Curmudgeon presumes to instruct Holy Mother Church on how to recruit more priests: Part IV of a series

For Part I of the series, click here. Click here for Part II, and here for Part III.

The accompanying church photo here was not randomly selected.

It is the Most Holy Trinity Catholic Chapel at West Point, on the grounds of the United States Military Academy.

And it is West Point that provides the template for my plan for the Catholic Church to eliminate the priest shortage in America.

In Part I of this series, discussing the principle of Apostolic Succession, I mentioned that a priest, good or bad, remains a priest unless or until he is laicized -- which I likened to being "kicked out." And that's true -- laicization is the way by which the Church can rid itself of problematic priests.

But that's incomplete: A priest can ask to be released from his vows -- laicized -- for any number of reasons. We had a couple in the parish, some years ago; he had been a priest; she had been a nun; they met and fell in love. They decided that their ultimate vocation was matrimonial, not clerical, and both sought, and received, release from their vows. They remained Catholics in good standing. They wed, had children, and lived long and exemplary lives. It happens. It happened a lot in the turmoil following Vatican II, but it still happens even today.

The committment to the priesthood is expected to be lifelong, and it usually is. In that sense, the priesthood is a lot like marriage: It's expected to be a lifelong committment, but, just as you don't stand at the altar reciting your vows envisioning your spouse 50 years older, you don't prostrate yourself at the feet of the bishop imagining yourself entering the old priests' home. No: Marriage is about committment today and tomorrow: This is the person I want to build a life with today, and, feeling as I do, I can't imagine that I would change my mind tomorrow. And, if you're lucky, and healthy, you wind up stacking up so many todays and tomorrows that your spouse -- and you yourself -- are 50 years older. But sometimes things don't work out... and even though Jesus was clear that marriage is for life, the church recognizes that, in some circumstances, the marriage has failed. The Church can annul a marriage.

While Jesus expressly said that marriage was for life, He did not say that ordination was for life, although, obviously, I won't argue that this has long been the expectation. But Jesus gave his Apostles the express power to bind and loose and to transmit the powers He gave to others. So I would not expect or want anyone to enter into the priesthood with the idea of merely doing a term of years and then getting out -- but the Church has recognized there are times when a priest should be returned to lay status. It may be because of scandal or fault, but it may be because the priest has recognized his true vocation lies elsewhere.

Which brings us back to West Point.

West Point graduates somewhere around 1,000 to 1,100 new second lieutenants every year. All are obliged to serve for five years. Somehwere around 50 to 60% of these will remain in the Army after the five year committment is up. But more will drop out along the way -- many at the 20-year mark -- so that only 10 to 15% of a typical cadet class will remain in the Army for 30 years or more.

The Army is happy with this arrangement, of course: It needs lots of second lieutenants -- but not so many colonels or generals.

Now, consider how this might work for the Church: Suppose the Church undertook to pay for a college education for persons interested in the priesthood. Men would take a degree in a normal academic subject, just as they typically do now (Pope Leo's undergraduate degree, for example, was in math), and spend summers and perhaps a fifth year in formation for the priesthood. After ordination, all priests would be expected to serve a minimum of five years in the priesthood.

Surely young men would line up in droves for this opportunity: The cost of higher education is astonishingly high, and going up every year, always outpacing inflation. So the Church should have the opportunity to attract as many new priests as it wants, or can handle.

This would have to be honorable service. A West Point cadet who runs seriously afoul of the Honor Code, or who refuses commission following graduation, or who refuses to honor his or her five-year service committment, is legally required to repay the government for tuition and benefits. It would be the same for men studying for the priesthood: No girls. Certainly no boys. No hanky panky of any kind. Any violation would be met with expulsion... and a very large reimbursement bill. Whatever sins of omission or commission that led to the expulsion might, potentially, be forgiven, but the bill would have to be paid.

At the end of his first five years of service, a man could ask to be returned to lay status. He'd be light years ahead of many of his peers: No student debt. Real job experience. Such men might be looked to as the mainstays of their parishes -- the likely pillars of the parish school boards or finance councils or Holy Name societies. Meanwhile, the Church would flourish with three or four priests in each parish -- mostly vigorous young men -- who could get up early enough for 6:30 daily Masses and still make parish calls and hospital visits, and sit in on committee meetings, and help plan the fundraisers, and pray with the Pro Life Committee at the abortion clinic, or coach or teach (or at least substitute teach) at the parish school. Some men would find, after stacking up five years of todays and tomorrows, that they have a call to continue in this work; others would find that their futures would lie away from the Rectory. But the priests who remain would potentially have classmates -- friends -- in any assignment, wherever they are sent.

Of course, some will get nervous about bringing lots of young men into the priesthood: What about the danger of child sexual abuse?

The truth is that, as long as there are children, there will be persons who will try and exploit them. This is a problem not just for the Church, but for our society as a whole. But there would be a number of deterrents with the Church's West Point plan. One would be structural: The molester, if found out before fulfilling his service committment, would be on the hook for full tuition and costs -- in addition, of course, to civil and criminal liability. But there is also safety in numbers: Multiple men in the Rectory -- many priests -- will allow for two or more priests to be present at any event with children. And the Church has learned a lot in the last quarter century, since the Dallas Charter. But the lesson can be summarized very succinctly: Nobody should want to be alone with a child who is not that person's own -- and any person who does want to be alone with someone else's child should never be left alone with a child.

I am sure there would be issues of canon law that would have to be addressed to make this happen. I am not a canonist, but Pope Leo is. He knows first hand the issues -- and the evils -- that arise from a shortage of priests. Even assuming the good faith of all concerned, we are too often putting men who should never be pastors into administrative roles for which they are ill-equipped. They may have other talents that could make them good priests, but these never come to the fore where they are shoved into jobs they can't handle. Deepening the talent pool will allow these men to flourish according to their gifts and strengthen the Church as a whole.

Now I know some of you started in on this essay with the question, why not just ordain women? That would double the available pool of priests without any West Point plan. Actually, if you are one of these persons, and you've read this far, I thank you. In real life, when I have proposed this plan in conversations with friends, many turn off instantly: Women must be ordained first before you do try anything else, they say.

I will tell you now what I have told people in real life: I don't know why the Church refuses to consider women's ordination. I'm just a dumb guy in the pews. The first witness to Jesus' Resurrection was a woman. Surely many of the Church's greatest saints are women. Many were martyred for spreading the Faith. And you don't have Constantine (and the Council of Nicea in 325) without St. Helena; you don't have St. Augustine without St. Monica. But I know implacable opposition when I see and hear it, and that's what I see and hear from the Church on the question of women's ordination. Maybe someday I will understand why the Church takes this position, but right now it is enough that I know what the position is, and that there's no getting around it any time soon.

And... in the meantime... we must have more priests. This, I am sure, would help.

The contradictions in the recent Facebook meme on public education

This was making the rounds in my Facebook feed the other day. In light of the outcome of the Virginia governor's race this week, it may be particularly important to break the statements in this meme down.

Why tie this to the Virginia race? Well, the one-time governor, and one-time prohibitive favorite to be governor again, Terry McAuliffe, lost the election. It appears that he fared worse in prosperous Northern Virignia suburbs that had gone heavily for Joe Biden just a year ago. And, in particular, this statement, made by Mr. McAuliffe in the course of a campaign debate, has been linked to his downfall: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

On an individual level, this is surely correct: Mrs. Jones, the local chapter president of the Flat-Earth Society, can not demand that her little Johnny and all his classmates be instructed in her own peculiar brand of "science." Also, as the first paragraph of the meme above suggests, Mrs. Smith, who believes in Biblical inerrancy, is free to send her little Susie to a private school which respects that belief; she does not have the right to insist that Susie be instructed in these beliefs in the local public school.

But the second paragraph of the meme is where the problem comes in. It reads (with emphases as in original):

The purpose of a public education in a public school is not to teach kids only what parents want them to be taught. It is to teach them what society needs them to know. The client of the public school is not the parent, but the entire community, the public[.]

This statement, too, is substantially correct, in my opinion. The purpose of public schools is to produce good, productive, patriotic citizens, the kinds of persons who will hold good jobs in an increasingly complex economy. People who will respect the law and support the Constitution. People who will be kind and generous and sympathetic to the plight of their less-fortunate neighbors. People who will be proud of their communities, local, state, and national, and who will make their communities proud in turn. The types of people you'd like to live next door to, and associate with, and do business with.

At least, that's what any healthy society would want, and demand, from its public schools.

But, again, the above statement is only substantially correct because it fudges on clearly saying what society should demand of its schools, saying only that the purpose of the public schools is to teach students what society needs them to know.

How do we determine what society needs our public school kids to know? We determine it from collective expressions of public policy: State statutes, to start with. The several states have always had principal responsibility for public education in America. And every state has many laws dictating what the public schools must teach. Gym classes, perhaps (so that future grown-up citizens are healthy) or financial literacy classes (so future grown-up citizens understand how to write a check, or the uses, good and bad, of credit cards). Most states have specified required courses that must be taken, and passed, in order to obtain a high school diploma.

And here's where we run into trouble... certainly the person on whose Facebook feed I first saw this would be fundamentally opposed to any law purporting to ban the teaching of "Critical Race Theory" in the public schools. My Facebook friend would feel quite strongly that states should not carve out whole topics or areas of instruction as forbidden. I tend to agree with her. But if the client of the public school is not the parent but the entire community, and the entire community enacts such a law through its elected representatives, isn't that the end of the discussion?

Yes, the parents alone are not the community. But they are a part. The teachers alone are not the community. They are also merely part. Also part of the community is the grumpy old couple with no children who always oppose school bond issues. And the parents who send their kids to private schools. And the seniors worried about what sort of stuff is being taught to their grandkids. We are all a part of the community and we all should have a say in what is taught. And it is not offensive to nature, or good order, or to the Patriot Act for persons who have a particular interest (e.g., parents) to demand to know what goes behind closed school doors.

But all of this controversy, all of this anger, all of this angst can be substantially reduced if only all of us can recall the purpose of public schooling. I've given you my understanding. Let me give it to you again:

The purpose of public schools is to produce good, productive, patriotic citizens, the kinds of persons who will hold good jobs in an increasingly complex economy. People who will respect the law and support the Constitution. People who will be kind and generous and sympathetic to the plight of their less-fortunate neighbors. People who will be proud of their communities, local, state, and national, and who will make their communities proud in turn. The types of people you'd like to live next door to, and associate with, and do business with.

Can we agree on this much? If not, what should be added? What should be taken out?

One thing we should be able to agree on: The public schools should not be used to teach kids to hate America, or each other, or themselves. Our nation is not perfect. No human thing is. We can always learn from our mistakes and grow from them -- if we don't ignore them, that is -- and I firmly belief that we have learned and grown as a society in my lifetime. We can, and must, continue to grow and learn and adapt. But we need to work together.

Do you know where your children and grandchildren are getting their news?

The headline sounds rather like those grim and accusatory later-night TV announcements of my youth: "It's 10:30 p.m. [curfew]. Do you know where your children are?"

You're here online... looking for something, presumably... so you are a step ahead of so many of our fellow citizens who consume news only from television.

You have perhaps already noticed... and rebelled against... your being funnelled into tribal groups in ways that surpass anything that poor, crazy Howard Beale imagined in the eerily (and presumably unintentionally) prophetic movie Network. Fox News... OAN... MSNBC... CNN... the demons on one network are the plaster saints on another. Shades of gray are ignored and overlooked. Matt Taibbi has written extensively, and persuasively, on this subject (see, in particular, Taibbi's book, "Hate, Inc."

The modern political and media landscape reminds me of the child's game, Mad-libs, where random nouns and verbs and adjectives are inserted into unseen sentences (unseen until all the blanks have been filled in, that is) to alleged comic effect. In my real life I get emails from all sides of the political spectrum. They are typically chock-full of overwrought, hysterical, the-sky-is-falling rhetoric -- it seems that only the proper nouns differ -- Pelosi is used in this one, Trump is used in that one, and so on. But the sentences are otherwise the same. They could be written by the same person. For all I know, they may be. I'd accuse that hypothetical person of being a Russian... but then I'd be stooping to the same level, wouldn't I?

Anyway, some people go trustingly into tribes. You, reading here, are resisting the siren call of one side or the other. (Here, you're in a no-tribe zone. Not because I'm so rational or anything; it's just that neither side would have me.)

It seems that a lot of people resist being placed into tribes. Many folks, apparently, have simply lost trust in the media, doubting everything they read or hear or see. Chaos ensues.

Our kids and grandkids never had trust in the media to lose. We may have become disillusioned with the 'dead tree media' and or the 'MSM' but our young people never paid attention to either. They get their news... if they get it at all... online. I remember my Oldest Son's snide remark while visiting one day, seeing the Sunday Tribune on the couch in the living room: "Look at that!" he said, feigning astonishment. "They've put the Internet on paper so old people can read it!"

Long Suffering Spouse, a middle school Spanish teacher, always asks her students for names of people important to them so that she can incorporate the names in games or skits teaching conversational skills. Some years ago, the names suggested for these lists moved from sports figures (though admittedly there are still some every year) or TV stars to YouTube or Instagram or, increasingly, TikTok "influencers." I know, because she brings home her list every year and makes me Google the names.

Every now and then some weisenheimer will try and get a porn star included on this list -- or nominate some persons whose views are wholly inappropriate in my wife's Catholic school. I'm not talking about these.

What this tells me is that people still crave information and knowledge of the world beyond their immediate circle. But, increasingly, they are seeking that information and knowledge from sources we never heard of and could not imagine.

Weird stuff follows. Because reporting what those crazy young people are up to -- especially if it's done in a snide and superior tone -- has a long-standing tradition in this country. An online outfit called Distractify published a list of school challenges allegedly making the rounds on Tik Tok. The article claims that Tik Tok users are challenging school kids to perform these tasks (and post their results) during the 2021-22 school year:

September: Vandalize school bathrooms

October: Smack a staff member

November: Kiss your friend’s girlfriend at school

December: Deck the halls and show your balls

January: Jab a breast

February: Mess up school signs

March: Make a mess in the courtyard or cafeteria

April: “Grab some eggz” (another stealing challenge)

May: Ditch day

June: Flip off in the front office

July: Spray a neighbor’s fence

It is my duty to report that Internet debunker Snopes.com found little or no evidence to support the contention that these 'challenges' are indeed making the rounds. (The linked post deals specifically with the October 'smack a teacher' challenge.) On the other hand, there were considerable media reports of school bathroom vandalism during September... even some relatively minor damage to a couple of the bathrooms at my wife's school... and the Tik Tok challenge was cited as an inspiration.

I don't know what's really going on with or on (Chinese-owned) Tik Tok. But I have come to realize that it has outsized importance among our kids and grandkids. That concerns me.

When I was a kid I listened to music that my parents did not like. But we watched the same newscasts, read the same newspapers (there were lots more of them, then). We even watched a lot of the same TV shows. We may have drawn different conclusions from what we read, or saw, and, of course, we often did -- but we were starting with the same raw material. We grown-ups dither now about the gaps among us, locked in our 'silos' or tribes, to the point where we do not seem to notice that there is also a gap between old and young -- and it's not just about music any more. It's about everything... and that frightens me more. Because we are not using the same raw materials to develop our own, unique world views.

Which brings me, at last, back to the Candorville comic (by Darrin Bell) at the top of this post. Long Suffering Spouse, for example, would not 'get' this. Even though one of the kids in her homeroom last year had 5,000 followers on Tik Tok. I think it's pretty funny. Funny... and a little scary, too.

Curmudgeon grapples with depression, death, and dying

Really fertile ground for an alleged humorist, doncha think?

But these less-than-cheery subjects are much on my mind of late.

Winter weather in Chicago can account for a serious mood indigo all by itself. We set something of a record recently for consecutive days of one sort of precipitation or another. It's been gray, it's been gloomy, it's been wet, it's been cold. We have less sunlight in an ordinary February, I believe, than in any other month -- and we're running well below average this month.

Of course, the Sun is out this morning, just to make me look like a liar.

But the weather alone does not account for my current funk.

I mentioned yesterday that I closed my downtown office and am now 'working' from home.

I didn't do this because I had paying clients climbing over each other to shower me with money. I did it because I didn't make one thin dime from the practice of law last year.

I'll let you chew on that for a moment. I did pay the rent, or at least my portion of the rent and electric and Internet. I paid a King's ransom for my Lexis research service. I paid my membership dues in all the various bar groups to which I belong. I paid medical expenses through the firm -- I operate as a C corporation expressly for this reason. But never, not once, during the entire year, was I able to squeeze out so much as a penny of salary. In fact, I had to lend my firm money to keep it going -- doing strange magic with credit card advances -- and the chickens are about to come home to roost on that venture.

All the years that I've been whining about my impecunious stature here on this blog -- in all those years but 2018 I was still able to pay myself something. Thus, last year was awful, even by my low standards.

My lease was up at the end of January. Rent was an expense I could cut, so I did. With efiling it really is almost possible to work from anywhere and still practice law.

I wish I still wanted to.

Now there's a problem.

I do have some work to do. Some of it may eventually realize income. Emphasis on eventually.

But what I've noticed lately is a complete disconnect between effort and results. I do good work on something -- what I think is good work, anyway -- and I get shot down by this judge or that one. I did actually "win" a case recently -- and, from a cynical lawyer's perspective I should be rejoicing because I not only won, my opponent filed an immediate appeal. And this on one of my only paying cases.

However... I should have won that case two years ago. I have been beating my head against the wall -- figuratively, so far at least -- filing motion on motion, raising argument on argument, laying out an airtight case -- and until the learned trial judge who had been handling the matter suddenly retired, I was losing. The other side would -- and I am not exaggerating -- make stuff up -- sometimes inventing some ridiculous claim in open court -- and the judge lapped it up. When I did win, the new judge based the ruling on something that, in all candor, was pretty much irrelevant, at least insofar as I was concerned.

I settled a case last year -- pursuant to client instructions, of course, but for far less than I thought the case was worth -- as it happened, the client's conduct had undermined the value of his claim, but let's leave that to one side -- and the insurance carrier immediately reported the settlement to Medicare. Which meant that I had to deal with Medicare's "Super Lien."

And the carrier should never have done this: My client had slipped past his 65th birthday during the pendency of the claim -- but he was not a Medicare recipient when the accident happened, nor was he a Medicare beneficiary during the entire time he treated for the injuries sustained in that accident. The carrier, in a move apparently calculated to add injury to its insulting settlement offer, made the bogus Medicare referral so that it could try and delay payment on the claim. This is illegal under Illinois law, as long as I made the undertakings required by §2-2301 of our Code of Civil Procedure, which I promptly did -- but I still had to complain to the Illinois Department of Insurance to get my check -- which I had to keep in my client funds account for the inordinate amount of time it took me to convince Medicare that it really didn't have a lien.

I could go on.

I don't have many cases these days but each and every one of them has some obnoxious, nonsensical twist that squeezes any satisfaction from the case that might otherwise exist. And/or the client doesn't pay. Usually and.

Long Suffering Spouse has noticed my depression, and she tries to encourage me to get back in the traces and work my way through all this.

Which, certainly, is the right thing for me to do.

But Long Suffering Spouse's situation also distresses me.

She is a teacher, of course, and, as indicated above, pretty much the sole breadwinner in the Curmudgeon household at the moment. And, because she teaches in the Catholic schools, she makes a fraction of what her colleagues do in public schools -- and she has no pension besides. (Actually, that's not entirely true -- the Archdiocese of Chicago did not discontinue its pension plan until shortly after my wife began teaching full-time. It lasted long enough for my wife to partially vest in the plan. I believe that, when our golden years arrive, we may look forward to $17 a month from that plan. Or maybe it was $17 a year. Whoopee!)

Basically, my wife works so that we have health insurance. (The Cardinal has not yet -- thank God -- discontinued that benefit.)

And, brother, does she work.

As the school's Spanish teacher, she sees every student in the building at some point during the year. She sees the middle school scholars three days a week, the fourth and fifth graders two days a week, and everyone else, from preschool on, one day a week for 'enrichment' during one trimester a year. Many days she has no break at all. Many days, she can't even go to the bathroom even once during the school day.

This has predictable consequences.

And because she has students during virtually every period of the school day -- when she does have 'breaks' she often has students in her room anyway -- she has no time for grading, or posting grades, or doing lesson plans, or doing any of the other tasks she has been assigned by an ungrateful and unsupportive administration. She's in charge of the honor society, for example. (And, for the record, I like her principal -- I'm just telling it like it is.) So, consequently, when my wife does get home (and after she makes a bathroom stop) she continues to work here. She falls asleep every night -- no exaggeration -- every single night -- grading, or posting grades, or doing lesson plans, or responding to anxious or angry parent emails.

Ah, yes. Parents.

Our school parents pay enormous sums of money to send their children to our parish school. For these prices, they expect miracles. In fact, they demand miracles.

And the teacher is always wrong.

I attended Catholic schools when I was a boy. We had nuns then. That's why the tuition was so much lower; the nuns were really paid next to nothing. Yes, even though modern lay teachers make a pittance compared to their public school counterparts, their salaries and benefits are still 90% or more of our school budget. Divide that up among the number of students in the school, and voila!, you have a princely sum per student.

When my older kids were still in school, the parish was allowed to subsidize the cost of operating the school -- and did -- some years kicking in as much as $250,000. The Archdiocese demanded an end to this before my youngest kids graduated. There is no way Long Suffering Spouse and I could have sent our children to Catholic schools the way things are now.

(And still the bishops wonder why Catholics are falling away!)

So it's understandable why the parents have such inflated expectations about what our school can do for their kids.

The problem is, of course, that the kids don't know any better; they don't appreciate the sacrifices their parents are making to send them to the parish school. So some of them behave as some kids have always behaved -- indifferent, even hostile, to attempts to teach them anything.

My wife's students hate her. She makes them work. She holds them to standards. She will threaten to actually fail those who will not toe the line. She doesn't always succeed at this because the parents of these miscreants scream bloody murder -- and the administration almost always intervenes on the side of those who pay the bills. The teacher is always wrong.

The funny thing is, those same kids will eventually, despite their best efforts, wind up in high school. Where they will retake Spanish I -- and, usually, get A's. The good students, who also hate my wife because, you know, they are kids and don't want to work (and we do?) will place out of Spanish I or place into an honors class and also get A's. Many of these kids, even some of those who were the most hostile and disruptive in junior high, will come back and express gratitude for the preparation they received from my wife. Some of their parents will seek Long Suffering Spouse out and praise her to the heavens -- these same persons who just a year or two ago were sending angry emails to my wife's principal -- and some will even have the good grace to admit that they were wrong back in the day.

There's some satisfaction in that.

But it doesn't stop the next crop of angry, demanding helicopter parents who, despite having access to their darlings' grades all trimester long, wait until the last week of the grading period to insist on extra 'help' or demand 'extra credit.'

I've tried to explain to my kids that there is a great deal of difference between "want to" and "have to." The psychic satisfaction from the many kids who come back and thank Long Suffering Spouse for their success would be so much greater if she didn't have to keep working to keep us afloat.

And Long Suffering Spouse carries the extra burden these days of worry about her mother.

Abuela is 85 now and is on what, if memory serves, is her third round of cancer treatment. Maybe fourth. The day after Grandchild No. 8 was born, Abuela went into surgery to have radioactive "seeds" planted in her liver. This is the second time this procedure has been done; the first did not keep the cancer at bay for even six months. (This was originally a colon cancer. I've had colon cancer.^* Mine did not escape the colon. Abuela's did, moving to the liver -- thus the seeds.)

My mother-in-law is not the world's most compliant patient. She's not eating or drinking as directed and, although her initial "numbers" following this most recent procedure are very encouraging, she is convinced that she will not recover this time.

Of course, Abuela says this every time -- but one of these days she must, of necessity, be correct.

And Long Suffering Spouse has become persuaded that this time really may be it. She is having definite forebodings -- and I have been with her too long to dismiss these out of hand.

I have long held the belief that Abuela was destined to outlast me. If she really is going, this time, I'm getting even more nervous than usual.

But I have whined too long today. I do have things I should be doing... and while there's more on these unhappy subjects I'd like to talk about, I'll have to come back to it later.

Perhaps. When I can better articulate what else I want to say.

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^* If you are interested, you can read about my somewhat cockeyed experiences here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Reciprocity? Can you get an ointment for that? (More adventures of Youngest Son in the ignorant world of education)

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post suggesting that the best way to improve education in this country would be to tear down all schools of education. My rant was prompted on that occasion by my son's being refused the opportunity to student teach during his 7th college semester. After he had received fairly mediocre grades in his freshman year education courses---still adequate, mind you, according to the standards then in force---the Education Department at Youngest Son's thrice-cursed South Janesville College decided to raise the standards for student teaching.

Yes, I know. Ordinarily, I'd be the first to say "hooray" for raised standards. But the school retroactively imposed these standards---held them against---Youngest Son; they did not 'grandfather' him into the program. He wound up having to 'return' for a ninth semester---which was the Education Department's goal all along, to keep pumping kids for tuition for the longest time possible---and, even then, he had to battle because the grades he received freshman year, which would not have been perfectly acceptable for eventual student teaching according to the standards in place at the time Youngest Son earned those grades, were still used to threaten his prospects.

Now you may think that my beef is really with South Janesville College, that the SJC Education Department is particularly incompetent and inept---and it is---but my beef is with the entire education establishment in this country, at least insofar as I've encountered it. I said tear the system down in 2014. My attitude has only hardened: Blow up all the schools of education, I say now, burn the buildings down, raze the rubble and sow salt on the sites where the buildings once stood.

Now, not all of the dialog in the screed that follows is exact. I exaggerate for effect. But though I may exaggerate, it is only to expose to sad and sorry truth of the closed, dim, dumb, dense, peanut-sized brain of the apparently typical education bureaucrat and administrator....

Youngest Son did persevere in his quest to complete his teacher's credentials. He served his ninth semester largely at home, teaching in a near north suburban high school, under the mentorship of a friend of ours---someone we know not to have two heads, someone I would wholeheartedly exempt from my attitude toward teachers generally. Every rule has exceptions. My wife is a teacher; I surely exempt her.

And the 'supervising teacher' (I may have the idiotic nomenclature wrong, but this is the teacher who is enlisted by the college to see whether its student functions well or badly---it does not rely solely on the report of the classroom teacher to whom the student teacher is assigned) is the husband of a former colleague of my wife, a colleague that my wife and I both think very highly of. She's actually made appearances in these essays, at least a couple of times. I like her; I trust her. I don't know her husband from Adam's off ox, but I know he has a PhD in history (my son's a would-be history teacher) and a Vietnam vet (that makes a difference to me, which I will come to... eventually).

Anyway, both of these supervisors thought the world of Youngest Son. They thought he handled himself superbly in the classroom. They thought that he should be snapped up in a minute by the school district where Youngest Son was student teaching -- and there were, in fact, three history jobs coming due in the high school for the coming year.

Of course, Youngest Son completed his ninth semester around the end of 2015. Maybe his responsibilities stretched into January of 2016; I don't recall at this point and it really doesn't matter.

High schools hire for the Fall, not for January. And Youngest Son was cut loose, cast adrift, placed at liberty in January.

Sign up to be a sub, he was told. The rules with regard to subbing have long been that anyone with a college degree---even me, though I'm totally unsuited for classroom work---can be a sub. That's what we were told.

He was never called.

There was some delay in processing Youngest Son's license. In a final insult, South Janesville College couldn't quite finish its paperwork so that Youngest Son could get his Wisconsin teaching license right away. It took a couple of extra months, many phone calls and emails and even a pilgrimage to the old campus by Youngest Son to get the paperwork moving.

But eventually it moved. He had to be fingerprinted, submit to a background check, a few things like that. But the license was finally issued.

Now, Youngest Son could supply his license number when he applied for teaching jobs. And he applied to any and all teaching jobs in the Chicago area during the Winter and Spring and Summer---and the glowing recommendations he received from his student teaching supervisors notwithstanding---he got nary a sniff from anyone. Even the school where he had student taught, which had three history teaching positions to fill, did not give him an interview. That school interviewed a knuckleheaded grammar school classmate of Younger Daughter, a girl who'd stretched her undergraduate career to 11 or 12 semesters; Younger Daughter saw it on Facebook and was afraid to mention it to her brother lest his head explode.

Youngest Son became quite adept at applying. It was all computerized, he told us, and it was the delay in getting a license number that, Youngest Son later determined, created the first problem. The computer kicked out anyone without a license number: Even if the person in question had taught in the building and was vouched for by a senior teacher there, the application never made it to a set of human eyes.

How nuts is that?

But it gets much, much worse.

Remember how I mentioned that Youngest Son got a Wisconsin license? Thrice-cursed South Janesville College is in Wisconsin. Naturally its graduates would be licensed in Wisconsin.

Fortunately, Wisconsin and Illinois have a reciprocity agreement: An Illinois license is good in Wisconsin and a Wisconsin license is good in Illinois. Teachers are told that, if they wish to remain in Illinois, however, they should convert their Wisconsin license to an Illinois license within five years.

On this, all were agreed. South Janesville College said so. We heavily discounted anything SJC had to say, of course, but the teachers who supervised Youngest Son's student teaching efforts both concurred as well.

Finally, in August, having applied for a history position that just came open unexpectedly at a Chicago science and technology charter school, Youngest Son received an invitation to interview.

Initially, things went well. He had his Wisconsin license with him, and his glowing letters of recommendation, and the initial interviewer seemed quite taken with him. She called in someone else---an administrator, presumably---who came in and seated himself before the computer. A few keystrokes later he said, "Your name's not here." He was looking at a page on the website of the Illinois Board of Education. He read off a name. "Is this person related to you?" he asked. "My mother," said Youngest Son. "Well, she's here, but you're not," he said.

"Yes, but I have reciprocity." Youngest Son held up his Wisconsin license.

"Is that contagious? Maybe you should see a doctor."

"No," Youngest Son tried again. "My Wisconsin license is good in Illinois for five years."

"But it's not here," said the man, the apparent administrator at a science and technology charter school, gesturing at the screen.

The interview was over.

But---the statutes notwithstanding---now we knew: The Wisconsin license was bupkis. Youngest Son immediately began the process to convert his Wisconsin license to an Illinois license. More forms were required. South Janesville College was required to send records---Youngest Son's copies weren't good enough---but, wonder of wonders, on this one occasion, South Janesville College acted promptly. Still, two months later, according to the same website that charter-school jackass was looking at in August, the application is "pending." The kid can't get a job without the license---even though he has a license that is supposed to be good under the law---and he can't get the State to act on his application.

Meanwhile, we've learned that the State of Illinois does issue a substitute teaching license. It isn't required, so far as we know; it's just that no one will hire you as a substitute without one. So Youngest Son went a got a substitute teaching license -- I saw it this morning on the screen at the Illinois State Board of Education website. There were still more forms to fill out, another set of fingerprints, all for the hopes of getting $100 or so a day as a sub. A hundred dollars a day, even if you work every day, adds up... slowly... and not to very much.

Public high school teaching jobs start anywhere from $40,000 to $50,000 a year---decent money---but you have to jump through an awful lot of hoops to get there.

And, of course, you have to be on the screen.

Now you may be wondering---if you have a good memory, at least---why I mentioned that it was significant, in my mind, that my son's supervising teacher was a Vietnam vet.

Well, it may not be the only reason why departments of education, education bureaucracies, and educators generally suck (that's a technical term), but I'm absolutely positive that the Vietnam War contributed.

See, back when the war was on and the draft was going, one of the best ways to get out of the draft, and thereby avoid Vietnam, was to go to college. So many of our most hawkish neocons evaded actual military service in this way. A lot of schools, including my own alma mater, had "draft counselors"---students in good academic standing who could earn their continuing deferments---who helped their duller classmates find departments and programs that would allow them to stay in school, too. I was a little young for Vietnam, but some of the ex-draft counselors were still in school or hanging around campus when I started. I got to know a few (I worked for one for many years---I didn't meet him until my last year of law school---but, once I did meet him, I found out we had several mutual acquaintances). And I know a lot of the dullards got steered into education programs. Easy, easy A's and B's---or C's, anyway, for the really dumb ones---aided and abetted by sympathetic professors who did not want to be responsible for sending anyone to the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Yesterday's draft-wary dullards are the deans of education departments today, the superintendents, the principals. Once in power, they continued to recruit and promote equally dull, untalented, unimaginative people just like themselves. And public education in this country went careening downhill. I don't know why the husband of my wife's colleague actually served, but at least he wasn't 'saved' by draft counselors, which is why I automatically exempt him from the scorn I heap upon so many of the 'professional educators' of today. You may not think that's a proper tie-up, but that's my opinion anyway.

Frivolous Friday: Potpourri edition

"Potpourri." That's a French word. It means "no organized theme."

Which fits right in with Second Effort generally, doesn't it?

Let's start in with this Wizard of Id strip from May 28 (all comics here obtained from Yahoo! Comics unless otherwise indicated):

This is a pet peeve of mine -- judging by some of the things my wife (a teacher) has picked up at schools or seminars, educators seriously believe that kids don't have to memorize things (like facts) anymore because Google has all the answers.

But -- and this is a huge but -- search engines know all the answers only, only, only if you know the right questions and if you know how to sort the wheat from the chaff in the results provided.

While we're on the subject of teachers, though, Grand Avenue (by Steve Breen and Mike Thompson) has been doing a series this week on the end of the school year. This one struck me as very funny:

My wife would probably disagree. She gave her 6th graders tests yesterday. They complained bitterly. How can you give us tests now, they protested, don't you know we get out of school next week?

One parent, lobbying (I guess) for her son to get a second retake of a test he'd bombed already twice, seemed to be making a similar argument. Long Suffering Spouse had to remind the parent that, next year, when her son goes to high school, his last class will be a final exam. The kid's mother is an intelligent, educated woman; surely she remembers this. The good news, I suppose, is that the mother is concerned about her son's grade. The bad news, however, is that her son stopped caring around the time he took his high school placement test. In January. And his grades reflect this. It isn't just this one test that has brought down his grade.

Sticking with schools, this Grand Avenue strip struck me as all too true:

But, as apprehensive as parents may be about the kids coming home for the summer, it does not compare to the relief that teachers feel at being rid of the little monsters, er, darlings for the summer. (See discussion above.)

We switch now to the terrible world of telemarketing. I do feel sorry for telemarketers. I do. They have horrible jobs and people mostly answer their calls just to scream at them. Still, there's humor even in this, as the following Duplex comic, by Glenn McCoy, from May 28, shows:

I've spent a lot of time here crowing about being a grandfather -- and I truly do love the gig. I mean it when I tell people it's the best club I've ever joined. Even so, this F Minus comic, by Tony Carrillo, from April 18, strikes me as all too true:

I lack the discerning eye of all those (in my family, it's the womenfolk) who can gaze at a newborn infant for 10 seconds and pronounce authoritatively that 'the baby has her father's eyes' or 'she has her mother's ears' or 'she has her Aunt Tessie's tushie.' No! I don't believe it. Newborn babies look remarkably like Winston Churchill or Richard J. Daley. Eventually, as they grow, they will resemble this relative or that one -- but sometimes, at least it seems to me, for only a little while because, with another growth spurt, they then resemble someone else entirely.

But that's my opinion only. The weight of authority is clearly against me on this one. I guess.

I enjoy reading the comics -- lots of comics -- every day. For amusement. For entertainment. For laughs. But sometimes... well, sometimes it seems the comics are used as a place for the artists to work out their own issues.

Recovering lawyer (and one of my favorites) Stephan Pastis, the creator of Pearls Before Swine, may be going through some sort of rough patch and working it out right in front of us in our daily papers. At least if this May 23 Pearls strip is any indication:

This week, Stephan invents a little kid from down the street, a precocious 2nd grader named Libby, who turns out to be able to draw rings around the artistically-challenged Mr. Pastis (he's such a terrible artist that he's only syndicated in about a gazillion newspapers). Today's installment brings together his domestic issues, his insecurities about his artistic skills, and his concerns about how long there will be a gazillion papers to carry his work (and keep him from having to return to the practice of law):

I hope Mr. Pastis feels better soon. I hope his domestic issues are resolved satisfactorily. But, although it's a little dark for me to say it, right now, I'm sort of enjoying his pain.

Wow, that came out badly.

But not as badly, I'm afraid, as things turned out for Dorothy in this truly dark, (*ahem*) Wicked re-imagining of The Wizard of Oz in this May 28 Bizarro strip by Dan Piraro (this one was obtained from the Chicago Tribune Comics Kingdom):

------------------------------------------------------------------------
UPDATE 6/7/14: This is so cool! Pardon me, while I gush like a teenager, but "Libby" in this week's Pearls episodes was none other than Bill Watterson. Yes, that Bill Watterson. The man who drew Calvin and Hobbes. The J.D. Salinger of cartooning. The recluse. Mr. Pastis kept the secret all week, but, he says, now the story can be told. Wow....

All "schools" of education should be closed -- immediately and permanently

My wife is a Spanish teacher, and a good one. Her students go on to success in high school, which surely is the only true measure of success for a junior high teacher, isn't it? Many of her students place out of Spanish I in high school; the ones who don't routinely report that they cruise through the introductory high school Spanish course, almost all getting A's. In other words, they were well-prepared.

Youngest Son wants to be a teacher. He's playing baseball at South Janesville College (the name I made up for his actual school) and majoring in history and education. He is one course shy of completing his history major. He wants to student teach in the fall of his senior year.

After he started school -- after he took C's in a couple of introductory education courses -- the education department at SJC decided to impose a 3.0 GPA requirement for student teaching. Youngest Son is a few tenths of a point short, although he has better than a B average in his history major. He was not grandfathered in. Yesterday, the education department allegedly considered his petition to student teach next fall -- as a senior. They turned him down. On the most bogus pretext, too: He "has a ways to go" he was told "in disciplinary content." Really? He's already passed the certification content exam for history and (remember?) he has exactly one course left to complete his history degree. And the kid is still a junior.

Now I will grant you that Youngest Son is no Einstein. He's a kid, like most kids, meaning that, when he's interested and engaged he does fine and when things are dull and boring he tunes out. He was apparently indifferent (that's a polite word, isn't it?) in several of his classes freshman year. He passed everything -- that much I know, since he was invited back. But, of course, thanks to Federal privacy laws I haven't seen one of his report cards -- ever. He's the fifth of our brood to go to college; I've never seen one report card from any of them. I got tired of asking the kids -- they'd tell me this grade was posted, or that one, but nothing beyond that. And I could never actually get to the site where the grades were allegedly posted. I needed a password that the kids always neglected to give me. Privacy, you know. Somehow, though, privacy laws do not extend to tuition bills. Colleges send those to me.

Among the courses in which Younger Son floundered as a freshman were his introductory education courses. He was very discouraged. "Education classes are terrible," my wife -- the good teacher -- agreed. "They're pointless. But you have to get through them to get to the methods classes. That's when you find out whether you're cut out for teaching."

For those who may not know, "methods" classes involve getting up in front of a class and presenting lessons. Some folks have a knack for it -- my wife does, for example, and, judging by the glowing responses he's gotten so far, Youngest Son may have the knack as well.

And Youngest Son has grown up some in college, just like he's supposed to. He has his eyes on the future now, and he wants to graduate on time.

But "education" departments don't let kids graduate on time.

I'm not talking just about South Janesville College. Middle Son and Younger Daughter went to different schools in the Chicago area, both of these traditional teachers' colleges. Neither of them is a teacher -- Younger Daughter flirted with the idea for a semester until she took an introductory education course and was so repulsed she abandoned the notion -- but both of them have many friends who did pursue teaching degrees.

And they all got saddled with an extra semester. A ninth semester. Education majors 'walk' with their classmates at graduation -- but a lot of them don't get their diplomas until they return to student teach. Because education departments don't let many of their majors student teach until after they are supposed to have graduated.

And, of course, student teachers aren't really on campus -- and certainly not frequently. They teach in schools and their colleges get extra tuition.

This is a scam, a sin, a crime and a shame.

And -- pardon me -- but there are too many lazy, incompetent, stupid teachers out there for any education department at any school to claim that it is doing a good job.

Think of your own education. How many truly good, memorable teachers did you have? One? Two? I was lucky -- I can think of a half dozen without stretching -- including one teacher who saw promise in a tall, skinny kid who absolutely deserved the D he received in his introductory high school science class. That teacher decided I was bored, not stupid, and recommended me for the honors course in Chemistry and Physics (yes, I was the D student). Wonder of wonders, the teacher's recommendation was accepted and I started getting A's and B's. In the honors courses.

How about your kids? How many really good teachers have they had? How many times have your kids come back to you and said something like, "Thank goodness for Mrs. Smith! Without the foundation she provided, I never would have passed Trigonometry!"

We spend boatloads of money on public schools -- many of which are terrible, so terrible that responsible parents sacrifice their futures to send their kids to private schools. That are somewhat better. Sort of. Sometimes. (The 'best' schools in Chicago right now are probably a handful of public high schools -- e.g., North Side College Prep, Walter Payton College Prep, Jones College Prep, Whitney Young Magnet School -- but it's easier to bring explosives into the White House than it is to gain admission to one of these schools. They are that competitive.) But, on average, for normal people, people without über-clout, private schools are better in the City of Chicago -- and many Chicago suburbs -- than the publicly funded ones.

There are societal reasons that explain why so many schools fail, of course: Hunger, poverty, drugs, crime. But the poverty-stricken drug addicts of today were yesterday's public school students. Parents, or the lack thereof, may be the single most important factor in shaping the next generation (I think so, certainly) but teachers contribute to the success and failure of our offspring as well.

Meanwhile, American test scores are in free fall (professional educators' "solution"? eliminate testing!). American kids place well down the lists of achievement in math and science. In Europe, kids speak two and three languages without working up a sweat. But our kids are getting dumber here at home.

Years ago, my parents gave me a reprinted set of McGuffey Readers -- stuff they used to use to teach little kids. Compare these to the watered-down pap given to our little kids today. It's embarrassing.

No -- the problem with schools is not money. Money is being spent, but not wisely.

Let's get smart.

To begin with, let's close all the education departments and schools of education.

If someone wants to teach math, let him or her first become a mathematician. Then let him or her apprentice to a math teacher for a term -- a semester, perhaps. If he or she likes teaching, and if the kids prosper, and the senior teacher agrees -- voila! he or she is a math teacher. Oh sure, there will be many slugs and parasites that will have to age out of the school system; we can't fire them all. But even observing slugs and parasites has value: One learns what not to do. Maybe we'd need two or three terms, apprenticed to different senior teachers, to fairly evaluate a candidate's potential. But these apprentices should be paid -- not at a full teacher's pay, perhaps, but maybe half-pay. Because teaching is a knack, a skill -- a talent -- not a set of equations or theorems that can be reduced to writing and taught to any stiff off the street.

Long Suffering Spouse is encouraging Youngest Son to stick it out and suck it up and get certified. His baseball coach gave him the same advice. Get past these parasites and get the credential so you can get a job. I hope he will. I think he will. But no thanks at all to the 'education' department.

Tear it down.

Tear them all down.

Long Suffering Spouse heads back to school in "the Year of the Parent"

Duplex comic by Glenn McCoy, image obtained from Yahoo! Comics.

The Chicago Public Schools are starting up today. Even if you're not in Chicago, you may have heard about this because of our school strike last year, the controversial closing of 50 schools this Spring, and the creation of alleged "Safe Passage" routes for CPS students to follow as they wend their way to new schools this morning. It's not surprising, perhaps, that policemen have been detailed to these routes, some of which traverse hotly contested street gang borders, but the City has also assigned firemen to these routes, and employees of Streets and Sanitation, and employees from other City departments, too. Oh, and there are 'paid volunteer' escorts -- an oxymoron on the level of military intelligence -- armed with government-issued phones. They can call for help if the gangs start shooting. Unless, of course, the gangbangers are shooting them.

And all of this -- somehow -- is supposedly saving taxpayer money.

Oh, to be a child again! Not that I'd be anxious to re-live my school days, mind you. Once was surely enough. But, if I were as innocent as a young child maybe I could believe such a ridiculous claim.

Meanwhile, some of the Catholic schools in these parts are also starting up this morning. Long Suffering Spouse's school opens for business today.

In the Catholic Archdiocese, this is Day One of "the Year of the Parent."

Now, you had better believe that parental interest and involvement is integral to the success of Catholic education. If all parents were as interested and involved as your typical Catholic school parents, there would be far less need for saturation of "Safe Passage" routes. There might not be any street gang borders to cross.

And parents of Catholic school children make a tremendous sacrifice to send their kids to Catholic schools. A determined parent can find less costly options for his or her child than a Catholic school. By many metrics, several Chicago Public High Schools (the 'college prep' schools -- North Side, Payton, Jones, Whitney Young etc.) are better than anything the Catholic high schools can offer. And there are some excellent 'magnet' schools for CPS students in grades K-8 as well. No, parents who choose Catholic education want a sound foundation in both intellect and character and they want their traditions passed along to their children.

So the Archdiocese had darn well better cater to the men and women who dig deep into their wallets to send their kids to the parish school.

But....

You knew there would be a 'but,' didn't you?

Perhaps you read my Priscilla Pigdahl post earlier this year. If you didn't, maybe you could read it now.

Some well-meaning parents value success for their children more than real learning.

It's a terrible, terrible mistake. But young parents don't always understand that a kid who flounders now can flourish later. It's better for a kid to fail in 5th grade than to fail in life. We learn from our mistakes more than we ever do from our successes. So let's get those mistakes made sooner rather than later.

But it's easy for teachers and administrators to become cynical. It can happen to anyone. I certainly am cynical. Look at the start of this essay: I couldn't be more jaded. I think something similar has happened to the principal at Long Suffering Spouse's school. I'm speculating now about what's may be in her head:

Enrollment is the lifeblood of the Catholic schools. If enrollment goes down, the school fails. It closes. If it goes up, the school succeeds. Test scores don't really matter -- tests can be taught -- high school performance doesn't really matter -- the struggles of our graduates are not necessarily going to be blamed on us. Really, grade school doesn't matter. Pass everyone through, make them feel good about themselves and hopefully they'll learn something in high school when they're more mature.

Meanwhile, my wife teaches. She has standards. Some of her kids struggle. Some struggle mightily.

And then they go to high school.

The good ones, the successful ones, are placed in honors courses, a full year ahead of their peers. They wind up in AP classes.

Some of the kids who did just OK in my wife's Spanish classes breeze through their placement tests anyway and wind up in accelerated Spanish I or even Spanish II.

And the ones who struggled? Even the ones who struggled mightily? Those who start over in Spanish I find that it's easy; they were well prepared. They get A's and B's. My wife hears from them; they are grateful.

This should be the model in English, in Math, in Science, in History -- and it's not.

Because the principal gets complaints.

She hears complaints about Long Suffering Spouse from parents who have one child or whose oldest child is one of those struggling. If my wife gives a C to a student who gets (undeserved) A's in every other class... who looks like the outlier? My wife's principal doesn't hear complaints from the parents who have multiple children once their oldest begins succeeding in high school. But any complaint is one too many.

There has been friction.

No junior high kid is dreading the start of this school year more than my Long Suffering Spouse. The Year of the Parent? My wife feels she's in danger of losing her job because she's too good at it.

Some days, I just hate the world.

I bet most kids today would flunk this test

Chuckle Bros. comic by Brian and Ron Boychuk, obtained from GoComics.

Oh, sure, we old folks think this comic funny because, after all, who can't copy words when the words are written out right in front of you?

The answer, I'm sorry to say, is today's kids. I'm going by what I see from my wife's junior high classes, so perhaps your kids' or grandkids' school is different. But I don't think so. My wife teaches at a private (Catholic) grade school where the students are from middle class backgrounds. According to their standardized test scores, just like the children of fictional Lake Wobegon, the kids at my wife's school are all (or almost all) above average.

And today's kids seem incapable of copying a word when it's written right in front of them.  My wife has showed me test paper after test paper proving this.

Why?

Part of it, I believe, is that teaching methods seem to have changed: When we were kids, we were expected to copy stuff off the board. Accuracy was compulsory; sloppiness was a punishable offense. We were forced to do this time and again in the primary grades, and the teacher actually looked at what we copied. Neatness counted. And graded us very harshly if we didn't copy correctly.  Thus, we learned -- we were required to learn -- how to do this.

Today, rote copying (and -- oh, my gosh, memorizing) are looked on as primitive, wrong, even abusive.  Today's kids didn't learn how to copy accurately in the primary grades; and, thus, they can't do so when they reach junior high.

I don't know why this is the current trend; it seems awfully stupid to me.

Imagine an astronaut in a crisis scenario, trying to copy down critical instructions relayed by Mission Control. "Roger that, Houston," the astronaut would say, but the mushy jumble of characters on his or her note pad might not really match up with the information sent up from the ground.

Apollo 13 would have had a very different ending.

Oh, no, the 'modern' educator may say, in a patronizing tone, today's children have technology (when it works) and spell check will correct their spelling (but only if they get reasonably close to the correct spelling -- and spell check can't help a kid know when and how to use 'there' or 'their' or 'your' or 'you're'). And, as near as I can tell, 'modern' teachers say that kids today don't have to memorize anything because they can always look it up on their ever-present 'devices.' (But how do you 'look up' what you never knew? How do you even know you should be looking for it?)

As Blog of Days readers already know, this is Teacher Appreciation Week. It's an especially appropriate time to think about teachers and teaching -- especially good teachers and good teaching.  In that spirit, share this post with a teacher in your life. Am I being unfair to 'modern' teachers? Am I being unfair to today's kids? What do you think? What do the teachers in your life think?

Lego finds robots -- and redemption

You never know when that next wave of nostalgia will crash over you. Today it happened as I was reading an article in this month's Smithsonian, "How Lego Is Constructing the Next Generation of Engineers."

Remember Lego?

I loved Lego as a child. My parents would get me boxes of just plain bricks like this one (in addition to this standard 2 x 4 size, there were several other sizes too, 1 x 2, 2 x 2, 2 x 3, 2 x 8, 1 x 6....) but, with just these little rectangles I could build anything.

And I did. I built buildings to accompany the train setup, I built cities, I built ray-guns (I had a pretty good phaser design, if I do say so myself), I built control panels -- buttons on buttons -- to operate spaceships that would take me all around the Galaxy -- without ever leaving my parents' house.

I didn't play with Lego as often as the years went by, but (like the boy in Toy Story) I had occasional relapses for many years. Eventually, though, I went away to school and my mother gave my Lego collection (by then quite massive) to my aunt so that my 14-years-younger cousin could play with them. I thought I'd get them back for my own children, but that's not how it worked out: The whole box got sold in a garage sale at some point; I was not informed until well after the fact.

Still, by that time, I was married and looking forward to my own children and the chance to play with their Legos. We did fine with the Duplo blocks (Duplo being the giant Lego blocks that are made for little hands) and we built up quite a collection of these (which we absolutely refused to share so that my grandchildren will have them). But when the time came for my kids to graduate from Duplo to Lego, Lego wasn't the same.

Lego was very different.

When I was a kid, the idea behind Lego was that you could build anything you want. When my kids were little, the Lego philosophy had degenerated to 'you can build anything we want.'

There may always have been Lego models; I don't think so, though. I think somebody built the Empire State Building (I remember a huge Lego Empire State Building in the toy department at Marshall Fields one Christmas) or the Statue of Liberty from Legos without instructions. But, even if there were models, the big sellers were the boxes of bricks.

And those boxes of bricks didn't exist when my kids were little. I looked everywhere for them. There were only models. We have a green Lego Statue of Liberty in the dining room still, a little dusty, and with a few of the pieces missing after being jostled from time to time down through the years. My wife bought it for Oldest Son. I hated it. He loved it -- until he was done with it.

After he built it, what else was there to do with it? Admire it? For how long?

So we didn't get Lego Millennium Falcons or any of the other models.

Now I must admit to a certain prejudice against models. My father tried to interest me in model making -- a standard hobby for boys in the 20th Century -- and my father continued making lots of models, even later in life (a lot of them ones I hadn't already ruined). He had the fine motor skills and patience necessary to build models. He had hopes of capping off his model making career by building a ship in a bottle. He never quite got to it.

When I tried to make a model airplane, on the other hand, the wings wound up on the same side of the fuselage, or at least out of alignment, and I usually glued my fingers together. I was a disaster. If I was supposed to break off a plastic strut here, I inevitably broke it off there. There was no model so simple I couldn't screw it up. I learned to hate model making. (You lose a little skin off your fingers each time you pull the glue off.)

So my feelings about model making generally may have colored my feelings toward Lego models in particular. But, if so, I was not alone. As the Smithsonian article relates, Lego sales were in decline during the late 20th Century. By the early 2000s, Lego was on the verge of being bought out by Mattel.

I wasn't following Lego's decline; my kids were largely grown by this point and their Lego window had closed. But, if I had known of Lego's near demise, I might have smiled a smile of secret satisfaction.

And then Lego found robots. And schools, even middle schools, found Legos to teach basic engineering principles by having robot competitions. The latest entry in Lego's robot reboot is Mindstorms EV3:

Mindstorms EV3 is a jumble of parts (nearly 600 separate elements) that can be plugged together many ways. The toy, which clocks in at $350 and will be in stores this fall, comes with 3-D interactive building instructions for 17 different bots that walk, talk and stalk. And, this being Lego, enterprising kids are encouraged to hack away and turn the components into whatever they can dream up.

Well, it's not exactly a box of bricks from which one can make anything yet... but it sure sounds like a giant step in the right direction. And, this time, the blocks can move.

It gives me something to look for at Christmastime when the grandkids start coming along in more quantity....

Payton Prep forfeits baseball game after parents refuse to let kids drive to Roseland on a Saturday night

Bee, I know you're going to think this is about sports, but it's not really. Nor is this really about race, but that's the way it's being reported here.

Walter Payton College Prep and Gwendolyn Brooks College Prep are two of the best, most prestigious high schools in Illinois. That's not my opinion; that's the verdict of the current U.S. News & World Report rankings. Payton checks in at #2, Brooks at #13. These are both Chicago Public Schools (indeed, seven of the top 20 in the state are CPS schools -- most of them, Payton and Brooks included, highly selective "magnet" schools).

Payton is located not far from the Loop, at 1034 N. Wells, in an area the Realtors call the Near North neighborhood, close to both the Gold Coast and River North neighborhoods. Brooks, on the other hand, is located at 250 E. 111th Street, about two miles east of I-57, in the Roseland neighborhood.

Roseland is increasingly in the news these days, and not in a good way. It is wracked by gang violence, shootings, drugs, and all manner of crime. You can get mugged near Payton on a Saturday night, too. Cabrini Green used to be just a couple of blocks away -- but that neighborhood is, objectively, far safer these days than Roseland.

The Brooks baseball team plays on its own field, on the school grounds. According to one account I saw, the field is literally locked away from its surrounding environs. Ninth Ward Ald. Anthony Beale, who happens to be an assistant coach on the Brooks team, says that Brooks has the nicest high school field in the City. Even if he is a Chicago alderman, on this point at least, I take him at his word. It looked pretty sweet on TV.

The story broke this way: Sunday morning it was reported that Payton forfeited its scheduled night game at Brooks because 'team parents' refused to let their kids venture into the Roseland neighborhood. The Payton coach was embarrassed. The Brooks coach was embarrassed -- and angry. Furious backtracking has been underway since.

We will probably never know exactly what happened. It seems, however, that a bus was supposed to take the team to and from the game -- which may or may not have been hastily arranged. It's been an awful spring around here, folks. Coaches can't reschedule all the rain-outs and freeze-outs and they are grasping at any opportunities they can to get their kids some playing time. It's quite possible that last-second bus arrangements might have fallen through.

Unless you've had kids who've played high school baseball you may not know what that means.

Let me tell you: Some parents would have been able to take their own kids and maybe a couple of others. But, on a Saturday night, in families with more than one kid, there may have been -- would likely have been -- conflicts. Who knows? Maybe some of the moms and dads had plans of their own. So that means that kids would be expected to get themselves there. To carpool. To drive to an unfamiliar, and dangerous, neighborhood, where kids can, and do, get killed because they looked like someone else. Or maybe just because they looked like they didn't belong.

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell, an African-American, wasn't happy about the situation, but, she wrote, "Given the steady stream of shootings and killings occurring on the South Side, I really can’t blame any parent for having concerns about a night game." She added:

I’m not proud to admit it, but I don’t travel certain streets at night when I have my grandson in the car.

Crime can happen anywhere. But by now, I have a good idea where I run the greatest risk.

Obviously, this is not something parents should have to worry about, but they do — especially when they are not familiar with the area.

Unfortunately, because of the increase in homicides that we experienced last year on the South Side, the entire area must seem like one big shooting gallery.

Mitchell writes that there were 13 shootings in Chicago this weekend, one resulting in a fatality, and most on the South and West Sides. "Although none of the shootings occurred in Roseland," she writes, "the entire South Side has been stigmatized by the gun violence."

I agree with Ms. Mitchell about the stigma that attaches to the entire South Side -- but the fact that none of this weekend's shootings were in Roseland is no more than a happy coincidence.

But at least Ms. Mitchell is trying not to see this controversy in terms of black and white. Simply calling this a black and white issue is overly simplistic, of course, and (although perhaps not just because it is the simplest) it is the the one adopted by the media generally: Brooks is in an African-American community, therefore Payton parents must be bigots for refusing to let their kids go play. A picture of the Payton team, gathered around their coach during a game Monday at Taft (in a largely white neighborhood on the Northwest Side), on page 10 of this morning's Sun-Times, subtly reinforces this view. The kids sure look white, at least from a distance. I'll bet some of them are.

But there is no such thing as a lily-white Chicago Public High School, and certainly not a magnet school. Every race and nationality is represented at Payton. If Brooks is predominantly African-American, it is a function of its location in such an overwhelmingly African-American area -- but I'd bet there are white kids there from Mt. Greenwood and Beverly, too. That makes it a little harder to just cry bigotry.

Image from this morning's Chicago Sun-Times

I'll also bet that, even if there aren't a lot of African-American kids on the Payton squad, there probably are a lot of Hispanic players. A lot of high school baseball teams in this area are heavily, if not predominantly, Hispanic. And appearances can be deceiving: My kids are half Cuban. Middle Son's high school catcher, a 6'4" behemoth who looks more like a Viking than anything else, is half Dominican. The picture that accompanies the on-line version of the page 10 story I just referenced shows Mayor Emanuel making nice with the Brooks players. Some of the kids are surely African-American, but -- again -- I'd bet money that the Brooks squad is heavily Hispanic, too.

Moreover, although I'm sure Payton students are drawn from all over Chicago, I'd guess that the majority may be native to the North Side. It is a fact of Chicago life that North Siders are cheerfully ignorant of anything south of Roosevelt -- Soldier Field and McCormick Place occasionally excepted -- just as many South Siders, white and black alike, are ignorant of anything north of Oak Street (North Avenue, perhaps, for the adventurous). I am a rarity among my fellow Chicagoans. I was born on the South Side and I've lived on the North and Northwest Sides. There aren't that many of us. So it's neither surprising nor conclusive evidence of racism if Payton parents plead unfamiliarity with the far South Side.

Sixty-six years after Jackie Robinson, white Payton parents weren't refusing to let their kids play against African-Americans. Parents, white and Hispanic alike, weren't comfortable allowing their kids to go to an unfamiliar, dangerous neighborhood on a Saturday night. Especially when they'd have to drive themselves. Is that really racism? Or is it prudence?

(Those who think that having a bus available would have solved everything need to consult the very politically incorrect police blog, Second City Cop. In SCC's coverage of this story, in NEWSFLASH! South Side Isn't Safe and in today's post, More Payton vs. Brooks Controversy, it is noted that school buses are sometimes targeted by gangbangers with guns.)

However, as the linked Sun-Times story notes, the game will finally be played this Saturday night, weather permitting. We can assume that the 5th and 22nd Police Districts will be employing surge tactics along 111th Street: Mayor Emanuel will insist that there be no incidents. The kids will be happy to play, as kids are. It'll take some time, though, for the alleged grown-ups to work through all this.

Long Suffering Spouse sees red

And not just metaphorically, either, although that was true as well.

She'd taken something off her classroom wall Friday during homeroom period, intending to replace it with something else. But there was something already there: Some scurrilous graffiti had been scrawled on the wall in indelible red Sharpie.

She immediately called her students to account. "Which one of you did this?" she demanded.

Naturally, no one admitted anything.

"Why do you think it was one of us?" huffed one student. Most of the school population rotates through my wife's classroom in any given week, but, as my wife reminded the students, she is present at all times.

"Well, you're not here at recess," theorized another student.

Long Suffering Spouse considered the point about a nanosecond. "That's true," she said, and it was. Ordinarily, no one is in the classroom at lunch or recess -- and Long Suffering Spouse keeps the classroom door locked. But, when the weather is inclement, the kids spend recess in their homerooms after lunch. It's rained a lot in Chicago in recent days. If April showers bring May flowers, we can expect a riotous floral outbreak in these parts in just a couple of weeks. "So who would be here during recess?" my wife asked, answering her own question when all the kids started looking down at the floor: "Only you."

"Well, someone could have come in here during recess."

"And then you would have all seen that person do this, right?"

My wife looked out over a classroom of heads staring intently at the floor.

"That's fine," she said, "if no one wants to tell me now, we can stay here after school until someone wants to talk."

It was a sullen group that returned for afternoon announcements. Everyone else was going home for the weekend; my wife was going to follow through and hold her students hostage. Meanwhile, though, they had decided on some other possible ways to divert suspicion.

"That's probably been there for years," ventured one theorist. After all... permanent ink, right?

Wrong. "I cleaned this classroom over Easter Break," Long Suffering Spouse responded. "I changed all the wall decorations, as you know. If it had been here before, I would have known. This is new. Now, will someone tell me who did this so we can all go home?"

An uncomfortable silence followed.

Actually, "silence" is not exactly the right word. Eighteen junior high kids are never truly silent. They fidgeted. They muttered to one another. ("We're never getting out of here," my wife overheard one whisper to a friend, "she stays late every day." "I know," the other hissed back. "She's still here most days when I come back for basketball practice.")

Many of the kids tried to get away on the basis of preexisting arrangements. "My mom's waiting in the parking lot," one said. "She can wait awhile," my wife said.

"But I've got a dental appointment!" one said, and, suddenly, so did five or six others. "I guess you'll all be late then," my wife said.

Time passed. At Greenwich, the worthies at the Royal Observatory probably counted the passage of no more than 10 or 15 minutes, but to the sixth and seventh and eighth graders in my wife's homeroom, a lifetime at least had ebbed away.

Finally one spoke. "If I say I did it, will you let us go?"

Long Suffering Spouse regarded the volunteer. She seemed an unlikely candidate; my wife doubted her guilt. Long Suffering Spouse thought that the crude printing was likely a boy's -- but, in this post-literate age, where handwriting is increasingly a lost art, it's harder and harder to tell a boy's writing from a girl's. Girls' cursive no longer necessarily has big balloon letters, much less hearts instead of dots over 'i's. These days, everyone's handwriting looks like a doctor's after a three-martini lunch. "Of course," my wife told me later, "no matter how many times I tell them, half of these kids fail to put their names on their papers. I'm forced to learn how to recognize individual printing and handwriting just to get the kids' stuff graded properly."

No, my wife was pretty certain that the volunteer was not the guilty party. She probably knew who did it; most of the kids in the room probably did, but the unwritten Code of Silence seemed to protect the miscreant. No one would snitch... but my wife was hoping peer pressure would succeed in forcing the guilty party to acknowledge the offense. "But did you do it?" my wife asked the girl who'd volunteered to take the rap.

"No."

"Then, no, I won't let you all go."

The kids made no effort to conceal their groans. "What if we all clean desks and blackboards from now to the end of the year?" asked one.

"I thought you don't like collective punishments," my wife answered. Yes, the topic has come up before. "Why don't you just tell me who did this instead?"

Eventually, technology defeated my wife, leaving her madder than ever.

It seems one of the little darlings was doing more than just avoiding eye contact by staring at the floor. She also surreptitiously texted her mother from the cell phone concealed by her purse, asking her mother to have her paged to the Principal's office. Several of her classmates watched her, wondering if it would work.

It did.

The child was paged to the Principal's office, and off she went, ecstatic to be released.

The Code of Silence which protected the graffiti artist did not, apparently, apply to escape attempts: A number of the girl's classmates finked on her before the door was fully shut.

The spell was broken anyway. "This isn't over," my wife warned, as she released the rest of the group, just a couple of minutes later. "I will find out who did this and there will be consequences."

I got an earful of those consequences not much later: Long Suffering Spouse was fit to be tied. And she was angry all over again this morning. To my knowledge, however, the perpetrator still remains at large.