The American Community School, Abu Dhabi

“She is the light which draws all the butterflies,” says a teenaged boy of his mother in the book Mother without a Mask by Patricia Holton. I read this line in the opening pages of the book and think how the description is also the perfect way to describe a school library – the light of the school, warm and beckoning. It reminds me of an old poem:

THERE was never a Queen like Balkis,
From here to the wide world's end;
But Balkis tailed to a butterfly
As you would talk to a friend.
There was never a King like Solomon,
Not since the world began;
But Solomon talked to a butterfly
As a man would talk to a man.
She was Queen of Sabaea—
And he was Asia's Lord—
But they both of 'em talked to butterflies
When they took their walks abroad!

from The Butterfly that Stamped by
Rudyard Kipling

Michael and I spent the last week walking abroad and talking to butterflies at American Community School, Abu Dhabi, he in the middle school and I at the elementary. We certainly are not kings and queens, but you can bet we enjoyed being treated like royalty, which we were. During the week, we camped out in the hubbub that is the ACS library, the penultimate goal for all literacy lessons as what we want is for students to become life long readers. The ACS library seems to be doing a booming business attracting students.



Years ago, I was gardening one afternoon and Kelly (no more than three) toddled over and exclaimed, pointing, “butterfly.” I told her, “I always talk to butterflies,” and she toddled off, jabbering to the breeze, an early lesson for me as a mother and a teacher in the power of suggestion and modeling.

In the ACS classrooms, the elementary butterflies had writer’s notebooks at all grade levels and were deeply into writing thesis statements. I went to each class and made my case that writing poetry, how learning about its patterns, precise language, descriptive words and images and a poem’s ability to summarize an experience concisely would help them with writing all text types. As usual, the kids were all over the poetry like butterflies to a lavender patch.



Many of the classes sent me thank you notes (just a couple pictured here) and letters. The coolest part is that these were NOT the poems I wrote with the classes, but instead examples of the teachers taking our workshop and adapting it to their own classrooms -- as did fourth grade teacher Mr. Kraus and his class who used our model of making a list and turning it into summary quatrains, cranking it into warp speed and writing about the solar system. This is the best result of a writing residency, when students and teachers continue with the writing we started in class. Many thanks. Also thanks to master teacher Megan Sloan (Seattle) whose lesson I adapted to use with the K-1st graders.

I received kind gifts from a couple of students and library/curriculum aide Young Le who wanted to make sure we were well-prepared for our upcoming trip to Korea and gave us maps and tour guides. Thank you to all the teachers and students who embraced the lessons, infusing them with their thoughtful words and sharing their poetry.

Following our week at school, hosts Dianne and John took us to Dubai (see next blog for touring photos and anecdotes). Dubai rises like an illuminated fountain out of the desert where Abu Dhabi seems to blossom. In Dubai we visited the museum, saw the world’s tallest building, looked down the throats of sharks at the aquarium, took a ride across “the creek,” and strolled through a shopping mall roughly the size of Delaware. Elementary librarian Dianne Ritz Salminen spent a good chunk of time at the bookstore collecting new butterfly food for her garden.

Thanks to Steve and Janet, Mark and Mary, and all the administrative folks who stopped by during the week. Dinner at The Club was elegant and dinner on the floor the first night was excellent. Special thanks to Dianne and John for hosting us and taking great care to teach us about the area and make us feel welcome.

Rabat American School

ESOL is for amateurs at Rabat American School. Here the norm is ETOL or EFOL -- English as a third or fourth language -- or more, I am reminded as we come together to find our poetic voices how students in the USA (me included) suffer from not having access to more than one language. Here the students and teachers flow easily from Arabic to French (two languages most common in Morocco) and then to English. Many students have even another native tongue -- Russian, Korean, German, whatever from wherever. The music of their speech is magical to me as they confidently confer like well-seasoned chefs with one another in their native tongues and then serve up similes in English. I wait like Oliver, spoon in hand, thinking, "more, please."



Last November at NCTE we heard Dr. Nancy Johnson observe that second language learners naturally speak in poetry -- reaching for images to explain concepts for which they have no words. If I don't know that thing on the door is called a knob, I might describe it as a door hand or a button for turning. Pure poetry. Voila! I think this is what makes primary kids naturals, also. Could it be that sophistication in language, spending all our lives mastering English, is really a handicap to writers? As I write with the students of RAS, I become more convinced that it is. I've decided to adopt a new phrase when I go home to talk to young writers in the States: if you were from another country and you didn't know the word for that skateboard, how would you describe it? What would you call it?

Michael and I had opportunities to write with all the middle school students, many of the high schoolers, coach performance skills, and I even got to have library chats with several of the elementary grade classes. After I went directly from a high school assembly to talk to kindergartners, the principal asked me if that gave me whiplash. We both laughed. But the truth is, all the kids were so steeped in thinking in images at every grade level that the age-diverse audiences had more similarities than differences.



Many many thanks to upper school librarian Lora Wagner and assistant librarian Rhonda for all their work in preparation, toting us around and making our stay in their library a joy. Thanks to ALL of the teachers for their enthusiastic participation. Thanks to Paul and Patty for the lovely dinner and reception at their home. Warm thanks to Janane (sp?) who took us on a small tour of Rabat on Wednesday afternoon while the teachers were in professional development (which didn't seem fair at all, but sure was fun). And special thanks to Cynthia Ruptik and her husband Woody for housing and feeding us, offering candlelit laughter and a nurturing exchange of ideas while hosting us at their cottage by the sea. And thanks to all the kids who wrote and then shared their poetry in class and at our grand finale poetry night. Great respect and admiration to you all.

Along for the ride

It’s nobody’s job to shut the doors on the train speeding from Marakech to Fez in Morocco.
Cars do-si-do, in a rhythmic two-step, doors wide open to the rush.

It’s someone’s job to punch the tickets, and another’s job sell the snacks, while four people claim jobs teachers, they are really touts, stepping quickly between moving platforms that never quite meet, so casually offering to become illegal guides. Each has a fictional cousin in the States and probably non-fiction realities they are trying to feed.



It’s someone’s job to pick the olives, make the morning crepes, kill the chickens for dinner and another’s to daily roll a cart full of tangerines into the crowded, climbing medieval streets of the medina to be sold one or two at a time.





It’s our real guide’s job to explain the complex designs of the tiles on the wall of the mosque and show us streets “too narrow for a fat American woman.” He carries in him a poet’s heart and he makes it his job to drop lines of poetry into every story. Write this poet’s name down, write this history down. It is his job to pass out wisdom like the butchers throw trimmings to the wild cats, hoping to bring some peace and harmony to the marketplace.

It’s Suad’s job to give the cooking lessons to the tourists, make the harira soup, thick with peeled tomatoes, toss the couscous in olive oil and roast the eggplant right on the burner, to mix the salads and the macaroons with her bare hands all the time expressing distain for machines.



Though not an official part of her job description, she tells stories of her heart seasoned with generous laughter.



Would you believe that it’s someone’s job to collect pigeon poop to cure the goat and cow hides for Moroccan bags, coats and briefcases? Another’s job to jump into the tubs of lye barefoot. Another’s to hang the skins to dry. Someone picks the saffron for the dyes, someone bends over a low table cutting pieces by hand, and another sits on a low stool stitching with black fingers. The man who sells the products does not have dirty hands.



It is someone’s job to guard the villas of the wealthy and someone’s job to put corrugated steel roofs on the slum shacks that flip by the train windows in dizzying succession. No one chases down the black and white dog dragging its broken rope through the brown field beside the tracks.



Cooking the tagines before lunch is someone’s job and collecting the uneaten bread for resale is another’s. For some children it is their job to go to school in white lab coats, for others to try and sell tissue packs for pennies to tourists. Like the blind old man calling as he walks in the medina and the ancient women creased with decades of worry who crouch quietly with their hands out, some people would switch jobs if they had the choice.



It’s someone’s job to sell the spices, to stitch the shoes, and another’s job to make the bread and take it to a community oven where another does the baking, a chainlinked support system old as the seventh century medina walls.



Haunting voices sing the call to prayer at two-hour, predicable intervals. Darting motorcycles call prayers to the lips of the shoppers in the medina without warning. Someone slaughters the animals, shears the wool, sells the hoofs, pickles the meat and tans the hide so that no part goes wasted.



The train makes short stops beside open markets, standing groups of unemployed young men whose job it is to look and shepherds who watch over sheep grazing close enough to the tracks.



It’s one Indian doctor’s job to explain to the Americans that America is not what it once was, no longer a leader in industry and technology, speaking like the past president of the chess club talking about the former star quarterback who has developed bad knees and a pot belly. Morocco is a land where sewing machines hum, baskets get woven, laden donkey carts are lead by men gripping their harnesses, lumbering under local products, weighing out the benefits of change as they used to weigh wives.




Everyone drinks mint tea prepared by someone at cafes beside the shops where men urge passers not to buy, just look. It’s free. The hierarchy of jobs in a carpet shop appears rigid as any bank’s, the shops’ wealth locked up by ancient knowledge, the derivative worth impossible to be valuated by the untrained.

Simultaneously speeding through 2010 and 1431, skating across a land of mountains, deserts and dusty villages, elegant palaces, ragged children, princes, donkey carts and Mercedes, the train gapes, sunshine or rain, and it’s nobody’s job to close the door.

You are Welcome in Marrakech

This is Morocco -- food and frenzy. Everywhere "we are welcome," which generally means, do you want to buy? We were met at the airport by our hosts in Rabat, and after a relaxing two hour lunch, wandered the medina where Cynthia helped to introduce us to the culture before we took off on our own to Marrakech. The next morning we took a 3 hour train ride to what has to be the shopping mecca of the world. Our rabat (bed and breakfast) met us at the train station. Good thing, because there isn't a chance in the world that we could have found this place on our own. Below are some pictures, but mostly I have just been directing Michael to "take a picture of that!" so more pix on his blog.



This is the breakfast room at our Riad Al Mamoune. Gotta love the internet. Part of what sold us on this Riad were the reports of the good breakfast and the crepes are indeed light and perfection. The staff is extremely helpful. The only drawback is the walk back at night down an unlit tunnel of an alleyway.

Marrakech is not just a place where things are sold (although everything including what is nailed down seems to be for sale) but also where thing are being made. Leather coats being sewn, weaving, metal work, old tires being turned into stools, stitching and beading -- all in process. Here men are making tiles in the morning light.



We spend an afternoon at the Palace Bahia -- home to a long gone king and his four wives and gaggle of concubines. No furniture, apparently they fled with all the goods before the guy turned cold. But they couldn't strip the place of it's intricate tile and wood working, which is beyond impressive. Here is Michael in what he calls his Bollywood movie poster pose.



In the ancient palace there was an exhibit of modern art -- one picture, true sentiment.



More later, time to eat again.

Outside of the box

All December we were boxed in -- by the weather and by deadlines. Three deadlines for me for books upcoming in 2010:

ZOMBIES! EVACUATE THE SCHOOL!
WEIRD? ME, TOO. CAN WE BE FRIENDS?
HIGH DEFINITION: VIGOROUS VOCABULARY INSTRUCTION

But now we are breaking out of the box! On our way to Morocco and then on to Abu Dhabi. So exciting. Waiting to be cleared at JFK for our flight directly to Casablanca. Exotic just to say. Happy to have passed the weather so far -- and now ready to face the long security lines. On our way.

Whenever we leave to take our walks abroad, anxiety over details and the unfamiliar seesaw with excitement in the anticipation of all the opportunities. Traveling outside of the comfort zone is what keeps us growing. Like Danny in this photo from the Smithsonian, we need to trust.



And then dive in like Sara in the sea of new colors.



It helps to try and see into the future like Thomas, even knowing that is not entirely possible.



We are making calculations about the unknown, reaching out for the fantastical like Scotty.



All of this is a heavy lift, as illustrated by Ben in a recent snowstorm in VA.



Those we love are what tie us to that comfort place called home. We see it in the faces of families at the airport saying goodbye, standing close right up to the metal detectors and conveyor belts.

People invariably ask: Are you scared to go to these places? And the quick answer is, of course not. Driving around deadman’s curve in a snowstorm in Cleveland, falling on icy steps, eating McDonald’s in a pinch: those things are scary. But traveling? No. But giving due respect to total honesty there is always one moment, slight as the gasp between sight and recognition that is shiverous. I’m not even sure that shiverous is a word, making it a perfect choice to describe a fear I’m not sure is even there.

Concerns swirl around being so far from all we love, but the call of adventure, new friends and new experiences is strong. It takes a loving ground crew to enable us to travel, Katie, Kelly, Claudia, George, Becky, Amy – all pitching in. And Max and Frank, of course. Not to mention all of our friends on the other side, who have offered advice, work, don’t forgets, and cautions. So, off we go on Air Morocco with excitement and gratitude. Now if the weather only holds . . .

Not sure.

I found this embedded on a friend's blog, so I did what all good researchers do, I copped the URL. Yesterday was a good day for a melt down. I wasn't in school and I had the time to fully appreciate the pressure of having three books due by year's end. Today was a great day for a recovery -- a full day at my desk to put ideas in documents and chapters in folders. How long will my productive recovery period last? Not sure.

The book on vocabulary development, High Definition is the closest I ever want to get to a dissertation. Too close, as a matter of fact. Lots of research, lots of URLs, piles of books, three years of classroom student samples, even index cards. Yes, I come from that generation of small white cards sorted by topic. On a good day, I think like stacks of little index cards. On a bad day, the cards are all airborne and refuse to be corralled. This is a real image in my mind. Putting ideas in little stacks. What images come to the minds of kids whose hands guide controllers and keyboards instead of pens? Not sure.

Exchanged email with an old friend (we are of course not old, there have just been a lot of years since we met) who commented that my blog really put my life out there. Another friend once observed that for some people their life is an open book, mine (because of all the books of poetry) is like a billboard. Is that too much or just enough? Not sure.

I exchanged a couple of emails with an artist friend who is illustrating two of the new books and currently working on Zombies! Evacuate the School. I told her that my insecurities were barking yesterday. She told me that sometimes hers "meow and growl and beat on the door with fists." Producing art of the written or drawn kind is a constant struggle with the critical internal voices that push you to do better one minute and trip you up the next. Will I ever be able to quiet them? Seems like I should have mastered that by now, but at this point . . . not sure.

Then, I hit save on the poetry chapter of the vocab book and with a few spare minutes before bed, I found this little video which makes me wonder all over again if any of this has any practical value. Maybe I should be investing more of my time on facebook and less on writing? I'm not sure.

Time for bed.

In search of Peace

If we're going to the beach, you have to put on shoes.

I don't want to wear shoes.
Here let me help you.
I can't find my shoes.
Here's one.
I don't want to wear those shoes.
These are fine.
I want my other shoes.
Start with putting on socks.
I don't want socks.
You need socks and shoes. It's November.
Where's my purse?
You don't need a purse.
Scotty has a purse.
That's a pouch for collecting things.
I want a pouch.
I gave you a pouch, where is it?
Sara took my pouch!
There. Everyone has shoes, socks and a pouch. Into the car.
Me! Me!
Everybody.
Scotty won't let me shut the door.
Sara is trying to shut my foot in the door.
Everyone in the car and buckle up.
I don't want to buckle up.

A trip to the beach with an almost 3 year old and a six-year-old is not necessarily a trip to the beach in the idiosycrinatic sense of the phrase. The fighting continued for the seven miles to the Mentor Headlands parking lot. As I turned off the engine, a continuation of complaints.
Can I leave my shoes in the car?
Can I leave my fleece in the car?
I'm hungry.
Where's the water?
We never went this way before.
Can we go swimming.
NNNNOOOOO!

As we entered the opening of trees and took the path through the dunes, winding our way another half mile to the shore, gradually we began to hear the calming whispers of waves. Lake Erie was Sunday morning lazy, barely breathing. November 8. The shoes immediately came off, along with the socks and the fleeces. Pouches were filled with special rocks and beach glass. Scotty is an experienced beach comber and selectively collected smoothed glass. Sara took the three-year-old approach, scooped up a handful of rocks, filled the pouch in one scoop, and skipped away to walk logs like tight ropes and make sand angels.

It's been a crazy-busy couple of weeks. Rewarding. Tiring. Two days at Pierce Middle school in Milton, Mass and a warm and walking weekend with Christine and Larry Charbeneau.



We celebrated literacy and rich food, explored Boston's historical highlights. Christine's seventh graders dove into writing definition infomercials with the gusto of seasoned pitch people and the families were so fun to talk to on literacy night. I love a two day visit as there is time to really connect with folks.

Then we flew back to Cleveland, got in the car and immediately drove to a two day visit in Mason, OH. Mason is next to Montgomery, OH where I remember working at a GE plant typing freight tags the summer of 1971. The area was a cornfield back then. No more. The land has sprouted into neighborhoods and the MS/HS campus looks like a community college. Michael and I did three assemblies for the 7-8th graders, 600 kids at each show. They were very well prepped (thank you Jenny May) and enthusiastic about reading and writing poetry.



Saturday was the Buckeye Book Fair, seven full hours of signing and chatting and then I dropped Michael off at the airport for a gig in Chicago and picked up Scotty and Sara for a sleepover, all three of us in one bed.

The sound of waves smooths the spirit just like the lapping lake smooths glass shards. Setting aside the environmental anxiety over sixty-five degrees in Cleveland on the 8th of November, Scott, Sara and I walked, inhaled, and tossed rocks -- filling ourselves with peace. The achievable kind of peace. The peace you can hold in your belly.



Smiles all around.

It's Love/Hate

Watch CBS News Videos Online

The boy is right -- seems like everyone either loves or hates the president -- no middle ground. But unlike the way people either love or hate coconut, opinions swing wildly. I don't know if that reflects the fact the president is a moving target (unlike the flavor of coconut which remains pretty much the same and as long as you keep it away from my chocolate, I'm not going to pick up a sign and start marching on its hairy head). Or maybe it is more reflective of the fact that not only is the middle class evaporating, so is that wide swath that used to be called the middle ground. And that's not limited to politics.

No one is ever mildly annoyed. They are either jumping for joy or mad enough to rip someone's head off, blustering around like some kind of Tanzanian devil. It's like our whole society has plunged into into a perpetual state of adolescence, wildly mood swinging through events until manic has become the new normal. Too much TV? Too many shoot your way to conflict resolution video games? Have pumped up World Federation of Wrestling Neanderthals winning through prat falls and intimidation become our role models for building community?

Whatever. Drama queens (and kings) are no longer the isolated firecrackers they once were. Attention seeking behavior has become routine and any activity is justified, whether it is eating bugs or scaring the socks off of someone, if it brings you a little fame. Where do you go next when fame and infamous collide?

I would hope people talk about this fourth grader and his question to the president, but they probably won't. He didn't kick him in the shins, throw a tantrum, or threaten Obama in any way. He left that kind of behavior to the grown-ups. He just posed a question, politely asking. He waited for a response. He listened as if he really wanted to know instead of counting the seconds to a zinger comeback.

Good kid. Good question. But not such good T.V.

Austinburg Elementary School

Austinburg Elementary is old school. Literally. It is a very old school. Tall wooden windows, a gym with a real stage at one end, heavy wooden classroom doors. I couldn't find an age on the building on-line, but I'm guessing the old girl is pulling up hard on a centennial. The steps into the front door are well worn, the secretary's office is the size of my dining room and just about as cozy. I loved walking in there, it reminded me of my good ol' Berkley Elementary where I went to school (now a parking lot, I don't want to talk about it.)


The kids were primed and ready. We had a laughing good time through three assemblies and then I got to meet with the fourth grade for writing. I have a special connection with this school as my nephew Edison goes there. The kids were anxious to write, we included good visual details and talked about how poetry writing doesn't have to be hard because you don't have to get it right the first time (like say, sky diving). If you don't like the way you wrote it the first time, move the lines around like Legos. Which is exactly what Edison elected to do with his draft.



Great job Edison and thanks to all the teachers who worked to make the poetry day a success.

"Poetry makes me less scared"

Two fantastic schools in two weeks -- Central Elementary in Edgewater, MD and
Garfield Middle School in Lakewood, OH.

Today in Lakewood I met with the seventh graders, first in writing workshops and then for an assembly. In the course of our writing, one student observation stood out, "Poetry makes me less scared." Shyly, she whispered the line. I asked her to read it and read it again. One more time. I love that line.


Teachers Leslie Eiben and Trish Csongei had done a careful and fun job of preparing the kids for a poetry day -- enlarging a few of my poems defining feelings -- annotating them for better understanding, and then using them as mentor text for kids to write their own poems about feelings. Everybody was excited to see their poems posted for others to read. Now, posting poems in a middle school hallway identifying feelings may seem a bit scary in itself -- but instead it had the opposite effect as students were excited to point out their poems to others. Maybe acknowledging feelings in print really does take some of the scared away. How cool is that?

Sometimes kids will ask which age group I like the best and I always tell them that what I like the best is mixing things up. And that's the truth. Last week my first school visit of the fall took me to Edgewater, Maryland where I met with pre-K through grades 5. We played our tummies and played our lips, making the sounds of poetry. We had great discussions and I not only met some very dedicated teachers, this school has a very active parent group. One of the mom's brought in a poetry book written by her cousin, an Iraq war vet. Very powerful writing, the images still haunting me a week later. I regret that I forgot my camera!

I've been closeted with my computer through the month of September working on new books and thinking about school, vocabulary, poetry, and zombies (another story). It felt good to get back to school.

Travelers

While trying to stay within the lines and not tearing the the pictures of baby Moses in the weeds with my crayon in Sunday school, I remember hearing that if you talk up the fact that you did a good deed, points get deducted from your naughty or nice permanent record. So, I'm going to take a minute to talk up the artwork created by Debbi McCullough,
my artist and activist cousin who (among other good deeds) makes art from trash discarded by immigrants in the desert. The faces mounted in shoes and tuna fish cans which the travelers carry and drop along the way. Behind the faces in the cans are pages from the Spanish Bible. The sculpture on top is mounted on a section of cactus and in memory of the five people last month who received a death sentence for trying for a better life crossing the desert between Tucson and Nogales. Her work is beautiful and puts a human face on the tragedy of desperation.

I come from a family of do-gooders. It's true. That phrase has been tarnished of late by hateful folks who spit do-gooder out with scorn while stockpiling ammunition, but that's what we are. In order to do my small part in the world of inequities, in April 2008, (this is the part that's going to get me the point deduction) I checked a box to make a monthly donation to an organization Women for Women International, a flagrantly do-gooder group that is worth mentioning despite the fact that I'm a small contributor.

This organization provides an allowance for women in desperate situations to help get back on their feet. It connects each do-gooder with one woman, translates letters, and distributes the checks. The first woman I was connected to was and Afghan widow, I wrote to her and sent her a picture of my daughters and me in April 2008, but I never heard back. Monthly when I saw the $27 hit on my credit card, I'd wonder if she and her two children were even alive.


And then out of the blue (or out of the mailbox, as it were), I received a new partner abroad. Her name is Anastasie and she lives in D.R.Congo in a refugee camp where she has been since 1997. She is married and was born in 1969. She and her husband have two children ages 4 and 4 months. Under my cozy desk lamp, in my dry and warm house, compliments of the internet, I was able to search images of Mugunga Camp II. I studied Anastasie's letter and the translation. So, I looked up the phrase "jina lake" in Swahili to find that it means: name is (seems to work for my name is, her name is, his name is).

Somehow these images came together for me this weekend, voices from a wilderness of need and insecurity -- travelers who remind us to be grateful every time we turn on a water faucet or a light switch. Last week I also had to get my auto license tag renewed and had to stand in the inevitable line -- I even took a minute out to be thankful that I had a line to stand in, one that moved and ultimately worked. I didn't have to pay a bribe or a coyote to be legal.

We are all travelers looking for that place called home, that place where Frost reminds us "they have to take you in." But for too many, there is no one to take them in, no one left or never was. And that rather than building walls to keep those travelers out, isn't it safer for everybody if simply, in whatever way we can, we help one another along the way?

First: Kill All the Teachers!

This past weekend provided a luxury of reading time as we visited with our friends Sarah Willis and Ron Antonucci in the vicinity of Chautauqua, NY. Hiking, naps, reading in the hammock – a restful way to welcome in the fall for three writer/teachers and a head librarian. Suzi even stretched her stick-fetching skills plunging Phelps-like into the pond, getting a paws-on education in how to gauge the shortest route from the edge and how not to leave shore before knowing where the stick has landed in order to avoid swimming endlessly in circles.


So, I had time to read Luong Ung’s book First They Killed my Father, about her childhood in Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge’s genocide that resulted in the deaths of 2 million of its citizens. It is a powerful story of survival including the author’s child’s eye view of the absolutes taught by the Khmer Rouge.

Their first dictate was to kill the teachers, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals – basically anyone who was educated was under suspicion. “Children in our society will not attend school just to have their brains cluttered with useless information.” (p.61)

Last week, Michael and I watched The Kite Runner, after both having read it. It was a stark reminder of the restrictive view that the Taliban takes regarding education (particularly of girls). Literature and daily news reports are constant reminders that teachers and students alike put their lives in jeopardy for even learning to read under Taliban rule.

One of the most vivid books I have read about the Cultural Revolution in China under Mao is a YA book, Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution by Ji-li Jiang. Guess who the revolutionaries picked first for public humiliation and execution? Teachers. Stalin, Lenin, Hitler -- similar mandates.

It's impossible not to draw parallels. I know the Khmer Rouge and Mao banned religion and the Taliban uses religion as a justification, but the results are the same – dictators using young zealots to help limit access to education as a means of controlling a populace – and the first thing you have to do to limit education is kill the teachers.



Teachers are a hard-headed lot. They taught kids in holding camps on their way to the gas chambers during the Holocaust. They teach in refugee camps. They teach drawing numbers in the dirt in Africa and Afghanistan. They teach in places right here in this country where many people would be afraid to traverse the parking lot.

So, whenever I read something like this account of college conservatives making a hit list of professors they (in their mature wisdom) think are liberal, it scares the la la la out of me. (you know the la la la, that’s what you do when you have your fingers in your ears and don’t want to listen to what’s being said). http://www.thefoxnation.com/college/2009/08/31/college-republicans-compiling-liberal-teaching-list

Or how about those creationist museums that seek to limit any study of what happened in this world if the hieroglyphic or rock is over 6000 years old? Teachers haven’t been killed for teaching evolution in this country – but they can lose their jobs.

Or how about the folks who constantly discredit teachers on the radio and television? The campaign against teachers has been one of the most focused and successful public relations campaigns on record. Ask the average person what the state of education is today and they’ll say it’s awful. Then ask the same person about how her kid’s teacher is and she’ll say, “Great.” It's not as if anyone is calling to kill teachers, but you kill all respect for the profession, if you kill the teachers' self esteem, if you marginalize teachers, shaming them publically and relentlessly, what does that say about our collective position on education?

I don’t know if this organized attack on teachers is designed primarily to break the unions or to privatize schools into profit centers for the crooks on Wall Street, but as in Mao vs. the Taliban, it really doesn’t matter what’s behind it. The net result is to straightjacket those who seek to educate through inquiry and wonder, those whose life’s work it is to help the next generation to not just jump in the pond and swim around in circles until you sink like a pooped out Papillion – but to think.



My wish for this school year is for every citizen. The next time you hear someone spouting off about wanting to limit education in any way, from banning books to underfunding schools to standardized tests designed to clutter up the curriculum with mandates that keep teachers from helping kids to think on their own, ask yourself: What is this person’s agenda and why doesn’t he/she want our kids to grow up to be independent thinkers?