A Lever Long Enough Can Move The Globe But It Takes a Different Kind To Work Through Depression

Chomping down the entire one pound bag of pretzel nuggets took most of the day, Wednesday, as I snacked my way from early morning until late afternoon.  I was trying, and failing, to “catch the bear”, so I could go on-line to locate information for my alternative school project. The immediate project chore on which I am to be working might best be described as a Bullet Point Need Statement.  It is to consist of a targeted population of children, in hard numbers, from which the school is to draw, reasons present schooling of the population is not meeting the needs of the population and reasons my school design would meet those needs.  Now, the targeted population for my project is Special Needs; thus the Need Statement is to have the hard numbers representing the entire Special Needs population of the New York City, a break down of those being served by present public and private placements throughout the City and those who are not being served in any way at all and of disability, disorder and disturbance so it can be argued more specifically on how each disability, disorder and disturbance is being mis-educated and then for me to be able to argue the reverse for my school.  Unfortunately, these numbers are not easily come by as at the moment I am unaware of any group which collects them and the City’s Department of Education guards very jealously such information.  Besides, the total number of Special Needs children in NYC may be a number which does not exist anywhere.  Yet, it is possible that with some time on-line I might generate leads on where I could get such information or, jump for joy, the information itself.  But, I am required to take the step of going on-line for this purpose, and I am balking, big time, at doing this. 

About seventeen years ago there was this colleague, a professor of far greater import than I, who had been fighting all sorts of demons for almost as long as I was at the time.  He told me of a “lever” which moved his emotional predisposition to action from paralysis to action, and as one should understand, a positive emotional predisposition is the key motivator to all self-actualization.  He said, paraphrasing, I feed the bear, order him to leave me alone and then I can get on with what I want to get done.  Now, we’re not talking copious amounts of comfort food:  he was talking a handful of grapes, a single Navel orange, a big Delicious apple.  However, I have taken to things like pretzels, ice cream or cookies.  While it certainly would be healthier eating fruit, it is the self-actualizing step, the voluntary act of eating, feeling the pleasure and fulfillment of the action, and of the food itself, which re-sets the emotional predisposition, which releases the paralysis. And, naturally, it is eating in proper proportions, such as a small handful of pretzels, four ounces of ice cream or four to six cookies which makes the difference between a lever and an act of self-sabotage.

I explain how the lever works though my sideways understanding of Freud’s psychology of Superego, Ego and Id where I substitute the concept of Parent for Superego, of Adult for Ego and of Kid for Id-where the Kid is divided into the Playful Kid, well adjusted, reacting appropriately, etc., and the Bent Kid, maladjusted, vengeful, over-reacting, etc.  The Parent is filled with all the pre-and proscriptions of authority.  The Adult is largely goal oriented, logical, deliberative, interpreting the world in proper perspective.  The Kid is full of impulses, instincts, intuitions, positive and negative-of course, the positive belong to the Playful Kid and the negative belong to the Bent Kid.  

Behavioral paralysis, the inability to do those actions one wishes to do, is a consequence of the interaction of Adult, Parent and Bent Kid.  The Adult proposes an action which the Parent assigns as a pre-or proscribed behavior, a should or should not, a must or must not.  Once the Parent defines an Adult action, the Bent Kid opposes it as the Bent Kid opposes all Parental authority.  In the conflict between the Parent and the Bent Kid, the Kid triumphs, causing no action, or, worse, a self-sabotaging behavior, either way making the Parent impotent voiding the intended action.

The idea behind the eating lever is to generate the Playful Kid feeling of self-actualized pleasure from a range of food associated with pleasure to replace the Bent Kid feeling of vengeance stirred by the opposition to the Parent.  Once the Playful Kid feeling takes over, the combined food pleasure and satisfaction of the self-actualized step, the Adult is enabled to put into proper perspective the Parental pre-or proscription, that is, weighing pros and cons in light of the action’s goals, which has the effect of breaking the paralysis and precipitating action.  So, with a handful of pretzels purposely taken as a lever I can tell the bear to leave me alone, and get on with my school project chore.

However, in the presence of Depression, the lever works but less often.  As was said to me by another friend, “Sometimes you get the bear; but sometimes the bear gets you.”  Unfortunately, in Depression, the bear gets me far more frequently than I get it.  Yet, I try whatever lever I can which might catch the bear.  And I thought Wednesday, that with a handful of pretzels, I could tell the bear, the Bent Kid, to leave me alone and I could get on to what I wanted to do.  Well, that day, the bear, the Bent Kid, got me, and instead of generating pleasure and self-actualizing satisfaction, the Playful Kid feelings, the Depression kept on feeding me more of the Bent Kid’s vengeance which I expressed by continuously going back to the bag of pretzels and just as continuously balking at going on-line for the required information.  So, I never did go on-line for the information.

However, today I am not entirely paralyzed in that there are some activities my psychodynamic and Depression will allow me to do. Within the spectrum of what I want to do there are many actions including writing this post.  What I call the trade-off lever gives me permission to do what I can, which if done with some frequency elevates a sense of personal power, the recognition I actually can get accomplished what I set out to do, and increases the “can do” spectrum, perhaps to include my on-line project research.   So, now, I’ve “traded off” doing the specific school project chore to talk about the personal struggle of doing the chore.  And, I suspect, I will be “trading off” further as I relate the history of the project in blog posts to come.  And in so doing I will be not only telling my story, but also I will be re-setting my emotional predisposition sufficiently to occasionally chip away at the research, and at other elements of the school project itself. 

In the end, which ever lever is working, at least I will be getting work done and, after all, getting something accomplished to someone suffering Depression is a big deal, a definite sign of moving in the right direction and of sustained movement out of the deep psychic hole.

Doth Media Images Provoke Days of Rage and Revolution?

We think the media are responsible for everything, George Will sarcastically quipped to Sam Donaldson’s considered thought about the vital role of broadcast and social media, especially, in the uprising in Egypt on ABC’s This Week-Jan. 30, 2011.   Off handedly Mr. Will was expressing a sentiment I encountered in undergrad school of the mid-1970’s.  We Communication Arts majors of the time believed every post-WW II social-political uprising around the world, and those urban riots in the 1960’s U.S., were a consequence of failed expectations borne from an extreme contrast between all those middle class images of American television broadcast throughout the country and exported into world cultures, and the impoverished circumstances of those consuming those images here and abroad.  

The middle class images from cigarette, car and personal care product commercials and shows like Dallas, Mary Tyler Moore and even All in the Family were said to excite the desires of the working classes and the poor for the American Dream.  These folks, the idea went, identified with and aspired to the American middle class life-style, creating and increasing the expectation of eventual acquisition of that life-style.  But, when over time it became ever more impossible for the masses to acquire the American Dream a failure of expectations was created, turning into individual and then social discontent.  And the more intense the discontent, the longer it simmered, the greater the likelihood of uprising until a spark, like a severe rise in the cost of food, or the jailing or execution of one too many dissenters, or a self-immolation coalesced the anger and out to the street the masses would come.  Well, it is a good theory.  And it might have a grain of truth. But, it seems to me rather ethno-and class-centric in that we think the American middle class images are the be all and end all of how life should be lived, and thus we think everyone in our country and around the world thinks, and should think, likewise.  And if we do not life the American middle class way because of powers preventing it from happening, well, then we just have to do something about it, like riot, rebel and even cause a regime change.  But, I have to wonder the degree media images do force discontent and such discontent rage, rebellion and revolution.  I suspect real life, real time experiences are a far more powerful influence.

At the moment I am not about to put my late middle-aged body in front of rows of riot control police, no less columns of National Guard troops with rifles ready.  I do believe in civil disobedience but I've decided to leave such tactics to the young who can far better tolerate the physical abuse than I.  Besides, my real life, real time experiences are not so life threatening to me or to my family's health and well being to radicalize me into action, although it is getting tougher as the price of living keeps rising and the social contract stitched together during the FDR and LBJ administrations is being rolled back by radical libertarians who favor big corporate interests over the common good, but we are not yet anywhere near to a radicalizing situation.  But it may come sooner than we like.

Still, today remains a bastion of plenty and even if a lot of that plenty disappeared, I would not be so inclined to see it as cause for radicalization.  And certainly the televised images of what I do not have and would like to have really have not moved me to take up street protesting.  So, my family has been enjoying blueberries from Chile recently on sale in our local supermarket.  If I can’t get blueberries in January which has been the rule up until recently I definitely will not feel it a cause for me to be on the way to the barricades.  We tried Rachael Ray’s Egg Foo Young a couple of Saturday’s ago, the one we saw her preparing on one of her shows several months ago.  I would certainly miss the oriental vegetables like bean sprouts, bac choi and water chestnuts along with the variety of Chinese noodles if somehow we were prevented from enjoying them, but the inability to secure these types of food commodities is, for me, equally not a cause for going into the streets.  Likewise, that there is absolutely no way we can afford any of the exotics as seen on BBC’s Top Gear like the Ferrari California or the Lamborghini Murcielago, or the Bugatti Veyron, no less my favorite, the Aston-Martin DP9, or the new American entry into the exotic market, the SSC Ultimate Aero, or that when we had to buy a car we settled for a Nisson Sentra instead of the GTR which was featured on a Top Gear episode, creates no cause for me to feel disillusioned, disappointed or dispirited, especially to the degree that I would be on the streets with a placard parodying the Janis Joplin tune:  “Oh State, guarantee me a Mercedes Benz, my fiends all have Porches, I gotta make amends…” , or the libertarian version, “Oh, Corp, won’t chu buy me a Mercedes Benz…” And finally, that we live in a tiny bungalow instead of a palatial house as seen on Homes of the Rich and Famous, and like television programs, really does not force a resentment in me of any degree, no less one which would propel me onto the barricades.  Indeed, while I would like the money to afford the life-styles of the rich and famous, I am okay where we are and hold no resentments for those who are better-off, much better-off, whether I see them on television or in their natural habitats in New York City's exclusive neighborhoods, or in the Hamptons on eastern Long Island, or on the Island's Gold Coast, the North Shore.

But I have to wonder if, along with tens of millions of neighbors, friends and colleagues, my family could no longer afford the staples we have come to rely on to survive, like guaranteed safe bread, rice, beans, potatoes, milk, fish, chicken, eggs, fruit, vegetables, along with clean water and air, as might happen if the radical libertarian agenda becomes the law of the land, transferring the wealth of the nation continuously upward to the top two percent leaving the rest to fend for scraps, then, we just might see uprisings here and I will disregard the fragile state of my aging body and face down the symbols of oppression of the common good, the police and both the National Guard and the U.S. Army.

Indeed, I have to wonder if this radical personal responsibility-small government society comes to pass eliminating or reducing to starvation levels the Social Security upon which my wife and I will be in need in five to eight years when we both stop working, upon which our one hundred percent disabled son relies and will need to depend for the rest of his life, if it eliminates or reduces to death inducing levels the Medicare upon which my 94 year old mother needs to live to be 95 and upon which we will need for life sustaining medical payment when we no longer have job provided medical coverage, if it excludes or reduces to insolvent levels the Medicare Drug benefit my mother needs to sustain life and my son to stay mentally even, and on which we will rely eventually as much because of the health problems created by the government supported toxic American corporate-industrial diet as inherited predispositions, and if it eliminates or drastically reduces accessibility to Medicaid to all those who in spite of working as they are told to do yet still can’t afford life saving medical care, I think you will see me definitely on the barricades, bent over, ill and aged as I might be.

And you bet you will see me on the barricades if the society of wealth hoarders and privilege, backed up by the power of the state, dictate the only shelter my family can afford in our old age with our disabled son is a tarpaper shack or a cardboard box!  Yes, sir, if we revolve to a world like that of the nineteenth century, or that of the 1930’s, then regardless of age and infirmity, I will be in the vanguard of the revolution!

Perhaps it is what is happening in the real world, the living world of daily existence affecting health, sustenance and survival, rather than the world of images which has the more profound affect on bringing people into the streets demanding a restructuring of social, political and economic orders.

The Depression Post: An appreciation for the response

As long as I lived in my boyhood Bay Ridge, Brooklyn home I didn’t have to worry about throwing a party and no one showing up, although I’ve always harbored the fear since a very small child.  Indeed, our basement was one of the first on our block to be “finished” and all my friends loved it so much they wanted to be down there as often as possible.  I was about twelve, if memory serves, when my parents renovated the basement.  Prior it was a dark, cool, musty storage space with a coal fired furnace and a black as night coal bin.  Well, they traded the coal for gas and pipes for bin and set off the new boiler in its own palatial space in the back while creating in front a wood paneled big room complete with sliding door storage shelves, a six foot long bar and several Danish Modern benches and chairs. 

Naturally, the kids on the block with whom I hung used the basement as a kind of neat club-house.  Being a responsible son, I would ask permission for my friends and me to hang out each time they wanted to go there.   And my folks would respond in the affirmative. We thought highly of our masculinity-the crowd I went with was all boys.  However, the fact of the matter was that, to a guy, we were polite, well mannered and respectful.  Still, the junior high age does come with some itches which occasionally required attention.  So, I felt I needed to “play cop” protecting the fine workmanship of the renovators and the stored family property.  On occasion, that duty pressed so hard on me I pleaded with my folks to say “no” when I asked for permission.  Putting the blame on them worked well, as all understood and were appropriately sympathetic to my plight living with parents so cruel.

Well, this blog is the party I am throwing now and I have the great fear that no one will show up.  Yet, I live in the hope that someone, or, in fact many, will come to take notice of the thoughts freed After Great Pain, in the words of Emily Dickenson’s poem.

What has pleased and surprised me has been the response to the post on Depression.  I want to thank all who gave great support and even better advice.  I thought it proper to give a collective response, some of which I have supplied separately.

I agree about finding help for my mother to both give me a break and to provide her the kind of intimate care I, as a male son, cannot give.  My wife and I have started a process looking for a home health aid to come on a regular basis and expect to secure the services of one within the next few weeks.  The Visiting Nurse Service here has begun coming, so at least there is a regular medical person seeing my mother.

Her decline has been rapid.  While she has had trouble walking for the last five years it was never to the point of a wheel chair all the time, just shuffling around with a walker inside and outside the house.  About two years or so ago she was hospitalized for congestive heart failure reducing her mobility more.  In the house she remained able to shuffle back and forth with a walker, but outside she needed the wheel chair.  However, about two months ago the bottom fell out where she just couldn't move without the use of the wheel chair and the kinds of assists I described.  And, what was worse was the dramatic decline into senility.  I mean, she would forget a thing or two, a little more than the usual and on a more than a frequent occasion, but the forgotten thoughts were truly of no consequence.  And then, Bam!, right into this child-like state where being dislocated and dependent has become routine.  Frankly, my wife and I were caught off-guard, ill-prepared to know what to do other than to press me into service. 

I do not need this circumstance to slip into Depression.  Heck, when my wife informed me over thirteen years ago we would be moving from our Brooklyn home where we had been for nearly fifteen years up to the Southern Berkshires because of a really good job offer she accepted, I replied, that that was really great, and then I added, that I could be Depressed anywhere, but the Berkshires are certainly one of the better places for being Depressed.  And that was true on all accounts.  As I said Depression has been a fact of life since as far as I can remember.  When looking back I seem to be able to identify these feelings definitely when I was eleven or twelve, but I have to wonder if they were there earlier.  

Over the years I've gotten help for it but like a good rugged individual American I feel I can conquer it all myself. I was working with a really good therapist up to three weeks ago but had to stop because I could no longer afford it: I had to pay totally out of pocket as he did not accept any insurance.  I had been very reluctant-heck stubbornly obstinate-in accepting I needed medication to lift the mood.  In our culture one is suppose to be able to heal oneself.  I have what one would call the American diet diseases:  hypertension, type 2 diabetes and high cholesterol.  I denied for quite some time that I needed medication to control these disorders as I had the deep abiding American faith I could do it myself without any pharmaceutical assists.  But, then I went to teach in the New York City public high schools which required a physical exam.  The examining physician really laid into me for being very hypertensive telling me that it was only a matter of months before either a heart attack or a stroke put me six feet under.  I resented being treated like a delinquent child, but his dire warning did the job.  I immediately afterwards sought out my doctor, promptly filled the prescriptions and started on the life-time routine.  The psychologist, on the other hand, treated me like an intelligent adult arguing cogently that I should conceptualize the treatment of Depression the same way I think about the physical ailments.  Emotionally, I was ready to hear what he was saying and secured a prescription for an anti-depressant from my primary care doctor, only to be prevented from having it filled by our health insurance company who wanted me to take a different medication.  This kind of hassle in such a tentative mood put me back into a reluctant frame of mind.  Additionally, we are in the middle of changing health insurance companies.  So, here I sit in a kind of limbo until we get all this stuff straightened out.  There is a concept in sales that goes that if a buyer is ready to put money down, you had better have the product right in front of him; otherwise he will walk away from the purchase.  I almost feel that that is happening here.  Indeed, my resolve weakens by the day. 

Now, I do not believe in divine intervention.  But there are times I have to wonder.  I had just fallen into a deep depressive sleep on this past Saturday afternoon when I was jolted awake by the phone next to our bed.  My wife answered on another extension.  She reported that the caller was our local State Assembly District Leader with whom I’ve been working for the last six years.  He had a couple of extra tickets for the evening’s Hearts and Shamrocks Dance-it’s one of the annual fund-raisers for the Queens County St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee.  He wondered if we wanted to use the tickets as his guests.  Karma was a popular idea during the late 1960’s.  At the time I had no idea what it was so I asked.  I remember whoever it was responding saying something like, Karma is the intellectual and emotional predisposition to perceive genuine opportunity.  It’s like Tom Hanks in Cast Away in that as the contents of the FedEx boxes washed up on shore, he was able to see what he could make from all the flotsam and jetsam coming at him.  Eventually, a large piece of a port-a-john washed up which he saw as the sail he needed to propel himself off the island, his strong Karma allowed him see the opportunity and by taking advantage of what he saw he got off the island.  So, I saw the opportunity to get out of the house, to dance with my wife and to get happy.  And what do you know?  The lever worked, the mood lifted some, at least enough for me to build on it.  Indeed, the District Leader asked me to accompany him to a community town hall tonight featuring our Mayor, another genuine opportunity has presented itself of which I am going to take advantage.  I understand this does not substitute for medication, but at least, I am on the way out of the deep hole.

Again, thanks.  Your responses have been very reassuring.  Additionally, I no longer have to live in fear of throwing this party and no one coming.

The Personal Struggle: Depression

According to the journalist Andrew Sullivan, “a blog, unlike a diary, is instantly public. It transforms this most personal and retrospective of forms [a diary] into a painfully public and immediate one. It combines the confessional genre with the log form and exposes the author in a manner no author has ever been exposed before.”   http://www.thealtantic.com/doc/200811/andrew-sullivan-why-i-blog

Certainly, I wish not to become self-indulgent loading my blog with self-pity and regret on the limitations life has and is placing on me.  But, if I am to give a full account of the pursuit of the dream of opening an alternative school, I am required to let the personal struggle tell itself, along side the professional one.  So, disclosure is important to the story, but I will promise not to create such a melodrama, although done correctly I would think melodrama an excellent marketing device.  But I will worry over marketing at some future time.  This individual post sets the scene upon which I will report and comment from time to time as issues arise.

I have a four day beard which itches as much as the athletes foot I had when a teen-ager.  Looking in the bathroom mirror at the salt and pepper on the face and the severe red blotches underneath I make a vow that now will be the time to clean up, to rid myself of the maddening itch.  I turn on the hot water mixing it with enough cold in the stoppered sink to get the right temperature.  I pick up the soap. But then I feel sick, a wave of sadness crashes over the entire body just as the waves use to do when I was able to swim, and have fun, in the ocean.  I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror anymore. I drain the water from the sink and slink off to return to bed, slumber and hiding.

Depression is the way of my life.  Intellectually I’ve known it for decades, but emotionally I have been in deep denial.  I continue convincing myself that as I am a good person, someone of fine character, strong of muscle, thought and opinion, I need no help, either through therapy or medication to overcome the debilitating sadness which prevents movement to accomplish even the smallest of tasks.  And, you know, it is the smallest of personal tasks, like shaving, or brushing ones teeth or changing from sleepwear to street wear or making an American cheese sandwich, which cannot be done.  Of course, the larger things like job hunting, or writing for publication, or participating in community activities go by the board just as easily.  Indeed, going outside the house is impossible when under this tsunami of remorse.

It is interesting to think that as I’ve been told insomnia is a symptom of Depression.  But when I am fully under its spell I sleep upwards of twelve to fourteen hours.  Yes, sleep is one way of hiding from everything which works very well for me.

There are levers I use to work my way out of the deep hole in which Depression puts me.  But, it takes a whole lot of being at an emotional bottom before I get the psychic energy to take steps to work a lever.  The best lever is exercise.  In fact, a little exercise followed almost immediately by a shave and a shower works to temporarily bring me up, sufficiently that I can build on it.  However, now circumstances are conspiring to “feed the beast”. 

My 94 year old mother has turned into a nearly helpless creature.  In her senility she wants to be dependent on me, and my wife, for everything, just about every single life activity including wiping her bottom after going to the bathroom.  She still can feed herself, and does, but we prepare meals and clean up after her.  She only minimally takes care of her personal hygiene: My wife has to bath her.  She needs help getting in and out of bed and into and out of chairs:  It has gotten to the point where increasingly I’ve had to lift her from bed to wheel chair and from wheel chair onto living room chair, from bed to wheel chair and from wheel chair to bed!  She moves about the house in a wheel chair which she refuses to self-propel, although we have rearranged enough household stuff for her to unobstructively move herself about, with the exception of going into the bathroom whose doorway the wheel chair does not fit.  Yes, there is pain in movement and that has driven her to engage in less and less activity:  And you know the saying, the less one does the less one can do.  And she has moved less and less over the years until she can hardly move any muscle group without some assistance and without pain.  Her lower body has completely atrophied and her upper is not that far behind.  I understand the desire to avoid pain which almost all movement presents, but her lower body debilitation, which precipitated all the rest, could have been greatly lessened thirty years ago with knee replacements.  But, she refused to do anything to remedy her increasingly arthritic knees and now she and we are paying the price.  Mentally she has regressed into a child-like state where she either balks or squawks about helping herself in areas where she remains physically capable.

Depression runs in the family.  My father was authentically Depressed and coped with it with prescription drugs and alcohol abuse.  My father died at age 57 refusing to acknowledge his need for mental or physical health services. 

My mother like so many dutiful wives and mothers kept her Depression to herself and with all the contradictions in her relationship with my father seems to me to have kept an even-keel.  Still, with the onset of the infirmity of arthritis her coping broke and the Depression asserted itself big time.  She really knew the destructive force of Depression as her mother, another authentic Depressive, essentially committed suicide by starving herself to death when recovering from a broken hip.  Nonetheless, it seems to me the illness finally took over and my mother, in her own way, has been dieing since.  Yet, her instinct for life and her fear of being like her mother has been keeping her from taking her mother’s route.  

The price to me of my mother’s infirmity causing Depression is substantial.  My world has shrunk to the walls of my house as I cannot go beyond them since I am her main care-giver and need to attend her at whatever time she is in need of it!  This is a 24/7 job with which my wife is helping when she is at home in the weekday evenings and on the weekends.  Still, all those hopes and dreams I’ve been having, all the work on the school and my political/legislative advocacy over the years (of which I will tell in subsequent blogs) are being put in jeopardy, on hold or potentially being forsaken, as I slide deeper and deeper into my own Depression.

I know I practice a range of psychological avoidances with my “projects”, but they, especially the school and the politics, have been the way by which I confirm my self-worth to myself.  (I intellectually understand a reframing can transpose my intimate care-giving into a self-worth confirmation but I am finding that just as impossible as I’ve found it over the years when a house-husband between employment:  I cannot see any of this as demonstrating my intellect and, it seems, there is a huge need for me to confirm myself as being learnedly intelligent.)

Indeed, I’m having trouble continuing to work on the school and thus my self-worth is being challenged. There are ways by which to continue working.  The key is in setting up my sleep routine which would create evenings and weekends relatively free for whatever activities required.  This is becoming difficult in that my mother wakes up once, sometimes two or three times during the night to go to the bathroom.  And that means I must awake and get her out of bed to the bathroom and back from the bathroom and into bed.  She is spending more and more time in the bathroom, so I can be up for an hour and a half each time!  This does not lend itself to a comfortable, or consistent, sleep period, nor to a suitable routine. 

Working when I can, postponing or forsaking my the school project for the duration of my mother’s remaining days requires both a reframing of what constitutes a self-validation of worth and a reforming of schedule to get me out of the house and back into the larger community “doing the politics” and the library research in the evenings and on weekends.  But I have to have both the physical and psychic energy to reframe and to create the routine and then to work what I’ve created.  Depression and much interrupted sleep have sapped those energies for now. 

My Democratic Education School: A Journal's Beginning

When you’re a hammer, the popular quip goes, everything looks like a nail.  Well, I am an academic, although subscribing to some radical learning philosophies, Democratic Education among them.  So, I do tend to see the world through an alternative education pair of funky sunglasses.  In fact, this Democratic Education, the likes practiced in Summerhill, in England, Sudbury Valley and the far more recent Brooklyn and Manhattan Free Schools here in the U.S., are worth replicating throughout many neighborhoods.  Over the coming year, or years-gee I hope not too many years-I will be commenting on and recording my attempts to broaden Democratic Education here in New York City with a “DemEd” concept which has the working title of “Rockaway College”. 

When going for my Ph.D. in Media Ecology at New York University, as well as going for my Wood Badge in Boy Scouts, I had to keep a daily journal.  The contents of which, we were told, should include observations on the processes fulfilling our obligation for the dissertation and for the completion of our Ticket project as well as the details of the process itself, along with comments on the progress of our own personal growth in the knowledge of the subject undertaken.  So, I remember writing, unfortunately rather frequently, in my Doctoral journal, items such as:  “10 am…in Bobst…looking for material on human memory…finding suitable references in catalogue but when going to the shelves the titles were missing…How can I do my literature review if the majority of the time the library just does not have the literature for me to review!”  Well, there just might be some complaints like that in the blog posts to come.  But I will try to keep them to a minimum and let my experiences spark comment on deeper aspects of the enterprise, letting the inquiry at hand be a stepping stone to another level of questioning.

To wit, the following:

Can we say that in the era of facebook, email and blogs, that ownership of our thoughts and expressions are over?  If we broadcast what we think, feel and do through social media or through other forms of web-based media do we not forsake ownership of the content?  I mean, can the author now collect the product of reflection into a book for publishing, for commercial circulation?  Or is that no longer open to those who are money poor but word, and insight, rich?  Are we not fooled into a bargain which enriches the e-platform constructors but gives us no compensation?  Do we not fall for the narcisstic illusion of seeing our presence within the trend of our time?  Do we too easily surrender ourselves...

The impacts of the answers to these questions for such as myself, a poor, itinerant academic with a big dream, a larger ambition and an even larger hole in his personal finances, are not inconsequential as in other epochs a journal of the considerations for establishing an alternative school and the experiences in trying to do so would form the foundation of a publishable work.  The blog posts still might be able to be collected into some form of book which someone would find suitable to place into a consumable commercial object.  But, if the ideas, thoughts and experiences are already “published” it is unclear to me that it can be.  However, in this age of “letting it all hang out”, I guess even that will be reported to the blogosphere when it becomes appropriate.

One last thing, reader, not each and every post will be so absorbed by this adventure.  No, there will be room enough for me to comment on other things which are worthy of your time.

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.