– Wednesday, October 23, 2019 —> +11˚C / +51˚F —> Very Grey & cloudy in Atlantic Canada @ 1:22 pm –

– I found out about this talk too late to attend –

— I would have liked to have been there.

— Wow, Education Reform  –

— In the early to mid 1950’s I would often wake up early on a Saturday morning and run downstairs, turn on the television and watch a very silly line-up of primitive cartoons in black and white. Felix the Cat, Betty Boop – and wild and crazy things with hordes of angry mice carrying signs protesting something – those hordes of mice ( or whatever they were ) would rush and swarm all over all kinds of obstacles – I had no idea what that was all about, but I got used to it. I think we had three network stations and 3 independent New York City stations that were watchable and a couple other stations that were so fuzzy we never tried to watch them, there was also the problem of the sound not quite being tuned in properly.

— And if my parents were still in bed sleeping in when the cartoons were finished there were some odd ‘educational’ programs – I learned that by the year 2,000 we should have flying cars or automatic highways where pre-programed hooks would catch a ring beneath the car and carry you along at a uniform speed with all the other cars on that highway and launch you onto your exit when you got there. These highways would run on electricity and you would not have to burn any gasoline to get anywhere on them. Houses would be entirely automated, mothers dressed to the nines, wearing high heels and pearls would press a few buttons and gourmet dinners would appear all nicely presented on dinner plates. There would be automatic dish washing machines and clothes washing machines and dryers and all mom would have to do is fold the perfectly wrinkle free clothing when the dryers were through drying. Vacuum cleaners would be a giant leap forward from the goofy old mechanical things that moms had to push forward and pull back to clean all the dirt and lint from their carpets, and when that magical future came to us all, nobody would have to hang up rugs outside and beat them with wacky things that looked like stylized tennis rackets.

— And then again there were the more ‘newsy’ programs that showed us how the very scary communists in China were stealing children from their parents and forcing them in indoctrination concentration camps to make sure they never learned what it used to be like to be free and think for yourself beyond the limits of communist party guide lines.

— Nobody told us there were things euphemistically called ‘Residential Schools’ where ‘fine-upstanding-Christian’ clergy and nuns and teachers were drumming every last bit of indigenous culture out of what they might have tried to tell us were pitifully uncivilized savages who needed their ‘God-inspired guidance’ in those days. I don’t think anybody had coined the word ‘Cultural Genocide’  back then and if anybody described what was going on we would have believed that things like that happened in totalitarian communist countries, not here. Not in our enlightened and entirely positive United States and Canada.

— In 1968 I think it might have been Look Magazine that did a series of articles they called “Education and Ecstasy”. One of the first concepts that hit me when I read through their material was that “Children Love Learning”. There was a section on experimental, unstructured ‘Free Schools’ where children learned whatever they wanted to and adults/teachers were their to facilitate their learning. Near the end of that series of articles somebody said that if they wanted to build a University they would build a library and fill it with all the books they could fit into it. If they had money left over they would build a few laboratories. If they still had more money they might build dormitories and cafeterias where students could congregate and communicate with each other. Auditoriums where lecturers could come and tell large audiences about ideas they might not have been exposed to – Actors could put on plays, movies could be shown, and musicians could come and play music from other cultures – Museums would be a good idea to expose students to art and all manner of cultural artifacts from distant times and places. If they still had money left they would think about hiring professors. There would probably be a lot of intense, contentious arguments concerning whether or not they needed any administrators.

— I was a bright student. I was also one of the tallest students in any grammar school class I was in. The closest thing to conflict I experienced in the lower grades was when there were three of us who were taller than most and two slightly taller chairs and we three tried to get to one of the two chairs first. In first grade I seem to remember that another boy and I quite often tried to sit next next a certain young woman classmate { I’m ashamed to admit that I have recently forgotten her name. Shhh – don’t tell anybody. }

— My family moved from a neighbourhood that had been hastily put in place to house the work force the USA needed to fuel the war machine when World War II dawned in the US two years after it hit our Canadian neighbours – moved from a neighbourhood that today would have probably raise alarms and worries as to whether or not that might be a nice, friendly or safe atmosphere to raise children in – to a ‘nicer’ ‘higher class’ part of town. I’d spent the first eight and a half years without hearing anybody mutter the ‘eff’ word. Our nicer area was breeding children who were competing with each other to be the ‘coolest’, ‘most popular’, and ‘toughest’ kids on the playgrounds. On my first day in my new grammar school the teacher asked me to stand up and read aloud a section of a book that every other child in that fourth grade class had read already. I didn’t know anybody, I was an awkward stranger in a strange world, and I stuttered and stumbled over the words while my new classmates laughed at my expense. My teacher asked out loud if I should be in a lower grade or with a group of ‘slow learners’. In my first month in that school the only friendly classmate I met was somebody who had been ‘kept back’ three times, his mother was a single parent, a lawyer, and he had hair that was longer than any other boy in class and kind of looked like the style that Elvis sported in those days. AND he wore a black leather jacket with silver studs. He was soft spoken and quiet and told me he thought I looked ‘cool’ – He and his mother moved away before our spring break.

— In fifth and sixth grades in this ‘nice’ school pecking orders emerged. Two boys in my classroom became the better athletes – the kids who didn’t necessarily pick fights, but they were quick to anger and one of them nearly killed a less athletic kid who talked back and then pushed back when he was shoved. The bigger stronger heavier athlete knocked the slighter kid down, covered his mouth and nose and would have suffocated him right in front of dozens of kids on the playground before our afternoon classes began.  Nobody out of several grades, most of which had two classrooms full of kids for each grade did anything but cheer the athlete on.  I stood there and gasped. I’m not a thousand percent sure, but I think this ‘fight’ ended when somebody yelled out that a teacher was coming to see what everybody was gawking at. The Athlete vanished into the crowd and somebody helped the choking. coughing kid up from the asphalt.  ( We went home for lunch. My slightly younger sister and I had the farthest distance to hurry home and back until a year later when maybe half a dozen new kids moved into a series of rubber stamped ranch houses on a series of new streets that ran parallel to each other and at ninety degree angle to the main road that we lived on. In the last few years of the nineteen fifties almost every mother we knew about stayed home and did housework. )

— In sixth grade we had our first male teachers. My class had a dark haired guy with an Italian last name who looked like he might have been athletic in his university days. He entertained us with odd anecdotes that caught my attention when, for instance, he told us about Yogis in the Himalayas who could sit on a mountaintop and not feel the cold and make a bowl of water boil just by looking at it. He had a nephew in the other sixth grade class ( the nephew was shorter than most, wasn’t picked to be a pitcher or catcher when we played baseball, but could throw a semi softball farther and straighter than most, and adopted a mean look on his face and sometimes spit without meaning to when he grew a nasty tone of voice and growled angry questions like “Are you stupid or something?” – or yelled at somebody with “Nice play, Shakespeare!” when somebody playing one of our ‘Physical Education’ sports ( We’d graduated from ‘kickball’ to baseball and volleyball. ) – If he missed a fly ball, he’d laugh and joke, ‘The shade got in my eyes-” if somebody else on his team missed catching a fly ball he’d scream out “What the Hell!” if somebody on the opposing team missed  a fly ball he would roar out his, “Nice play, Shakespeare!” He ended up playing on little league teams and would be unbearable if his team lost. So – the teacher’s nephews were jerks but he had interesting off beat stories that really fired my imagination.

— Seventh grade launched us into junior high school ( many of which later changed their names to something more fashionable? ‘middle school’ -? ) Seventh and eighth grades were a descent into hell. We began moving from classroom to classroom in seventh grade. We were grouped in ‘sections’ there were eleven or twelve sections to each grade. Somebody in the administration had tried to group us according to our IQ scores and our last few years worth of report cards. There was one group full of well adjusted kids who were flagged as ‘college bound’. There was a second group that wasn’t quite as academically acute and the group I was in was secretly labeled ‘underachievers’ – In my case I was busy developing a mild case of PTSD with a mean alcoholic for a father – It was more important in my eyes to make sure I was comparatively safe and avoided being beaten to a pulp by a raging drunk who was two and a half times my size than making sure my homework was always done on time. At the beginning of the school year we had teachers leading each class as a group from classroom to classroom. After a month or so the teachers figured they weren’t needed and we were on our own. There were maybe half a dozen kids in our grade who found it delightful to sneak up on somebody and punch them in the back and then disappear into the packed hallways before their victims could turn around. I was still among the tallest. I was wiry, fairly thin, and might have seemed like a likely target to those guys. Nobody dared telling anybody who the culprits were, if they knew who they were, out of fear of becoming their next victims.

— Also in seventh grade. We began having ‘hot lunch’ at school. We could either pay a minimal amount at a cash register before walking down an assembly line with a plastic tray and taking whatever they gave us, and maybe pay an extra dime or something like that to get an extra ice cream on a stick when those were on the menu, we’d pay our dime announce our choice and get a ticket from a roll the cashiers guarded with their lives. We’d have twenty minutes to wolf down our lunch and then stand in line for a couple minutes to empty the plates and place them in a pile –  and throw away the milk cartons and set the trays in another pile – and then, on days when it wasn’t raining or snowing, we were herded outside to stand on a asphalt in a twin basketball court sized area where the gym teachers sometimes let us play with tetherball contraptions and where girls in their small groups sometimes tortured each other by yelling out that one of their group ‘liked’ one of the boys in her class and sometimes went as far as grabbing their victim by her wrists and trying to drag her to the boy she may or may not have admitted she liked… which often victimized the boy and the girl. For the most part boys hung together in small semi defensive groups of friends and acquaintances with similar interests and or personality types. – After five or ten minutes on the asphalt one of the phys ed coaches would blow a whistle and announce which range of classrooms were to line up in six to eight lines – boys one side of double doors, girls on the other. Four about six months out of that seventh grade school year, there was one of the sneak-up-and-sucker-punch guys who managed about half the time to get behind me and close enough to strike. I found out who this was one day when he snuck up behind me grabbed me by the neck and threw me down a forty five degree hill. When I got back up on my feet and ran back up the hill he jumped out of line and tried to get me in trouble for threatening him. The one phys ed coach who happened to see what happened grabbed the culprit by his ear and dragged him to the principal’s office. I was then accused of being a ‘snitch’.  But one halfway athletic kid laughed at my accusers, “Bullshit, the coach saw the whole thing.” & I only got sucker punched once after that. I did have a series of dreams where I went to punch my attacker in his face and something held my arms back with a force that slowed me down to the point where if I tried with all my strength the worst damage I could do might be to nearly touch the fabric of his shirt. – The coach who had seen the incident where I’d been tossed down the hill greeted me with a smile in gym class and asked me quietly if I’d learned to defend myself yet. When I was slow to answer and other guys were swarming toward us he shrugged, “Well, I tried -” and walked away. I did not tell him about my weird dreams or my religious angst –

— I’d been brought up Episcopalian by a screaming maniac who threatened to beat the bleep out of us ( usually me ) if we didn’t get our butts in gear and get to church on time every Sunday and then he’d drop us off at home afterward and go get drunk at the Local VFW hall and come home screaming or even violent most Sunday evenings. I can’t blame my weird approach to religion on Catholicism. My sister and I were Christened before I went into the hospital for a hernia operation about a month before I started kindergarten. I was almost five years old and my sister was almost three. The either they gave me on the operating table scared me half to death. I was not a happy camper being kept in a crib in the hospital for a week after the operation. Having extraordinarily little time to see my mother and having the nurses tell her she had to go home and leave me there in the semi darkness was traumatic. About a week later I dreamed that I was at a birthday party for me in my grandparents’ yard with the cast from Howdy Doody there and loads of cousins and friends – and Jesus showed up and asked me if I’d like to come with Him. I don’t think I was afraid that might mean I was about to die, but I blurted out, “I can’t leave my parents-” and He walked away. I never fell right to sleep at bed time. I think it was during my seventh grade year I was kind of drifting off and imagined I was climbing a very long and steep stairway to Heaven – I got to the top and found myself in a kind of popular movie depiction of what a village in the ‘Holy Land’ would have looked like in the first decades of the ‘Christian Era’. I climbed an outside staircase on one of the small masonry houses and found an open door to a dilapidated masonry shack-like building on the roof of that house. I looked inside and discovered God was drunk and suicidal and muttering words I couldn’t understand and He looked desperate and scared. That woke me right the heck up. I think I heard our famous evangelist to several presidents on a car radio during a late night drive to or from somewhere and the fire and brimstone scared me. Later on that year I started confessing my sins every night with the prayers my mother had started us on when I was very young. I was trying to keep to a schedule of committing one less sin every day. I thought maybe the dream I had where I couldn’t punch my assailant in the face might have been a message from God. Or maybe God Himself had been holding my arms back so I couldn’t punch the kid.

— Should I tell you about the wise guy who probably believed every word he said when in our group visits to the washrooms he would stand at the urinal and announce, “Well, that’s another baby that will never be born.” – Probably not – I should probably keep that to myself – along with my concerns that that guy, if he ‘grew up and got married’ probably beat his wife regularly or brow-beat her with strings of angry words and violent gestures and totally broke her spirit.

— Should I admit that I learned to fake throwing up within earshot of my mother – and managed to convince her that I was sick so often the guidance counselors wanted to know if I was really sick or did I have problems with anything or anybody in school?

— Should I tell you about the time my father stopped home for something in the middle of a morning, heard that I was upstairs sick in bed, came charging up the stairs, ripped me out of bed threw me around the room, punched me a couple times and roared, “Get Dressed I’m taking you to school myself!” I was shaking and had a hard time standing up as I tried to dress myself while he stood there and glared at me. I was probably pale and broke into a coughing fit and pushed him out of the way, ran to the bathroom and suffered through several dry heaves with him watching before he swore at me and told me to get back in my bleep bleep bed but if he found out I was faking it he would kill me. I managed to gasp, “I already threw up everything that was in my stomach and he nearly slammed in the side of the head with his fist before he shook his head and stared daggers at me, turned around and stomped away.  After he drove away my mother came running to see what kind of shape I was in and helped me push my bed back in place and push the mattress back so it covered the box spring instead of hung there like if I coughed really hard the mattress might fall to the floor and take me with it.

— Eighth grade was marginally better – I think I scored two baskets in our first two gym periods and might have grown a couple inches since seventh grade. I was also in a slightly different section that might have been the upper echelon of under-achievers, or the lower echelon of brainy nerds who may or may not have been destined for college and university life. After our math teacher gave us a standardized test she asked me to see her after class for a couple minutes and told me I had a really score on that test but she couldn’t recommend me for an accelerated math class unless I made an effort from that day on to get all my assignments in on time and participated more often in class discussions. My English teacher read some of my classroom assignments to the class and did not tell them which one of their classmates had written that, but maybe by spring break they’d figured that out. One of the more popular kids came over to my table in art class and asked me how I’d drawn a silhouette of a duck so well on the blackboard and later that year thought the cup I designed and made when we were working with clay was ‘really cool’. But there were still some moments when I felt bullied either physically or psychologically, by teachers as well as classmates and ‘upperclassmen’.

— Ninth grade. Parts of what would have been my junior high school’s ninth grade class was sent to one of the two public high schools in town. There were fewer of us ninth graders left in that school. I think they might have sent the hard cases to the high schools. The newest high school had only been open for a couple years. That’s the one I was destined to go to. They learned immediately that they’d vastly underestimated the extent of the baby boom I was part of. The second year that school was open they were already overcrowded.

— President Kennedy was assassinated in November of my ninth grade year. For an English assignment I wrote an essay saying that I didn’t believe JFK would have approved of the way Lee Harvey Oswald was assumed guilty from the start and then shot in front of live television cameras when everybody in the USA was in shock and staring at the black and white coverage. { I didn’t start listening to any conspiracy buffs until I was in my thirties. But my memory has always been fantastic, not quite photographic, almost audio recording like – and it stuck with me that Oswald called out “I didn’t do it, I’m a patsy!” and then he was silenced. Sounds like a perfect formula to keep anybody from finding out the truth. Executed without due process or even a mock trial. }

— The Beatles exploded in our consciousness almost immediately after they buried JFK. A couple months later most of the kids in my class were asking each other, which are you? Beatles or Rolling Stones? One guy who’d nearly been crucified for not being very manly was suddenly a minor hero because he could play Beatles songs on a piano when the teacher was out of the room. And the teacher did not go into a screaming fit when she returned. My cousin and I got cheap acoustic guitars that Christmas – We’d seen a flash of ‘Beatlemania’ in a newscast that our parents hadn’t seen or noticed. Acoustic guitars and ice skates. It was a cold Christmas season in Connecticut and all kinds of ponds and creeks were frozen solid enough to be fun when we were fourteen years old and often needed excuses to get the heck away from our parents. My father threatened to smash our television set if he caught us watching any show that featured the Beatles. My cousin’s mother was awe struck when he and I wrote our first song and he sung it while we played I think two chords all the way through. My father didn’t complain because he was passed out drunk in the middle of my grandparent’s kitchen floor. But that didn’t keep my Grandmother from spouting “Honor they mother and thy father!” any chance she got.

— But! My class was more or less the seniors of the junior high school. We had not upperclassmen to bug, threat or bully us.