"Long, too Long America" - Where Now America?

from Wheatley's Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future. 

I. Direst Fate

From when I was a young teenager, I've had an ongoing love for Walt Whitman. In tough times, especially, I'm draw to poetry. Poets tend to see with a clarity I admire. So it won't be too much of a surprise that since the presidential election occurred, I've been rehearsing a line from "Long, Too Long America" from Leaves of Grass.  Whitman writing about the United States during the Civil War contrasted the country's civic prosperity prior to the war with it during the war. He said, 

"But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not."  

I love the conflict between naming the situation as direst fate and yet commanding fellow citizens to not recoil.  Now, that tension feels very contemporary. Very much the moment. 

A similar 'direst fate' is before us today, a crises for certain. No, we are not in an actual civil war although those words have been threatened prior to election result and for the moment our sovereignty seems intact. Certainly, though the influence of oligarchs on our political and now on our governing party should cause all citizens in this country grave concern. With their extraordinary wealth, dubious morality, alignment to Russia, and questionable capacity to love or even respect this country and its laws, the influence of digital oligarchs such as Elon Musk on Trump and those he will share power within his cabinet is highly alarming. 

Timothy Snyder (2024), Yale historian writes in On Freedom that "Putin’s genocidal undertaking was supported by the wealthiest digital oligarch, Elon Musk...Musk and others wax nostalgic for the racial purity of an imagined past" (p. 157). Musk, like Trump, is a serial liar and pundit of ignorant, fanciful mistruths.  Snyder again writes, "Putin says Ukraine does not exist, and Elon Musk boosts the lie; hydrocarbon companies claim that global warming is not a problem, and Elon Musk boosts the lie; Trump says that he won the election of 2020, and Elon Musk boosts the lie. These lies then grow within us thanks to mental vulnerabilities that machines find and exploit" (p. 106). Snyder states, "Like the Czechoslovak communists, the Silicon Valley libertarians first promised a brave new world, then told us that there were no alternatives, then invited us to live inside a screen. Like the communists, they passed from great certainty about utopia to total nihilism about everything, to a world in which “everything is shit.” And then they ask us if we are not, perhaps, living in a computer simulation ourselves—or, in an older language, inside Plato’s cave. Unfortunately, wealthy and important people who speak of simulations are searching for an excuse to be irresponsible. If we decide that we are not real, that life is elsewhere, we can drop into a cave where morality has no sense and freedom is impossible" (p. 70). 

Currently, Trump has nominated 6 billionaires to cabinet level positions. Together, the billionaires Trump nominated are worth at least $344 billion which according US News and World Report is "higher than the GDP of 169 countries." To imagine their interests and yours will be aligned, is to be mistaken. Elon Musk has used Twitter to amplify lies that feeds his wealth and forwards a very Pro-Russia agenda.

II. Recoiling Not

Where do we stand considering such threats?  Those of us who read the landscape before us with clear trepidation and yet know that silence cannot occur must not recoil. As women in red states are dying due to draconian laws, we cannot recoil.  We cannot take a pause while more and more women die because they have been denied necessary health care. Had these women lived where I live (in NJ) they would be alive today.  That is a fact.

In NJ, the last few weeks, our forests have been burning. That burning has occurred up the east coast in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts all due to drought. This burning comes a few weeks after a rapid succession of hurricanes that also marched up the east coast destroying mountain towns in western North Carolina happened. At the same time, on the west coast, flooding from torrential storms is changing the landscapes of northern California and Oregon.  And all of this is in just a 6-week period.  Trump's nominee to head the EPA is Lee Zeldin.  Zeldin said in a Fox News interview that he would prioritize efforts to "roll back regulations." Zeldin is a climate denier, just like Musk.

Across the globe, the people of Ukraine are fighting for their sovereignty, their right to be self-governing and have the final say about their laws, their lives. Recently, a Russian oligarch claimed that Ukrainians do not actually know that they are really Russians and if it takes killing a million Ukrainians or even 5 million Ukrainians to get them to understand this, so be it. This is genocide. We should be appalled and moved to action. Just wait though, and this idiocy will soon be a talking point that some members of our Republican party, including the president-elect, will be mouthing as they attempt to convince you that this untruth is an old truth, and that Putin really has sovereignty over a country that is not Russia.  

I'd love to remain silent and turn my eyes away from all the dying: young women in red states, Ukrainians, our Earth.

I'd love to practice 'self-care' and dim my responsibilities to this country, but forests, less than 5 miles away from my home have burned and the smell of smoke is becoming so common, not exceptional.

I'd love to lower my eyes and stop seeing trash islands in the Pacific, rising ocean waters, declining ice masses, increasing temperatures, droughts and floods, burning forests, declining species, and disappearing land, but I can't find the apathy needed to do so.

III. Which Way America?

In 1955, Allen Ginsberg in "A Supermarket in California" asked Walt Whitman, "Where are we going?"  He mused,         

        "...Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? 

         Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?" 

And perhaps similar questions are before us, if we are still brave enough to ask: "What America did you have" when you voted or failed to vote in November?  Will we have a future without democracy? Where are we going?  What world will we be leaving our children? Grandchildren? What country will be here across these next four years?  Will we be a Republic? Will we grow immune to young women unnecessarily dying when health care elsewhere in the country would easily save them?  Will life expectancy in the United States continue to decline? Will we turn blind eyes to the world beyond us?  Will we even ask such questions? 

Snyder closes his book with some important advice:

"We can recognize reporters as the heroes of our time. Paying for newspaper subscriptions is a start. Too often, we profit from the reporting of others without rewarding them. Subscribe to media that offer investigative reporting, and post to social media items that are reported by a human. Support campaigns to tax social media companies to fund local reporting. Without solidarity, we fail to see others’ travails as like our own, and so we lose the ability to see ourselves. Choosing a way to express solidarity makes us freer—and helps us to resist frustration and demoralization. Deliberate in organized settings. Pick a civil society organization to join, and another (if you can afford it) to support financially. Try to listen. Remember that neighbors might have had worse luck. Help others vote. Listen to those whose families’ historical experiences are very different from your own. Find organizations that allow you to help others. If you have the means, pay off someone else’s medical debt." (p. 233). 

Do not turn your eyes away.

We need one another. As Margaret Wheatley said so well, "We can turn away, or we can turn toward. Those are the only two choices we have."

Two choices.

Which choice will you make?

Works Cited

• Ginsberg, Allen. (1956/2023) "A Supermarket in California" in Howl and Other Poems. Macon, GA: Mercer Books.
• Snyder, Timothy. (2024). On Freedom. New York: Penguin.
• Wheatley, Margaret J. (2009). Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
• Whitman, Walt. (1881). Leaves of Grass. from https://whitmanarchive.org/published-writings/leaves-of-grass.

 

Why Uncertainty Matters: Measuring Teacher "Effectiveness"

Maxine Greene (1988) wrote: A teacher in search of his/her freedom may be the only kind of teacher who can arouse young persons to go in search of their own" (p. 14).  It represents a singular truth that I believe and have believed across decades.
 
There have been many teachers who have helped me to understand that learning is essentially about searching for one's freedom and that the idea of freedom is often a far too slippery concept to hold still and study.  A paradox, perhaps. Mrs. Seeliger, my second grade teacher, found joy in the smallest of things and demonstrated that the inconsequential is critical and worthy of one's notice.  I still can recall the winter day in second grade when she placed Charlotte's Web in my hands. Many years later I reread the book at a friend's home in Massachusetts on a different winter afternoon. The constant between the events was pleasure.

Ms. Donovan, a high school social studies teacher valued experiential learning. Many years later, I still recall being the judge in our class's simulation of the Triangle Factory Fire case. Our findings and sentencing clashed with the outcome of the actual case. In addition to learning about the particulars of the case, I also carried  the uncomfortable understanding that justice is not always blind, especially for those without powerful advocates.

More recently, Ruth Vinz, doctoral adviser and friend told me, Slow down when else in your life will you have this time to theorize, research, read and write?  Draft after draft of writing, Ruth read and consistently inspired me to work in order to understand the dilemma from slightly different points of view. Perhaps more than any other, Ruth helped me to value uncertainty.  

Although different, each of these teachers demonstrated what it might mean to live a wide-awake life through their passions, capacity to reflect, curiosity, and desire. They occasioned in me a desire to want. After many schools, degrees, and lots of informal learning choosing to live a wide-awake life represents the most significant and profound learning I have experienced.

In a recent Edutopia post, Maxine Greene clarified the term, wide-awakeness. She said:

I use the term wide-awakeness. Without the ability to think about yourself, to reflect on your life, there's really no awareness, no consciousness. Consciousness doesn't come automatically; it comes through being alive, awake, curious, and often furious.

American Bus Stop: No Lemming Left Behind

These days we seem to be overly interested in measuring teacher effectiveness.  Yet, the question of "effectiveness" is a poor question, if not a wrong one.   It suggests the plausibility of schools being causal worlds of inputs and outputs, where variables can adequately be controlled and effectiveness rightly and singularly determined.  And yet, when I think of the teachers I mention in this post, none of them could aptly be measured via a single test measure (such as my performance on a state assessment), nor could anyone have projected what their range of influence might be decades after contact.  

U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, State Representatives from Florida, a "Teacher Effectiveness Panel" in NJ, and so many others, want all of us to foolishly think we can equate the measure of a teacher via the results of a single round of test scores with "effectiveness".  I can't help but wonder if Secretary Duncan would submit himself to such examination and be satisfied with the determination of his effectiveness based on a single measure. One might ask: How well did Arne Duncan do as Superintendent of Schools for Chicago based on test scores during x year in comparison to y year?  Based on that criteria was he effective? Let's assume there was no "Texas Miracle" for this Secretary, would that negate all that he had done if the results demonstrated less student achievement via a single measure? (See Larry Miller's blog for the skinny on this).


Perhaps a better measure would be to ask to what end is a teacher/administrator in search of his/her freedom? How do they inspire and guide young people to go in search of their own freedom?  In what ways do all of these learners live wide awake lives and how do we support them in these quests as a public committed to public education? 

I realize that we could not capture such depth using a bubble sheet and a #2. But then again, that might be for the best.  In understanding this limitation, we would also acknowledge that we cannot know the trajectory of our efforts with any great certainty and would be best to not waste effort and time trying to do so.   As Ilya Prigogine explains “for a large class of dynamic systems, small perturbations in the initial conditions are amplified over the course of time. Chaotic systems are an extreme example of unstable motion because trajectories identified by distinct initial conditions, no matter how close, diverge exponentially over time” (1997, p. 30).

We would do well to remember that teaching, like learning, is nomadic and trying to assess such dynamic systems using a single measure at a particular point in time is wasteful, wrong, and will reduce what we value to the limits we can measure.


Work Cited:
Prigogine, I. (1997). The end of certainty: Time, chaos, and the new laws of nature. NY: The
Free Press.