A Declaration for Education Freedom adapted from Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

Parents believe their children are special.  And I say they’re right.  Each child has a gift or two which creates differences among them.   One can be superior in sports and another in academics.  Even in sports one can be really good at defensive tackle in American football but well below average at any position in basketball, which was much like me growing up.  In academics one can, as my mother was, really good in Latin and Math, but really not so good in Spanish and Geography.  Yet, we are traveling through an epoch where our public and private school governors demand all children be the same regardless of strengths and deficits.  Thus, curriculum, teaching and learning, heck, the entire way of American schooling, especially public schooling, has been standardized across the entire country just like my favorite cookie, Oreos, is the same here where I live in Rockaway, NY, or in Santa Clara, CA, where I was for a media convention a couple of years ago.  

But my son and those like him are as far away from the standardized student as they can be.  They belong to a group of youngsters who are gifted and talented but also have a disability.  They are called Twice-Exceptional.  The education field recognizes this category of pupil but the states and the federal government do not.  So, in our State of New York, as in all states with the exception now of Colorado and Maryland, a youngster can be found to be disabled or gifted, but not both.  And they cannot be found twice-exceptional here because, as I have been told by City and State officials, there is no federal law recognizing them and mandating identification of and service to them.  So my son suffered in the mainstream classroom until high school when we were able to finally get him into a setting which understood the mix of gift and disability. 

The crushing force to ignore and to eliminate the cognitive differences among children severely injures our children and causes me to declare the need for parents and children to insist on the natural right of their children's intellectual, neurological and educational freedom.  In Appendix I in Garry Will’s Head and Heart:  A History of Christianity in America is the text of Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.  The more I read it and thought about it over this weekend, the more I found it was that perfect declaration for which I was searching.  All I would need is to replace “religion” with appropriate education words and phrases and edit for my purposes. 

Before going to the appropriated text I would like to say that an implication of this declaration just might be the repeal of each state’s compulsory education law.  Now, I must admit I am not there, yet.  But with the tone-deafness of our political and education leaders to the neurological differences among our children which should mean differentiated schooling structures, curriculum, teaching and learning and quality differentiated outcomes, and the continued hurt to children, especially to those like my son, who are non-persons, I am getting closer and closer to those who are demanding the end to compulsory education.  Still, I do believe in universal, free education, meaning public schools.  But, public education must undergo systemic change from one of massive standardization to one of differentiated service based on the individual neurological differences among its students.

Another implication of this declaration, I’m afraid, might be the possible support for the nativist agenda where bigotry and hatred cause the denial of rights to those the nativist deems inferior.  While I am forced to admit some looking for such preference may find it here, I do not mean it to be taken as such and condemn it in the strongest possible terms.  Regardless of the Divine one conceives there to be, or not to be, I say in the strongest way:   We are All God’s Children, all equal in the sight of the Divine and before Humanity and one must treat the other with peace, love and understanding everywhere, every time.

And, now, here is A Declaration for Education Freedom adapted from Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom as found in Appendix I, pp. 599-601, Garry Wills, Head and Heart:  A History of Christianity in America,  New York:  Penguin Books, 2007:

“We are aware: that the opinions and belief of the young depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, who, being themselves fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the judgments, attitudes, and outlooks of the young, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and such endeavoring to impose them on the young, hath established and maintained a usurpation of the young’s natural right to their own reason, to their own humanity; that all attempts to influence the minds of the young by temporal punishments, or burdens, or by civil incapacitations visited upon them by civil education authority tend to only beget habits of hypocrisy, and meanness.

We are furthermore aware:  that to compel a youth to furnish compliance to the propagation of opinions which he questions is tyrannical depriving him of the comfortable liberty of determining for himself the particular evidence whose powers he feels most persuasive to reason; that the young’s civil rights have no dependence on the state’s compulsory Syllabus, any more than the dogma of religion; that therefore the proscribing any young citizen as unworthy of the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity unless he professes in excellent example the state’s mandated Syllabus is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow adult citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also to corrupt the principles of the free mind education it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it; that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its monopolistic jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy; which at once destroys all intellectual liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order;  and finally that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; that errors cease to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

Thus, We Declare:  that no state has the right to a monopoly of the opinions of humanity and the evidence proposed to minds of the young; that no state has the right to a mandated, universal Syllabus negating the natural right to the exercise of individual, independent judgment, attitude and outlook in matters of the opinions of humanity and the evidence proposed to the mind; that no one be restrained, molested, or burdened in body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of the individual, independent exercise of his own judgment, attitude and outlook in matters of the opinions of humanity and the evidence proposed to the mind; that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of the mind, and that the same shall in no way diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities; that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to narrow its operation, such an act will be an infringement of natural rights.”

Teacher: Education is Broken, or, Teacher Education is Broken?

“You’re coming to school with me today”, my New York City high school English teacher father said on all those elementary Catholic school holidays which left me free when the public school kids were not.  There are hardly any subject lessons I remember.  But one had to do with commas.  Indeed, punctuation placement and reading transforms meaning.  So, there are two very different meanings to the following sentence depending on the presence and reading of commas:  “The dog, said the man, is very disobedient.” and “The dog said the man is very disobedient.”  Thus, when the commas are read in the former it is “the man” who is speaking about the dog; when in the latter it is “the dog” who is speaking about the man.  And here with this title, “Teacher:  Education is Broken”, when the colon is read it is a teacher who is claiming that Education is Broken.  However, when the colon is unacknowledged, “Teacher Education is Broken” is read and, well, that is a wholly different meaning.  And I yesterday read the latter in a facebook news post.  As it turns out, the meaning was suppose to be the former as the title referred to a CNN interview snippet of Sir Ken Robinson saying that education is, indeed, broken (http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/living/2010/03/16/sir.ken.robinson.ted2010.cnn.html?ref=nf).  I suspect somewhere in Sir Ken’s repertoire of criticism there is the sentiment that teacher education is broken as well, but not in this snippet.

Still, the idea that teacher education is broken is, to my mind, too often correct.  However, I cannot fault colleges of education for preparing their pre-service teachers to work within the current system, after all, they would be failing their mission to do the best for their students to survive and succeed in their chosen profession.  That the structures of their chosen profession are broken, are failing the children who are forced to be there, is certainly beyond the province of the education schools’ ability to change, even if they could. 

Usually, when criticized, teaching programs are slammed for doing too little in giving their pre-service teachers sufficient methods to do the job properly.  This was not exactly the case for me when I went to Brooklyn College to complete my teaching methods requirements for public high school qualification. I had been headed for the professorate once I decided to go for my Master’s degree and than on for my Doctorate.  As a pre-service college professor, I was taught to do research not taught to teach.  College teachers largely teach how we were taught, for good and for ill.  I had been teaching part time at the college level for just over ten years, so I had integrated in my teaching style what I considered the best of those professors I had had.  Thus, when I came to the courses which were suppose to teach me how to teach, I was surprised when my professor was instructing us on techniques which mostly followed what I was already doing. 

While my degrees are in Media/Communication Arts, the City of New York decided I was a Social Studies teacher.  (How this happened is a story for another day.) This was fine with me as I love history and was well read in Irish and American history.  So, when I took methods courses I was being taught how to teach Social Studies.  The professor in charge was then the Social Studies Department Chair at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn.  As Chair he was able to create his own teaching program and he selected the honors and AP classes.  He was a master teacher, giving us teaching techniques meant to stimulate curiosity, thought and comment in our students. 

I should have taken the clues to heart when I did my student teaching, but I was too engrossed in trying to apply what I was being taught, attempting to stimulate curiosity, critical thinking and reflective comment in each and every youngster in front of me.  My cooperating teacher thought what I was doing was just great, but, he said, I was working way too hard:  you think you are back at college with kids who care, who want to be in your class and who are willing to engage, heck, who are prepared to engage in the kind of learning your lessons assume.  But I didn’t pay attention, not at all.

In the fullness of time I was appointed to Erasmus Hall, in charge of four Global Studies classes of ninth graders who were two to three years deficient on all measures and a Principles of Government class of somnambulant super seniors with teaching techniques suited to high school honors and well motivated college students.  It certainly doesn’t take a brain surgeon to know what happened to me.  I lasted all of two months:  I drove my students wild and they drove me out of class, out of the school and out of the job!

Did my professor and the courses I took ill-prepare me to go into the New York City public high schools?  You bet!  But, I believe I received a solid grounding in the kind of pedagogy meant best to do all those great and wonderful things with youngsters we all wish we can do:   stimulate curiosity, critical thinking and reflective comment.

A Hidden Curriculum: Obedience to Authority

A principal reason for coming into the 21^st century with this blog is an attempt to give wider circulation to ideas, mostly on education, which I have been bouncing back and forth with colleagues over the last six years through other e-channels.  Naturally, my friends are part of the blog conversation as well and will undoubtedly recognize the substance of what I say, if not the same exact wording, and gloss over it as my wife has been doing for some time since she has heard it all before, many times before.  Still, it is hoped that I will be forgiven and the meaning of all said will not be lost for it being repeated.  And for those coming fresh to the subjects of my past dialogs, well, I ask you to take it in, let it roll around a bit, let it resonate which ever way it does and then respond accordingly.

Way back in graduate school when I was looking at the effects of acquiring reading and writing on us humans, I came across studies-whose chapter and verse now I have completely forgotten-which detailed what were called "schooling effects".  Schooling effects, as I recall, were behaviors such as an enhanced sensitivity to time leading to the ability to intentionally parcel a day into many discrete parts each containing specialized activities, or-and this is a biggie-the cultivation of proper attendance while forming and being "in-line", or-another biggie-the delayed gratification of waiting your turn.  But, I think the biggest of the biggies is the development in each child of obedience to authority.  While almost all subject content is forgotten the moment after the necessity of knowing it for the test, this instilled behavior remains.  Obedience to authority is just one subject in the hidden curriculum.

My father kept on wondering even into my adulthood what my mother and I found to talk about so soon after awakening for the day.  And it was true, my mother and I would start chatting with one another from the moment we first said our “Good Mornings.”  My father would hold his conversational appearance until much later in the day.  Yet, here it was:  the family who loved conversation.  This was the way it was for as long as I can remember and it seems to me it started even before I knew how to talk.  Thus, when I went to nursery school-a combined pre-school and kindergarten-I wanted to talk.  Back then such schooling took multiple aspects of play by which to develop emotional, social and cognitive readiness; consequently I was provided frequent opportunities to engage my vocal acuities, which I did with relish.  But then I got into first grade.

Now, memory is a tricky thing at times, so it is possible this incident happened in the second grade, but it was definitely something which did happen.  I was an obedient boy in school.  My family had a reverence for people in religious orders, nuns, brothers and priests; and since I was attending a Catholic school, I found it natural to pay the most deference to my teachers, all nuns.  Yet, when it came to exchanging points of view with my classmates, well, that impulse seemed at times to over-rule the impulse to being obedient.  So, there I was seated in my row desk, talking away with the classmate in the next desk along side of mine when the teacher asked the class to be quiet.  I guess I didn’t hear or chose not to hear.  Anyway, I kept on talking.  Being so engrossed in what I was saying I didn’t see the nun coming close until I felt her fingers grabbing my right ear and lifting it as high as she could.  Along with this display of physical acumen, she was scolding me for not paying attention and continuing to talk when she required silence.  Well, I guess I learned a lesson that day.

This definitely was in the first grade as it had to do with the first grade Christmas play.  With the exception of two-and-a-half years between the ages of 18 and 22, I have always been overweight. (I like the description of “chunky but cute”.)  Being that I fit the part, I was chosen to play Santa.  The nun who was directing the play, in which all first graders were obliged to be, called for a full dress rehearsal a couple of days before the big performance.  Well, I forgot my Santa suit at home.  Not only did I get scolded for being so forgetful, I had to phone my mother at work to fetch the costume.  While waiting for her and the suit, I was “put in solitary”, exiled to a special room where I was all alone!  I guess I learned a lesson here as well.

As an educator, a father and a decent human being, I can say with confidence that there should be a law against homework.  Naturally, there are solid educational reasons for such a view (which in future blog posts will be elucidated).  But I have to wonder if at base I am still reacting to the mountain of work our first grade teacher demanded we do.  Again, as an obedient child I did my work, which I found easy to do but completely unchallenging, boring and time consuming.  As the work held little interest-I was doing it to avoid punishment by the teacher, mostly, but also to avoid parental disapproval-I would begin to nod, not a few times outright falling asleep with my head on my bedroom student desk as the hour of the day grew late.  Most nights I didn’t get to bed until well after ten o’clock, this is, having started the homework at six.  Every day our teacher would make a big deal when collecting the work so as to be sure that everyone was completing the assignments.  She would single out for admonishment those who were neglectful.  So, I guess I learned a lesson from that as well.  Oh, my father, a high school English teacher, paid a visit to this nun.  It turns out this was her first time teaching first grade whereas up until then she had been in charge of sixth, and she had expectations of us six year olds which were the same as the eleven year olds she was accustomed to ordering around.  Whatever my father’s argument was, it was successful in she reduced the load by quite some.  But she still demanded on pain of all sorts of hell and damnation that what she assigned be done to completion.

While my parents were the first to instruct on the meaning of obedience to authority, meaning, obedience to themselves, the experiences within such a highly structure world of obedience assured that there was no overt resistance to what the teachers thought best for us kids.  And while Catholic schools even today have the reputation of being the most efficient world of obedience, the rest of the schooling field, public and private, is equally structured that way.  Indeed, of the many values and behaviors our schooling structure inculcates, that which our hidden curriculum teaches, the most important is strict obedience to authority.

Everybody Must Get Stoned

California’s Prop 19, the initiative to regulate, control and tax cannabis, has on this election eve gotten me looking back into my part of the ‘60’s and thinking of my experience with the weed.

I was raised in a working class part of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where alcohol was the main intoxicant the father’s, and a few mothers, used to cope with stress and to escape from the reality of working pretty much without much to show for it other than a mortgage, tuition at a Catholic school for the large number of off-spring and new clothes for Easter Sunday Mass for each and every child.  The fathers would go down the block to Connors Bar at the corner.  It was a wondrous place for us kids:  as we were never allowed to go in there, we couldn’t help but conjure many tales about what went on there.  The interesting thing was that when we did start going to bars, at age 16, we could never go to Connors as the fathers were not to know we were drinking.  Of course they did and at various times a friend or two would be grounded for quite some time.   And when we were of the age when we could enter the sacred hall, well, heaven forbid we go anywhere where the “old men” went. And so as far as I know not a single friend from my home block ever went to Connors.

But before we started the bar hop we would go to our nearby school yard polishing off quart bottles of beer.  We were all of twelve years old when we chugged our first bottles.  Because I looked older than the rest I was selected to take the shopping list and the money and purchase the night’s sport, which I did with pleasure as this was taken by my friends as truly a respected and an honored thing to do.

So, my teen years in the early-mid 1960’s were spent soaking up the pleasures of cheap beer.  And even in my first college, a military school, the adult beverage continued to be beer.  Occasionally, an upper classman would circulate a shopping list for those who wished to participate and he, along with his cohorts, would go for a hero and beer run.  At the time I really wasn’t up for the academics.  Although there were aspects of the military side of the school I did like, I felt I was not yet ready for the advanced learning the college offered.  But my father disagreed and pressured me back into being a college kid again.

Attending my second college I took seriously the administrations of my Physical Education elders in respect of good health and while not exactly swearing off beer, and all other alcohol, I scaled back so much that for all purposes I had sworn an oath.  And then I changed majors to Theatre.  I was in love with radio broadcasting, but the school then did not have a mass media program and I figured that Theatre was close enough.  Besides, I didn’t want to go through the hassle of again changing schools.  And, as it turned out when I came back from summer vacation in 1969, going into my new major, I found some of my classmates had talked the school’s administration into a grant and the purchase of radio broadcast equipment.  Our radio station was born over the Fall semester, and combined with the smell of solder was the pungent aroma of cannabis. 

I recall no one going to classes stoned, although there were not a few of us who after our last class of the day were very happy to sprinkle, roll, lick and light.  Weekends featured parties of music, pumping out from our professional broadcast sound machine, wine out of jugs and pot out of, well, there were some rather unusual pipes along with the usual wrappers.

While I am sure there were not a few who scored their dope from other folks, I pretty much exclusively bought from this one guy who was always around the radio studios.  However, for the ease of sale I had to suffer his cutting the weed with either tobacco or oregano.  But, after a little wine, hey, who cared?  For floating on the chords of our music, with good friends at my shoulders, laughing at everything said and stumbles done, I felt for the first time in my life I belonged.  And this lasted the rest of the academic year.  I had to work summers to make tuition, so I took my leave of this nest of hippies for the hot loading docks of the sugar-house.

Returning to the college in September-that would be of 1970-changes were afoot:  I met the young lady who would eventually be my wife, and the wine and pot party attitude was gone replaced with the kind of cut-throat politics college clubs are noted for. Those hippie fellow travelers of mine had moved on through graduation, the draft or some other activity of unknown origin.  My guy was still there and I resumed our relationship, but it was different:  I just couldn’t stomach being taken advantage of.  And, it didn’t take too long before I left him and left the school for the work-a-day world of network broadcasting.

We have this friend who was quite willing to share anytime he had a good sample.  One evening a couple of years after I left school for the real world, he came over our basement apartment with some really fine grass he said was the strongest he had ever had.  We all sprinkled, rolled, licked and lit up.  I hadn’t had a joint since leaving so I was really wanting to test drive this varietal.  But we hadn't seen our friend in at least a year and we were as anxious to catch up.  Ah, even today I remember the great high, the undulating arms of the soft chair on which I was sitting, the wavy streaks of light circulating around the living room, the punctuated electric guitar riffs.  However the altered reality made concentrated conversation impossible.  In the end, I loved the high; I hated the interference.

From that time on I left marijuana alone, except for one ski trip my wife and I were on with friends and fellow travelers.  The slopes never looked snow white...

And now what to make of Prop 19?  From my point of view, the moderate social use of marijuana can create a conviviality among folks who agree to lightly indulge, and like coffee in our society it can become a bonding agent bringing separate individuals into solidarity one with each other.  Indeed, this moderate social use recommends the passage of Prop 19 as written.  But, I hesitate to give a full-throated support for Prop 19 as written because as written it says nothing about mental health services those who are compulsed to abuse weed will need. 

The one very important thing about the abuse of any substance, including cakes, candies, ice cream-and all things chocolate-is that it is not the substance-marijuana, or Triple Chocolate ice cream-which causes the abuse!  No, it is an underlying psychic disturbance which forces people to search for relieve in any thing available.  People so much in hurt will try anything to rid themselves of the pain even for just a little while.  Such is the first cause of substance abuse.  And an understanding of first causes recommends to me the passage of Prop 19 under the condition put into law that at least fifty-percent of the revenue collected through the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010 be dedicated to mental health services which will place in treatment those whose first cause has led to abuse any substance, Oreo’s included.

Teacher as Order Taker

No matter where I go across the media spectrum I constantly hear that the problems in public education are all due to the teachers.  So many people remember how horrible school was for them, their teachers forcing them to do all the typical school stuff and how hateful it felt being forced to do what they didn't want to do in the first place.  And as a consequence teacher bashing finds resonance. 

Indeed, teachers, the spear-points of elected government school policy, get hammered for the constant punctures to each child's intellect, self-esteem and soul.  Yet, how sad it is that the teachers get it in the neck when they are, especially at this time, quite powerless to do anything about the policy for which they are so crucified.

Our elected officials who make policy have been jumping on-board the high stakes testing train for decades, for instance.  However, it has been since the Good George W. Bush elevated these evaluation tools into a national standard have the electeds been in full testing mode demanding our teachers make excellent test takers out of our children, more than ever reducing the initiative of teachers within their classrooms to just about zero.  But, teacher as order taker has been long in the making, pre-dating No Child Left Behind by quite some time.

My natural teaching environment is within the university as in no other level of formal learning can one engage in the learned conversation which is a life-giving force to me.  But, for lots of different reasons I've been able to only stay short periods within that ethereal realm.  During one spell between appointments I had the idea of teaching high school here in New York City.  And so I was appointed in September of 1992 to teach Social Studies in Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. 

I was assigned four classes of ninth graders, along with one class of super-seniors.  The super-seniors, those who for one reason or another remained in school at 19 or 20 years of age, slept during the class on the Principles of Government.  While I loved the fact that no one disrupted the class at any time, I must admit I,  who lived for studious conversation, got quite frustrated.  But the greater problems were the ninth graders who were two to three grade levels below on every measure you could care to talk about. 

Now, the fourteen year olds presenting the highest challenges were placed in a program called "Discovery".  Discovery was an attempt to combine Communication Arts with each of the other subjects.  So, my responsibility for two of the classes of ninth graders was in this program.  As it turned out Discovery didn't even looked good on paper as the folks who put it together really hadn't a clue how to integrate subjects.  Still, we teachers were responsible for making it work.  More, and this is the point here, we were told by the supervisor of the program that we had only one semester to turn our kids around from abject academic failures to blooming academic successes, and if we didn't the Principal would terminate the program!  There was not a peep from any of the program teachers for they were powerless to alter the program in ways which might have made sense, and each teacher knew they were powerless to alter the academic trajectory of their students in such a time frame, especially when these youngsters would remain within a schooling structure which created the problems in the first place.  We were powerless to do anything except say, "Yes, ma'am." and soldier on.

As we all knew would happen, our program children remained failing their classes and the Program ended shortly thereafter.

At some point, it is hoped, our good citizens will get beyond their fixation on teacher bashing and take a real good look at the policies and the policymakers who are the folks ordering teachers to do their bidding for the sake of the easy sound-bite that test scores are up and therefore they should remain in office!

To see a funny, but tragic and realistic, animation demonstrating the teacher as order taker click on http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/school-turnaroundsreform/ha-funny-scary-education-conversation.html?wprss=answer-sheet 

My Family is Killing Me!

I said to my wife, mother and son that the first blog post when I started my blog would be this:  My family is killing me!  With the exception of two and a half years between ages of 19 and 22, I have always been quite overweight.  I must admit I did shave off about thirty pounds once the young lady who was to be my wife said she would be my wife and we began planning the wedding.  However, as I got older that weight and far more settled around my face and torso until I was truly obese.

Starting in 1984 I went on a self-imposed weight reduction program which while lasting years resulted in the loss of about 70 pounds of which I gained back only 15.  Still, to be really in good health, and to live longer, I need to get rid of those 15 pounds and another thirty to thirty-five. 

Now, I am at an age where body fat just doesn't easily come off.  And what's worse, my wife, son and mother conspire against that happening!  My mother, keeping to the code of all mothers, continues saying that I should eat more although my appetite has shrung-it takes far less calories to keep up my weight than at any time before.  Additionally, she will hand me a ten dollar bill and ask for me to buy candy or cookies which we all eat right as it is coming through the door.  And then there is my wife who just cannot live without her sweets on the weekend.  Now, because in my family there is no such thing as a small portion, ice cream is pilled high in the kinds of bowls we have for morning cereal!  Candy bars, you know the very large ones, go in one perhaps two sittings.  My son who loves to cook, also loves to serve pasta and pizza which he does quite frequently. Oh, and he keeps after us to always have some form of snack chips in the house.

And then there's me wanting to reduce my size so I can live as long as my mother and beyond: 94 years of age she is now.  But I just do not have that kind of will power to resist the candy, the ice cream, the pasta, the cookies, the chips and all the other high carb-high fat food my family places in front of itself, nor do I have that kind of fortitute to have just one piece of candy, a small hand ful of chips or a four ounce serving of pasta: no, I was raised in a family who thought both love and long life came with giant size portions.

But, I must confess, I too conspire against myself, for if it isn't my mother, my wife or my son, it is I who will take a few dollars, motor to the supermarket and get some goody or other.  In fact, I've been known to buy a can of prepared frosting, chocolate, of course, and finish it in one sitting.  Recently, though, I have not been so reckless; still as long as there is money in my pocket, and a supermarket full mostly of high carb-high fat food, I will be tempted beyond endurance.  Indeed, my family is killing me and I am part of that family.