“I hear that you made something of yourself.”

I didn’t really understand that statement as a conversational gambit.  I must have looked blank, because she reworded it. 

“I hear you’re successful. You’re a doctor?” Not a statement, that, but a question.

Yes, I am a doctor, so does that make me successful?  On some scales, perhaps.  I don’t think of myself as successful—accomplished, yes.  Educated, most definitely, but have I attained the goals I want to attain?  Not all of them.

Unfortunately, I was at a venue that forced me to face how I felt about my life.

High school reunion. All those years. How do I feel about the experience now that it’s over? A little let down, I think.  Not that seeing people was a let down. I reconnected with some sweet people I was friendly with 30 years ago. Most are doing well, and I’m happy to see that. They are content with their lives, successful at what they do, and mostly healthy, and that makes me glad. 

There were other people there who didn’t talk to me at all.  No change. They didn’t talk to me 30 years ago, or 40 for that matter.  Most of them I went to school with from kindergarten on.  Geographical proximity should not be a reason to have to like someone, then or now, nor is it a reason to care what people think.

That’s the problem, though. Once upon a time, I did care, very much, what these people thought, and I let it upset me to the point that it affected the quality of my life. Some of those people bullied me something awful, and did pretty much up till sometime in my junior year.  By then, I started to grow up a bit, find my purpose, succeed at things others weren’t doing.  The summer before that year I was blessed with a trip to England, staying with an aunt and uncle.  Being off on my own in London every day helped me grow up and gain confidence.  Senior year I got very sick, so sick that I was initially told I would die within months.  Facing one’s own mortality at the age of 17 puts bullying into perspective very quickly.  Dealing with horrible pain helps one focus.  All of a sudden the opinion of people I didn’t care about fell far down on my list of things to worry about.  Not a method of dealing with bullying that I can endorse or recommend, but it worked for me.

So seeing many of those people, revisiting those feelings, was odd.  I don’t care—I am truly disinterested in their opinion about me and my life. (Unless, of course, they think I’m beautiful, witty, accomplished and interesting; then, please, tell me.  But somehow, I think that won’t be happening.)

Even with all of the personal emotions running around in my head, I tended to think about the event in a cultural context.

Americans seem to have a strong sense of nostalgia. Why do we hold class reunions? Could it be that we’re more mobile than many other cultures? We move a lot, so there’s more of a need for a homecoming.  I currently live about 50 miles from where I grew up. But there were people there from California, Florida, North Carolina and who knows where else? One of my best friends came from seven hours away, and she still lives in New York State.

People in other countries have reunions, but they seem bigger here, but that sounds American, too.  Bigger is better.  And ours seem more formalized. In other countries it didn’t seem as if people needed a zero in the years since graduation to get together—but we like the symmetry of 10, 20, 30.

I don’t like to look back. I think most people, deep down, didn’t love high school.  How could they? It happens right smack dab in the worst part of hormone hell.  We’re spotty, awkward, gauche, immature and confused, and that’s the best of us.  We’re tribal little beasts—enjoying being part of a clique, shunning those outside it.  As with many high schools in America, ours was dominated by the people who played sports—the jocks.  I was not a jock.  I was a nothing—I hung around with other non-jocks, but I was different even from many of those friends. 

Looking back, I can understand why.  I am the writer geek.  As genial as we all are, by nature we tend to stand on the outside and look in at life.  I wasn’t a loner, but I was separate, an observer.  And I think I scared some people.  I was smart, in honors classes, and a lot of my friends were not in the same classes.  Those honors classes were probably full of misfits and outsiders, though I was so busy being a misfit to notice other’s discomfort.  Back then there was no “geek chic”. We hadn’t been made “cool” thanks to films like Superbad and Napoleon Dynamite.

No, bad there we were just odd, and odd was bad.

I guess I should thank many of my classmates.  They prepared me well for a life lived as “Other” during my travels. And I think one of the reasons I enjoy living abroad is that I am odd, but when living abroad, that oddness is chalked up to my American-ness, so it’s exotic.  When I’m living in America, I’m just odd.

No real analysis here.  I just wanted to share the oddness that is a class reunion.

Sorry that I’m AWOL (though you may not be). During the semester, it’s difficult for me to carve out time to write. I really need to become independenty wealthy so that I can write full time! But in the meantime, it’s catch as catch can.

Having trick or treaters made me think of all those Halloweens abroad, missing the fun and the costumes.

Enjoy it wherever you are, and stay safe!

Last night, President Obama gave a 40 minute speech to the Congress making a plea for his health care plan and vowing to be the last President to deal with the crisis.

Overall, the president kicked some Congressional butt, called liars liars and cleared up the confusion that has reigned for many Americans, myself included.  This is the first time I feel like I have a clear picture of what is being proposed.

He clearly listed the points of his proposals and pointed out the lies and rumors put about by the competition.

He even told us the projected cost of the project over the next 10 years–$900 billion.  Sounds like a lot, but “less than we have spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and less than the tax cuts for the wealthiest few Americans that Congress passed at the beginning of the previous administration.”

He also warned that he won’t “waste time” on political games nor will he allow fear mongers to muddy the waters.  It was encouraging to see a show of backbone from him.  Too many times in the recent months it’s looked like the president was holding back from showing his mettle.

He ended the speech quiet brilliantly by reminding Americans of what makes us Americans:

One of the unique and wonderful things about America has always been our self-reliance, our rugged individualism, our fierce defense of freedom and our healthy skepticism of government. And figuring out the appropriate size and role of government has always been a source of rigorous and, yes, sometimes angry debate. That’s our history.

He quoted a letter from Teddy Kennedy and mentioned how some Americans thought Kennedy had a passion for big government for the sake of big government.  But the president countered that Kennedy’s motivation was always based in a large-heartedness–a concern and care for others, and that’s something shared by all Americans:

That large-heartedness — that concern and regard for the plight of others — is not a partisan feeling. It’s not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character — our ability to stand in other people’s shoes; a recognition that we are all in this together, and when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand; a belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgment that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise.

When put like that, it makes anyone fighting against health care reform look mean-spirited.

And the president was careful to give credit to Republicans on more than one point–to John McCain for his ideas, to the Bush Administration, to the Republican party’s push for limiting malpractice claims.

I’m sure some of my Republican friends may beg to differ, but I thought he tried hard to make this look like a bipartisan effort blocked by extremists on both sides of the political spectrum–the difference being that the people on the Left were called “progressives” instead of Democrats–though, yes, I admit, the Republicans took more hits than the Progressives.  Of course, that’s Washington for you.

But his point is that Democrats and other people on the Left holding out for national health or nothing are also jeopardizing the chances for health care reform.

For those who missed it, the NY Times has posted an interactive video of the speech along with transcript and commentary here.

One major drawback for me was that there was too much self-applause and self-congratulation on the part of Congree for my tastes.  Too many standing ovations, especially since nothing has been done yet.

Clap when the job seekers have jobs, when the businesses thrive, when the homeowners don’t default on their mortgages, not when the government promises to help.  Clap when we have some meaningful reform on the health care issue.

I do understand that speeches to Congress are political theater.  No one was standing because he or she supports the President.  It’s theater for the voters back home.  “See me stand?  This is good.  See me sit and scowl? This is bad.” This is all part of the political game, and it has been since the very first Congress convened, but it’s tiresome.

Of course, Rep Joe Wilson probably shot himself in the foot with his outburst of “You lie.” He broke protocol beyond the Pale, and what’s worse, he’s wrong.

It’s quite clear from this blog’s past posts that I do support President Obama, but I like to flatter myself by thinking that I’m not a blind follower–I listen, I weigh his words, I think for myself.  And I encourage all of my readers to do the same.  It’s the American way, after all.

As the president pointed out, “Our collective failure to meet this challenge — year after year, decade after decade — has led us to the breaking point.” And I think Americans are at a breaking point, at least when it comes to patience with this matter.

But the facts are scary. “We are the only democracy — the only advanced democracy on Earth — the only wealthy nation — that allows such hardship for millions of its people. There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage.”

We are a wealthy nation. Some people call us a Christian nation.  Do wealthy people, people who call themselves Christian, allow others to go without health care?

Well, yes, obviously.  People are afraid to give up the freedom that the president talked about.  They are more afraid of paying more money or losing insurance benefits they already have.  Thirty million people sounds like a lot, but it’s less than 10% of the population.  That means 90% of Americans do have health care.  Put like that, it doesn’t sound too bad.

But 30 million is a lot, percentages bedamned. And to stop change, people have been reverting to fear mongering and lies–the worst of Washington, as the president noted.

But what we’ve also seen in these last months is the same partisan spectacle that only hardens the disdain many Americans have towards their own government. Instead of honest debate, we’ve seen scare tactics. Some have dug into unyielding ideological camps that offer no hope of compromise. Too many have used this as an opportunity to score short-term political points, even if it robs the country of our opportunity to solve a long-term challenge. And out of this blizzard of charges and counter-charges, confusion has reigned.

Hopefully people watched or listened to the speech, or at least paid attention to some of the commentary.  Technically speaking, it was a good speech.  As a former public speaking teacher, I’d give it an A.

But at the end, it was just a speech. Nothing is set in stone.  The proposals for bills are just that–proposals.  The fate of American health care reform drags on.

“People are very open-minded about new things – as long as they’re exactly like the old ones.” ~~Charles Kettering

The health care debate has been raging all summer, and lucky me, I’ve been ignoring it.  I’ve been too busy working to pay attention, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care.  I very much care, as my son and I are part of the over 46 million Americans without health insurance.  I haven’t been able to find full time work for the past year, so I’ve been working three part time jobs.  That keeps the roof over our heads and the bare minimum bills paid. I pay the car insurance (because I can’t get out of my lease), but I can’t afford private health insurance.  I make too much for Medicaid, but now that my son is over 18, he can apply for coverage.  And now, thanks to my strong union, I will be eligible for health care through my employer in the fall.

But in the time I spent overseas, I lived in two countries with national health and one with mandatory health insurance.  Taiwan and Sweden were the national health countries, and in Switzerland, insurance is mandatory. If one isn’t covered through an employer, there is an affordable option available through the government.

Sweden is often held up as the exemplar for national health, and while I wouldn’t go that far, I can say that in most instances, it was fine.  My son is an epileptic, and as a child under 18, all of his medical care was covered.  When we came to America, even with the insurance I had the first year, my co-pay was over $300 on an office visit and some blood work.  And he’s supposed to see the doctor twice a year.

Of course, on the flip side of that, my taxes in Sweden ran close to 50%.  Through taxes, I paid for the care there, as well, but when my husband and I were out of work, my son still got the care he needed.  I checked some policies, and private health insurance for myself alone would cost about 25% of my yearly income; for the two of us, about 44% of my income.  Add my taxes to 44% and I’d be paying well over 50% of my income, so cheaper in Sweden.

One major problem with the Swedish system is that it’s overtaxed. Unemployment is high—about 10%–and with an ageing population, there’s too much going out and not enough coming in. And Sweden only has a population of nine million people.  Administrative costs are relatively low.

Swedes also register with the government and are assigned doctors, whether you like them or trust them or not.  I was very lucky with my son’s doctor, but terribly unfortunate with the “specialist” I was assigned.  To be perfectly blunt, she was inept at treating my disease and prescribed something no longer prescribed, in fact, something contraindicated.  When I balked, so did she and my care went downhill from there.

I can’t see Americans enjoying registering with the government and being assigned doctors.  According to the White House, this isn’t even something on the table, so I can relax about that.

America has fine health care, but it’s just not affordable.  And one thing alone is not going to fix the mess we’re in.  America’s health care woes are caused by many factors: profit-driven insurance and pharmaceutical companies, foolish laws, core ideals about personal responsibility and American’s poor health habits.  And frankly, labels don’t help. Am I left or right? Am I socialist or capitalist? Am I liberal or conservative? Throw out the labels and just think.

Insurance rates are high for doctors.  People sue for huge damages, so doctors have to have the insurance.  On the other hand, I’ve seen firsthand the devastation that can happen to families in which there has been a medical mistake.  Friends who are unable to sue for damages because their state has a statute of limitations have faced bankruptcy while caring for their son who incorrectly treated following his premature birth.

But the insurance industry in this country is not a nice group of kindly folks, no matter what image their PR firms try to show.  Michael Moore’s Sicko was typical Moore showboating, but it did point out some hard, if obvious, truths.  People in healthcare shouldn’t be profit-driven. But in a capitalist society, that’s how it works.

Insurance companies lobbied for laws so that doctors could not charge people without insurance lower fees.  They got the law. Sounds fair at first glance, but in reality, doctors rarely get the billed amount sent to insurance companies.  They are usually sent a percentage.  So when I walk in the door without insurance, I have to pay the full amount, but the person next to me, with insurance, pays a co-pay, and the insurance company pays “the rest”. But the insurance company doesn’t always pay all of it, so I’m stuck paying a larger price. Also insurance groups often get “group rates,” something the non-insured can’t get.

Insurance companies have also pretty much killed off the idea of a lone doctor practicing out of his basement.  When I was growing up, and I’m not yet 50, my doctor practiced from home, as did most of the doctors in town.  And I grew up in suburban New York, so not exactly the “boonies”.  When I moved back to my mother’s in the 90s, my same old doctor was still practicing.  He was a wonderful physician, and he apologized that an office visit was now $35.  The doctor I’d had just a few years earlier in “upstate” New York charged $50 for a routine office visit. This week I paid $95 for an office visit for my son and was shocked it was so low.

One reason for the cost is that now thanks to insurance companies, doctors spend small fortunes on paperwork alone. Couple this with sky high malpractice insurance premium, and you have a recipe for disaster.

A friend of mine who is a veterinarian has complained about the mark-up medical doctors give to supplies—vets and “human” docs use the same materials in most instances.  She has a point, but then I thought of the costs associated with running a physician’s office.  Most people don’t have pet insurance—the number is growing, but it’s considerably less than human insurance—so there’s no one who has to do that paperwork.  And vets do have malpractice insurance, but as much as we love our pets, they aren’t human.  There are no lost wages or multi-million dollar settlements made on pet care errors.  So for physicians, the cost of insurance has to be covered somehow.

I really don’t mind physicians getting a large salary.  Most made years of sacrifice and paid through the nose for their educations, and they hold my life in their hands.  I would love to be making what they are (the average US general practitioner, internist or pediatrician makes just under $150,000 a year according to the website payscale.com) since I have as much education, and I hold the future of the country in my hands, but that’s another story.  Of course, that’s the average salary.  That means that there are selfless physicians working for $30K in America’s rural and urban poverty centers while there are profit-driven folks raking in obscene amounts. But that’s capitalism.

Doctors today are major employers—they have nurses, LPNs, office staff and so on.  Physicians have to pay salaries and often benefits, as well.  All that is reflected in the price of a visit. I get that, as well.

Many states also succumb to pressure groups, making insurance companies cover all sorts of things on minimum plans.  Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote a very enlightening piece on this “Healthcare: Do we need the Lexus?” that I highly recommend.  Let me include one very eye-opening paragraph:

Forty years ago, there were only a handful of benefits that health policies were required by law to cover. Today, the Council for Affordable Health Insurance identifies an astonishing 1,961 mandated benefits and providers. While any one mandate may not add appreciably to the price of an insurance policy, in the aggregate their cost is huge. The Cato Institute, citing the Congressional Budget Office, estimates that state regulations increase the cost of health insurance by 15 percent. And since “each percentage-point rise in health insurance costs increases the number of uninsured by 300,000 people,’’ as scholars John Cogan, Glenn Hubbard, and Daniel Kessler point out, it is clear that the proliferation of insurance mandates is one reason why millions of Americans are uninsured.

Frankly, if the insurance mess was cleaned up, there would be a lot more affordable private insurance that would be available for people to purchase.

I haven’t even treated pharmaceutical companies here.  One example: my son’s epilepsy medicine costs me about $170/month.  I just discovered, after 23 months in this country, that the generic version is less than $12/month. Don’t get me started on advertising drugs on the TV and in magazines.  I am a very educated, pro-active patient, I research (and not on Wikipedia, but in medical databases—I’m a doctor, too.  Not a medical doctor, but research is research).  Americans for the most part have wised up about the over prescribing of antibiotics, but we still love to medicate ourselves.  I’m not anti-medicine. But I do think we overprescribe and just generally overmedicate. Learning about all the new drugs while watching the after dinner TV shows is too much.  I went to the pharmacy in Switzerland to get children’s cold medicine for my son and the pharmacist handed me some homeopathic tablets. They worked fine and were cheap.

Alternate treatments are marginalized here.  I’ve ingested thousands and thousands of dollars of harsh drugs that have left me with permanent side effects because I have stage IV endometriosis.  In Sweden I tried acupuncture, and it worked. I was off pain medications for years thanks to that treatment.  It’s not for everyone, but it works.  My American doctors laughed at the notion (so did my Swedish doctor, but once I had my run in with her, I was on my own for health care).  My Swiss doctor, who is a world famous researcher of endometriosis, prescribed hypnotherapy and massage therapy, as well as herbal treatments, all of which provided relief.  On a whole, Swiss doctors, along with many other European doctors, are not threatened by blending traditions.

And finally, the thing I am seeing get in the way of discussion so that we can’t even make a small change is America’s core values.  As many have correctly pointed out, health care is not something to be provided for by the government. The Constitution and Bill of Rights don’t mention health care at all.  Of course, in 1776, health care was a pretty rudimentary item. Catastrophic medical bills weren’t an issue.

America also likes to pride itself on being a caring country. Some people claim that we are a Christian country, and while I don’t agree, our culture, like all of Western culture, is solidly based on Judeo-Christian-Islamic values (all three are sons of Abraham, following the same basic rules given to Moses).  Just about any religious value system includes caring for the sick, so that’s at odds with our capitalist values on some levels.

Of course, we say that people have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I guess health care falls under the life part.  So it can get sticky.

When we discuss issues that involve core values, things can get heated.  We see this by the knee jerk reactions on both sides of the discussion.  People are no longer discussing health care—they are discussing what it means to be an American.  They don’t articulate it, but that’s what it is.  In America, the word “socialist” is a bad word, but we have Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare.

As you can tell by the previous 2000 words, this is a complex issue.  As the New York Times notes in its helpful article “A Primer on the Details of Health Care Reform:”

Each side hopes to win ground by boiling down one of the most complex policy discussions in history into digestible nuggets.

Not only are the sides turning this complex discussion into sound bites, most Americans seem to be perfectly happy with looking no further than those sound bites.  When I started really looking into President Obama’s health care reform, I found it confusing and amorphous. And I have 20 years of experience reading freshman compositions.  I am not being facetious. Most students today have incredibly weak logic skills, yet I read their papers and ferret out meaning.  Before I was a teacher I was a legislative correspondent. That’s a fancy term for being a reporter in the state capitol, reporting on legal stuff.  I’ve read more bills and laws than most non-lawyers.  I’m not a neophyte at this.

At the end of the day, I do wish there was a way I could afford health care for my son.  I don’t mind paying premiums at all, but I can not afford to pay 44% of my salary to cover us both.  As President Obama rightly points out, health care costs in this country are out of control. Something should be done.  Now we have to see exactly what gets put on the table. It all seems unformed still.

One final point: Americans have to take responsibility for their health. Americans are some of the fattest people in the world, and even many who are thin have deplorable diets.  I’ve written about this before, what and how Americans eat, but we need to take control of our lives.  When I am a rich philanthropist, my ultimate goal in life, I want to teach nutritious cooking to young people and young mothers. And I mean real nutrition, not the government-sponsored ideas of nutrition.  I’m overweight myself, and I work at getting thinner, but I do know that my diet is relatively better than the average American.

Drunk driving is also something Americans do more than most places I’ve ever lived.  In Sweden, a country known for massive drinking, people simply don’t drink and drive.  Not just because there are stricter laws; driving while drunk is stupid, and almost every Swede I’ve ever met at parties, where I was the designated driver, has asked why Americans are stupid enough to drink and drive.  Answering that we have the freedom to do what we want just doesn’t sound right.  How many millions does drunk driving cost in medical bills per year?

I was researching today and found this quote. Obviously, education problems have been around for a while. This is another problem with our system:

Modern cynics and skeptics… see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing. ~John F. Kennedy

Better pay = incentive for better teachers.

Think about it.

Some much needed changes to American society have had unexpected consequences for education in our country.  Both feminism and educational reform opened doors and made America a stronger country, but there have definitely been negative side effects to both.

The feminist movement opened doors to women that had been closed and allowed us to enter fields that had previously been the domain of men.  And we entered those domains in droves.  But pre-feminism, one of the few career choices available to women was teaching, so the best and the brightest went into teaching as it was one of their few options for a career. There was nursing, of course, and a few hearty souls entered “male” fields, but that was statistically rare.  Since teaching had become a “woman’s field,” even then the pay was lousy and the conditions weren’t much better,  it was an enviable position for most women because it was one of the few that offered them a steady income and a modicum of respect.

When I was growing up I was taught by a number of these women—brilliant minds who held themselves and us students to the highest possible standards. Yes, a number of them were old battle axes who made me crazy, but I managed a pretty good education, though even by the late 60s, things were getting spotty.

Because in the 60s, women had more options.  By the time I entered college in the late 70s, it was much more common that the best and the brightest women students majored in pre-law, pre-med, business or accounting.  I had no intention of being a teacher when I was in school—I eventually became an English major, but I originally planned on becoming a medical doctor.  And no, I didn’t flunk out of my bio major.  Much to my mother’s dismay, I decided I didn’t want to spend so many years in school and residence programs and really wanted to be a reporter.  Or maybe go to law school, which remained an option until I finished my MA and, on the advice of lawyer colleagues, decided to go for a PhD in English instead. (On a personal note, there are days I second guess that decision, I must admit!  And the real irony is I ended up in school longer than I would have had I just gone to med school!)

Of course, some of the best and brightest were also education majors, but with so many more options that could lead to lucrative careers, it did make a change in the demographics of who went into teaching.  At my undergrad college, for many of my friends teaching was the default major.  I went to a women’s college with fantastic nursing and physical therapy programs, especially.  They were incredibly competitive programs, so many were dropped out of the program for earning grades lower than a B.  This could happen as late as junior year, so the education department to the rescue.  In fact, of my college friends who are teachers today, I think only one started out with that major, and actually, I’m not sure about her.

Many of those education majors are no longer teaching in a classroom.  Some went on to do fine in the classroom, but others got the degree and used it to get a job for which they were more suited..

But in terms of grades, things started to look bleak for teachers.  On a whole, education majors have some of the lowest SAT scores and class averages and ranks from high school, and their GPAs in college are lower than students in other professional and pre-professional majors.  I remember reading about this when it came out, so I did a quick search to find the information I wanted.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) compiles loads of statistics on education. The NCES “Digest of Education Statistics” Table 136 shows average SAT scores by student characteristics for 2001. Students who select education as their major have the lowest SAT scores of any major (964). Math majors have the highest (1174).

It’s the same story when education majors finish college and take tests for admission to graduate schools. In the case of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), education majors have an average score that’s the lowest (467) of all majors except for sociology majors (434). Putting this in perspective, math majors score the highest (720), followed closely by economics in third place (625). (Walter Williams, “Educational Ineptitude, Con’t” Jewish World Review, May 19 2004)

This means that weaker students become teachers with weaker abilities.  This is a recipe for disaster.  But this was only part one of the recipe.

Educational reforms have often been double-edged swords.  While reforms have made our educational system less rigid and more student orientated and created better thinkers, some have frankly backfired.  Somewhere along the line, it was decided that rote memorization was a bad thing.  We were no longer required to memorize poetry and other “useless” things for the sake of memorization, which is fine in theory, but this led to lack of practice in the skill of memorization itself.  And it’s pretty useful when learning geography, foreign languages and math.  When I moved overseas, I realized that one thing many Asians students had on their American peers was incredible memory skills.  Of course, they focused too much on memorization and not enough on thinking, and their American peers excelled at that, but there has to be a happy medium.  Somehow we managed to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Let me give you an example.  When I was in grammar school, it was decreed that grammar need no longer be taught.  Language arts would focus on allowing students to express themselves well.  Students would be able to intuit grammar naturally.  That’s all well and good for a large part of grammar, but in English, some rules just need to be learned and memorized, especially for students who want to be successful academic writers in higher education.  And knowing grammar is incredibly useful when trying to learn a foreign language in school.  How can I figure out Spanish sentence structure if I don’t know the difference between a direct object and an indirect object?

There are many theories of holistic language learning, and I’ve “picked up” languages in my time just from being in a country or being around speakers for an extended amount of time.  There’s definitely something to that.  But I also know that when I learn languages, and I have formally learned three foreign languages in my time, there comes a time when I just have to learn grammar from either a book or a knowledgeable person in order to read more complex writing or even write notes that sound like they came from an adult, not a fourth grader.

Granted, most Americans, even educated Americans, can live long and happy lives without learning grammar, but people who go on to teach really should have a clue.  And I don’t mean just English teachers.  All teachers are role models, and all teachers are responsible for students being able to communicate clearly and accurately.  And when a teacher sends a letter home to parents that is riddled with grammatical errors, there’s something wrong.  In the past, I have received those letters from my son’s teachers!

I remember in college seeing a poster made by students in the education department that contained a glaring punctuation error.  The poster read YOUR’S instead of YOURS.  I was frightened for education even then.

The person who wrote that poster has been teaching kids for over 25 years now.  I’m sure that kids she taught are now teaching kids themselves.  Hopefully somewhere down the line their students learned to use an apostrophe properly, but based on the papers I receive from college students now, too many didn’t.

I teach freshman English, but the course I teach is very different than the version I took 30 years ago.  I now teach my freshmen skills I was taught in middle school.  I teach how to outline and how to have a thesis statement and a topic sentence.  I teach how to find the subject and the verb in a sentence.  I have to teach these things because too many of my students are writing papers that are so weak that I don’t even understand what they are trying to tell me.  And they are native speakers!  Even worse, the students I teach were often A and B students in their high schools.

Entropy is more than just a theory.

And I am not just a grumpy English teacher here.  If I am teaching basic skills in Freshman English everything is being pushed along.  The skills students need to acquire in upper level classes aren’t being learned.  And being able to communicate clearly is pretty much one of the main reasons we educate people, isn’t it?

It literally scares me that my Taiwanese graduate students in English can write better papers in English than my graduate students in America, both in terms of critical thinking skills (at which we supposedly excel) and mechanical language skills.  Our democracy depends on educated thinkers to survive.

True story: a few years ago I applied for a position at a major law firm.  The firm wanted to hire an English professor full time to teach its recently hired lawyers how to write clearly and properly.  Neophyte lawyers who had gone through a four-year undergraduate course, a three-year law course, passed the Bar exam, but they still couldn’t write clear and error-free prose.  When the use of a comma can radically change the meaning of a sentence, one would hope someone in law would know how to use it correctly!

The philosopher George Santayana writes, “Grammar, rhetoric, and logic enrich enormously the phenomenon of being alive.”  The first time I read that, I thought, “That is the biggest piece of hyperbole I’ve ever read.”  Now I’m not so sure.  Grammar, rhetoric and logic are the three components of excellent communication skills.  Of the three, the only thing still taught on a regular basis is rhetoric, probably the least important of the three.  We now teach the other two skills at the college level, so no wonder students can’t get a decent job without a college diploma.

This leads me to the point I wish to discuss in my next installment: when did vocational training become bad and college become imperative?

Teachers.  For the most part I have nothing but the highest regard for my fellow teachers.  It is a demanding profession; we get little respect and far too little pay for our efforts; we work with a population that while delightful some of the time, can be little terrors at others. And yes, I include college students in that population.  Ever have to deal with a surly (and smelly) hung over young man who doesn’t want to be in class and get his work criticized? We do.  But over the years, I have found that there are three types of people who go into teaching in America: the true believers, the ones who like the summers off and the short day, and the ones who landed there because they flunked out of their first major and needed something to major in fast so that they could graduate on time.

I don’t want to talk about the true believers here, who believe that theirs is a sacred duty or at the very least a vocation.  They are the teachers who have often unofficially taught peers since childhood, but have often struggled with the desire for a different career.  They could easily be in a more lucrative career, but something always calls them back to teaching.  They almost inevitably do a great job, and sacrifice and go above and beyond the call of duty each and every day of their careers.  We’ve all had a teacher like that, and if we’re lucky, we’ve had more than one.

But let me cast a glance at the other two groups.

The teachers who are in the field for the hours are a mixed group. Many are women who want to have more time for motherhood and planned on a career to accommodate that long before a baby became a reality.  They usually enjoy children and take their development seriously.  On the whole, these are good teachers.   Sometimes, though, this group can include people who want to have a totally different career, usually in the arts, so they teach as the “day job” until they attain success in their other field.  For some, that happens and they leave the field.  But if that never happens, this group can turn nasty and bitter, but on the whole they can be competent.

But then comes that last group—and they can be scary. I knew a lot of people who followed this path into teaching.  By this point in time, I’ve taught many of them, as well. Some of them openly hate children, yet teach or will teach elementary school.   I can understand the necessity of finding a major for graduation, but it scares me that some majors are stricter than others.  If someone is not competent to be a nurse or a physical therapist or an accountant, why should we let them teach?  One could argue that a teacher’s mistake won’t kill you or cause you problems with the IRS, but that’s a myopic view of reality.  Poor teachers create students with weak skills.  To use a hoary chestnut, teachers shape the future.

You do see where I’m going with this.

All of us with children have stories to tell about poor teachers.  Many of us have bad childhood memories as well.  To be fair to the profession, we all have stories to tell of idiot doctors, lawyers, car mechanics and insurance people as well, but idiots in those professions usually only damage one person at a time.  A bad teacher can inflict long term damage on a whole classroom of kids in one academic year.  And unless a teacher is grossly incompetent or oversteps the boundaries of propriety, there’s not much one can do about the situation.

Of course, we can always raise standards for teachers.  Most states now have tests for teachers.  One of my former students, a very bright young man who belongs in the first group, just took his state exams and found them shockingly easy.  I’ve heard from other students that they were far too difficult.  They only passed by luck and a prayer.  One student even asked me why the need for the difficult exams?  She was planning on teaching sixth grade.  Why did she have to know this stuff?  I hear things like this, and I am disheartened.

Frankly, I have no easy answers or quick fixes.  One major thing that must be done to fix American education is to change American attitudes toward education.  I’ve written about this before, but as long as this county pays lip service to respecting teachers while treating teachers like second rate professionals, it will continue to get far too many second rate professionals in the field.

Americans point to Japanese students, Chinese students, Indian students and ask, “Why can’t our students be as good?  Why can’t our schools be as successful?”  I answer, “Look at how these societies treat their teachers.”  There is a clear and direct correlation between teacher quality and student quality.  Great teachers bring out the best in students.  We see this in our own schools, so why can’t people make the next step in the logic? Better teachers means better students.

It’s actually a very small number of teachers in this country who are ill equipped to be in the field, but sadly, it is a larger number than in other professions.

Unfortunately, I’m not done with teachers, and so more on them in the next installment of my views on American education tomorrow.

For a while now, I’v e been threatening to write about the state of education in America.  Well, I’m geared up and actually have some time.  But before I start writing about the schools, I have to say something about the people the schools service: parents and children.  And from the title of this blog, you can probably tell I don’t have great things to say.

For those who haven’t heard the terms, these are the new descriptors for today’s parents and children.  Helicopter parents are parents who hover around their children, and in the process cushion every blow, ward off every potentially painful situation.  Helicopter parents are the ones who are up at 2AM “helping” their kids with school projects, helping being code for doing the kids’ projects.

Hothouse flowers are the kids who result from helicopter parents.  They are beautiful, pampered and do just fine in the rarefied, protective environment of their hothouses.  But once they are exposed to the harsh realities of life, once they meet any kind of hardship, they give up—they fall apart under pressure.  When I was a kid this kind of kid was called a brat who was spoiled rotten, but there are so many of them now they have a less “damaging” moniker.

Before I get too far into this, I do want to say that not all parents and kids fall into these categories.  In my experience, I find on many levels these roles are class markers.  My students in NYC community colleges are pretty uniformly free of helicopter parents and most are not hothouse flowers.  Their parents tend to be working far too many hours to have time to hover—these kids are more likely to be latchkey kids who’ve been working for years before they get to college, even if they are still only 18.  As a result of this, I find this group much easier to teach.  Sure, they have terrible study skills and know nothing about how to succeed in college, but that can be learned more quickly than learning to lose a sense of entitlement.

As a college professor, I get to avoid parents for the most part.  Once a kid is over 18 it doesn’t matter who’s footing the bill.  The kid is an adult in the eyes of the law, and I’m not allowed to discuss certain topics with parents.  And it’s usually only in cases of extreme emergency that I ever really deal with parents on classroom issues—when a student is in the hospital, parents will call to tell me, but that’s it.  I love talking to parents at school events like plays and sports games, but that’s strictly social chit chat.

But friends who teach at higher ranked private schools than I do have horror stories to share.  At one school, the rule about plagiarism (stealing the intellectual property of someone else and claiming it as one’s own) are clear.  If your teacher catches it, there’s a mandatory meeting between the student, the teacher and the dean.  A friend called one student on the carpet and before the meeting got a call from the dean.  The student’s parents and their lawyer were demanding to attend the meeting.  Now I don’t know about you, but if my son told me he was in trouble for plagiarizing in school, my response would not to be to bring in the lawyer.  It would be to metaphorically (if not physically) hit said kid upside the head.  How dare he cheat!  But not these parents (who sadly are not the only ones).  No, these parents are teaching their kid if you break a rule and get caught, make sure you bring in help to bail you out.

The subtext of that lesson is: it’s okay to cheat as long as you don’t get caught.

Now really, the first time a kid gets caught plagiarizing, the penalty is a slap on the wrist—a scary meeting with the school authority to throw a little reality into the seriousness of what they are doing and that’s it!  Helicopter parents don’t want their kids to face consequences that might hurt them down the road, but that means the kids aren’t learning the lessons they need to learn.  But the lessons these parents are teaching are much worse.

The bottom line is if you don’t let your kids fail when the stakes are low, how will they handle failure when the stakes are much higher?

And schools are feeling the pressure from these parents.  All of my syllabi are very clear on plagiarism.  If you do it in my class, you will fail.  Depending on the level of offense, you will fail either the assignment or the class.  Well, two students were caught cheating on their midterm.  My first response was the throw them out of the class permanently, but I rethought that and decided that both would get a Zero grade on the exam.  I thought that was more than fair considering I had repeated my warnings against cheating right up to the moment of the test being given.

I mean, really? Do I have to tell someone that it is wrong to cheat on a test?

Well, the head of my program, the one who has to take the flak from parents and higher ups, “recommended” that I just deduct 20-30 points from their exam grade because a zero would be rather harsh.  So I did.  Both failed the exam by a few points, but a grade in the 50s doesn’t quite damage a final grade as nicely as a big fat zero will.  In another school, I was talking to my dean about failing a student who was totally unprepared for the level of work we were doing in class.  I was told that I could not fail that student.  End of story.  That student was to pass.

And people wonder why I am disgusted with my life’s work.

Hothouse flowers are funny to have in class though.  They provide cynics like me with endless hours of entertainment.  Students who miss deadlines expect me to accept their work no questions asked.  When they receive grades they deem unacceptable, they demand the right to do it over.  When they fail quizzes because they did not do the required reading, they want “extra credit” work so that they get a good grade in the class.  Ah, the laughs I get from these demands.  My favorite is when they are failing through sheer laziness, so they drop the course.  That way they don’t hurt their GPAs.

Grades are also a bone of contention with hothouse flowers.  They are above average in every way, so they deserve above average grades.  In fact, I have yet to find a student who considers him or herself average in any way.  In fact, while I’ve been away, Americans have become a country of extremes—above average students (according to my students, a B- is a bad grade) or failures.  A C grade means average work.  There are no averages, no C students, any more.  Well, I actually give students C grades.  As a result, I am known as a “really hard grader” (that’s the kindest way to put it).  Often it’s not put that nicely.

Oh, on a whole, we teachers do give C grades.  But while C used to be the biggest grade group in a class, it’s now a much smaller percentage. (Remember the old bell curve grading standard?)  I would say the B grade has become the “new average” with more and more teachers trying to give a B- instead of a C+.

Grade inflation is something that academics have discussed since I’ve been a teacher, 21 years now.  Even top schools recognize that an A today is not what an A was 30 years ago when I started college.  An A grade is still hard to earn from me, but they are easier than they were years ago.  The most movement comes in the B-C-D range.  I know that papers that would have earned a C- from me when I was a newbie (still using the standards of grading that had been used on me) are now earning a B-.  I’m not proud of that, but departments try very hard to use grading norms so that the departments’, and in fact the college’s, grades are on a par.

Recently I gave a senior in my class a C on a paper.  I thought the C was a little high because there were not seven sentences in the entire three page paper that did not have some kind of major grammatical or spelling error.  I really thought that was unacceptable for a college level paper, and part of me wanted to make the student do it over, but I decided to let it go.  See? Standards really are dropping.

The student was enraged.  Couldn’t understand the C.  Had never gotten a C in college level work before!  When I pointed out the reason for the C and mentioned that I had originally wanted to fail the paper, the student really blew.  Who did I think I was? (Somewhere along the line many students have started treating professors like staff.  That doesn’t sit well with me.  At all.)  I was hated for the rest of the semester, and I’m probably still hated to this day.  Such is life.  All the other professors had also let it go, but even worse, had given much higher marks.

scariest part of this story, though?  This student was an education major and has just completed a first year of teaching at a public school.  And the student teaches English.

Next time: what’s up with America’s teachers?

When I was a child, my mother drummed this saying into my head: “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.”

I was reminded of that today when I was writing for my other blog, Patchouli Haze, a place where I post affirmations and words of wisdom, among other things.  I’m going to do a little cross pollination and lift some of today’s post there for here.

If I gotta do what I gotta do, I’m gonna do it well with style and joy.

I don’t know if this is really an affirmation or more a rule to live by.  When I was growing up, I wanted to be a medical doctor.  My mother taught me that I would never make a good doctor if I couldn’t mop a floor well.

Her point was that if some jobs are beneath me, then all jobs are above me.  Job satisfaction comes not from having a great job, but from doing any job well.  If I do my job well, I can take pride in it and from that comes joy.

I was also taught: there are no small roles, only small actors.  This is an old chestnut for theater people which was a way of saying that people’s dignity comes not from their job titles, but from how well they do their jobs.  So not only was I never to look down on any job as “beneath me,” neither was I ever to look down on someone because of his or her job.  That was a total contradiction of every value in our home.  So a nice double-whammy of a lesson.

As I was writing this, I couldn’t help but think of the American society I’ve come home to.  What has happened to Americans’ work ethic?  I’ve written about this before in this column, but it’s something that bothers me more and more as time goes on.

Last summer I was looking for an apartment here in New York City, and I was amazed, no flabbergasted is a better word, at the level of “service” I received from people in “service” jobs.  Inept was the kindest thing I could say.  Rude and surly and downright mean spirited would be closer to the truth.

This was all the sadder to me as I had just read Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick with group of grad students doing a course on American Optimism.  We’ve all heard the phrase “a real Horatio Alger story,” but most of us these days have never read any of his books.  Alger wrote about poor boys who worked hard, worked well, remained cheerful and were ultimately rewarded, not with vast riches, but with a comfortable middle class life with warm water, warm beds, plentiful food and rewarding work.

The cheerfulness in the books was occasionally a little too relentless even for me, an eternal optimist, but Alger was trying to show his audience, working class boys and girls, and even the “street urchins” of his time, how hard work and dedication do pay off in this country.  They are part and parcel of the “American Dream”.

My students today tell me that the American Dream is dead.  There are no longer any opportunities for people no matter what they do.  I disagree.  Vehemently.  Every day I meet students who will succeed, who have succeeded against all odds.  The homeless shelter kids who are pulling straight A’s in my classes.  The war refugees flourishing in college while working “menial” jobs.

And pretty much I can tell you long before graduation who will make it and who won’t.  It’s not talent, not totally, nor is it family connections, really (though both help, of course).  It is attitude.  One of my amazingly successful graduates wasn’t the one who stood out academically in her class.  She was good, not great.  Now she’s a powerhouse in her chosen field, far out-succeeding some of her more academically successful classmates.  But she’s also one of the hardest workers I have ever met.  And she’s unfailingly positive in her outloook.

Those two qualities–hard work and positive attitude–are components of the American Dream that seem to be missing from too many of today’s youth.  Are they too spoilt by their parents?  Too dissillusioned?  I don’t know the answer.  All I know is that this rot is bringing down too many American kids.

And my outstanding student mentioned above? She’s an immigrant to these shores.  Is that why she still believes in the American Dream and follows it  for success?  I don’t know.  I don’t think so.  I’ve met a few, sadly disproportionately few, non-immigrant students who still have faith in the Dream.  They usually don’t articulate it , but through their actions I can tell they were brought up with it.

So I continue to carry a spark of hope with all my despair.  The inept workers I’m meeting day to day? They are shooting themselves in the foot, I’m sure.  They will be passed over for jobs for harder workers, people with better attitudes, but someday they might realize they can help themselves.  But the high proportion of people like them are a drain, and that’s what worries me.

A worried optimist–now that’s funny!

Today on Facebook, a friend posted the question: “So tell me, why are you proud to be an American?”

Because I’m either contrary or a precise user of words, I initially wrote this:

“I don’t take pride in being an American, because that would be like being proud of being white or a woman or Irish-American. I was born that way. BUT, I love my country fiercely because it is, in theory, a republic of virtue, striving to uphold the highest ideals of Western Humanism: freedom, liberty, responsibility, charity. We fail too many times because America is made of humans, but at least we’re trying. I’ve lived around the world and seen other countries. I know this country is hated, envied, feared and loved. I know my country has done things in the past of which I am not proud at all. But I continue to love my country because we are the great experiment. Sometimes we fail, but then we keep trying. And because I love my country, I hold it to the highest standards. Like many in America’s history, I am an idealist. We also have the best possible government humans can design, I think. Our administrations aren’t all that great far too many times, but the design is brilliant.

“And I wouldn’t NOT be an American ever. I’ve met lots of Americans in my time overseas who gave up their American citizenship. I would never ever do that. Maybe it’s how I use the word “proud”. I tend to be proud of accomplishments. I am proud that I am an active participant in the experiment that is America. Uh-oh, I’ve got too much to say on this to post here. I’m going to post on my blog.”

And so here I am.

I think it’s proud that I was reacting to.  But anyone who’s read me for a while knows I love America.  That’s one of the reasons I write.

Since I also teach American Cultural Studies in Sweden, I’m taking a short cut here and posting a lecture I did in Sweden.  So here it goes:

Many Europeans wags have said that there is no such thing as American culture, that it’s an oxymoron like military intelligence and plastic glasses. Or at the very most, it’s nothing but a conglomeration of pop culture – Barbie, Campbell’s Soup and the Brady Bunch. That always burns my biscuits, since America has a great cultural heritage. Yes, much of it was brought over from the Old World, but it melded with the New. The Constitution of the United States is a prime example. It blends the ideals of John Locke, the great British philosopher with the ideals and format of the Constitution of the Iroquois Nation, something that was in place and working even in pre-colonial times.

For an interesting look at the documents important to the culture of our government, and indeed, our culture, I recommend the page maintained by the University of Oklahoma’s College of Law. There you’ll find links to important documents from the Magna Carta to the 2009 Inaugural Address. And you’ll also find the documents that have blended in to create American culture.

There’s the rousing speech Patrick Henry gave in 1775, ending with the famous words, “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” There’s the Declaration of Independence, the writings of Ben Franklin and the Federalist Papers.

Moving on in history, the page includes links to the short but extremely moving Gettysburg Address.  What American can’t recite its opening lines, “”Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

And there are more documents – the Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King’s stirring I Have a Dream speech, even things as seemingly mundane as the lyrics to Yankee Doodle Dandy and The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

One of the most moving documents I found there was President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address. I highly recommend reading it, for it is as powerful and as timely today as it was on that January morning in 1961. I’m sure you know it by its famous line: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.

But it goes on:

“My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

“Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”

Heady stuff, all of this. It’s wonderful, stirring rhetoric, and I recommend it. Perhaps it’s not always easy to read, but nothing worthwhile is easy, right?

I get back to the question: “Why am I who I am?”  I find that as a broad abroad, with a kid abroad, it’s something I ask more and more. What makes me the person I am? What cultural references inform the way I see the world?

Most Americans never read all this material, but it’s there in our subconscious. We got highlights in history class and can quote King, Kennedy, Jefferson and Franklin without even stopping to think about it. I didn’t read Ralph Waldo Emerson until I was in graduate school, but as soon as I read his essays on education I understood American schools.

Living abroad has changed my worldview. That was inevitable. But my core values haven’t been changed. I still believe in the same things I believed in when I lived in America.

This musing in turn leads me to America and the Great American Experiment. How have we managed to become such a unified country when for the past 227 years we’ve been swept by wave after wave of immigrants? Not only have we managed, we’ve done pretty well. It’s our immigrants that make us great, just as it’s something that weakens us. Not the immigrants, per se, but our reaction to them. Every time we as a nation do something racist or xenophobic towards our immigrants, we weaken America as a whole, the ideal that is America.

The American Dream: The term was first used by James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America which was written in 1931. He states: “The American Dream is “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of t he fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

Some say, that the American Dream has become the pursuit of material prosperity – that people work more hours to get bigger cars, fancier homes, the fruits of prosperity for their families – but have less time to enjoy their prosperity. Others say that the American Dream is beyond the grasp of the working poor who must work two jobs to insure their family’s survival. Yet others look toward a new American Dream with less focus on financial gain and more emphasis on living a simple, fulfilling life.

Thomas Wolfe said, “…to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity ….the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him.”

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/lessons/97/dream/thedream.html

Core Values

I talk about American core values, but what do I mean by that phrase?  A core value is a value that is an integral part of a belief system.  A Christian core value is that Christ is the Messiah.

Americans themselves debate on our “core values,” but there are some that we all believe.  It’s the interpretations that vary.

Liberty is one.  This is so important to Americans that we have Lady Liberty at our border.

People visit this monument, and get choked up when they see it, not because it’s beautiful art.  But because we believe in what she stands for.

I was trying to list the others and was having trouble making it clear.  Then I found this on a blog (got to love the Net).

A while back, I saw a presentation by public opinion researcher John Russonello, who has advised many progressive organizations on messaging and framing.

Russonello lists only a few core values, and divides them into two tiers.

Primary values * individual responsibility * family security * honesty * fairness * freedom * work * spirituality

Secondary values * responsibility to help others * compassion * personal fulfillment * respect for authority * love of country (Jom Stalh’s Journal)

So for all these reasons I love America. I’m proud of America because it tries. It doesn’t always get it, but we strive, and that’s half the battle.

Note on this text: I am an inveterate recycler of my own writing.  I had forgotten that much of this lecture came from the post Multicultural Children, which is also on this site.  It you’re copying from yourself, is it still plagiarism?