Valuing Education

This month one of America's largest school districts emailed all of its thousands of substitute teachers a link to a great opportunity. They could get raises of $2.07 per hour, regular hours and great new benefits including health insurance, sick leave a retirement account if chosen for this promotion. The title of this exciting new position: bus driver.

Upon reading this I called up my favorite scholar of health-care inequalities in a controlled outrage. "Does this really mean," I simmered, "that for all those times I got pulled over for speeding on the way to college classes, I was hurting my career both ways?"

"You're not missing out," she told me. "All the studies of bus drivers' health data show they have a very short life expectancy and lots of heart trouble due to all the stress."

"Well that's just it," I said. "There are studies of data about bus drivers, because they have insurance. The insurance company has hard-drives full of data about how unhealthy bus drivers are, and how stressed they tell their doctors they are every time they drop by just to take off their shirt for another check-up. Nobody studies substitute teachers because we don't have health insurance and we don't visit doctors. No data exist."

And upon that analysis, I decided not to grade chemistry quizzes over the weekend this weekend, saving them instead for my paid planning time on Monday. Last weekend I was so excited by the opportunity to teach something interesting that I was grading in my downtime at my other job. After reading what the Human Resources department thinks of me, though, I think I need a couple days off. My favorite scholar was right about one thing, though: no matter how hard my job is, I really am glad I don't have to do it in traffic.

They Can But They Don't*

After my work is done I'm going to write a book about why Capitalism doesn't feed everybody. There seems to be a consensus among my Republican friends that if we just eliminate all social welfare programs designed to keep human beings from starving to death in the streets, everybody will suddenly find great jobs and thank us for taking away all of the handouts that had been keeping them from achieving their full earning potential.

Obviously it's easy to criticize the people at the bottom, themselves, and to point out that many of our homeless, unemployed and elderly are not in great shape to work. Many of our poorest are pretty out of touch with reality and do indeed have a hard time with many simple, basic tasks. I don't think this explains everything, though, because whenever I see interviews with CEOs, they have their fair share of weaknesses as well.

I could try from the outset to explain the math of how capitalism works in individual cases to help individuals collect money from others. I could try to compare capitalism as it's currently played in the US to a game of checkers, where once you get a king the rest is just cleanup. I could try to find statistics on the number of successful capitalists who start nonprofits that feed people vs. the number of successful capitalists who start nonprofits to increase the profitability of their for-profit corporations. But ultimately, these approaches would only show why I think capitalism isn't intended to feed everybody.

There are plenty of people who still believe Ronald Reagan's trite rallying cry that a fully de-regulated capitalism should provide everything for everybody at the best possible price. So I'd like to interview them and find out what they're doing, through capitalism, to create opportunities. I'd like to find out what CEOs believe they are doing to help create jobs each day and meet needs for those who have the least. I'd like to find out how small business owners are leveraging their savings to uplift their communities and promote equal opportunities.

Now, to be fair, I am not a communist. Communists come from poor countries and don't respect democracy or competition. I love competition, because it lets me show how smart America has made me. I just think that the American way, as it has succeeded since the Great Depression, is still the best way to keep this country the greatest in the world. I believe that we should keep providing opportunity for all our children if we want them to grow up to provide prosperity for us.

But that's all been said. What I'd like to write are just the stories of CEOs about how pure capitalism is supposed to provide an alternative means to the unprecedented success of the mixture of capitalist competition and socialist safeguards that has made us the greatest superpower in the history of mankind.

*"They Can But They Don't" is also the title of a book about teaching students with learning disabilities. I would like to reuse that title, because I think the comparison is appropriate. Given extra time, a dyselxic child is entirely capable of reading Moby Dick. But they need special attention, incentives, encouragement and supervision. Similarly, given extra money, Warren Buffett is capable of feeding us all. His heart is in the right place. He'd like to help. That's just not what he does on his own, so he'd rather work together with everybody else, through the government to get it done.

Faster, Higher, Stronger

After my work is done I'm going to start a blog about success. Not how to get it, but about what it is. I think the American dreamer is too focused on how to find success to know it when he's got it. Take my Grandfather--God did.

Grandpa Resnick was a Jewish cavalry doctor in the US Army. He rode horses with a small bag of surgical supplies to fight Nazis. That's pretty much success, right there. Am I right? What could be more awesome for a Jewish kid from a poor immigrant family than not only becoming a doctor but becoming a cavalry doctor fighting Nazis with the best fighting force in the history of the world?

I'll tell you what: becoming a doctor who fought Nazis on skis in the greatest fighting force in the world. So, the American Dream being the uncatchable, impish sprite that it is, Grandpa Resnick did that too. And was he happy?

Of course not! Americans are never satisfied with who we are. If we are computer scientists at Harvard or MIT, we want to drop out and start Microsoft. If we are astrophysicists who discover new stars, we want to get arrested in solidarity with teacher's unions. If we are the first Black President, we want to provide health care for all Americans, solve the immigration dilemma, end two unnecessary wars, start and finish two more and keep our approval ratings up. Of course Grandpa Resnick wasn't satisfied with being a skiing, horseback-riding, gun-toting, Nazi-fighting, Jewish doctor in the U.S. Army.

And what's cooler than all that? Obviously, a ski-jumping, spying one.

Grandpa didn't like to talk about the war. But when I was three and I asked him about it, he didn't tell me that. He didn't say, "I don't like to talk about that." He didn't say, "who wants to bring up a fight I'm lucky to have survived two generations ago." He didn't even say, "war is complicated. I've been more of a hero by saving lives at home than taking them abroad."

Instead, probably because he knew that I was three, and that I wouldn't stop asking until I got an answer, or maybe just as much because I was three and I would believe anything, but probably never remember it, Grandpa told me, "the war was exciting. We used to ski through the alps, spying on the Germans to find out where they were. One day we saw a whole company of them up ahead, in a valley, and we were going so fast that we couldn't stop. The only thing we could do was jump over them. But the Sergeant was worried that if we jumped over forwards, they might shoot us in the back, so he made us ski-jump the valley going backwards. When I was in the air, I heard the German commander say, 'don't shoot. Save your bullets. They'll kill themselves just trying to land.'"

From the age of three until about twelve, that was what war meant to me. A quick, death-defying, impossible acrobatic feat, coupled with mutual understanding and mutual respect between nations. Yes, I knew that at other times in a war, soldiers on different sides shot at each other. But they didn't shoot each other in the middle of a backwards ski-jump. Even in a war, some things were still sacred.

When I was twelve I told the story to my father, who looked at me for a long time, and probably thought about why my grandfather had told it to me that way. He thought about a father who never talked about the war, and had a hard time talking about anything else emotional. He thought about a father whose accomplishments he had struggled to live up to. He realized for maybe the first time that his own father must have felt some of the same inadequacies, in spite of being, by all appearances, incredibly great at everything. He didn't want to fight the perfected image of a man he knew was closer to perfection than anybody had any business being anyway.

I think as soon as he heard that story, he loved it even more than he loved his own memories of his father, because it was a rare chance to see his father as Grandpa wished he could be. So my father didn't point out that Grandpa only skied in basic training, and probably not enough to jump at all, or that Grandpa didn't speak German and couldn't possibly have understood a German commander, even if he could have heard him with the wind rushing through his ears in the middle of what would have had to have been a sixty mile per hour ski jump to clear an entire German force. My dad just said, "Wow. He never told me that story."

A lot of people tell me I'm lucky to have the family I have, and know that I can grow up to be anything. But I know the truth. I know that I'm American, and that I am blessed and cursed to spend my life pulling upwards, white-knuckled on my own bootstraps. I know that whatever I accomplish in this world, I will always wish I could have achieved it faster, backwards and on skis.

Educational Reform

After my work is done I'm going to start a blog about educational reform. Politicians on both sides of the aisle talk about the need for an educational system that truly prepares kids for the workplace.

Delusionally and embarrassingly, they all tend to agree that this means giving kids more tests of their ability to analyze logical statements, solve math problems and bubble in circles with a number two pencil.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Intertubules, I have been to the work-place, and they did not ask me to solve any calculus problems. What they did ask me were a lot of banal questions about the weather, about my weekend, about how long I had been working there, not counting today....

Having a job doesn't start with a timed test in a crowded room and no talking. Having a job starts with a hand-shake and a conversation. You sit down with someone who already has a job and you make friends with them. If they like you, then you get to have a job, too.

Then you spend some time making friends with the other people who have that job, and vaguely, while you're at it, doing something you all agree is "work." If you don't do the work very well, the other people tell you how you're supposed to do it. This is okay. If you stop being friendly, though, and start being mean to everybody there, you won't have a job.

So when I reform our education system, I'm going to help our kids spend more time hanging out. They're going to practice smiling through boring, meaningless meetings. They'll practice answering questions in ways that couldn't possibly offend anybody. They may even go out for pageants.

The students of my reformed educational system won't cure cancer. They won't go to space. Heck, they won't even know how to unclog a drain. But they will know how to succeed in the American workplace. And isn't that our goal?

Clothes make the man.

After my work is done I'm going to start a blog about the role that context plays in human relationships. Today I attended my big sister's dissertation defense at a major research university. She did really well and I was really proud of her. Naturally, as a proud little brother, I wore a fancy jacket and tie to go see her.

I've been really down on myself lately, feeling old and unattractive, so it kind of cheered me up when some young lady smiled at me in the hall. And then another one did, peering out of a classroom. And another. And then it stopped cheering me up, and just depressed me.

Because these were the looks I'd be getting if I were the sort of person who had to wear a tie every day as part of his role at a major research university. Which is always the sort of life I expected for myself.

But instead I substitute teach, and coworkers don't look at me twice, not flirtily, not friendlily, not acquantancially (is that a word? has anyone ever needed it before?) and not even to invite me to that happy hour I know they all go to every week just to be polite. Because I couldn't possibly know anything worth talking about. Because the sticker that says "substitute teacher" on my shirt also says "idiot," much more clearly.

But at a major research university, where no one is a substitute teacher, I could not possibly be an idiot, so if my shoes are tied correctly and my tie is on relatively straight, I must be among the World's Greatest Men.

We had a brief luncheon with cake and one of my sister's friends gave me the same flirty look I had been getting all through the building. I should clarify at this point in the story that I am not available, so my reader will understand why I didn't just stop and talk to any of the other five million women trolling the halls of this building. I was somewhat worried that I wouldn't be able to successfully give the eye contact or body language or magic look that says, "thanks, but I'm in a good relationship. Can we be friends," and it seemed like I might not have a lot of time to, because she seemed totally excited to meet me.

But then a professor stepped in and asked me about what I do.

And the room got silent.

And they all moved away from me.

When that girl left, early, I said, "nice to meet you."

It seemed like the thing to say.

She didn't answer.

I love my sister and I'm really proud of her.

She's earned her way into a very exclusive world.

Very, very exclusive.