E Is for Education

Education may change

In 1943 when my parents were in high school their teachers augmented lectures and reading with blackboards and chalk. The teachers used chalk to explain mathematical concepts, to focus student attention on main points of science, history, language, and to list assignments and due dates.

The world was engulfed in World War II. Schools were open.

Young men in school then, knew that if the war didn't end before they graduated, they would go. Indeed some, like my Daddy couldn't wait to graduate. As soon as they were 18, they enlisted foregoing their final year of school.

When they went to war, no one knew if they would come home again. Or what home would look like when they did.

Methods of teaching in the classroom have changed.

Blackboards disappeared from classrooms before my time in school. By then they were green. And overhead projectors had come into vogue. In fact, when I was in the 8th Grade, us Baby Boomers were overwhelming the schools and schools were covering the shortage of teachers with educational television. In those early days, that did not mean Sesame Street or Reading Rainbow. It meant actual classroom topics with a teacher on the screen.

My 8th Grade physics class was held in the school cafeteria. TVs (black and white, of course) sat on  wheeled carts, placed to be seen by students seated at long tables. 220 8th Graders, monitored by one teacher, learned the basics of physics in that class. Our teacher, (I can't think of his name right now, but he was a very brave man) carried a "pointer." It was a long, tapered stick. Previously, such sticks were actually used to point at things like equations on green blackboards or locations on large maps.

Now that I think about it, he used the pointer rather like George C. Scott playing General Patton used a quirt in the movie Patton. He (our teacher) walked constantly up and down among the tables, occasionally slapping his pants leg with the pointer or using it to threateningly point at a recalcitrant student. Mr. Whatever-his-name-was must have occasionally wished he were wearing that pearl-handled pistol that Patton wore.

When we graduated from high school, the draft sent the young men off to Vietnam. The World may not have been at war, but we felt as though it were.

Today schools are closed throughout America. Students were sent, not to war, but home. With no forewarning. They went to Spring Break, which was extended a week, then through March, and now until the end of April with the understanding that schools may be closed through the rest of the school year. Students in Denver start online learning today.

This was my daughter's first year to teach as a graduate student at the University of Houston. Last Fall Semester she taught Introduction to Fiction. It went swimmingly. She loved choosing which bits of fiction to teach. She enjoyed her students. She decided teaching is definitely for her.

She is a student in three classes this semester, working toward her Masters so she was especially pleased to be assigned to teach Introduction to Fiction again this semester. A very helpful assignment. She didn't have to develop new lesson plans from scratch and she could use her experiences with the Fall class to adapt and improve the class for Spring. She had confidence.

Then Corona Virus 19. All bets were off.

Now she is being taught and is teaching online. Luckily, she is a digital native as are most of her students. Having used computers practically since birth is not enough though. Neither her teachers nor she has been trained to teach online -- so it's all by guess and by gosh. Having lived in a house all your life does not fit you for building one. None of them can have confidence in what they are doing. Little comfort in this time of Covid-19.

Students have left school, but the world is not at war. If it were, we could choose sides and hate those other people. We could build bombs and make bullets. Then the old men would get together, declare a winner. Name what is left Peace and go back to business as usual until the next war.

This is a World-wide Health Crisis. A pandemic. There is no side to choose. Weapons do not exist to fight it. Our hope is that the best minds of the World, working together, will develop treatments and vaccines to control humanity's susceptibility to Covid-19. Only fools will declare a winner and return to business as usual.

The thing about education is that we can

The Post -- A Movie Review

          Real -- Then              Hollywood -- Now   

                             

Real headline from June 18, 1971, "Documents Reveal U.S. Effort in '54 to Delay Viet Election"
First of a Series
By Chalmers M. Roberts
By THE WASHINGTON POST

Real headline from the Denver Post which picked up the story from The Washington Post,
"Fitness devices expose troops"
By Liz Sly
By THE WASHINGTON POST
January 28, 2018 at 6:04 pm

A striking similarity, don't you think?

There are differences. The first headline was on a hard copy of a newspaper. Perhaps the tactile nature of the bearer of bad news made it all the more shocking. Not to mention the fact that newspapers, printed using Linotype machines to produce lines of type then set into the printer, left ink smudges on your breakfast hands.

The second headline showed up on my laptop as I read my digital edition of The Denver Post this morning. (For the curious reader. No printer's ink smudges here.)

Steven Spielberg has done it again. Another excellent movie. The Post staring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks is about a newspaper that prints information the United States Government (You know, that government "of the people, by the people and for the people") would rather "the people" not know.

Actually, just as there was more to those days than the Vietnam war, there is much more to this movie. Women's rights, a mega-defensive President. (At least Nixon's expletives were deleted.)

What the movie got wrong. Not in the opening scenes where the soldiers pushed through threateningly quiet, dense jungle, unable to see their enemy. Or the soldiers amid the noise and chaos of injury and loss following a battle. And maybe the soldiers would have referred to the "long-hair," Daniel Ellsberg instead of "that old guy." What was wrong in the opening scenes was that the soldiers looked too old. The average age of American soldiers in Vietnam was 22 compared to WWII and Afghanistan when they were 26. Four years difference is not much, is it? They're all too young.

What The Post gets right is Robert McNamara's glasses and the part in his hair. And the times.

Meryl Streep's portrayal of Katherine Graham is stunning. She gives us a woman who grew up in luxury and privilege. She married. She raised children. She gave the best parties, attended by the best people, including Washington's great and powerful. A woman who lived like she was supposed to until her husband died. Worse yet. Her husband committed suicide and left her to run a newspaper.

As publisher, Graham was certainly not responsible for the business on a daily basis. She had a Board for that. All men. She had an Executive Editor responsible for the newspaper's content. Also a man.

Tom Hanks gives us the editor Ben Bradlee. His character is not nuanced. He's the gungho newspaper guy. His first concern is to beat the competition -- The New York Times. Which brings up the question of the Constitution's First Amendment right to a free press.

That, in turn, brings up the fact that Bradlee's Big Boss is a woman.

For my money, the absolute best scene in the movie is when Bradlee's wife describes for him precisely what Graham's situation is. She is not prepared by her background or her sex's recognized position in society to shoulder the responsibility of defending Freedom of the Press. Such a decision would require her to abandon her loyalties to friends high in the government. To that government itself. Not to mention the very real possibility that she could be imprisoned for publishing classified information from what would come to be called The Pentagon Papers.

Worst case scenario, Bradley might do some time in prison. He might lose his job. He would definitely become high-profile in the world of journalism and would be in high demand for another job.

Graham, on the other hand, could lose her family's business. Their income. The jobs of hundreds of people who worked for her. Her position in her community. Her friends. Her father and husband's legacies.

SPOILER ALERT!!! In case you weren't born when all this went down, were still doing your hippie-dippy drugs, or living your own life safe and secure oblivious to your country's crises of faith ....

She did decide to run the story. The audience where I watched the movie broke into applause. And that's not all. The movie ends with a night watchman calling in a possible break-in at the Watergate office building.

Here we are folks -- 2018 almost half a century later. Less than a week before I saw the movie I took part in the Women's March. More than fifty-thousand of us in Denver. We were of all ages and ethnicities and genders and preferences. And there were many thousands more across this nation as we endure another crisis of faith in our country.

Freedom of the Press is included in the First Amendment to the Constitution for good reason. Remember:  “If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, ... it expects what never was & never will be. Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”  -- Thomas Jefferson

Perceptions

From Google:
Perception: pərˈsepSH(ə)n
     1.  the state of being or process of becoming aware of something through the senses
     2.  a way of regarding, understanding, or interpreting something; a mental impression
     3.  intuitive understanding and insight

Perceptions can be wrong.

My brother tells good stories and some of them are mostly true. This one probably is entirely true.

It happened back in 1970 or 71. Matt was in his twenties. He had longish hair that he wore in a pony tail and he drove a VW micro mini bus, undecorated. Maybe he had a beard, too. I can't remember. I've seen him both clean-shaven and bearded so many times that I don't even notice.

Now being young with long hair and driving a micro mini bus might not have attracted attention in San Francisco at the time or in Boulder, Colorado, today, for that matter. But he lived in Oklahoma City and the Vietnam war raged on. Perceptions and public sentiment were not on his side.

He worked the second shift at Western Electric. (They made telephones for AT&T. Telephones that people today wouldn't recognize as anything but props from an old movie.)

He was driving home from work in the middle of a weekday, hot summer night. The streets were nearly empty and the homes were all dark.

Those old buses didn't have air conditioning, at least his didn't. So he had the windows rolled down to get what little cool air there was.

There were lots of things those old buses didn't have. Push button windows. Seat belts. 5-mile-an-hour bumpers. They didn't go fast and they crumpled on impact. I'm sure they wouldn't be legal to import by today's safety standards.

Matt pulled up to a red light and stopped. Some old dude, properly tonsured and wearing a suit, pulled up behind him in a convertible, top down.

The man started shouting at Matt. "Get off the road, you damn hippie."

Matt was tired from work and just wanted to get home.

The old guy revved his engine, shouted epithets about cowardice and aspersions against the VW bus. All ending with "you damn hippie."

At six feet, a hundred and eighty-five or ninety and with a background of high school wrestling and football, Matt could be formidable.

With the traffic light still red, Matt got out of his bus and walked back to the man in the convertible. He leaned over the open car toward the rude driver and spoke quietly, clearly.

"Mister, hippies don't believe in violence, and I ain't no damn hippie."

Without waiting for the green light, the old dude gunned his convertible and sped around Matt's VW micro mini bus.

Perceptions can change.