Brothers and Sisters, Sisters and Brothers: the Autobiography of an Ex-Only Girl

Dear reader,

I am an only girl. Or, at least, I was once an only girl. Just like the Ex-Colored Man in James Weldon Johnson's novel, I'm not sure what it means to be an only girl, or when and whether I get to decide to stop being an only girl. But I've been thinking about it a little bit lately. I started to write a review of my year, just like all the education bloggers did, but it was so depressing that I decided to focus on one of the highlights instead, so here's one: In 2012, I became a sister.

My first delegates' meeting for the Chicago Teachers' Union was not an especially eventful or exciting one--those would come later--but it was much more thrilling than I could have hoped for. I arrived late, so I missed the part where I, as a new delegate, would be "recognized," but, as I slinked into the meeting already in progress, I was first overwhelmed by the sheer number of delegates. It seemed way more than one per school, I thought, and I was soon to learn that there are, indeed, multiple delegates per school--as many as one for every fifty or so teachers in a school building. What a proportion of representation! If only we could be so lucky in every aspect of our representative government.

At House of Delegates meetings, the officers always speak in reverse rank order. I missed the report of Michael Brunson, the recording secretary, and came in to the middle of financial secretary Kristine Mayle's report. I had met and already knew that I liked Kristine, but I was surprised at her sober tone on the stage. Then came the Vice-President: Jesse Sharkey. I had also met Jesse and I had already been tickled by how he called us teachers "trade unionists." Trade unionists! I guess that is, technically, what we are, but it of course feels like a throwback to a long-gone era, one I've become certain that Sharkey, a history teacher, knows plenty about, and one that I also know plenty about, having written a dissertation on it.

Sharkey has a fiery, extremist style of oratory that reminds me of the best moments of Huey Long, and his knowledge of the long and--apparently, very much still living--history of trade unionism was tremendously impressive and exciting to me. Had I, as a Chicago Public School teacher, really become a part of the history I was writing about? Had I, really and truly, become a sister soldier? When Karen Lewis said "Sisters and Brothers"--which she does, repeatedly, when she speaks--it made my heart flutter, like I finally belonged to a big family fighting for a real cause.

But what was the family, and what was the cause? That's still a little bit unclear to me. Having grown up in the 1980s and 1990s, in a non-union family, I was raised to treat trade unionism with the same suspicion as almost every other educated person in this country who has not belonged to a union. In college and early in graduate school, I had been skeptical about efforts of graduate students to organize, particularly because, to my mind, these were elite institutions who were making the lives of their graduate students pretty darn nice. I also remember explaining to a friend why it made me so uncomfortable: we are not sweatshop workers, I said. We were, in point of fact, grateful, at the University of Chicago, to receive any teaching appointments at all; we were not the overworked, underpaid graduate students of the large state universities. At the time, I thought it somewhat high and mighty to be demanding free health insurance when we were already getting so much for free--a tremendously prestigious education in exchange for little-to-no tuition, for example. (This is not to say that PhDs do not "pay" for their education, in blood, sweat, and tears. But, with some frugality and austerity, the living stipend we are given is not unlivable. Most of the payment comes in the form of tears.)

To be clear--at the University of Chicago, the first whisperings of graduate student organization came at a time when PhD students were not universally funded at the same level. In fact, it was through the efforts of organized graduate students--in some cases, against the professed wishes of their professors--that the University finally agreed to fund all PhD candidates equally, which meant a dramatic drop in enrollments in the Humanities and Social Science divisions. But it was being around and intimate with this organization and seeing its effects--only just before the whole world watched the United Auto Workers let themselves get royally screwed in order to save their existence--that made me think twice about the power of collective action, if not of collective bargaining.

So, when Karen Lewis called me "sister," it was as if she had said my name, even though I was just one among nearly 30,000 Chicago Teachers' Union members. It would be several months before I became more familiar with the various caucuses and curmudgeons, the in-fighting that happens in every big family.

In my own nuclear family, I am the only girl of five children. That's a big family, by the standards around which I grew up. And being the only girl could be a lonely existence, at times. It was sort of like being an only child, while also being a middle child--which I also am. When I tell people that I'm the only girl, they respond in one of two ways: "I'm sorry, that must have been rough" or, "You must have been really spoiled." Well, of course, both are true, as far as these things go. It was rough and I was spoiled. I was treated like an only child and like everyone's annoying kid sister, all at the same time, and by everyone in not only my immediate family, but also my extended family, in which, in my generation on my dad's side, there is but one girl: this one.

The second girl to come along came along around 1989 or thereabouts, and she was my first real sister: my sister-in-law, the one I wrote about some weeks ago who is Tim Kreider's sister. When I read Tim's essay in We Learn Nothing titled "Sister World," I felt an uncanny, and misplaced, sense of concern and anger when I read this paragraph, worth reproducing in its entirety:

I'd always thought of being adopted as being about as interesting and significant a fact about myself as being left-handed or having family in Canada. What seems freakish and fascinating to me is something so commonplace most people take it for granted: being related. As an outsider and a newcomer to this phenomenon--what people call kinship, or blood--I may have a privileged perspective on it, like Tocqueville visiting America. What's so familiar to you it's invisible still seems outlandish to me. For most people the bonds of blood and history are inextricable, but I experienced them in isolation from one another, just like my transgendered friend Jenny has had the rare vantage of living as both a man and a woman. Meeting biological relatives for the first time in midlife, I felt like one of those people, blind from birth, whose vision is surgically restored, and must blunder about in an unintelligible new world, learning, through trial and error, how to see. You can't understand the word blue until you see the sky for the first time.

My first thought when I read this, truly, was, "Hey! You can't talk about my sister like that!" Of course, that makes no sense--she is my sister by the law of marriage, and his by what seems like a firmer, more permanent law, the law of adoption. But it shows, with some clarity, the difference in idea that I might have about "relatedness" than someone like Tim, who grew up adopted and therefore always-already alone. You'll notice, for example, that he slyly equates being adopted with singularity: the "freakishness" of being left-handed and having relatives from Canada, both of which are, I think, true about him. I don't have figures in front of me, but I can recognize that being adopted puts one in a silent minority, just like having Canadian relatives or being left-handed does. (My sister-in-law is not left-handed, but my nephew is, which means left-handedness runs in her family, by law and by blood, as it does in mine, by blood and by law.)

Now that I re-read the passage with new eyes, I see that Tim is more ambivalent than I thought about having blood relatives vs. having legal relatives. He rightly historicizes blood relation as only one kind of "kinship," but he comes frighteningly close to qualifying it as a better kind of kinship than the other kind. If one could only have sisters by blood, then I still wouldn't have any. I could, in fact, never have any, a fact that became clear to me when I was 5 years old, and, when my fourth brother was born, I asked my mom, while still in the hospital, when she would be having another child. She responded, with memorable vehemence, "never!"

Walter Benn Michaels (that guy again), makes a very strong case in his book Our America that the idea of the nuclear family as it is developed in modern American literature is a cover story for another very American idea: race and racialism. One of the novels he reads (attacks) on these grounds is one of my favorites: Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. In that novel, Walter reads everyone's love of Caddy, the absent sister, as not incest, per se, but rather, as a version of racism: preferring your family means preferring those of your own race. Similarly, the Ex-Colored Man in Johnson's novel endorses racism by his very renunciation of it: you can only refuse to be colored and choose to pass if there is something to being colored other than the color of your skin--something like blood, as in the famous "one drop rule," or, in Walter's argument, something like culture.

Learning this argument from taking a class with Walter and reading his book made me initially uncomfortable, as I have written before. I am a mixed-"race" child, and therefore a mixed-culture child, and that part--the culturally-other-part--of my identity has always been strong, even though I sort of "got over it" when I was in college and learned of more interesting and worrisome dilemmas having more to do with racial inequality, and less to do with me. But, in spite of Walter, and maybe, just a little bit, to spite him, I care about my people. The the reading of Faulkner, who I already knew as a white supremacist, was almost more painful than the reading of Johnson, who I already knew was not a white supremacist. I loved that novel! And I loved it first and foremost, I am ashamed to say, because I automatically love, blindly, all stories about families in which there is only one girl, from Duck Tales and Voltron to Emma and The Corrections. Caddy Compson's status as the only girl in her family is the least of the Compson family's worries, and The Sound and the Fury is, as even Walter admits, a great work of art, for other reasons. But, for me, just like he does in As I Lay Dying, Faulkner had me at the one girl, freaks though they are. Like me, the women in these stories have no sisters. It is my oldest, and weakest, soft spot.

Like Walter, Tim goes on, in his story, to discover that having cultural values in common can feel more like brother-sisterhood than having family in common. His biological sisters are more "like him": they are humanists, they like--oddly--the same kinds of food. But I have to say, though all four of my brothers are doctors, and we don't always find a lot to talk about, I still love all four of them tremendously, with much of the room in my admittedly roomy heart. And I love my sister who is Tim's sister. She and I have a lot in common, too: she is a fiery, assertive, professional woman, and she has been an inspiration to me ever since I met her, when I was very young and had very, very high expectations for my first sister. She is also, as it happens, a great mom. To say the least, it's not easy, these days, to be a fiery professional woman and a great mom at the same time.

My expectations were met not only by my sister-in-law, but also by my sister Karen Lewis and my 30,000 brothers and sisters in the Chicago Teachers Union when we went on strike and won. For the first time in my life, I closed ranks with my union family and Won! An! Argument! The argument was about more than just one thing, as they usually are: it was about teaching and teachers, about dignity and workers' rights, and about real education equality for students. But, in some ways, it didn't matter that what I was fighting for wasn't the same as what every single one of my sisters and brothers was fighting for. The fight, itself, felt good and right. And what we won has benefited my students, my colleagues, and me, personally, and other teachers, throughout the nation. And no one, not even Karen Lewis, knows just what causes or what people the CTU will benefit next, but the strike sure gave people a helluva lot of hope. There are only a few things I have done in my life of which I am prouder. And, after the strike, at my dissertation defense, I was able to say that I know, for a fact, that participating in a strike is fun. Like (I wrote "just like" and then decided to delete the "just") the workers and humanists in my dissertation, I sang songs and marched in the streets. I even sang one of the same songs, with different words. For Langston Hughes, Theodore Ward, and many others, the song was both "John Brown's Body" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." For me, it was "Solidarity Forever." I sang it over and over. It's my favorite.

Family really is forever, and forever is a long time. Has being a sister paid off for me? In the Barton family, I can say with certainty that it has. In the family of the brotherhood of teachers and educators? In the family of man? It remains to be seen. I am no longer a CTU delegate. I had to relinquish the position because I needed the time and energy I put into it for other purposes, being, as I was, a wounded soldier. But, happily, I have not yet had to give up being a sister in the struggle. What that struggle is remains for me to find out, in the only way we sometimes can find out: waiting.

I had a chance to see Walter Benn Michaels speak last week, and I also had the chance to ask him and his fellow panelists what should be done about the fact that very few people in K-12 teaching take any notice of him or the other impressive literary historians in his company. He told me that I should stop worrying about what goes on in the high school English classroom and keep following Karen Lewis! If that's not having my life come full circle, then it is something like that--a good ending to my story of sisterhood, at the very least.

Where Do We Go From Nowhere? To the movies, of course: A Theater Review

My friend Ben Blattberg has asked me to describe where I think one goes from rock bottom. Here goes...

On Saturday I felt devastated and was laid low by my grief about Newtown and Everything Else that is Wrong With the World. On Sunday I began to feel better again, largely because of two things: I went to a Quaker meeting, and I went to see a show.

The play was Manual Cinema's Lula Del Ray, and if you are reading and live in Chicago, I'm sorry that you missed it, because it has now closed. But Manual Cinema will live again, and soon, and they could use your support, because they are making amazing original art.

I think because of my own research and thought processes of late, this play hit me with its joy at just the right moment. But it was carefully crafted to do that. I got to talk with one of the writer/producer/directors, Drew Dir, an acquaintance of mine, today, and he confirmed a lot of my thoughts about the play, but left me wanting to hear about it some more. And I'm excited, because they're going to keep working and growing, and if you read this, you'll have heard about them at an early-ish stage in their development. (wink!)

The joy of the play and its originality did not come from any one component of the play, but, rather, from its hybridity. It combined an ancient art form, shadow puppetry, with a relatively young one: silent film. (It is literally manual cinema--completely hand-made shadow puppetry, projected by those overheads that we teachers don't use anymore, and the effect looks like the earliest moving images, like stop-motion photography.)

The play told a story that we've heard since time immemorial: Lula Del Ray, a young (wo)man with a lot of hope, leaves home, goes on a long journey, finds out that what she was searching for is not what she thought it was, realizes that she has lost everything, and then finds hope again. The play used that story to offer an overt critique of capital, which plays have been doing since the 1930s. And the play made that critique by using our love of authentic folk music and turning it upside down, just like a true hipster. Plus, the music was live, and mostly singer-songwriter-style whispery scoring on a cello. The whole thing was a pretty terrific experience.

So, with all of this derivation, what made the play so amazing and original? It was just that: it amazed while also feeling comfortingly familiar. It was a beautiful and jarring thing to watch. It told the story so well, in such a gorgeous and fascinating way. The whole time I was watching, I was thinking two things: I love this, and I hope Chris (my husband, the musician/therapist) doesn't hate it, because he likes original stories and original music and he already knows that the music industry is bogus. And then I knocked over my empty beer bottle, which was embarrassing. Afterwards, I found out that Chris loved it too, because the whole time he was watching, he was thinking: this story is not new to me in any way, but the way it is being presented is wholly engrossing, except: I want to know how they're doing that! And also, it's so embarrassing that my wife made such a loud noise.

This is a classic example of a technique and theory of art that the German theater artist Bertolt Brecht called Verfremdungseffekt, which gets translated several different ways, usually as "alienation effect" (and it was sometimes abbreviated in English translations as A-effect, I think even by Brecht himself), but also as "estrangement effect" or "disillusionment effect" or "distancing effect." In the German, obviously effekt means effect, and fremdung means stranger (which the author learned from the lyrics to Cabaret), and ver is a prefix that means something like "the opposite" (I think). For example, the German word verboten is a cognate with the English word forbidden. 

I don't read German all that well, and I don't know anything about German etymology except for one undergraduate course in historical linguistics. But I do know that Brecht re-invented the word Verfremdung when he used it, and he was trying to create a German version of a Russian word. That word was ostranenie, usually translated in English as "defamiliarization" or "estrangement." (And I know absolutely no Russian, so you can forget about (thankfully for all involved) the Cyrillic alphabet or any further commentary on translation).

"Defamiliarization" was coined by Viktor Shklovsky, a Russian poet and critic from a school of Russian poetry critics that English literature critics now call the "Russian Formalists." Shklovsky first started working on the concept of defamilarization in 1916, but he happened to be living in St. Petersburg at the time, so he got busy with the Russian Revolution, decided to turn against the Bolsheviks, got in trouble, fled Russia, went back, fled again, and went back again. The essay that presents the idea, "Art as Technique," was first published in Russian in 1925, though it is usually backdated in anthologies to 1917, the year it was completed. Like many intellectuals, Shklovsky was persecuted by a regime he initially supported. Unlike many intellectuals, he was lucky to live to a ripe old age (a Russian-born-German-Jew living in Berlin in 1923. Moved back to Russia that same year, and managed to survive the Second World War and die in his 80s in Russia. Some people have tried to call him an opportunist. I say he decided to live, and got lucky.)

Anyhow, Brecht was trying to translate a word that was somewhat untranslatable, so he created another untranslatable word, a German pun. Literary Theorists do this all the time. The V-effekt is what happens when theater is alienating, but also familiar. In my writing, I have stressed that it's important to remember the familiar part. A lot of Brecht's followers and critics (interpreters) tend to harp on the de- part, the ver- part. But if theater is totally alienating, it's not going to get its message across, it will just piss off its audience. It's like how I used to feel sometimes when I would go see my friends' shows as an undergrad: I sometimes thought, but was afraid to say, that their work was pretentious. Now, I'm glad I didn't say anything.

For Marxists, like me, all art always has a message. Sometimes the message is WAKE UP!, and sometimes the message is pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, and usually it's both. But, as W.E.B. DuBois once said, "All art is propaganda." He was talking about the art that we might, even today, consider "neutral" (not didactic), or "merely beautiful," or "just for fun," what the French called l'art pour l'art and what English-speakers called "art for art's sake." DuBois was talking about jazz, or Hemingway's fiction, which both seemed (in 1926) plain, authentic, and unadorned, while also being deep. DuBois argued that even this art was propaganda for a certain way of life, a certain type of man, and a certain definition of beauty. We know that now, thanks to English teachers.

Shklovsky noticed that the Russian novelists and poets got the reader's attention, broke her tendency to become entranced when she was reading realistic fiction, by describing ordinary things very closely, like Anna Karenina's outfits, or the living room furniture in War and Peace. Shklovsky argued that this kind of re-viewing of something that we normally take for granted, that we normally don't even notice, causes us to notice and appreciate the beauty of those things anew. That, he argued, is why humans love to create art. Art is something that makes ordinary things either beautiful or strange, or both.

When Brecht took up this flag, he wanted to re-frame what Shklovsky was saying about art. Brecht said that traditional "high" or "legitimate" theater, like the theater of Broadway, put us in a trance. It provided an escape from life, instead of a new view on life. Like Shklovsky, he wanted art to be jarring and beautiful at the same time. Unlike Shklovsky, he argued that this kind of art would wake people up, not to art, but to society and all of its madness. I've noticed, in my lifetime, that people tend to forget that Brecht believed that familiarity and fun (Spass, also translated as "play") were important sides of defamiliarization. (Credit where very much due: Loren Kruger taught me this.) A lot of theatre that is made in Brecht's name is designed to just GET IN YOUR FACE. And some people like that. But not everybody.

Lula Del Ray was both lovable and alienating for its audience of about 50 hipsters from the north side of Chicago. The problem with all art-against-ideology is that it runs the risk of having its audience miss the point. And this is actually even more risky if the audience is very educated, like hipsters and academics are, because they love to congratulate themselves on "getting it," without thinking too hard about what exactly it is that they're "getting."

According to the theater critic and performance studies professor Jill Dolan, there is also a way around that sort of self-satisfied mis-reading, and Drew and his partner, Sarah, took care of it. After the show was over, they invited the audience to come backstage and look at all the puppets. At the very least, even the self-congratulatory could be amazed (again) at all the hundreds of hours labor that had gone into producing their 90 minutes of enjoyment. It's pretty easy to buy a song on iTunes these days. Most hipsters know that the record industry is a scam, and that $1.99 per song is causing poor musicians to be unable to make money from just selling their music. Katy Perry, on the other hand, doesn't have to tour much. Maybe then they would examine their "guilty" love of bad Top-40 music, or their "ironic" clothes that were made in China. I thought about those things. And I felt bad about them. But, then again, I also believe in forgiving myself (and others) for being inconsistent.

For Dolan, the "utopia" that we find in the pleasure of performance provides an escape from the world that is also educational. The subtitle of her book is "finding hope at the theater." When Brecht's theories first came to the United States, they were called "educational theatre." Now, I have friends from undergrad who actually do educational theatre for children (this one loved Pynchon and Nabokov when we were younger, proving yet again that knowing some stuff about postmodernism and being a great elementary school teacher are not contradictory). When we know that the world is rotten, possibly even rotten to its core, and we've learned to hate everything and believe in nothing, and to be suspicious even of our pleasures (so suspicious, in fact, that we feel "guilty" about them all the time), we can find hope in art that teaches while also comforting us.

When I entered graduate school, I started learning to Hate Everything, or, at least, to feel ashamed for loving all the things I had once loved, because I had been "duped." Atticus Finch, my hero, was a white supremacist. F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner were, too, and so was everyone. And comics and cartoons just reproduced capitalism, except for early Mickey Mouse and early Bugs Bunny. The most crushing "discovery" was that James Weldon Johnson was secretly a white supremacist! Later on, I forgave myself for believing these half-truths and being really disappointed in myself.

People aren't usually "duped" when they love something. They just love the thing because it speaks to them. In teaching, we call this "meeting students where they are." My grad school friends who are still teaching and I have talked about how long it takes to figure out where students are, and how frustrating it is to try to meet them in the middle. I have tried, but have never succeeded, in teaching a child to tell the difference between an adjective and an adverb on a multiple choice test. But I do have students who can use adverbs and adjectives correctly in their writing. It just takes a lot of time for them to learn it, especially if they're 17 and they didn't learn it the first 8 times.

Students don't like being told that they're stupid, and adults don't like being told that they've been tricked. And teachers hate it when other teachers badmouth them. Everyone makes mistakes, and most people like figuring it out for themselves (which is what good teaching helps them to do). When I read Dolan's book after two years of intellectual despair, I found hope. So I wrote my dissertation about a theater movement that also gave people hope. We live in dark times. I watched Thor (the 2011 Marvel movie) for the first time tonight, and I thought it was brilliant. Maybe art can give us hope again, while also teaching us to notice things better.

Why I Write: Baldwin, Orwell, Didion

The title of this essay is an allusion to two of my heroes who wrote essays of the same name--George Orwell and Joan Didion. (Didion also wrote an essay called "Notes of a Native Daughter"--a response to Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son."

There is this song that have been listening to on repeat throughout this fall to keep myself going. The lyric is: "Dr. King, I think often of you, and the love that you learned from Jesus." It's by Mason Jennings, and it's called "Dr. King." It's a beautiful song, and the message means a lot to me.

Many of my friends and colleagues will see this as an oversimplification of King. But it's an oversimplification that I think is worth remembering, and I try to remember it every day. There is King hagiography and King denigration, and he was a complicated and egotistical man. But King's ministry was a ministry of love.

I am not a Christian. But lately I have been thinking a lot (shout out to my mother-in-law!) about the gospel of love. Baldwin knew that King believed in love and sacrifice, which is why he respected King. But Baldwin wished that King would include more rage in his ministry. Baldwin was, himself, a lapsed Pentecostalist youth minister--he knew a lot about Christian love, Christian hate, and Christian rage. Also he knew that these three things--love, hate, and rage--could exist in one man: his father, and himself.

My friend "Jim" wrote me this note today:

I had an awfully self-helpy thought about "selling oneself" this morning -- at least, it helped myself: it occurred to me that a better formulation than selling, with its connotations of commerce, commodification, prostitution, etc., might be giving an audience or readership permission to find you complex, pleasurable, etc. Audiences are made up of all kinds of people with all sorts of defenses about the prospect of allowing you the quasi-intimacy that reading creates. A writer's job is to contextualize herself in such a way as to make that possible. I realize as I write that sounds weirdly erotic, which is not quite what I mean. Because adapting one's work to a trend, having reputation or pedigree, etc., are all ways of building trust -- and it's very hard to reach people without that. Rambling. But what do you think?

Jim, who is English, always beats himself up for Rambling. He even had a blog once upon a time that made a punny joke about this and what the British call "Rambling," which means walking long distances for fun. But anyway, his point here is a good one--which is that you need to remember your audience, and that the relationship between teacher and student, writer and audience, is a love-hate relationship.

Baldwin knew a lot about psychology, about which I will be posting later this week. But for today, I wanted to answer this question: Why do I write? Why am I writing this way right now?

Didion said: "I. I. I. [...] I write to know what I am thinking." Yes. Writing, teaching, being an academic: these are endeavors in which the human has to balance between feeling selfish (egotistical) and selfless (a martyr). Nobody likes someone who acts like a martyr when they're not literally dying for a cause. And nobody likes an narcissist, either. The humanist professions--writing, teaching, academia--attract people who wrestle with this duality. But we're kidding ourselves if we think that we write only for the sake of our audiences. The problem that Jim is talking about above is the problem of recognizing your audience. Do you write for yourself (narcissist) or for your audience (martyr)?

The answer, of course, is both/and. Martin Luther King may have been quite egotistical. There is certainly evidence to support this. But even people with narcissistic tendencies actually do most of what they do out of a sense of mission. (All ad hominem attacks on Obama aside, no one would run for President of the United States and then keep doing that job unless they actually cared about changing the world. Well, maybe one guy....who ran to please his father. But enough psychoanalysis of the presidents.)

King's mission was not one of self-aggrandizement. Movements need leaders. He knew that. He tried to balance of self-aggrandizement with self-sacrifice. And, since he was murdered at 39, and lived his entire short career of celebrity under the threat of imminent death, I should say that the balance was on the side of sacrifice for him. So it kind of annoys me when people dishonor his memory by talking about what he said in private company, which we only know about thanks to the U.S. government SPYING ON HIM. No one is all good. But he was, on balance, one of the better ones.

Orwell said that he wrote for four reasons: (1) sheer egoism; (2) aesthetic enthusiasm; (3) historical impulse; and (4) political purpose. Yes, yes, yes, and yes! Do you, dear reader, see why I love and worship these writers?

So what am I writing about now? And has it changed? My husband pointed out to me that I appear to have taken a slight turn from my previous postings. I can understand his point of view. I rarely used to talk about Foucault in my previous writing on this blog. But, at the same time, I think it is consistent with what I've always tried to do on this blog, which is to create dialogue where I could not find it in my working life.

Dialogue, cooperation, collaboration--I sound like Mr. President! But the man has a good point. We live in a  world right now that is so with-us-or-against-us that we have shut our ears to ideas. A good idea is a good idea, whether it comes from your friend or your enemy.

I don't want anyone who has read this blog before the last week to think that I have stopped writing for you. I don't entirely know who you are, but you are still my audience. Many more of my academic friends have started reading since I posted "A Defense of English." What I have noticed, and I will keep repeating it until it gets heard, is that the dialogue between English Literature departments and English Education departments is pretty impoverished, except at the few universities where these two types of specialists co-exist in one department.

To put this point another way, what I posted about Orwell was somewhat taboo for me, as an academic writer, to put out there, on a couple of levels. As a junior, junior, junior, "jobless," just-about-to-be-minted PhD, it is presumptuous of me to write about Orwell. Orwell, as an author, falls outside of my field of specialization--American and African American literature and drama. And I'm by no means an Orwell specialist; I've just read a lot of his books. I haven't read all of the criticism that's already out there about Orwell. I haven't paid attention to that conversation. So who am I to write about him? Well, I have taught a lot of Orwell to high school students--Animal Farm and 1984; Homage to Catalonia and "Shooting an Elephant" and "Politics and the English Language" and "Such, Such..." and the essay he wrote on the Spanish Civil War. So I've read him pretty carefully; and I've tried to assemble a picture of him that makes him make more sense to other people, younger people. Non-experts.

That's what teachers and critics of literature do: we try to give people a bigger picture.

On a second level, I'm way too googly-eyed about Orwell for this writing to be considered "academic." In the academy, we don't love the authors we write about. If anything, taking a position that shows that we love the author is likely to be challenged--"Why do you defend this person's thinking so much?" "I can understand why you might want to, but it's causing you to be blind to this persons flaws." In academia, we are all about pointing out people's---er, wait, arguments'--flaws.

Critics often feel sad about themselves because they feel so unwanted and unneeded by society. But society needs critics. Critics help us read better. And that's what we need to do. Orwell knew that. He saw--firsthand--all of the madness of modernity, and he wrote about it for multiple audiences. For adults and for children. For intellectuals and for ordinary people. And he wrote in a way that most people could understand, because he prized clarity above many other things (more on that in a future post).

Baldwin believed in love. I want to write like him because he believed in pouring his love and his rage into his writing, which is what I've tried to do on this blog, more than once. Most people now call Baldwin a "liberal" (in a bad way) for believing in love. But he did, and he wasn't wrong to. He was an ex-Christian and he understood the teachings of Jesus better than the people who write about him now. He understood King because he understood Jesus. He believed in love, and was sorely disappointed, because he had believed in Jesus and then watched many of his closest friends die as a direct result of American racism.

I think, in academia, it's time we had a little bit more love, and a little bit less hate from the haters. Paranoid reading is annoying and boring. There are only so many times that you can point out that an author from the past was duped. Hindsight and all that. It is presentist and unfair to judge King's gender politics by today's standards, or Harper Lee's race politics, for the same reason, or Baldwin's politics, period. Most people in this world who aren't psychotic narcissists (like Hitler and Stalin and Castro) have good intentions. In teaching, we call this giving the benefit of the doubt, or assuming positive intent. Baldwin was a liberal because he knew that being one would give him a platform. And he wanted to be heard. That's why he wrote. That's why I write.

"So What Are You Going to Do With That?" An open fan letter to my brother-by-another-mother(-in-law), Tim Kreider

Here's a little dorky academic joke:
Q: How do secular humanists explain cosmic coincidences?
A: They tell the story. (Art imitates life, you know.)

The writer/cartoonist Tim Kreider is my sister-in-law's brother. My brother's (Todd, who I have written about on this blog) brother-in-law. And Todd is my half-brother (different moms), and Tim and my sister-in-law are adopted* (different moms), so by my calculations, we're just one shy of six degrees of mother between us (my niece and nephew live in an episode of Modern Family trying to keep all their aunts, uncles, and grandparents straight). But when I was younger, I looked up to Tim a lot. (And I'm not sure he ever knew that, hence the "fan mail" title.) I've been thinking about him a lot lately, as I ponder, yet again, the question at the top of this post. I have a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. in English, and an M.A.T. in Secondary Education. What am I going to do with all that?

*So, by way of a story, here's the coincidence: Tim wrote beautifully about his experience meeting his birth mother and birth sisters in his book We Learn Nothing. It was really weird for me to read that essay, because it's about his sisters, one of whom is my sister, my sister-in-law, my first real sister in a lot of ways (4 boys, one girl, one girl-cousin-sister-cum-au-pair), and I also know his adoptive mom, their mom. And I was literally just thinking about his book and that essay this morning, because I was worrying about writing about my family in this public way--Thai-American midwesterners are not dirty-laundry-airing people, and the essays in Tim's book are quite personal. And so I was thinking about how to write more like Tim, to sound detached and personal at the same time. And then boom! This article lands in my inbox, sent to me by a good friend who has been helping me with all this soul-searching (see previous 10 posts or so). My friend (I have taken to calling him "advice man") thought that Tim's article might model the kind of writing and research that I might want to do, now that I am oh-so-credentialed.

I feel like I got whacked in the head and woke up in August 2000, at my nephew's first birthday party. I was just recounting this memory to my brother this past August, now that my nephew is an honest-to-god YOUNG MAN. In honor of my nephew's first birthday, I had pooled the resources of my other three brothers and purchased, for our nephew, the first 4 Harry Potter books in hardcover (those were the four that were out). I had spent spring break of my sophomore year in college reading the first three Harry Potters, and the fourth one had just come out. I found out about Harry Potter before all of my friends because I had brothers that were still in high school. It's so odd for me to think back on those days and how, even then, I was baffled by the way that reading cultures differ in high school and college. My friends were all into Rushdie and Pynchon and Kundera, and here I was reading kids books. (Not coincidentally, that's what Tim's article is about, too.)

So, birthday party. I can't remember the theme--my sister-in-law throws a killer themed kids' birthday party--maybe either Bob the Builder or Blues Clues. (My niece's love of Dora the Explorer has come in super handy teaching in a mostly Mexican American school. When we look at the world map, I often sing the map song, which is, by the by, the cruelest, most repetitive ear worm in the history of man. Take that hyperlink at your own risk.)

In college I always felt shy and awkward around my brother and sister-in-law's friends at these things because of the age difference. Todd is 9 years older than I am, and I met most of their good friends for the first time at their wedding, when I was an awkward 13-year-old in a floral pantsuit, watching my ladies-men-cousins and my older brother, who got to be a groomsman, hit on the bridesmaids. I'm not kidding. A floral pantsuit. It's no small wonder that I spent most of the wedding hiding behind a video camera and/or stuffing my face with desserts. My brother still teases me about how I ate all the desserts. I have no recollection of this, so I can neither confirm nor deny its factuality. There is supposedly photographic evidence, but I have never seen said evidence.

So they had already unwrapped the 4 Harry Potters, which, on four college-/high-school-student incomes, had felt expensive, and I was pleased, because all of these actual adults seemed to think it was a cool present. And then Tim walks in with this crusty banker's box FULL of used children's books--a lot of them first editions--and all the really great ones. I was so chagrined. It felt like some episode of Sex in the City where one of the girls gives the other an antique baby rattle from Tiffany's, and the other one gives a six-pack of Gerber onesies. Or like a birthday party in Logan Square now, where one person gives the birthday girl a set of saucers from Crate and Barrel, and another gives her a hand-knitted apron with an ironic animal screen-printed on the front. You get the idea. Tim had out-hipstered me avant la lettre.

But let me be clear, there's no resentment here. I think at the time I expressed my embarrassment to their mother, my brother's mother-in-law, and she, always knowing the right thing to say, announced to everyone that, between Uncle Tim and Aunt Lit (my name in my family), our nephew would grow up a reader. And it's true--both my nephew and my niece are terrific readers. It's been fun, as a high school teacher of "struggling readers," to share books with them, and have them share some of theirs with me. Not to brag, but I have gained a lot of cred with them as the aunt who introduced them to both Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. I've been trying, now, to get our nephew to read Lord of the Rings, or A Wrinkle in Time, or Ender's Game. But I also know that it's pretty tough to get my own students to read these children's classics. I actually asked my nephew when I last saw him what had happened to all those books that his Uncle Tim had given him, and he said that he still had them, and I told him he should start reading them now, because they're all so, so good. I haven't heard from him lately about what he's been reading, but I hope he's given one of those a shot--he told me he'd tried Lord of the Rings a few times but had found it kinda boring.

At that birthday party, I so wished I was as cool as Tim. I was entering my junior year in college, and I had been thinking a lot about what I was going to do with my degree in English. In my extended family on both sides, there are a lot of professionals, but not very many humanists. In fact, there are just four English majors: my cousin Alisa Tang (also a writer), my brother Todd (double English and Chemistry, now an MD), Tim, and me. We all grew up with that immigrant ethos--my dad's parents were both first-generation Italian-American, so the question that is the title of this post was asked of us. A whole effing lot. (My cousin Alisa once complained to me that everyone expected her to "just" become a teacher, which, at the time, was what I wanted to do, so I was pretty chagrined, again. Abashedness, mine, comes up a lot in this story.) My parents did not want me to major in English. When I told them as a freshman that I had decided to be an English major, they told me that they thought it was impractical. My father actually said he thought it was a waste of my analytical, scientific mind. (He'll probably deny this now.) At the time, my brother and my sister-in-law and my cousin Alisa, all older, all tried to be encouraging. And my brother and sister-in-law pointed to Tim, who was, at the time, working as a professional writer and cartoonist, but he hadn't "made it" yet. Now, with his book out and a blog on the New York Times website, I think he has, and I'm super proud to know him. I hope the book is a Times Notable Book. I think it deserves it. If he does win it, you heard it here first!

When I was a freshman in college in 1998, I wanted to be Tim when I grew up. By the time my nephew turned 1, I didn't want to be Tim anymore, because I didn't think I could be him. I got to college wanting to become a writer, but I got really discouraged, really fast. First, I quickly discovered that no one wanted to hear me write about myself (shout-out to Abigail), second, that I couldn't be Joan Didion in my wildest dreams because I just wasn't stick-to-itive enough about my writing habits (this is, Abigail, my personal anecdote of how high school and college kill the love of writing), and third, that I was actually much better at writing literary criticism anyway. So, by the time my nephew turned 1 in 2000, I had made a different plan, one that would fit my parents' ambitions and fears for me: I would teach high school for a couple of years, and then I would go get my doctorate in English. This, I thought, would impress my parents. I would still be a doctor, just a different kind! (Aside, because I love to digress like gothic novelists love to digress: My senior year, when I took the GRE, I mentioned casually to my dad that I might take the LSAT just for the heck of it. I sort of tanked the verbal section of my GRE (which shocked everyone), but I did really well on the analytical part, so I thought it might be a good idea to have a high LSAT score in my back pocket, just in case I couldn't get in to any English PhD programs. My dad brought this up with me again about a month after I mentioned it and asked me if I'd thought any more about law school. He's the most tiger mommest dad ever, and he's not even Asian.)

My aunt, who is a retired teacher (one of only two other educators in my family besides my husband), asked me this summer if I was going to make my students call me Dr. Barton. I told her no, but I was going to make everyone in my family--all six of them are MDs--call me that. I graduate next week. My husband and I have already joked about the Instagram photo of me, in my cap and gown, surrounded by the MDs. The caption will read "black sheep."

And I'm still not quite sure what I want to be when I grow up. But I've started to think that I might still, after all these years, want to be Tim, especially now that he's a bona fide public intellectual/renaissance man. He really is an outstanding writer. I was just telling my sister-in-law on the phone the other day how much his writing  reminds me of all the great mid-century essayists I love.

Back then, I wanted to become a renaissance woman, but we all know there's no such thing. I was scared of not getting a "real job." Tim was the only adult I knew well who didn't have a "real job." And I had already decided not to do many things I thought I might like--writer, lighting designer, stage manager--because I thought I wasn't going to be good enough to make it, and I was scared to go into the world without a steady income, without health insurance, without a degree that would impress my parents. Ten or fifteen years scratching out a living on an uncertain path seemed like a long time and a big risk to try to become successful for them. And it has only been in the last three or four years that I realized that I'm supposed to become successful for me. So I'm working on that now. Stay tuned.

Taming the Tiger: My Return to Identity Politics

My last post was about patience. This one is about anger,which is, in a lot of ways, the opposite of patience. If you look at the two "sides" of the Civil Rights Movement, for example (an incredibly reductive argument that often frustrates me), one side was about patience and passive resistance, and the other was about anger and aggression.

Civil disobedience follows the traditions of Christianity and some Asian religions that teach suffering (passion, a word that has the same Latin root as patience) and abnegation as the means to social change. Gandhi's ethos was selflessness and sacrifice. King was probably less selfless than he wanted people to believe, but he, too, took suffering--in this case, the suffering of Jesus--as an instruction on how to endure and how to make progress happen. Others involved in the black freedom struggle--Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, for example--disagreed with King's program of passion and compassion. They wanted black people to express their anger at centuries of injustice. (These philosophical differences, always characterized as a "debate" even though that portrayal lacks nuance, goes back to W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington at the turn of the century, to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass before the Civil War.)

So, anger. Frustration. Hate. These, Yoda tells us, belong to "the dark side." Christian and Jedi theology both teach us that patience and quiet suffering are better than aggression and vocal disagreement. And they paint these things in black and white, just as I have done here. But, as usual, things are a lot more complex than that.

Tiger or Dragon? Are those my choices?
Source: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Oriental-Asian-Tiger-And-Dragon-Art-Prints-/280662440248

In America, there are two common stereotypes of Asian women. One is what I would call a Madame Butterfly type--demure, quiet, self-effacing. The other I will name after Amy Chua: the tiger. Asian women can be sweet and ingratiating. They can also be fierce. A lot of people who buy into these stereotypes don't see a lot of middle. And it's hard, as an Asian woman, to live in a world where you have to fit into one of those two stereotypes.

When I was a kid, I watched my mom try to negotiate how she was perceived, and I felt frustrated on her behalf, and I sensed her anger. She is 4'-10". She, like many Asians, looks young by Western standards. And she is a doctor. I talked to her about this today (I was already beginning to compose this post when she called), and I asked her what it was like when she first started working in the U.S. She recalled a 60-year-old patient who was startled to encounter my mother as her doctor. "You look like a 12-year-old!" the patient said. My mom told me that her standard response to this remark--and she continued to get it, even into her 40s--was to make a joke: "I know. It's hard to believe, but I actually did go to medical school, and I am a doctor, and I'm here to help you today." What must it be like to have to explain to people that you really are qualified to do your job, day after day, year after year, for an entire career?

I know that the assumptions that people make about my parents' story have always made me angry. "How did your parents meet?" they say innocently, or "did your parents meet in the war?" No, I say. My mother is not Miss Saigon. She's A DOCTOR.

My mom was born and raised in Thailand, where the culture is Asian, but has its own unique national flavors. Thai people have some key cultural principles. One of them has to do with respect, and there are two Thai phrases that kind of sum this up for me. One of the phrases is greng jai.* My family figured out over Thanksgiving that greng jai is actually probably a loan word from Sanskrit, which would make it a cognate with the word "ingratiate," and that's how I usually translate it. Greng jai is a verb, but in my family we usually use it as an adjective--we talk about "being greng jai." As a cultural value, greng jai involves making other people feel comfortable, even at the expense of your own comfort. It involves treating others, especially elders, with the utmost respect. It involves avoiding conflicts. This is why the guidebooks call Thailand "the land of smiles." They take respect very, very seriously. So there's another phrase that has to do with what happens when people disrespect you: mon du tuk. To mon du tuk someone is to look down on them, to treat them with disrespect, to behave in a condescending way toward them. You are not supposed to mon du tuk anyone, ever. And when someone mon du tuks you, it's treated as supremely offensive. Being greng jai tends, in my observations of family and friends, to breed a lot of resentment, which is a form of anger.

The second value is called sanuk, and it means "fun." Thai people are fun-loving. They love to laugh, joke, sing karaoke, go on tour buses in large groups. They don't like doing tedious jobs without trying to make them more fun. They can sometimes be a little bit less ambitious than Japanese, Chinese, or Korean people, because ambition sometimes takes the fun out of things.

I learned all of these values, whether by nature or nurture, from my mom. My mom is fun. Her Thai pet name (everyone in Thailand has one) is "Toon," which is short for ka-toon, which means (surprise) cartoon. She often acts cartoonish, silly and goofy. This is charming and delightful, and she is great with kids for this reason. My niece and nephew and all of my cousins adore her because of this personality trait, which is both cultural and unique to her--and I'm like her. I like to laugh and joke, and I tend to give myself the giggles. My mom told me I laughed too much at my dissertation defense, and my dad told me that I shouldn't have said that strikes are fun. But they are fun! That's what my dissertation is all about: how pleasure can motivate people to participate in political action. I don't like to take myself too seriously. My husband says I sometimes act like a Muppet.

Thai women are caught between these different values in a big way. The Thai word for "lady" is khunnai. Khun is the Thai equivalent of donna in Italian or Spanish. You use it with someone's first name as an honorific. (My mom refers to the author of our favorite Thai cookbook, Cooking Thai Food in American Kitchens, as "Khun Malulee.") My mom and one of her best friends used to call each other khunnai as a joke when I was a kid. They meant it kind of sarcastically--they were basically calling each other "primadonna." The rules of greng jai require women to be extremely lady like: ingratiating, self-deprecating, in other words, Madame Butterfly types. (I once found this fascinating academic article about how Thailand's polarized gender norms developed through Victorian influence in the mid-19th century.) On the other hand, a lot of Thai women, my mom included, rebel against this norm. They are more like the Thai equivalent of American tomboys, which is what my mom was, and what I was growing up. (When I was about to get married, my mom went over to Thailand on one of her annual trips, and, to her great relief, her more girly friends helped her find an outfit for the wedding. She looked amazing, too.)

Between being greng jai, being small, and being ka-toon-ish, my mom has often wrestled with American norms for professionalism. I shouldn't necessarily say "wrestled," because she's been so successful, but I think it has come at a cost to her. I asked her if people used to treat her like a little girl when she was starting her career. And she told me the 12-year-old story. Then she explained to me that she knows that she has to be quite serious when she first meets patients, so that they will learn to trust her. She also consciously tries not to be intimidating. She told me: "The way I joke is usually self-deprecating, and makes other people feel good. Make yourself a bit less important than they are." I asked if it ever made her angry, and she said that it did. A lot. And she sure can be a tiger mom sometimes, let me tell you. I am self-deprecating too, sometimes to a fault. For example, I often tell people that my dissertation is really just a string of hilarious anecdotes about theater people, which I recognize undercuts my own work. (There are a lot of hilarious and weird anecdotes in my dissertation, though.)

So recently I've been having some of my own trouble with this conundrum. When I started teaching at 22, I, too, looked young. And now, at 33, very few people can guess my real age. My students often guess that I'm 20 (It's not that they think I'm precocious--they just don't know how old a college graduate is, and, for a lot of them, I am the same age as their parents, which is hard for them to believe.) I also get told that I "act young" a lot. This is more personality than maturity, though--I love to laugh, I cry easily, and our society values stoicism, and equates maturity (and masculinity) with stoicism. When people constantly treat you like you're young, you start to feel disrespected. And, at least for me, that disrespect has made me pretty angry.

So I am angry, but I also often look angry when I'm just trying to act serious. When I was 17, a friend of mine sent me a picture that she took of me. When I saw it, I thought, "wow, I look pissed." But I also remembered that, when she took it, I was just trying to look serious, to keep a "straight face." About a year ago, I learned about a real phenomenon known as "Asian poker face." The basic story is that a lot of Americans have trouble reading Asian people. So I hate to get all identity politics-ey, but sometimes when my students tell me that I "seem angry all the time," I think maybe they're just not used to looking at faces like mine.

I asked my mom about this, because she has a tendency to raise her voice when she gets passionate or serious, and so do I. She said, "If I don't yell, people don't listen to me because I'm a very small person and they don't take me seriously."

So you see, I grew up with a lot of mixed messages. Be nice. Be fierce. Be the best you can be. Don't brag. Don't apologize for being smart. Don't get cocky. Fight for what you believe in. Don't be a bitch. "You catch more flies with honey..." Don't say people are being sexist just because they disagree with you. And DON'T play the race card. It was hard to sort out. And it's still hard to find balance. On top of it all, I don't look Asian to everyone. As my mom reminded me today, Thai people tend to think I look like an American. Most other Americans tend to think I look Filipina, Hawaiian, or Mexican. Most Mexicans think I look Chinese (their word). I complained to my mom about being a member of--in a lot of ways--an older generation of biracial people, and she told me not to feel sorry for myself. Other people have had it worse. (I know that.) "Don't worry," she said. "Just tell people that in 40 years everyone is going to look like you."

Hillary Clinton, my mom's contemporary, is also my mom's hero. I think Hillary, rather than Bill, was the reason my mom decided to become a citizen in 1995. When Hillary ran against Obama, my mom and I argued a lot about whom we supported. My mom thought I was betraying feminism by supporting Obama. I thought Hillary was playing the race card too much. This is an old story in cultural studies--race and gender often fight for territory.

I tried to persuade my mom that the advice she was giving me was a little bit contradictory. I was complaining about being treated like a little girl, and she was telling me, in some ways, to act like a little girl (make jokes about yourself, smile), but also to act like an adult (don't show your emotions, don't giggle). We both have really loud, ha-ha-ha laughs. I think we both laugh like that not just when something is really funny, but also when we're uncomfortable. She understands American racism really well. She told me that I have to gain power before I can change things. So I guess it's time to tame the tiger.


*All of my Thai transliterations are phonetic and totally made up by me. Thai uses a different alphabet, and there are Roman transliteration rules, but since I don't read Thai, I can't spell in Thai.

Ballad of the Nice Yellow Lady: Reprise

Crazy White Lady

To paraphrase Blanche DuBois, sometimes there's hope, so quickly! Last night, I went to my school for a concert given by the group Cuerdas Clasicas, which specializes in Spanish classical string music and Mexican folk music. The group was joined by a mariachi band and an amazing female soloist. The concert was free and open to the public, and my school's community came out by the hundreds to see it. I only saw about 20 of our own students, but there were tons of parents and many adults who were unaffiliated with the school. And many people were dressed in their best swag. I felt embarrassed in my jeans.

This is the kind of thing that our principal is just amazing at organizing. The leader of Cuerdas Clasicas, Rudolfo Hernandez, teaches guitar lessons to our students once a week after school. My principal found the money to purchase guitars for the students to use and learn. Last year, the club was about 5-7 students; this year, it's about 15. Most of these students are mediocre or worse academically, but they come to school most days because of this club. Two of them, twins, have gone from hardly being able to play guitar to playing guitar and mandolin in the hallways. Another one, who failed my class last year, was in the guitar club and played a Death Cab for Cutie song at the talent show last spring.

These are the kinds of things that a great school does and should do. A great school can be a cultural organ for its community. A great school can give students great memories. No one remembers much about their day-to-day classes in high school. But most people have really strong memories of their high school friends and their high school activities. I remember every night of every play I stage managed, and I remember the one time my father came to watch me play volleyball. 

I've talked a lot on this blog about what CPS is missing, and what the school I work in needs. But there are many things that Solorio has. It has a strong, vibrant, beautiful community. It has an inspiring leader who wants the school to be a beacon for Chicano culture. When I wrote that post yesterday, I was feeling pretty hopeless. Last night, when I heard an entire audience singing and clapping along (to a song that I'd never heard before), I found some hope.

Ballad of the Nice Yellow Lady

There once was a nice yellow lady
Who thought she'd be able to change things...

I've written before about the ideology of the "nice white lady." It's a long tradition, perpetuated by movies since Stand and Deliver. Good teachers can change things even when most teachers don't care, this myth says. The difference between Jaime Escalante and the first incarnation of the nice white lady, Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, is that the nice white lady doesn't come from the community that she's trying to change. She just knows that, with the right amount of superiority and stick-to-itiveness, she can change everything.

I'm half Asian, so I'm not exactly white--my students tell me that I can't say I'm brown, but some of them (more than one, less than a dozen) also make racist jokes about Asians, so I feel pretty Asian at my job. There are no Asian students in the school and only four Asian teachers. There's a history of animosity on the southwest side between Mexican and Chinese immigrants. It's been really interesting, from an intellectual standpoint, being a member of a disliked minority. From a personal standpoint, not so much.

But back to the myth. The nice white lady comes into a school, rolls up her sleeves, and starts changing lives. She thinks everyone else is apathetic and she's the first person ever to care about these children, including their parents. In the awesome Mad TV sketch, she starts with a classroom where the students--black, Latino, and Asian--are sharpening their knives with the barrels of guns, kicks some ass and takes some names, and ultimately stands over one of her students, aggressively chomping down an apple, while the student writes an essay and weeps.

OK, I never bought into all of that Dangerous Minds stuff. As a kid, I watched Saved by the Bell, Head of the Class, and 21 Jump Street (when it was a TV show). I knew that TV used to be a lot smarter about what school is really like. But part of the power of that myth got my attention. My senior year in college, I applied to TFA. I wanted to work in the Delta (I was a fool who didn't know what kind of life she wanted). They rejected me, thank god. I wound up at a Quaker boarding school where I learned that I really do love kids, but that they are complicated, and their families are complicated, and it's not easy to change their lives, and it's not my job to do it alone.

And I learned that the myth of the cynical teacher is a powerful and false stereotype. Most teachers are doing everything they can. Most teachers are making a lot of sacrifices for their students--not just leisure but family, sleep, and health. No teacher should be expected to be a martyr. But that's where the "students first" ideology gets us.

And yet. When I moved to Chicago and started grad school, I missed kids. I started eavesdropping on their conversations on the bus. I started reading about ed reform. I thought No Child Left Behind was an abomination. And I decided to go back into the classroom so that I could fix everything.

My friend and mentor Lauren Berlant taught me, when we read Uncle Tom's Cabin in her seminar, about paternalism, which she also called "soft supremacy." Too bad Michael Gerson took that phrase and made a travesty of it. The real soft bigotry in education reform is bigotry about teachers. The reform movement wants us to believe that urban public school teachers are cynical and discouraged. That they've given up on kids. They think the solution to the problem of old teachers is to hire armies of young teachers and use them up until they burn out. Someone I know compared it to D-Day. One line gets mown down, just send in another. Gary Rubenstein talks all about this in his blog.

But I feel tricked. Some part of me still went into the schools thinking I could change them from within. I'm not giving up yet, but I am getting really, really discouraged. We don't teach social-emotional skills (formerly known as "character") any more because it's not on the test. We don't teach health and nutrition for the same reason. There's no room for these in the schedule because 9th graders have to take double periods of math and reading. We say that kids are more than a test score, but it doesn't show in our actions.

At the Quaker school, I learned a phrase that the Quakers use: educating the whole person or the whole child. This philosophy is very Quakerly, but John Dewey said pretty much the same thing. What have we done with curiosity? What has happened to imagination? When will we ever try to motivate with something other than grades and scores? I am beginning to lose hope that we will.

Here's what I care about:
1. The differences between poor/public and wealthy/private education...
2. ...especially when it comes to the teaching of literature, history, and writing.
3. The psychology and development of young people, and how knowing about it can be useful to teachers.
4. Fighting racial and economic inequality, and giving young people a voice in that fight.
5. Building social and cultural capital for the disadvantaged.

Can I continue to care about these things as a CPS teacher? I'm having a real crisis of faith about it. What I have learned is that I'm no nice yellow lady. I'm more of a tiger teacher (minus the obsession with academic achievement to the detriment of everything else). But I respect students and their families way too much, and I have suffered too much disappointment, to believe in that myth anymore.

Conversations with Students and Awesome Article Grab-Bag

Five
Student: Ms. Barton, you are seriously one of the sweetest people I've ever met in my whole life.
Me: Aw, that's sweet of you to say. I wish you would tell my freshmen.
Student: They don't like you?
Me: Yeah, they say that I'm mean.
Student: Well, you gotta be mean to freshmen. We put a freshman in a locker the other day.

Another student later insisted that the student who said the above was being sarcastic when he called me sweet, but I promise you he was not.

The student who called me sweet, by the way, has given me and my co-teacher hip-hop names. I am Dr. Jetlife, and my co-teacher is B-murder. Another student of my co-teacher's has started using this moniker:

Six (day after the election)
Student: B-murder, I knew Barack Obama was gonna get back to bidness.

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Some really great articles about education have come out in the last few days. Here they are:
Bill Ayers, "Open Letter to President Obama"
Charles Payne, "Getting the Questions Right on Chicago Schools"
Chicago Tribune Series on truancy, "An Empty Desk Epidemic"

Plus, by Charlie Tocci and yours truly, "What We've Learned about Unions Since the Strike" I think Charlie would agree with me that the articles listed above are way more powerful.

My "Lazy" Student has Dropped Out of High School. My "Bad" Kid is Saving His Own Life.

The student I called "Joey" in this post has dropped out of high school. I'm devastated. I wish he would choose what's right for his future, but I'm worried that he won't.

The student I called "Mike" in this post is doing "One Goal," formerly known as "US Empowered." He's taking school seriously and he's working hard this year. I couldn't be prouder.

Why I love My Hood

I had always hated Halloween for stealing my birthday (which was yesterday). Then I moved to Logan Square. Two kids tonight:

Me: Who are you? Quienes son?
Older brother: We're robots!
Me: wait a second. Are you Optimus Prime? [Nods] And are you--

Older bro: We're not really robots.
Me: Are you Bumble Bee? [Nods. Takes mask off.] Whoa! You're a little boy! I really thought you were robots!
Older bro: We're not robots! We're kids! [Takes mask off]
Younger bro: We're kids!
Me: You sure had me fooled.
Parents (whisper): Say Happy Halloween.
Kids: Happy Halloween!
Me: thank you!
Older bro: You're welcome!

Two Americas: Health Edition

In the America I grew up in, parents beg for a diagnosis of anxiety disorder or ADHD so that their children can have extra time. In my students' America, they refuse treatment because they're embarrassed or their home culture frowns on therapy and mood and mental disabilities.

In the America I grew up in, I was taught about health and nutrition more than once. In my students' America, that's not tested, so it's not taught.

In the America I grew up in, we got proper treatment for asthma (one brother and I have it). In my students' America, you use your rescue inhaler every day because you don't know that there are better treatments out there, and neither do your parents.

In the America I grew up in, my parents could afford glasses. In my students' America, free glasses are first-come, first-served.

In the America I grew up in, we had good health insurance. In my students' America, you have Medicaid or nothing.

In the America I grew up in, you didn't miss school if you had a sports injury. In my students' America, you miss multiple days of school going to the doctor and going downtown to get your Medicaid approvals.

In the America I grew up in, we had sex ed more than once, and very few people got pregnant. If you did get pregnant, you got an abortion and no one talked about it. In my students' America, you don't get sex ed because it's not provided for in funding or policy. If you get pregnant, your parents force you to have the baby to teach you a lesson, or because abortions are against your religion. You are forced to raise the baby to teach you a lesson. And, chances are, you drop out of school to raise your child.

In the America I grew up in, teachers are rarely sexist or racist. They know about political correctness. They never claim that fathers shouldn't have to pay child support if abortion is legal. In my students' America, that's not the case.

In the America I grew up in, students with disabilities get everything they need. In my students' America, you can be an amazing student with a physical disability who advocates for yourself and all the other students in the school. You are the most amazing young woman your teacher has ever met. You are afraid you won't get to go to the college of your choice because you won't be able to afford it.

Two Americas: Pre-Election Edition

Back when he ran for president the first time, and I supported him avidly, and campaigned for him, Barack Obama was a little bit tetchy about the "two Americas" line of thinking espoused by John Edwards. At the time, many of my university advisors and mentors supported Edwards. Edwards struck me as smarmy. I was right about that, but my profs were right in one regard: Edwards was the only one really talking about inequality and poverty. Inequality is the greatest problem our nation faces today. I know that's a bold statement, but I believe it to be true. There are very much two Americas in this country. I grew up in one, which we will euphemistically call "the suburbs." The other one is in urban and rural areas with high rates of poverty. We will euphemistically call this America "the city," but it should be understood that it also refers to Indian reservations, Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, and other high poverty areas.

"Arne Duncan and Obama Love School Testing"

In the America I grew up in, the suburbs, everyone takes the PSAT, because it is the test that qualifies you for National Merit Scholarship Money. In the city, not everyone takes the PSAT. This might be because your school doesn't offer it. Or you can't afford the testing fee of $14. Or you can't get a ride to school that day (a Saturday). Or you have to babysit your little brother. Or you have to work. Or your parents don't want you to go to college out of state (if you're a girl especially), or they don't want you to go to college at all.

In the city, your parents didn't go to college, so they don't know how to help you apply to college, even if they want you to go. They don't know about test prep books and test prep programs and The Fiske Guide and The Princeton Review. In the suburbs, where I grew up, your parents force all those books on you when you're a sophomore in high school.

In the America I grew up in, the suburbs, the school has plenty of athletic fields and offers nearly every sport that the state sports association offers. In the city, you can't hold softball and baseball practice at the same time, because both teams have to use the park across the street from the school. The football team and the boys' soccer team have to practice on alternate days, or organize their weight training schedules around each other. The ultimate frisbee team can't practice on the field at all. In the suburbs, most schools have ultimate frisbee teams. In the city, most schools don't know ultimate is a real sport. In the city, the track team practices by running up and down the sidewalk. If you're lucky enough to have a field or a track, it was paid for by a philanthropist.

In the suburbs, you never miss an athletic event because your bus didn't show up. In the city, this happens all. the. time. It just happened last week to an amazing, inspiring student with a physical disability who was about to compete in her first and only swim meet (it was the last meet of the season). She didn't get to compete.

In the suburbs, no one will let you drop out of high school without a fight. In the city, they don't have time to track you down if you don't show up.

In the suburbs, your parents take you to a psychiatrist so that you can get diagnosed with ADHD or an anxiety disorder because you want extended time on standardized tests. In the city, you think extended time makes you look like a dumb kid, so you turn down the offer.

In the city, you constantly have to write thank-you notes to the wealthy donors who are helping to pay for your education because the state can't pay for it.

In the city, you tell your teachers to work in the suburbs because you think it would be better for their careers.

If this doesn't make you angry, then I don't know what would.

I'm a Feminist Again: A Micro-autobiography

Now, I'm guessing that the majority of my handful of readers have read the title up top and said, "again"?

Yes, again. I have always been a feminist, even, I think, before I knew the word, because I have a strong, successful mother and I grew up in a household with four brothers and no sisters. Us girls gotta defend ourselves. Someone--my dad?--gave me one of those little feminist quote books that you can get in the bargain section at Barnes and Noble. Maybe I bought it for myself. I had a little commonplace book that I started sophomore year that had all these feminist sayings in it. I got all mad at my family whenever they tried to tease me about PMS (which they did all the time!) I loved Gloria Steinem and Joan Didion.

But when I was in college, I sort of got over feminism. College was a magical place of surprising levels of gender equality. Maybe Title IX has something to do with that--no sarcasm, that thought really just occurred to me. In college, gender-based literary studies sort of turned me off. I did take one class that I really loved about race and class, so I started to get interested in that. My roommate all four years of college is/was queer and I want to say he was a gender studies major, but now I can't remember. He was really involved in the women's center and also the LGBT group. College was the first time I had a lot of gay friends, so I got really interested in the queer studies side of gender studies, but a lot less interested in the women's studies side.

The Quaker school was also very progressive from a gender standpoint. We had faculty members who were out, we had an active GSA, my colleague taught a gender studies senior elective, and tons of students took it. We had very few problems with body image or disordered eating, even with the boys on the wrestling team, which had the same following as a football team (since we didn't have one of those. Football is too violent for Quakers.) It's true that I sometimes butted heads with male and female students in ways that had to do with gender, but the students at that school didn't seem to "need" much education (though they always do, I now realize) in political correctness, because Quaker education is awesome like that.

Political correctness, by the way, is a sort of obnoxious but convenient name for the practice of avoiding saying things that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or disrespectful toward people with disabilities, or disrespectful, discriminatory, or stereotyping of any one group. A lot of people think political correctness is silly, but maybe they wouldn't if they had the experience I had at the beginning of this year, with my 9th grade students unwittingly whispering sexist anti-Asian racial slurs, at first as a joke, and then, after I had explained how personally offensive it was, about me directly. (This is a "teens don't know any better, and they're mean" moment.) Since everyone now reading this blog knows where my school is, I don't want to embarrass my school or my students by explaining any further, but let me just say it was shockingly ignorant. Once the Dean of Students came into my class to explain to them the seriousness of what they were doing, it was over. I'm really proud of my 9th graders for taking it seriously, and several apologized to me personally.

So anyway, back to feminism. In grad school I got really interested in reading about the history of gender and class in a class with Lauren Berlant, and I also continued to be really interested in the dynamics of gender and race and class. But making the argument "this text is misogynistic" just didn't interest me at all. So I sort of left it. I planned one dissertation chapter where I was going to talk about gender and these two awesome female playwrights (Lorraine Hansberry, who you've heard of, and Alice Childress, who, in my opinion, deserves to be even more famous). But I ended up cutting that chapter to save time. I may end up writing it some day. But it's not all that surprising, given the trend of my interests, that it was the chapter I decided to cut. Of all the texts discussed in my diss, only one is by a woman (Alice Childress's play Trouble in Mind, which has experienced a bit of a revival in the last decade, so if you ever get a chance to see it, do see it. It's a brilliant play.)

These days I find myself returning to my feminist roots, including rediscovering Didion (I mean, I've read Didion all along, but right now I'm on a Didion bender. I wish she would let me write her biography. That's never gonna happen.) The main reason, I am beginning to notice, is that my students are just dumbfoundingly ignorant about gender and race, and the whole multiculturalism revolution in general, and, sad to say, so are a lot of teachers (I've written about this before). When I was in coursework for my teaching certificate I wrote an essay about how there are literally libraries of books about "the problem with black boys" and ONE about black and brown girls.

Now, it may surprise you, since my school is about 95% Latino and about 5% African American, but my students constantly use racial slurs about each other and about their white and Asian teachers, and literally, literally sexually harass each other and their female teachers. My students say all kinds of awful things--racist, sexist, you name it. And they sometimes think awful things. And my girls have terrible body image issues. And lots of girls accidentally become mothers.

So I had one student last year who became a mom at 15, and She. Is. Awesome. She has done such an amazing job of figuring out how to give her daughter a great life and still be an honors student. I'm so proud of her and impressed by her that sometimes I wish that she could help me if I ever get pregnant--and I'm twice her age. This year, I have another student, a junior, who is due at the end of the month. She's in lots of discomfort, but she is an extraordinary young woman, because she comes to school almost every day, and she does all of her work, and she's one of the hardest working students I've ever met.

So one day I asked the one student from last year, now a junior, if we had a support group for moms at our school. Here's our conversation:
Me: Do we have a group for students who are moms?
She: No. I kind of wish we did.
Me: Yeah. Lots of other schools have one. Maybe I'll start one or try to find someone to start one.
She: That would be great. I'll help you if you want.
Me (in my head): No, you'll start it and I'll help you.

So that is exactly what's happening! I'm so excited. She's excited. Our co-sponsor is excited. The other moms and expecting moms at the school are excited. I just hope it actually gets off the ground. I asked my student--the one who will now put on her transcript that the was the founding president of this group--what we should call the group when we talk about it at school, so it sort of has a code name. She said--I'm not making this up--that it should be "something about not giving up." So we decided to wait for inspiration to hit us and let each other know when we had an idea. I asked my husband, who is a brilliant song lyricist. He said we could use FIGHT as an acronym, and then we figured out what the words would stand for. But then I said it would be better if it was a Spanish word, so then he figured out an acronym for L.U.C.H.A. Either way, I'm going to have to turn away the male students (one in particular I already have in mind) who think it's a fight club or a wrestling club. But it's gonna be great. And this is another one of those times when I'm just so full of love for my students for helping themselves, and believing in themselves, and fighting for what they deserve.

Phinished!

OK, not really finished. I still have to file. My students are appalled that I successfully defended my dissertation but I still have to revise my conclusion. I just tell them that revision is always important.

It is pretty awesome to defend. It is even awesomer to have students seek you out to say congratulations. And to get a group hug from five of them at once. I will remember that for when I'm feeling bad about teaching.

The Kids You Love the Most

I recently told a story about a certain type of kid named Joey. This is a story about a type of kid named Mike. Mike is the kid who is always talking when he's not supposed to be talking. He almost never does what he is told to do. When reprimanded, he becomes combative and belligerent. And, OK, if Mike were my peer, I would think he was kind of a jerk.

But Mike is not my peer. He's just a kid. When you ask Mike why he did what he did (if he can be civil at all), he'll sometimes say, "I guess I'm just a bad kid." Just like Joey, Mike has heard himself called this over and over for years. But Mike is not a bad kid. He's just a kid who messed up. Or one who messes up a lot. That's why I prefer the terminology of the consultant Kristyn Klei, who calls kids like Mike the kids you love the most.

I have not always thought this. When I was first teaching, I had a class full of Mikes (really, they were a combination of Mikes and Johnnys--the kid who will blindly follow whatever Mike does). They drove me nuts. I hated them. And I thought it was all their fault. When people of my generation were in high school (and for sure before), teens were thought of as pre-adults: people who, though inferior to teachers, had the emotional and cognitive capabilities of adults. These teens, so the thinking went, could be told that they had to be more responsible and less lazy. They would do what they were supposed to do if threatened with the proper punishments. And, the good news is, the majority of teens will do what they're supposed to do, most of the time. But if you think that they do this out of fear of being punished, you're wrong.

We now know (and knew when I was in high school, but forget that) that teens are not fully developed human beings. They may stop growing on the outside and start to look more and more like adults (especially kids like Mike, who are often male and of color), but they are still children. The cognitive research is now telling us that the human brain is not fully developed until the age of 25. And the part of the brain that is still developing is the prefrontal cortex, the part that helps you organize and make decisions, decisions like, "Would it be a good idea for me to blurt something out right now?" or "If I throw this thing across the room, am I likely to get in trouble?" or "Is getting into a fist fight ever a good idea?" or "Homework or video games?" The list goes on and on. A colleague and friend of mine has even developed this sort of knee-jerk response when we tell stories at lunch about the dumb things our kids have done. After every story, she says "underdeveloped frontal loooobe" in a funny voice.

When I was 22 and a brand new teacher, I found the Mikes and Johnnys of this world supremely frustrating, and I decided that they were my enemies. They were out to make sure that I could not conduct my class. And so I began to expect the worst from them--nothing but bad behavior, and certainly no academic work. And, don't get me wrong, I still lose my temper with the Mikes when they're driving me nuts. But you have to see a teen as a kid. When a kid does something dumb, HE REALLY WASN'T THINKING OF WHAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN. In fact, he is somewhat incapable* of thinking ahead like that. So telling him that he has to be responsible and threatening him with punishment is just not going to work in a lot of cases. Calling him a bad kid will just make that label stick in his mind, so that he learns to assume that he is the kind of kid who teachers hate. And that's why these are the kids we have to love the most.



*Of course, the majority of children are able to stay out of trouble, and there are those especially mature children who are constantly thinking about their futures. But most teens just don't understand that getting bad grades now, or getting suspended, or even arrested, will mean bad things in the future.