle class. These folks were desperately poor and most scratched out meager livings in the local citrus groves and packing houses, one of which bordered the middle school where I taught. It was always clear to me that while I could go into Gifford during the day, love my students (because, frankly, most of them had no one else to really love them, much less defend them from the brutal lives they were facing) and even party with my friend, the music teacher who lived on the edge of Gifford, at night, I always had the option - if not the obligation - to go home at the end of my time there.
I also never fit into the wealth ensconced on the beach, not that I ever particularly wanted to. The level of self-awareness and corresponding dismissal of those who were inevitably seen as NOCD (Not Our Class, Dearie) was palpable, even at the many dinner parties Andy and I were invited to attend over on the beach. The beachside was lovely as was much of the downtown areas of Vero Beach with streets lined with royal palms framing Florida boomtime stucco homes. But, as I’ve learned long ago, the beauty of a place must be matched by the internal beauty of its inhabitants to be a place I would consider truly habitable.
Since we left Vero Beach to move to Orlando in 1983, much has changed. Gigantic gated communities have consumed much of the former wetlands bordering the Indian River. The realm of the “shit kickers in their pick’em trucks” has been steadily pushed westward into the former grove land and south into blue collar St. Lucie County as gated communities have competed with retirees in trailer parks and strip malls for the remaining land. Vero has become a reflection of Florida at large with its out of control growth, its pampered retirees and its large group of peoples left behind.
I set out for Vero in the week I had off prior to the fall term, seeking some down time, some quiet and, hopefully, a little peace of mind before the onslaught of fall term. At heart, I hoped to reconnect with a little of the Vero I knew, to hopefully engage a piece of my past that I remembered rather fondly. What I found left me angry and grieving for a life – and a state – now gone.
I stayed at the Holiday Inn on the Beach, a decent 1960s era hotel with a large lounge and restaurant full of noise, smoke and tourists from the northeast. I walked down the beach as I often had to Waldo’s, the old hotel assembled in the early 1900s by Vero eccentric millionaire Waldo Sexton, and filled with antiques and historical artifacts from all over Florida. Waldo's has decent though overpriced drinks, mediocre food on a good night and a young crowd. But it also has an ocean side deck with a sweeping view of ocean complete with the wreckage of a turn of the century steamship which went down on the coral reefs offshore and which still appears at low tide, today an attraction for divers.
After a couple of drinks I decided I’d head down to one of my old haunts, Crustie’s Pizza, right on the beach by Humiston Park. I’ve spent a lot of nights in Crusties (nee Patricks Pizza when we lived there) comsuming copious quantities of cheap beer and eating so-so pizza, all the while listening to the ocean roaring right outside the window and screaming over the roar of football on the television monitors all over the restaurant. This pizza joint held a lot of memories for me. I’d hope to go relive them one more time.
But, alas. Crusties is no more. The one-two punch of Hurricanes Francis and Jeanne in 1994 did the place in and, unlike the Ocean Grill, the social gathering place of beach elite similarly perched precariously over the beach on stilts such that the ocean comes roaring beneath it at high tide, Crusties was not to be rebuilt after the storms. In its place, a chain link fence stretching across the dune line to the beach below delineated a construction site where a new condominium would soon take its place. The last outpost of the locals across the bridges in mainland Vero was gone. Even that small spot would now go to the wealthy snowbirds who visit during “the season.” Old Vero was no more.
The final nail in the coffin came the next day as I was leaving town to catch I-95 north back to Orlando. I stopped at Starbucks at the Vero Mall just before the interstate to get some reinforcements for the long ride back up to Orlando after a long night at the Ocean Grill. All I wanted was a half-caf to go. Famous last words.
The woman ahead of me in line, a local retiree no doubt from one of the many gated communities squeezed between trailer parks and the Our Lady of the Corrugated Steel Building megachurches on the edge of town, had arrived in her Cadillac. As she gave her order to the young college boy home for the summer break, she let him know through her tone, affect and words that she clearly considered him hired help and below her status. After nearly 10 minutes of negotiating and renegotiating the temperature of her drink and the amount of foam (and I thought the undergrads were bad!), I finally was able to get to the counter, order my coffee and make my escape. The old coot actually scowled at me as I went out the door. "And also with you" ran across my mind but fortunately my Mother's voice reminding me "Don't be ugly, son" restrained me from verbalizing that thought.
As I headed out SR 60 to the Interstate that morning, I was very clear about one thing: the place I had loved and considered returning to in retirement no longer existed. What has taken its place is nothing I would ever wish to deal with again. The Vero I knew is dead and buried. May it rest in peace.
But all is not lost for this fifth generation Cracker.
Two weeks later, on Labor Day weekend, I went with my sister, her boys and my Dad over to Passe-a-Grille, an old beachside community on the south end of the Pinellas County peninsula jsut across the bay from Tampa. I had spent a couple years of my life in Clearwater, just a few miles to the north, during kintergarden and first grade. Having always grieved being taken from that place to grow up in rural Sumter County, I am always delighted to have a chance to be back to one the increasingly few places I consider my old Florida “homes.”
The hotel in which we stayed was an old 1950s era hotel which had been fairly recently revamped, with decking and a hot tub. It was across the street from the Gulf, a warm, salty bathtub on a good day and the place where the sun daily makes a hissing noise as sit drops into its waters (or so I’m told by the locals in Key West). The hotel is now operated by a middle aged, mixed race couple from New York. It was low key, simple but clean and comfortable. It was perfect.
Passe-a-Grille has prohibited building condos on the beach itself. All development is at least 50 years old or older and sits across the street from the Gulf, separated from the street by on-street parking, ramps over the dunes and a good 300 foot stretch of sand and sea oats. It was beautiful. Indeed, after my experience in Vero, it was heavenly.
Perhaps even more beautiful, from my perspective, were the locals. These were folks we’d have called Conchs had they lived in the Keys. MIddle aged to elderly, skin the color of your dog’s chew treat (and largely the same texture), wearing tie-dyed bikinis and shorts that looked like they had just barely escaped from the 60s, these folks had lived here much of their lives. Their modest homes brimmed over with tropical plants, a couple of seeds and cuttings of which made their way into my own yard at the end of this trip. (I wonder how that happened!) They often smiled and nodded hello as they passed. And the women at the corner store called me "honey" when I bought the overpriced six pack of wine there.
There was little traffic on the beachside streets and even less on the beach itself. We took a long walk on the beach after dinner, flashlights in hand, just like when I was a young boy there in Pinellas County. Within yards of our passing, fish and dolphins jumped in the inky Gulf waters while overhead a large pelican floated on the warm breeze, periodically diving into the sea for her dinner. We walked along the sand, flash lights in hand, periodically stepping over sand castles from the day past, a small, moving island of light and joyful laughter in a sea of darkness. Up the coast the lights of the condos and hotels shone brightly. Overhead, all the constellations visible in the early fall sky twinkled. It was magic.
My father, a second generation Floridian, and my sister and I, fifth generation Crackers (on our mother’s side) all remarked that this was the old Florida we remembered. It was a very happy weekend and a wonderful way to celebrate my 56th birthday. I came away from our little weekend jaunt thankful to my sister for putting together a brief sojourn in a little corner of the state which still looks a lot like the Florida I once knew and loved.
As I left that Sunday, I noticed that down the beach, the city limits of Passe-a-Grille are strikingly evident by the sudden jump in permitted building heights to 20 story condos. Passe-a-Grille is a bubble of low key, old time Florida surrounded by the relentless forces of development. No doubt the bulldozers and draglines are in a parking lot nearby warming their engines as we speak. Even so, it's nice to know a little piece of old Florida still exists even as the local self-described "developers," temporarily deterred by the real estate bust, await their turn at destroying yet another corner of a beautiful state once known as…Florida.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Taking on The Times
The St. Petersburg Times is undoubtedly the best newspaper in Florida and has been for most of my life. I have read it since I was a child and I agree with much of what I read on their editorial page. Yet, sometimes they get it wrong. Today's editorial today read:
Florida students overall passed a paltry 42.9 percent of AP exams in 2009 compared to 57 percent nationwide….The AP exam passing rates for individual teachers can be even lower. At Gibbs High in St. Petersburg, an F-rated school, not a single one of 35 students who took AP human geography over two years passed the exam. But schools with stronger academic reputations are also failing their AP students. St. Petersburg High, often ranked among the nation's top high schools, has AP passing rates for specific teachers as low as 8.6 percent, 5.3 percent and 0 percent. Imagine how that kind of job performance would be evaluated in the private sector.
The excuses from teachers and principals are predictable. Some point to differences in school populations, but there are dismal AP passing rates for individual teachers in otherwise high-performing schools. Others say teachers new to the rigors of AP classes need time to grow into their jobs. But there are plenty of examples of veteran AP teachers who have low passing rates year after year. The students cannot wait for the teacher to get better to have a shot at passing the test and earning college credit.
A friend of mine, when he takes issue with one of my assertions, is prone to cajole me with a quote from H.L. Mencken that reads: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. “ While, not surprisingly, I am disinclined to see my own thinking in such terms, the fact I readily see it in others might give me pause to wonder if I am projecting just a bit and that his observation might be somewhat on target. With that caveat in mind, I would still suggest that the Times got this one at least partly wrong precisely because it failed to deal with the complexity of the situation.
The first problematic aspect of their argument is the explicit assumption that public education is somehow analogous to consumer capitalism. Business tends to see human beings as customers in which human beings are either a means to the desired end –profit – or an obstacle. While philosopher Immanuel Kant might readily object that this violates the second statement of the categorical imperative in which human beings must always be treated as ends in themselves and never means to other ends, in America we insulate business from such criticisms through rather mindless assertions like “This is business” or its cousin, “It’s just business.” That translates to a rather convenient American common sense that the premises of free market fundamentalism are beyond question as are the deleterious effects such practices may have on human beings and human societies.
But public schools are not businesses. They do not have the same goals. Where sales of essentially worthless – occasionally even harmful - merchandise to half-witted consumers taken in by slick advertising campaigns may be absolutely acceptable to a business with a bottom line of profit, worthless knowledge will always be subject to criticism by the public. And it should be. Indeed, if anything, this is where the Times editorial is on target – our students deserve better.
A second important difference is this: where businesses are more than happy to leave as many consumers behind so long as profits are insured, public education is expected to leave no children behind, even as the cynical programs bearing this label have left up to 1/3 of America’s children behind with no high school diplomas over the past decade. America has no children to waste. The goal of public education is an educated public – all of it. Again, this is where the Times editorial is on target – if AP students are not learning enough to pass standardized AP exams, the public ought to be asking why not.
But the answer to that question contains a number of possible components. One of them might well be incompetent teachers. But that alone is too easy and simplistic. It is might be the beginning place of seeking to understand the problem but it is hardly the whole story. To simply stop there is to run the risk of scapegoating a whole class of workers for a much broader problem which I observe is at least partly out of their control. While that's easy, it's also intellectually dishonest and unfair.
A second inquiry might ask the the middle class, from which the majority of AP students come, to consider the unthinkable: Are the students taking these classes genuinely college material? Perhaps even more importantly – do they actually want to attend college?
Daily I see students at the university where I teach who clearly are not ready to be in college. Besides the lack of maturity and time management skills which is the nature of the beast - particularly those right out of our regimented, paternalistic high schools - they have no sense of vocation and often default to that which their parents or significant others have envisioned for their lives. But because this is not their dream they are pursuing, they have no real energy or excitement about their college educations. They see it as something to do because they had no other ideas or because they felt it was the path of least resistance. The result? Mediocre (at best) performance and misdirected resentment over any effort demanded of them.
My heart goes out to these students even as their cynicism and inability to escape their own immediate concerns often makes my life as instructor difficult. I sometimes write on their papers (which only they see) “Are you sure you are ready to be in college at this time?” It’s a serious question for me and it ought to be for them as well. But I think that question begins much earlier for them and perhaps the AP exams are one reflection of this.
But, there is an even more fundamental concern for understanding the AP exams scores. Teachers do not manufacture educations. They cannot be conferred or purchased, even with increasing tuition moneys. Educations must be achieved by the student who would become educated and is thus willing to exert the effort to achieve it. The very best a teacher can do is help make that attainment possible. And while it may be possible that some teachers are failing to do that, it simply can never be the only factor at work here. Perhaps a look at these same Advanced Placement students once they are actually "placed" in a university might be shed some light.
My observations of the university students I teach is that they often have enormous senses of entitlement, particularly the honors students I most love to teach. That translates to expectations of as high a grade as possible with the least amount of work necessary. It translates to a sense that required reading - not to mention, G-d forbid, preparatory assignments - before class is onerous and unnecessary. It translates to a sense that attendance is always optional depending upon one’s other concerns. It translates to a belief that the use of distracting technology in the classroom is a birthright. And it translates to a belief –fostered by the misguided use of standardized testing driven pedagogy in public schools over the past decade – that their grades in any class should boil down to performance on no more than three multiple choice exams. Any demands beyond that are generally seen as outrageous.
Students come to the university with such attitudes already firmly in place. They learned them somewhere. It’s possible they learned them in public schools. However my suspicion is that they learned them from the two most powerful socializing agents in our culture – their families and the electronic media (Just do it! Obey your thirst! Talk all the time!).
Might it just be possible that the blame for low AP scores must be shared with those who actually took the tests? Might their dedication to preparation and their sense of entitlement to positive results regardless of their own efforts be considered? And might their ambitious and overprotective parents also share some of this blame for pushing their children into a college path for which increasing numbers of them are uncertain they are prepared or even interested?
I think perhaps another analogy might serve us here. This is the comment I left at the Times website:
For years public school lunch room cooks and servers prepared food that was nutritious if not always appealing or attractive. Regulated by governmental nutritional standards and funded in part by federal moneys designed to insure children did not attend school hungry, their meals were designed to promote healthy diets. Yet students and their parents increasingly demanded more choices and as a result fast food, sodas, chips and candy came to mark the diet of these students.
Now, three decades later, we have a crisis of childhood obesity on our hands. Given the logic of the Times editorial, I'm guessing that accountability means we will blame the lunch room cooks and servers for the obesity crisis. That and the union to which some of them belong which obviously protects incompetent food preparers from being held accountable.
Seriously folks. What's missing from this picture?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The St. Petersburg Times is undoubtedly the best newspaper in Florida and has been for most of my life. I have read it since I was a child and I agree with much of what I read on their editorial page. Yet, sometimes they get it wrong. Today's editorial today read:
Florida students overall passed a paltry 42.9 percent of AP exams in 2009 compared to 57 percent nationwide….The AP exam passing rates for individual teachers can be even lower. At Gibbs High in St. Petersburg, an F-rated school, not a single one of 35 students who took AP human geography over two years passed the exam. But schools with stronger academic reputations are also failing their AP students. St. Petersburg High, often ranked among the nation's top high schools, has AP passing rates for specific teachers as low as 8.6 percent, 5.3 percent and 0 percent. Imagine how that kind of job performance would be evaluated in the private sector.
The excuses from teachers and principals are predictable. Some point to differences in school populations, but there are dismal AP passing rates for individual teachers in otherwise high-performing schools. Others say teachers new to the rigors of AP classes need time to grow into their jobs. But there are plenty of examples of veteran AP teachers who have low passing rates year after year. The students cannot wait for the teacher to get better to have a shot at passing the test and earning college credit.
A friend of mine, when he takes issue with one of my assertions, is prone to cajole me with a quote from H.L. Mencken that reads: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. “ While, not surprisingly, I am disinclined to see my own thinking in such terms, the fact I readily see it in others might give me pause to wonder if I am projecting just a bit and that his observation might be somewhat on target. With that caveat in mind, I would still suggest that the Times got this one at least partly wrong precisely because it failed to deal with the complexity of the situation.
The first problematic aspect of their argument is the explicit assumption that public education is somehow analogous to consumer capitalism. Business tends to see human beings as customers in which human beings are either a means to the desired end –profit – or an obstacle. While philosopher Immanuel Kant might readily object that this violates the second statement of the categorical imperative in which human beings must always be treated as ends in themselves and never means to other ends, in America we insulate business from such criticisms through rather mindless assertions like “This is business” or its cousin, “It’s just business.” That translates to a rather convenient American common sense that the premises of free market fundamentalism are beyond question as are the deleterious effects such practices may have on human beings and human societies.
But public schools are not businesses. They do not have the same goals. Where sales of essentially worthless – occasionally even harmful - merchandise to half-witted consumers taken in by slick advertising campaigns may be absolutely acceptable to a business with a bottom line of profit, worthless knowledge will always be subject to criticism by the public. And it should be. Indeed, if anything, this is where the Times editorial is on target – our students deserve better.
A second important difference is this: where businesses are more than happy to leave as many consumers behind so long as profits are insured, public education is expected to leave no children behind, even as the cynical programs bearing this label have left up to 1/3 of America’s children behind with no high school diplomas over the past decade. America has no children to waste. The goal of public education is an educated public – all of it. Again, this is where the Times editorial is on target – if AP students are not learning enough to pass standardized AP exams, the public ought to be asking why not.
But the answer to that question contains a number of possible components. One of them might well be incompetent teachers. But that alone is too easy and simplistic. It is might be the beginning place of seeking to understand the problem but it is hardly the whole story. To simply stop there is to run the risk of scapegoating a whole class of workers for a much broader problem which I observe is at least partly out of their control. While that's easy, it's also intellectually dishonest and unfair.
A second inquiry might ask the the middle class, from which the majority of AP students come, to consider the unthinkable: Are the students taking these classes genuinely college material? Perhaps even more importantly – do they actually want to attend college?
Daily I see students at the university where I teach who clearly are not ready to be in college. Besides the lack of maturity and time management skills which is the nature of the beast - particularly those right out of our regimented, paternalistic high schools - they have no sense of vocation and often default to that which their parents or significant others have envisioned for their lives. But because this is not their dream they are pursuing, they have no real energy or excitement about their college educations. They see it as something to do because they had no other ideas or because they felt it was the path of least resistance. The result? Mediocre (at best) performance and misdirected resentment over any effort demanded of them.
My heart goes out to these students even as their cynicism and inability to escape their own immediate concerns often makes my life as instructor difficult. I sometimes write on their papers (which only they see) “Are you sure you are ready to be in college at this time?” It’s a serious question for me and it ought to be for them as well. But I think that question begins much earlier for them and perhaps the AP exams are one reflection of this.
But, there is an even more fundamental concern for understanding the AP exams scores. Teachers do not manufacture educations. They cannot be conferred or purchased, even with increasing tuition moneys. Educations must be achieved by the student who would become educated and is thus willing to exert the effort to achieve it. The very best a teacher can do is help make that attainment possible. And while it may be possible that some teachers are failing to do that, it simply can never be the only factor at work here. Perhaps a look at these same Advanced Placement students once they are actually "placed" in a university might be shed some light.
My observations of the university students I teach is that they often have enormous senses of entitlement, particularly the honors students I most love to teach. That translates to expectations of as high a grade as possible with the least amount of work necessary. It translates to a sense that required reading - not to mention, G-d forbid, preparatory assignments - before class is onerous and unnecessary. It translates to a sense that attendance is always optional depending upon one’s other concerns. It translates to a belief that the use of distracting technology in the classroom is a birthright. And it translates to a belief –fostered by the misguided use of standardized testing driven pedagogy in public schools over the past decade – that their grades in any class should boil down to performance on no more than three multiple choice exams. Any demands beyond that are generally seen as outrageous.
Students come to the university with such attitudes already firmly in place. They learned them somewhere. It’s possible they learned them in public schools. However my suspicion is that they learned them from the two most powerful socializing agents in our culture – their families and the electronic media (Just do it! Obey your thirst! Talk all the time!).
Might it just be possible that the blame for low AP scores must be shared with those who actually took the tests? Might their dedication to preparation and their sense of entitlement to positive results regardless of their own efforts be considered? And might their ambitious and overprotective parents also share some of this blame for pushing their children into a college path for which increasing numbers of them are uncertain they are prepared or even interested?
I think perhaps another analogy might serve us here. This is the comment I left at the Times website:
For years public school lunch room cooks and servers prepared food that was nutritious if not always appealing or attractive. Regulated by governmental nutritional standards and funded in part by federal moneys designed to insure children did not attend school hungry, their meals were designed to promote healthy diets. Yet students and their parents increasingly demanded more choices and as a result fast food, sodas, chips and candy came to mark the diet of these students.
Now, three decades later, we have a crisis of childhood obesity on our hands. Given the logic of the Times editorial, I'm guessing that accountability means we will blame the lunch room cooks and servers for the obesity crisis. That and the union to which some of them belong which obviously protects incompetent food preparers from being held accountable.
Seriously folks. What's missing from this picture?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
What's Wrong With Education?
In today’s Care2 posts there is a two-part story on “What’s wrong with education?” It’s a timely issue, as Care2 tends to make its focus. Among the comments in the story were the following:
Before the advent of television, video games and computers, children would sit quietly in their classrooms and pay attention, no problem. Without the ubiquitous presence of cell phones, we didn’t have to be quick enough to notice the fingers moving under the desk, silently texting (how do they do that without looking?), or have to spend time communicating with parents about why their child had a cell phone confiscated yet again. It was just a whole lot easier back then. So they say.
But were we actually teaching? Despite the broken promises and political games surrounding the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), it did uncover an unfortunate truth about our nation’s educational history: Many of our children were left behind.
Shining a light on these children has been a good thing, but as any teacher knows, it’s just plain wrong to judge a student solely on the basis of a few tests. Yet that is exactly what NCLB has put in place. (Did they check in with any teachers when they were devising this system?)
Here is my response:
Having been on both sides of the desk before the advent of distracting technologies, I would say it’s a bit naïve to suggest students were necessarily paying attention prior to their arrival. The reality is that students passed notes, circulated slam books, planted whoopee cushions in the seats of unsuspecting classmates and whispered among themselves. That was particularly true in classrooms packed with 38 seventh graders sharing 20 text books as was the case in my middle school in 1976.
That was also the time when high stakes testing arrived. Mid-school year in 1977, we were told to throw away everything we had been doing up to then, that the new Florida statewide testing standards would be what we would teach. Of course, most of us were already teaching its basics – appropriate usage of punctuation, correct spelling, subject/verb agreement and reading comprehension. But we now had no choice about what we taught or how it would be taught. Our in loco parentis state Department of Education knew better.
Our students did particularly well on the tests. Our county came in second out of 67 counties statewide. Of course, our county was 97% white and largely middle class, the demographic out of which high stakes testing arose and whose children traditionally do the best on such tests. We had virtually no students speaking English as a second language and few special ed students, the demographics which tend to drag test scores down.
But what did it prove? Certainly not that our teaching staff was proficient and deserved recognition if not compensation. In the year our students scored second highest in the state, our teachers were in their second year with no contract, our starting salary was $8000/year gross with no medical benefits and our school board was fined by an independent mediator for refusing to negotiate with a union handicapped by state law which prohibits strikes. Our classrooms remained packed with more students than we could ever handle.
The test results also did not prove that our students were learning any more than they had previously. The same students excelled on the tests who excelled in the classroom. And the same students, many of them sadly headed for dropping out of high school, failed the test just as they failed our classes.
As was the case with NCLB, teachers were actively ignored in the process of creating the conditions for conducting the very enterprise for which they were trained and most intimately involved. The focus shifted from children to numbers, a dehumanizing move which also signaled the loss of any concern for context or complexity of circumstance. It is a rather mindless reductionism on a good day.
The notion that a single test score on a standardized instrument can tell an educator everything they need to know about a student’s educational process is naïve at best. Standardized tests were designed for diagnostic purposes, not evaluative. What such tests do best is identify the areas where students require more development. The employment of such tests as high stake, do or die events, signals a fundamental misuse of standardized testing.
Even more misguided is the use of such test results as somehow indicating the performance of a teacher. Horace Mann, teaching a group of students from the lowest scoring demographics, might well appear to be incompetent if his students’ test scores were all that was considered. And even a mediocre teacher with a group of college bound AP or IB students might appear to be a stellar pedagogue. Test scores alone say little about a teacher’s capabilities or performance. It’s a bit like a local supermarket offering a shipload of overly ripe peaches for sale and then suggesting that the parents of his area do not want their children to eat healthy food when the peaches failed to sell.
At the heart of this problem lies two fundamentally erroneous paradigms. The first is that bureaucrats and elected school officials are in a parent/child relationship to teachers. Admittedly part of the problem here is that former teachers who have been in parent/child relationships with actual children fail to adapt to a new reality when they are promoted to roles managing adults. The reality is that many teachers are at least as well educated as their administrators and have a lot more insight about the realities of the classroom than those who are removed from them , some for many years.
The second problematic paradigm comes from the broader societal belief that somehow everything worth knowing can be reduced to numbers. Numbers rarely convey complexity or context. And they are particularly poor indicators of human experience. Ask yourself about some of the most important aspects of being human: how much does love weigh? How do we measure the intensity (and thus the sincerity) of the grief of a widow or a parent who has lost a child? The reality is that if we want to know what children have learned, we have to do the hard work of actually observing their behavior. Such rarely lends itself to reduction to the instant gratification of a set of data.
Underneath all of these questions is a much darker concern. The reality is that Americans have steadily defunded public education even as they have increasingly regulated it and demanded more from it. More demands on fewer workers with less pay sounds a lot like free market fundamentalism with its predictable pathologies. But it does not sound much like a society that values an educated public, hence its operation of a healthy, productive public school system. Standardized testing is the mere tip of the iceberg here. Ultimately, the real question is who we wish to be as a people.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
In today’s Care2 posts there is a two-part story on “What’s wrong with education?” It’s a timely issue, as Care2 tends to make its focus. Among the comments in the story were the following:
Before the advent of television, video games and computers, children would sit quietly in their classrooms and pay attention, no problem. Without the ubiquitous presence of cell phones, we didn’t have to be quick enough to notice the fingers moving under the desk, silently texting (how do they do that without looking?), or have to spend time communicating with parents about why their child had a cell phone confiscated yet again. It was just a whole lot easier back then. So they say.
But were we actually teaching? Despite the broken promises and political games surrounding the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), it did uncover an unfortunate truth about our nation’s educational history: Many of our children were left behind.
Shining a light on these children has been a good thing, but as any teacher knows, it’s just plain wrong to judge a student solely on the basis of a few tests. Yet that is exactly what NCLB has put in place. (Did they check in with any teachers when they were devising this system?)
Here is my response:
Having been on both sides of the desk before the advent of distracting technologies, I would say it’s a bit naïve to suggest students were necessarily paying attention prior to their arrival. The reality is that students passed notes, circulated slam books, planted whoopee cushions in the seats of unsuspecting classmates and whispered among themselves. That was particularly true in classrooms packed with 38 seventh graders sharing 20 text books as was the case in my middle school in 1976.
That was also the time when high stakes testing arrived. Mid-school year in 1977, we were told to throw away everything we had been doing up to then, that the new Florida statewide testing standards would be what we would teach. Of course, most of us were already teaching its basics – appropriate usage of punctuation, correct spelling, subject/verb agreement and reading comprehension. But we now had no choice about what we taught or how it would be taught. Our in loco parentis state Department of Education knew better.
Our students did particularly well on the tests. Our county came in second out of 67 counties statewide. Of course, our county was 97% white and largely middle class, the demographic out of which high stakes testing arose and whose children traditionally do the best on such tests. We had virtually no students speaking English as a second language and few special ed students, the demographics which tend to drag test scores down.
But what did it prove? Certainly not that our teaching staff was proficient and deserved recognition if not compensation. In the year our students scored second highest in the state, our teachers were in their second year with no contract, our starting salary was $8000/year gross with no medical benefits and our school board was fined by an independent mediator for refusing to negotiate with a union handicapped by state law which prohibits strikes. Our classrooms remained packed with more students than we could ever handle.
The test results also did not prove that our students were learning any more than they had previously. The same students excelled on the tests who excelled in the classroom. And the same students, many of them sadly headed for dropping out of high school, failed the test just as they failed our classes.
As was the case with NCLB, teachers were actively ignored in the process of creating the conditions for conducting the very enterprise for which they were trained and most intimately involved. The focus shifted from children to numbers, a dehumanizing move which also signaled the loss of any concern for context or complexity of circumstance. It is a rather mindless reductionism on a good day.
The notion that a single test score on a standardized instrument can tell an educator everything they need to know about a student’s educational process is naïve at best. Standardized tests were designed for diagnostic purposes, not evaluative. What such tests do best is identify the areas where students require more development. The employment of such tests as high stake, do or die events, signals a fundamental misuse of standardized testing.
Even more misguided is the use of such test results as somehow indicating the performance of a teacher. Horace Mann, teaching a group of students from the lowest scoring demographics, might well appear to be incompetent if his students’ test scores were all that was considered. And even a mediocre teacher with a group of college bound AP or IB students might appear to be a stellar pedagogue. Test scores alone say little about a teacher’s capabilities or performance. It’s a bit like a local supermarket offering a shipload of overly ripe peaches for sale and then suggesting that the parents of his area do not want their children to eat healthy food when the peaches failed to sell.
At the heart of this problem lies two fundamentally erroneous paradigms. The first is that bureaucrats and elected school officials are in a parent/child relationship to teachers. Admittedly part of the problem here is that former teachers who have been in parent/child relationships with actual children fail to adapt to a new reality when they are promoted to roles managing adults. The reality is that many teachers are at least as well educated as their administrators and have a lot more insight about the realities of the classroom than those who are removed from them , some for many years.
The second problematic paradigm comes from the broader societal belief that somehow everything worth knowing can be reduced to numbers. Numbers rarely convey complexity or context. And they are particularly poor indicators of human experience. Ask yourself about some of the most important aspects of being human: how much does love weigh? How do we measure the intensity (and thus the sincerity) of the grief of a widow or a parent who has lost a child? The reality is that if we want to know what children have learned, we have to do the hard work of actually observing their behavior. Such rarely lends itself to reduction to the instant gratification of a set of data.
Underneath all of these questions is a much darker concern. The reality is that Americans have steadily defunded public education even as they have increasingly regulated it and demanded more from it. More demands on fewer workers with less pay sounds a lot like free market fundamentalism with its predictable pathologies. But it does not sound much like a society that values an educated public, hence its operation of a healthy, productive public school system. Standardized testing is the mere tip of the iceberg here. Ultimately, the real question is who we wish to be as a people.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Vocation, not Surrender
In today’s column from Care2, Deepak Chopra presents an excerpt from his book, The Path to Love ( Three Rivers Press, 1997) entitled “Have You Resolved Struggle Vs Surrender?” The title caught my eye as I glanced over the various Care2 columns (a site whose slogan is “make a difference”) . As I read the column, I came across this sentence: "Struggle is born of the ego’s isolation; it ends when you can find the Way and surrender to its guiding force." This was my response to the column:
While I totally agree with the premise - that struggle results from ego's isolation - I don't find the language of surrender or its cousin, submission, terribly compelling for mature adult human beings. These are words constructed from power relationships. I don't think spirit is about power (even as I recognize that 12 Step theology has made such thinking popular). Rather, it's about being.
What I sense as a more humane, and thus superior, way of describing the relationship of the individual to the Way is the concept of vocation. Vocatus (Lat.) means to call to. When the Way calls to a human being, the proper response is not to submit or to surrender, it is to respond and ultimately to embrace the Way. Such an understanding respects human dignity, constructs the resulting following of the Way in terms of relationship and avoids the elements of power that simply can never fully appeal to many human beings. That will be particularly true for those of us already suffering from the disadvantages we face under socially constructed power relationships.
The recognition of the rightness of the path, its salubrious if not salvific potential, and the advantages of embracing it result in a decision to answer its call. Deep calls out to deep, the psalmist says. Brahman calls out to atman. The underlying paradigm regards being, existence, not power.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
In today’s column from Care2, Deepak Chopra presents an excerpt from his book, The Path to Love ( Three Rivers Press, 1997) entitled “Have You Resolved Struggle Vs Surrender?” The title caught my eye as I glanced over the various Care2 columns (a site whose slogan is “make a difference”) . As I read the column, I came across this sentence: "Struggle is born of the ego’s isolation; it ends when you can find the Way and surrender to its guiding force." This was my response to the column:
While I totally agree with the premise - that struggle results from ego's isolation - I don't find the language of surrender or its cousin, submission, terribly compelling for mature adult human beings. These are words constructed from power relationships. I don't think spirit is about power (even as I recognize that 12 Step theology has made such thinking popular). Rather, it's about being.
What I sense as a more humane, and thus superior, way of describing the relationship of the individual to the Way is the concept of vocation. Vocatus (Lat.) means to call to. When the Way calls to a human being, the proper response is not to submit or to surrender, it is to respond and ultimately to embrace the Way. Such an understanding respects human dignity, constructs the resulting following of the Way in terms of relationship and avoids the elements of power that simply can never fully appeal to many human beings. That will be particularly true for those of us already suffering from the disadvantages we face under socially constructed power relationships.
The recognition of the rightness of the path, its salubrious if not salvific potential, and the advantages of embracing it result in a decision to answer its call. Deep calls out to deep, the psalmist says. Brahman calls out to atman. The underlying paradigm regards being, existence, not power.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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