August 22 A MUST READ!!
Welcome to the Age of Denial
By ADAM FRANK
ROCHESTER — IN 1982, polls showed that 44 percent of Americans believed God had created human beings in their present form. Thirty years later, the fraction of the population who are creationists is 46 percent.
In 1989, when “climate change” had just entered the public lexicon, 63 percent of Americans understood it was a problem. Almost 25 years later, that proportion is actually a bit lower, at 58 percent.
The timeline of these polls defines my career in science. In 1982 I was an undergraduate physics major. In 1989 I was a graduate student. My dream was that, in a quarter-century, I would be a professor of astrophysics, introducing a new generation of students to the powerful yet delicate craft of scientific research.
Much of that dream has come true. Yet instead of sending my students into a world that celebrates the latest science has to offer, I am delivering them into a society ambivalent, even skeptical, about the fruits of science.
This is not a world the scientists I trained with would recognize. Many of them served on the Manhattan Project. Afterward, they helped create the technologies that drove America’s postwar prosperity. In that era of the mid-20th century, politicians were expected to support science financially but otherwise leave it alone. The disaster of Lysenkoism, in which Communist ideology distorted scientific truth and all but destroyed Russian biological science, was still a fresh memory.
The triumph of Western science led most of my professors to believe that progress was inevitable. While the bargain between science and political culture was at times challenged — the nuclear power debate of the 1970s, for example — the battles were fought using scientific evidence. Manufacturing doubt remained firmly off-limits.
Today, however, it is politically effective, and socially acceptable, to deny scientific fact. Narrowly defined, “creationism” was a minor current in American thinking for much of the 20th century. But in the years since I was a student, a well-funded effort has skillfully rebranded that ideology as “creation science” and pushed it into classrooms across the country. Though transparently unscientific, denying evolution has become a litmus test for some conservative politicians, even at the highest levels.
Meanwhile, climate deniers, taking pages from the creationists’ PR playbook, have manufactured doubt about fundamental issues in climate science that were decided scientifically decades ago. And anti-vaccine campaigners brandish a few long-discredited studies to make unproven claims about links between autism and vaccination.
The list goes on. North Carolina has banned state planners from using climate data in their projections of future sea levels. So many Oregon parents have refused vaccination that the state is revising its school entry policies. And all of this is happening in a culture that is less engaged with science and technology as intellectual pursuits than at any point I can remember.
Thus, even as our day-to-day experiences have become dependent on technological progress, many of our leaders have abandoned the postwar bargain in favor of what the scientist Michael Mann calls the “scientization of politics.”
What do I tell my students? From one end of their educational trajectory to the other, our society told these kids science was important. How confusing is it for them now, when scientists receive death threats for simply doing honest research on our planet’s climate history?
Americans always expected their children to face a brighter economic future, and we scientists expected our students to inherit a world where science was embraced by an ever-larger fraction of the population. This never implied turning science into a religion or demanding slavish acceptance of this year’s hot research trends. We face many daunting challenges as a society, and they won’t all be solved with more science and math education. But what has been lost is an understanding that science’s open-ended, evidence-based processes — rather than just its results — are essential to meeting those challenges.
My professors’ generation could respond to silliness like creationism with head-scratching bemusement. My students cannot afford that luxury. Instead they must become fierce champions of science in the marketplace of ideas.
During my undergraduate studies I was shocked at the low opinion some of my professors had of the astronomer Carl Sagan. For me his efforts to popularize science were an inspiration, but for them such “outreach” was a diversion. That view makes no sense today.
The enthusiasm and generous spirit that Mr. Sagan used to advocate for science now must inspire all of us. There are science Twitter feeds and blogs to run, citywide science festivals and high school science fairs that need input. For the civic-minded nonscientists there are school board curriculum meetings and long-term climate response plans that cry out for the participation of informed citizens. And for every parent and grandparent there is the opportunity to make a few more trips to the science museum with your children.
Behind the giant particle accelerators and space observatories, science is a way of behaving in the world. It is, simply put, a tradition. And as we know from history’s darkest moments, even the most enlightened traditions can be broken and lost. Perhaps that is the most important lesson all lifelong students of science must learn now.
August 18
You MUST read Maureen Dowd's article today on
the Clintons..........
entitled MONEY, MONEY, MONEY.......
I can't copy and paste it for some reason.
I can with this article though:
This is interesting reading, especially for a Brit living, like me, in the USA.
One comment, though: do you really see how the Brits live if you live in London?
I don't think so.......
Ta-Ta, London. Hello, Awesome.
By SARAH LYALL
EVEN after 18 years, I never really knew where I stood with the English. Why did they keep apologizing? (Were they truly sorry?) Why were they so unenthusiastic about enthusiasm? Why was their Parliament full of classically educated grown-ups masquerading as unruly schoolchildren?
Why did rain surprise them? Why were they still obsessed by the Nazis? Why were they so rude about Scotland and Wales, when they all belonged to the same, very small country? And — this was the hardest question of all — what lay beneath their default social style, an indecipherable mille-feuille of politeness, awkwardness, embarrassment, irony, self-deprecation, arrogance, defensiveness and deflective humor?
Now that my spell as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times has ended and I’ve come back home — if a place counts as home when you’ve been away for so long — I’ve had some time to think about how Britain and America have changed, and how I have.
When I got to London, it was a calmer time. The only terrorists anyone worried about were the ones from Ireland. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative revolution was winding down. Princess Diana had yet to reveal that there were three people in her marriage. David Beckham had yet to learn that he could make extra money by posing alluringly in his underpants. Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World had yet to close in disgrace.
Meanwhile, Loyd Grossman, an American-born food-show host and purveyor of his own brand of spaghetti sauce, radiated from my television set like a piece of performance art representing the pitfalls of long-term expatriate-ism. The problem was his accent, a bizarre strangulated sui generis concoction that sounded as equally incomprehensible to English people as to Americans. It was not even mid-Atlantic, except in the sense that perhaps it was the way they used to speak in the lost city of Atlantis.
I resolved to hang on to my own accent, mainly by watching a lot of American TV, and to assimilate as best I could while remembering where I came from. What happens then is that you begin to see through the looking glass from both sides. I began to understand how America appeared from 3,000 miles away — not just the things Britons admired, but the things they didn’t.
And so a country where even Conservatives are proud of the nationalized health service cannot comprehend a system that leaves tens of millions of people unable to afford basic health care. A country that all but banned guns after the slaughter of 16 small children in Scotland in 1996 cannot understand why some Americans’ response to mass shootings is to argue for more gun rights, not fewer.
Despite the sometimes immature behavior of Britain’s legislators, they manage to enact laws without deliberately obstructing the running of the country. Britons are perplexed by the sclerotic hatred infecting so much political discourse in America. And not one Briton I ever met understood why being able to see Russia from Alaska was at one time apparently considered an acceptable foreign-policy credential for a prospective vice president.
Britons admire and consume American culture, but feel threatened by and angry at its excesses and global dominance. They are both envious and suspicious of Americans’ ease and confidence in themselves. They want American approval but feel bad about seeking it. Like a teenager worried that his more popular friend is using him for extra math help but will snub him in the cafeteria, they are unduly exercised by the “special relationship” — endlessly deconstructing what it meant, for instance, when in 2009 Gordon Brown, then the prime minister, gave President Obama a handsome penholder made of wood from a Victorian anti-slave ship, while Mr. Obama reportedly gave him a stack of movies that were incompatible with British DVD players.
Also, Britons are not automatically impressed by what I always thought were attractive American qualities — straightforwardness, openness, can-doism, for starters — and they suspect that our surface friendly optimism might possibly be fake. (I suspect that sometimes they might possibly be right.) Once, in an experiment designed to illustrate Britons’ unease with the way Americans introduce themselves in social situations (in Britain, you’re supposed to wait for the host to do it), I got a friend at a party we were having to go up to a man he had never met. “Hi, I’m Stephen Bayley,” my friend said, sticking out his hand.
“Is that supposed to be some sort of joke?” the man responded.
The pursuit of happiness may be too garish a goal, it turns out, in the land of the pursuit of not-miserableness. After enough Britons respond with “I can’t complain” when you ask them how they are, you begin to feel nostalgic about all those psyched Americans you left behind.
Sometimes in London I felt stupidly enthusiastic, like a Labrador puppy let loose in an antique store, or overly loud and gauche, like a guest who shows up at a memorial service wearing a Hawaiian shirt and traumatizes the mourners with intrusive personal questions.
Britain became more American while I lived there — everyone did, thanks to the Internet and the global economy. By this spring, 25 percent of the adult population was obese, and doctors were calling the country “the fat man of Europe.” Like a pale cousin of the Republican Party, the Conservative Party began squabbling with itself.
The rise of the right-wing British National Party, coupled with the populist influence of the popular Daily Mail, shifted the political axis to the right; the government cut welfare spending and tightened the borders. Even as London transformed into an international town square, there was talk that Britain might pull out of the European Union.
But the British character lay underneath it all, and that never changed. Many of the stories I covered had to do with the question Britons have asked themselves incessantly since their empire fell: Who are we, and what is our place in the world? It wasn’t until the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games last summer, with its music medleys and dancing nurses and quotes from Shakespeare and references to Mary Poppins and sly inclusion of the queen and depictions of the Industrial Revolution and compendiums of key moments in British television history, that the country seemed to have found some sort of answer.
It was a bold, ecstatic celebration of all sorts of things — individuality, creativity, quirkiness, sense of humor, playfulness, rebelliousness and competence in the face of potential chaos — and more than anything I have ever seen, it seemed to sum up what was great about Britain.
AMERICA has always been secure about its place in the world, though its self-belief is fraying a bit. But while Britain was figuring itself out, America was changing, too.
I’ve come back often, so it’s not like it was a total shock. But while I wasn’t paying attention, Arizona for some reason got its own Major League Baseball team. New York City’s center of gravity shifted to Brooklyn, at least according to the people who live in Brooklyn.
In other developments, available phone numbers ran out, forcing the introduction of unpleasant new area codes. “Awesome” went from being a risible word used only by stoners and surfers to an acceptably ubiquitous modifier, the Starbucks of adjectives.
New York City Transit began kindly informing passengers how long they would have to wait until the next train. A few Americans started going only to restaurants with lovingly reared, locally sourced unpronounceable ingredients; the rest started going only to restaurants with All-U-Can-Eat Fat Plate specials.
The Kardashians arrived and would not leave.
Now that I’m back, I feel somewhat Loyd Grossman-ish. I am thrilled to be in a city that has the cultural advantage of having a garbage can on every corner, but sad to leave one whose mayor speaks off-the-cuff Latin, employs expressions like “inverted pyramid of piffle” and last summer compared the Olympic beach volleyball players to wet otters.
After years of using pound and euro coins, I find dollar bills cumbersome and idiotic. After years of living happily among Britons who by New York standards would be considered functioning alcoholics, I now find my old friends’ tendency to order wine by the glass, not the bottle, unnecessarily Puritanical.
I’ve grown accustomed to British friends who, when it comes to personal matters, don’t ask much, don’t tell much and really, really, don’t want to get into it. We lived for more than 15 years next to a couple who corresponded with us almost exclusively by letter. I have become an expert in the art of the anodyne weather discussion. I’m chronically sorry.
“Sorry,” I said to a Metro-North conductor the other day, when I disrupted the swift completion of his progression through the train by asking what time we would get to my stop. “No problem,” he said, looking surprised at my apology, and so I apologized again, for apologizing.
It is enough to make your head spin. There I was at the Apple store the other day, asking basic technical questions and trying not to take up too much of anyone’s mental space. I told the salesclerk that I had to change my address, since I’d just moved back.
He asked me a million questions: Why? Where was I going to live? How about my family? How did I feel?
He considered the whole thing for a moment — me, the move, New York, life.
“Awesome!” he said. And I think he really meant it.
August 10
WARSAW, Ind. — Michael Shopenn’s artificial hip was made by a company based in this remote town, a global center of joint manufacturing. But he had to fly to Europe to have it installed.
Mr. Shopenn, 67, an architectural photographer
and avid snowboarder, had been in such pain from arthritis that he could not stand long enough
to make coffee, let alone work. He had health insurance, but it would not cover a
joint replacement because his degenerative disease was related to an old sports
injury, thus considered a pre-existing condition.
Desperate to find an affordable solution, he
reached out to a sailing buddy with friends at a medical device manufacturer,
which arranged to provide his local hospital with an implant at what was
described as the “list price” of $13,000, with no markup. But when the
hospital’s finance office estimated that the hospital charges would run another
$65,000, not including the surgeon’s fee, he knew he had to think outside the
box, and outside the country.
“That was a third of my savings at the time,” Mr.
Shopenn said recently from the living room of his condo in Boulder, Colo. “It
wasn’t happening.”
“Very leery” of going to a developing country
like India or Thailand, which both draw so-called medical tourists, he ultimately
chose to have his hip replaced in 2007 at a private hospital outside Brussels
for $13,660. That price included not only a hip joint, made by Warsaw-based Zimmer
Holdings, but also all doctors’ fees, operating room charges,
crutches, medicine, a hospital room for five days, a week in rehab and a
round-trip ticket from America.
“We have the most expensive health care in the
world, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best,” Mr. Shopenn said. “I’m
kind of the poster child for that.”
As the United States struggles to rein in its
growing $2.7 trillion health care bill, the cost of medical devices like joint
implants, pacemakers and artificial urinary valves offers a cautionary tale.
Like many medical products or procedures, they cost far more in the United
States than in many other developed countries.
Makers of artificial implants — the biggest
single cost of most joint replacement surgeries — have proved particularly
adept at commanding inflated prices, according to health economists. Multiple
intermediaries then mark up the charges. While Mr. Shopenn was offered an implant
in the United States for $13,000, many privately insured patients are billed
two to nearly three times that amount.
An artificial hip, however, costs only about $350
to manufacture in the United States, according to Dr. Blair Rhode, an
orthopedist and entrepreneur whose company is developing generic implants. In
Asia, it costs about $150, though some quality control issues could arise
there, he said.
So why are implant list prices so high, and
rising by more than 5 percent a year? In the United States, nearly all hip and
knee implants — sterilized pieces of tooled metal, plastic or ceramics — are
made by five companies, which some economists describe as a cartel.
Manufacturers tweak old models and patent the changes as new products, with
ever-bigger price tags.
Generic or foreign-made joint implants have been
kept out of the United States by trade policy, patents and an expensive Food
and Drug Administration approval process that deters start-ups from entering the
market. The “companies defend this turf ferociously,” said Dr. Peter M. Cram, a
physician at the University of Iowa medical school who studies the costs of
health care.
Though the five companies make similar models,
each cultivates intense brand loyalty through financial ties to surgeons and
the use of a different tool kit and operating system for the installation of
its products; orthopedists typically stay with the system they learned on. The
thousands of hospitals and clinics that purchase implants try to bargain for
deep discounts from manufacturers, but they have limited leverage since each
buys a relatively small quantity from any one company.
In addition, device makers typically require
doctors’ groups and hospitals to sign nondisclosure agreements about prices,
which means institutions do not know what their competitors are paying. This
secrecy erodes bargaining power and has allowed a small industry of
profit-taking middlemen to flourish: joint implant purchasing consultants,
implant billing companies, joint brokers. There are as many as 13 layers of
vendors between the physician and the patient for a hip replacement, according
to Kate Willhite, a former executive director of the Manitowoc Surgery Center
in Wisconsin.
Hospitals and orthopedic clinics typically pay
$4,500 to $7,500 for an artificial hip, according to MD Buyline
and Orthopedic
Network News, which track device pricing. But those numbers balloon
with the cost of installation equipment and all the intermediaries’ fees,
including an often hefty hospital markup.
That is why the hip implant for Joe Catugno, a
patient at the Hospital for Joint Diseases in New York, accounted for nearly
$37,000 of his approximately $100,000 hospital bill; Cigna, his insurer, paid
close to $70,000 of the charges. At Mills-Peninsula Health Services in San
Mateo, Calif., Susan Foley’s artificial knee, which costs about the same as a
hip joint, was billed at $26,000 in a total hospital tally of $112,317. The
components of Sonja Nelson’s hip at Sacred Heart Hospital in Pensacola, Fla.,
accounted for $30,581 of her $50,935 hospital bill. Insurers negotiate
discounts on those charges, and patients have limited responsibility for the
differences.
The basic design of artificial joints has not
changed for decades. But increased volume — about one million knee and hip
replacements are performed in the United States annually — and competition have
not lowered prices, as would typically happen with products like clothes or
cars. “There are a bunch of implants that are reasonably similar,” said James
C. Robinson, a health economist at the University of California, Berkeley.
“That should be great for the consumer, but it isn’t.”
COMPARING TWO OPERATIONS
‘Sticky Pricing’
The American health care market is plagued by
such “sticky pricing,” in which prices of products remain high or even increase
over time instead of dropping. The list price of a total hip implant increased
nearly 300 percent from 1998 to 2011, according to Orthopedic Network News, a
newsletter about the industry. That is a result, economists say, of how
American medicine generally sets charges: without government regulation or
genuine marketplace competition.
“Manufacturers will tell you it’s R&D and
liability that makes implants so expensive and that they have the only one like
it,” said Dr. Rory Wright, an orthopedist at the Orthopedic Hospital of
Wisconsin, a top specialty clinic. “They price this way because they can.”
Zimmer Holdings declined to comment on pricing.
But Sheryl Conley, a longtime Zimmer manager who is now the chief executive of OrthoWorx,
a local trade group in Warsaw, said that high prices reflected the increasing
complexity of the joint implant business, including more advanced materials,
new regulatory requirements and the logistics of providing a now huge array of
devices. “When I started, there weren’t even left and right knee components,”
she said. “It was one size fits all.”
Mr. Shopenn’s Zimmer hip has transformed his
life, as did the replacement joint for Mr. Catugno, a TV director; Ms. Foley, a
lawyer; and Ms. Nelson, a software development executive. Mr. Shopenn, an
exuberant man who maintains a busy work schedule, recently hosted his son’s
wedding and spent 26 days last winter teaching snowboarding to disabled people.
His joint implant and surgery in Belgium were
priced according to a different logic. Like many other countries, Belgium
oversees major medical purchases, approving dozens of different types of
implants from a selection of manufacturers, and determining the allowed
wholesale price for each of them, for example. That price, which is published,
currently averages about $3,000, depending on the model, and can be marked up
by about $180 per implant. (The Belgian hospital paid about $4,000 for Mr.
Shopenn’s high-end Zimmer implant at a time when American hospitals were paying
an average of over $8,000 for the same model.)
“The manufacturers do not have the right to sell
an implant at a higher rate,” said Philip Boussauw, director of human resources
and administration at St. Rembert’s, the hospital where Mr. Shopenn
had his surgery. Nonetheless, he said, there was “a lot of competition” among
American joint manufacturers to work with Belgian hospitals. “I’m sure they are
making money,” he added.
Dr. Cram, the Iowa health cost expert, points out
that joint manufacturers are businesses, operating within the constraints of
varying laws and markets.
“Imagine you’re the C.E.O. of Zimmer,” he said.
“Why charge $1,000 for the implant in the U.S. when you can charge $14,000? How
would you answer to your shareholders?” Expecting device makers “to do
otherwise is like asking, ‘Couldn’t Apple just charge $50 for an iPhone?’
because that’s what it costs to make them.”
Take a look at this and then see the following post about my time at Wounded Knee.......
Abandoned in Indian Country
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
It’s an old American story: malign policies hatched in Washington leading to pain and death in Indian country. It was true in the 19th century. It is true now, at a time when Congress, heedless of its solemn treaty obligations to Indian tribes, is allowing the across-the-board budget cuts known as the sequester to threaten the health, safety and education of Indians across the nation.
Many Republicans have lately taken to dismissing the sequester as a mild headache for a country that needs to tighten its belt. They are willfully averting their eyes from Indian reservations, where the cuts are real, specific, broad and brutal. The victims are among the poorest, sickest and most isolated Americans.
The sequester in a nutshell? “More people sick; fewer people educated; fewer people getting general assistance; more domestic violence; more alcoholism,” Richard Zephier, executive director of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, recently told Annie Lowrey of The Times.
The damage is being done to agencies and programs whose budgets rely nearly entirely on federal sources, now being slashed. In signing treaties with Indian nations in return for land, the federal government promised a wide array of life-sustaining services. One of the most important is the Indian Health Service, which serves about two million people on reservations and is grossly underfinanced even in good times. It routinely runs out of money halfway through the year. Though Medicare, Medicaid and veterans’ health were exempted from sequestration cuts, the Indian Health Service was not. It stands to lose about $228 million in 2013 from automatic sequester cuts alone, out of a $4 billion budget. That will mean 3,000 fewer inpatient admissions and 800,000 fewer outpatient visits every year.
On the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the tribal police force, facing cumulative budget cuts of 14 percent, or more than $1 million, has let 14 officers go. Its nine patrol cars are already pitifully inadequate for policing a 2.8-million-acre reservation plagued by poverty, joblessness, youth gangs, suicide, alcoholism and methamphetamine addiction. The tribe is cutting a program that serves meals to the housebound elderly. Its schools and Head Start program are cutting back. On a reservation with a chronic and worsening shortage of homes, where families double up in flimsy trailers without running water or electricity, a housing-improvement program with a 1,500-family waiting list was shut down. There were 100 suicide attempts in 110 days on Pine Ridge, officials there said, but the reservation is losing two mental-health providers because of the sequester.
The warnings about the cuts have come from many sources, all ignored. A report in May from the Center for Native American Youth described the looming damage to housing and juvenile-justice programs, child-welfare and mental-health services, and education. It predicted that sequester cuts to the Department of Education would lead to staff reductions, canceled programs and shortened school years affecting nearly 115,000 Indian youths at 710 schools.
In the Navajo Nation, in Arizona, the Window Rock Unified School District is cutting about $7 million from a $24 million budget; it let 14 employees go and shrunk to four buildings from seven. The United States attorney for North Dakota, Timothy Purdon, has warned tribes that sequester cuts could jeopardize public safety. Furloughs at the Justice Department, he said, could reverse the recent gains in the number of federal prosecutions of crimes in Indian country.
Byron Dorgan, the retired United States senator from North Dakota who founded the Center for Native American Youth, demanded in an Op-Ed article in The Times that Congress hold hearings to examine its broken treaty promises and develop a plan for restitution. He said it should exempt Indian country from sequestration. He is right. Where the deficit zealots see virtue, we see moral failure.
The next time any Republicans get pious about their party’s respect for life and the rule of law, someone should ask: What about Pine Ridge?
A Widow Airs Memories From the Dust of the Past
By THERESE STEINER
In a totally uncharacteristic move, I have been cleaning the house and attacking my closets with a rare enthusiasm and a sense of abandon I never believed possible. Some things are easy to pitch (what took so long?).
Others I hold, linger over, caress, remember: Jeremy’s ninth-grade lacrosse helmet, his 11th-grade “Constructing America” term paper, the Continental plane ticket stub that brought him home for Christmas his first year at the University of Edinburgh. Zoe’s green, signed plaster cast from a skiing accident at Lake Placid; the early-decision acceptance letter she received from Oberlin her junior year of high school, bringing such joy after those tough, early teenage years.
A photograph of Zoe in the Tuileries Garden, wearing her favorite dress with marguerite flowers (Size 3T), which she wore the summer her dad died 20 years ago. “I hate him, because I love him so much,” she said.
You, Howie. Her father, my husband. My thoughts ricochet with each discovery. A recipe for cranberry sauce, cut from Gourmet magazine, brings back our first year of marriage and our apartment on West Ninth Street, and the 40-pound frozen turkey your father shoved through the doorway for us to prepare for Thanksgiving (defrosted in the bath tub). How much we loved to cook together and entertain.
The black whistle you used when coaching Jeremy’s basketball team of kindergartners and first graders in Yonkers. The pleasure and pride you would have felt watching your son play sports in high school: football, wrestling, lacrosse. How sad I was that Jeremy never experienced his dad watching him play.
Or that Zoe never heard the loud guffaw, which most certainly would have come blurting out of you, at her performance as the mother in “Brighton Beach Memories.” The program is stored in the “Zoe” box.
You would have been so proud to know she had inherited your love of science.
A 45-year-old father and husband lost in a flash when he slammed into the front wall and broke his neck, in a freakish accident playing squash. (Never before recorded in the history of playing squash, said a doctor friend who looked up the statistics.)
I wasn’t single parenting, I was only parenting. Finding an old dog collar from our sweet Labrador, Blackey, brought back memories of driving the children home one night during a thunderstorm, both asleep in car seats in the back. I carried Jeremy upstairs, surprised at how heavy a drowsy 6-year-old can feel, and put him to bed; then Zoe.
I grabbed an umbrella and scooped up Blackey, then a puppy, and took her out to the backyard to pee. Tears were running down my cheeks. Another Saturday night.
Where were you, Howie, when the house was robbed? The car stolen? The chimney collapsed on the roof of our turn-of-the-century Victorian home? (A “first” for our insurance agent.) And when the neighbor’s tree uprooted and fell across the backyard and onto the house during Hurricane Sandy?
That horrible year when Zoe unraveled, set off by your death; the same year that Jeremy was in the emergency room seven times with stitches and concussions from various sports injuries. Where was the “it’s going to be O.K.” warmth of your arm around my shoulder?
Shouldn’t we be cleaning, sifting, downsizing, planning for our future together?
Here are photos stuck together of birthday parties, family vacations and graduations; half-filled cans of half-dead tennis balls; notes from family; invitations from friends; letters and postcards from old lovers mailed from some spot with a beach.
I find an old passport with stamps from Morocco, Tunisia, Israel and much of Europe, reminders of my producing work on a PBS television series. I smile as I remember waking up before dawn to film at the Alhambra in Spain, lured into secret courtyards by the smell of jasmine. And reams of notebooks from my consulting work. Twenty-five years of taxes are headed for the shredder.
Both children have decamped for points West: Jeremy, a budding mobile-game entrepreneur, to San Francisco; Zoe packed up her neuroscience degree and headed to Los Angeles for a career writing television comedy. Go figure.
Never did I think Jeremy, Zoe and I would be on the same OkCupid online dating service at the same time. Yes, there really is something called OkCupid. There are Facebook friends, tweets and smartphones smaller than transistor radios that we use to take photos.
It’s a beautiful day. Should I attack more dusty boxes on the third floor? Your jazz record collection? The carton of yellowed paperbacks from my Harvard years, required reading from Prof. William Alfred’s theater course? Or your suit and my dress from our wedding, carefully stored in tissue long ago in the unlikely event our children may someday choose to wear them.
You’re missed so much. You’ve missed so much. But you know me. Not the maudlin type. I may revisit the past and savor sweet memories, but I’m not one to dwell on it. It’s time to walk our dog, Belle, then drive to the city. I have a busy day ahead.
The Trouble With Testing Mania
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Congress made a sensible decision a decade ago when it required the states to administer yearly tests to public school students in exchange for federal education aid. The theory behind the No Child Left Behind Act was that holding schools accountable for test scores would force them to improve instruction for groups of children whom they had historically shortchanged.
Testing did spur some progress in student performance. But it has become clear to us over time that testing was being overemphasized — and misused — in schools that were substituting test preparation for instruction. Even though test-driven reforms were helpful in the beginning, it is now clear that they will never bring this country’s schools up to par with those of the high-performing nations that have left us far behind in math, science and even literacy instruction.
Congress required the states to give annual math and reading tests in grades three through eight (and once in high school) as a way of ensuring that students were making progress and that minority children were being fairly educated. Schools that did not meet performance targets for two years were labeled as needing improvement and subjected to sanctions. Fearing that they would be labeled poor performers, schools and districts — especially in low-income areas — rolled out a relentless series of “diagnostic” tests that were actually practice rounds for the high-stakes exams to come.
That the real tests were weak, and did not gauge the skills students needed to succeed, made matters worse. Unfortunately, most states did not invest in rigorous, high-quality exams with open-ended essay questions that test reasoning skill. Rather, they opted for cheap, multiple-choice tests of marginal value. While practically making exams the center of the educational mission, the country underinvested in curriculum development and teacher training, overlooking the approaches that other nations use to help teachers get constantly better.
The government went further in the testing direction through its competitive grant program, known as Race to the Top, and a waiver program related to No Child Left Behind, both of which pushed the states to create teacher evaluation systems that take student test data into account. Test scores should figure in evaluations, but the measures have to be fair, properly calibrated and statistically valid — all of which means that these evaluation systems cannot be rushed into service before they are ready.
Foreign nations with the highest-performing school systems did not build them this way. In fact, none of the top-performing nations have opted for a regime of grade-by-grade standardized tests. Instead, they typically have gateway exams that determine, for example, if high school students have met their standards. These countries typically have strong, national curriculums. Perhaps most important, they set a high bar for entry into the teaching profession and make sure that the institutions that train teachers do it exceedingly well.
In Finland, for example, teacher preparation programs are highly competitive and extremely challenging. (The programs are free to students and come with a living stipend.) Close attention is devoted not just to scholarly and research matters but to pedagogical skills.
This country, by contrast, has an abysmal system of teacher preparation. That point was underscored recently in a harrowing report on teacher education programs from the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and advocacy group. The report found that very few programs meet even basic quality standards: new students are often poorly prepared, and what the schools teach them “often has little relevance to what they need to succeed in the classroom.”
Some problems could be partly solved by the Common Core learning standards, an ambitious set of goals for what students should learn. The Common Core, adopted by all but a handful of states, could move the nation away from rote memorization — and those cheap, color-in-the-bubble tests — and toward a writing-intensive system that gives students the reasoning skills they need in the new economy. But the concept has become the subject of a backlash from test-weary parents who have little confidence in a whole new round of exams that the system will require. Beyond that, teachers are understandably worried that they will be evaluated — and pushed out of jobs — based on how their students perform on tests related to the old curriculum while they are being asked to teach the new one. If school officials fail to resolve these issues in a fair manner, the national effort to install the new standards could collapse.
Congress could ease some of the test mania by rethinking the way schools are evaluated under No Child Left Behind. Test scores are important to that process, but modest weight should be given to a few other indicators, like advanced courses, promotion rates, college-going rates and so on. Similarly, the states that have allowed the districts to choke schools with the diagnostic tests and data collection could reverse that trend so that schools have perhaps one or two higher-quality tests per year. In other words, the country needs to reconsider its obsession with testing, which can make education worse, not better.
Diagnosis: Insufficient Outrage
By H. GILBERT WELCH
HANOVER, N.H. — RECENT revelations should lead those of us involved in America’s health care system to ask a hard question about our business: At what point does it become a crime?
I’m not talking about a violation of federal or state statutes, like Medicare or Medicaid fraud, although crime in that sense definitely exists. I’m talking instead about the violation of an ethical standard, of the very “calling” of medicine.
Medical care is intended to help people, not enrich providers. But the way prices are rising, it’s beginning to look less like help than like highway robbery. And the providers — hospitals, doctors, universities, pharmaceutical companies and device manufactures — are the ones benefiting.
A number of publications — including this one — have recently published big reports on the exorbitant cost of American health care. In March, Time magazine ran a cover story exposing outrageous hospital prices, from $108 for a tube of bacitracin — the ointment my mother put on the scrapes I got as a kid and that costs $5 at CVS — to $21,000 for a three-hour emergency room evaluation for chest pain caused by indigestion.
Of course, Medicare will have none of this — it sets its own prices. And private insurers negotiate discounts. So no one is actually charged these amounts.
Check that. The uninsured are. They are largely young and employed (albeit poorly) and have little education. So the biggest medical bills go to those least able to pay.
At what point does it become a crime?
Consider another recent shift in health care: hospitals have been aggressively buying up physician practices. This could be desirable, a way to get doctors to use the same medical record so that your primary care practitioner knows what your cardiologist did.
But that may not be the primary motivation for these consolidations. For years Medicare has paid hospitals more than independent physician practices for outpatient care, even when they are providing the same things. The extra payment is called the facility fee, and is meant to compensate hospitals for their public service — taking on the sickest patients and providing the most complex care.
But now hospitals are buying up independent practices, moving nothing, yet calling them part of the hospital, and receiving the higher rate.
In North Carolina, Duke’s health system has been aggressively buying up local cardiology practices, thereby increasing the number of echocardiograms performed “in the hospital” by 68 percent in one year, and bumping the Medicare payment from $200 to $471, according to The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer, in Raleigh.
It’s happening in my hometown hospital, Boulder Community Hospital, where my late mother was a trustee. The Denver Post reported in May on a patient whose cardiac stress test cost around $2,000 one year, and around $8,000 the next, after his doctor’s practice was bought by the hospital.
Same office, same machine, same doctor, but it cost four times more. Mom would want to know: what happened to the word “community” next to the word “hospital”?
The problem is not just prices, but also volumes: how much we do to patients, and how often. Look at colonoscopies. There are good reasons to believe that they can reduce the number of deaths from colon cancer. Expert panels recommend that most people need a colonoscopy only once every 10 years. But a study published in 2011 in The Archives of Internal Medicine found that 46 percent of Medicare beneficiaries with a normal colonoscopy nevertheless had a repeat exam in fewer than seven years. For some gastroenterologists, it seems, the primary finding from your colonoscopy is that you need another one.
Cardiology has a similar problem. Each year millions of Medicare beneficiaries undergo an echocardiogram. Half of them have the test repeated within three years. It sure looks as if some cardiologists are doing the test annually.
Finally we’ve learned the value of new capacity: if you build it, they will come. Two proton beam facilities were recently approved for Washington. One is already being built in Baltimore, only 40 miles away. There may be some role for proton beam radiation in children who have brain and spinal tumors, but there are only about 140 such children a year in Washington and Baltimore. Three facilities have the capacity to serve well over 10 times that. It’s hard to imagine that some of the roughly 8,000 men in the area destined to develop prostate cancer next year won’t receive proton beam therapy, despite the fact that there’s no good evidence that it’s any better than standard radiation for their condition.
But it is certainly more expensive: profits at one of the facilities are expected to reach almost $16 million a year by 2019.
The word “crime” is awfully strong. Many prefer to call all this a problem of perverse incentives: good people, working in a bad system.
We could make the system better. We could ensure that everyone has access to the same set of prices, like the Medicare fee schedule. We could end the “fee for service” positive feedback loop — in which doctors and hospitals earn more for every procedure they do, which leads to overtreating patients — and instead have a flat fee. But the incentives will never be perfect. Ultimately, society needs individuals to be guided by ethical standards. And in medical care, those standards are getting pretty darn low.
Too many of us have passively accepted the situation as being beyond our control. Medical care in America could use a dose of moral outrage. It would be best for all if it was self-administered.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 5, 2013
An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed a 2011 study on colonoscopies. It was published in The Archives of Internal Medicine (now JAMA Internal Medicine), not The Journal of the American Medical Association.
Let’s Not Braise the Planet
By MARK BITTMAN
According to a report released by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace last month, we are not running out of fossil fuels anytime soon. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution we’ve used around 1.2 trillion barrels of oil; the report estimates that with current technology we can produce roughly five times that much. With future technologies, it may well be that the suffering sky is the limit.
This reduces the issue of conversion to clean energy to one of ethics and intent. Our ability to turn around the rate of carbon emissions and slow the engine that can conflagrate the world is certain. But do we have the will?
The chief economist at the International Energy Agency recommends leaving two-thirds of all fossil fuels in the ground. Makes sense to me, but if you’re an oil executive scarcely being charged for the global damage your industry causes (an effective annual subsidy, says the International Monetary Fund, of nearly $2 trillion, money that would be better spent subsidizing nonpolluting energy sources), responsible to your shareholders and making a fortune, would you start erecting windmills?
Here’s the answer: According to Rolling Stone, just this spring, BP put its $3.1 billion United States wind farm operation up for sale. Last year, ConocoPhillips divested itself of its alternative-energy activities. Shell, with its “Let’s Go” campaign to “broaden the world’s energy mix,” spends less than 2 percent of its expenditures on “alternatives.”Mining oil, gas and coal is making some people rich while braising the planet for all of us. It’s difficult to think ahead, especially with climate change deniers sowing doubt and unfounded fears of unemployment, but we owe quick and decisive action on greenhouse gas reduction not only to ourselves but to billions of people not yet born. “People give less weight to the future, but that’s a brain bug,” the philosopher Peter Singer told me. “We should have equal concern for everyone wherever and whenever they live.”
Here’s the answer: According to Rolling Stone, just this spring, BP put its $3.1 billion United States wind farm operation up for sale. Last year, ConocoPhillips divested itself of its alternative-energy activities. Shell, with its “Let’s Go” campaign to “broaden the world’s energy mix,” spends less than 2 percent of its expenditures on “alternatives.”Mining oil, gas and coal is making some people rich while braising the planet for all of us. It’s difficult to think ahead, especially with climate change deniers sowing doubt and unfounded fears of unemployment, but we owe quick and decisive action on greenhouse gas reduction not only to ourselves but to billions of people not yet born. “People give less weight to the future, but that’s a brain bug,” the philosopher Peter Singer told me. “We should have equal concern for everyone wherever and whenever they live.”
There’s reason for optimism thanks to renewable energy standards in most states, California’s groundbreaking cap-and-trade law and President Obama’s directive to the Environmental Protection Agency last week. But this isn’t nearly enough, and you have to hope that the president is now fully engaged in progressive energy policy and isn’t merely preparing us for disappointment should he approve of Keystone XL.
Three things worth noting: Most politicians prefer adaptation to mitigation — that is, they’d rather build houses on stilts than reduce emissions; energy independence is in no way synonymous with “clean” energy; and the oft-stated notion that “since gas burns cleaner than coal and oil, we should be moving toward gas” puts us on the highway to hell.
Make no mistake: when it comes to climate change gas isn’t “clean,” because undetermined amounts of methane — a powerful greenhouse gas — leak into the atmosphere from natural gas production.
The answer is zero emission energy. Even moderate changes can help, but cuts in the use of fossil fuels must be much deeper than the president is directing, and this may not happen unless we rid Congress of friends of Big Energy. (By one count the House’s 125 climate-change deniers have taken $30 million in contributions from energy companies.)
Investments in zero-carbon energy are relatively inexpensive and good for the economy, and the cost of business as usual is higher than the cost of even expensive carbon pricing. But it’s tough — pointless? — to make these arguments to the energy companies and their Congressional lackeys, who will fight as they have been effectively paid to do.
Unless we quickly put a steep and real price on all carbon emissions, our inaction will doom our not-too-distant descendants. “Really,” says Dan Lashof, the director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate and clean air program, “we need a comprehensive approach to reduce carbon pollution from all sources. What form that takes — caps, taxes, or standards — is far less important than how soon we get it in place.”
Americans and Western Europeans have been the primary beneficiaries of the lifestyle that accelerated climate change, and, of course are among the primary emitters of greenhouse gases. For the first 200-plus years of the fossil fuel age, we could claim ignorance of its lasting harm; we cannot do that now.
With knowledge comes responsibility, and with that responsibility must come action. As the earth’s stewards, our individual changes are important, but this is a bigger deal than replacing light bulbs or riding a bike. Let’s make working to turn emissions around a litmus test for every politician who asks for our vote.
Imagine a democracy across space, time and class, where legislative bodies represented not only those living in the world’s low-lying areas but their great-grandchildren — and ours. Or imagine that our elected representatives were proxies for those people. Imagine those representatives determining our current energy policy. Is there any doubt that things would change more rapidly?
Why They Fought
By DAVID BROOKS
Tuesday is the 150th anniversary of the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg. In his eloquent new account, “Gettysburg: the Last Invasion,” the historian Allen Guelzo describes the psychology of the fighters on that day.
A battlefield is “the lonesomest place which men share together,” a soldier once observed. At Gettysburg, the men were sometimes isolated within the rolling clouds of gun smoke and unnerved by what Guelzo calls “the weird harmonic ring of bullets striking fixed bayonets.” They were often terrified, of course, sometimes losing bladder and bowel control. (Aristophanes once called battle “the terrible one, the tough one, the one upon the legs.”)
But, as Guelzo notes, the Civil War was fought with “an amateurism of spirit and an innocence of intent, which would be touching if that same amateurism had not also contrived to make it so bloody.”
Discipline was loose. Civil War soldiers were not used to subordinating themselves within large organizations. One veteran observed that in battle “men standing in line got in paroxysms of laughter.” But many were motivated by the sense that they were living up to some high moral ideal. Words like “gallant,” “valor” and “chivalric” dot their descriptions of each other’s behavior. Upon being taken prisoner, one Union soldier shook his captors’ hands and congratulated them on the “most splendid charge of the war.”
Another officer remembered battle as a “supreme minute to you; you are in ecstasies.” A Union artillery officer confessed that throughout Gettysburg “somehow or other I felt a joyous exaltation, a perfect indifference to circumstances, through the whole of that three days’ fight, and I have seldom enjoyed three days more in my life.”
In our current era, as the saying goes, we take that which is lower to be more real. We generally believe that soldiers under the gritty harshness of war are not thinking about high ideals like gallantry. They are just trying to get through the day or protect their buddies. Since World War I, as Hemingway famously put it, abstract words like “honor” and “glory” and “courage” often seem obscene and pretentious. Studies of letters sent home by soldiers in World War II suggest that grand ideas were remote from their daily concerns.
But Civil War soldiers were different. In his 1997 book “For Cause and Comrades,” James M. McPherson looked at the private letters Civil War soldiers sent to their loved ones. As McPherson noted, they ring with “patriotism, ideology, concepts of duty, honor, manhood and community.”
The soldiers were intensely political. Newspapers were desperately sought after in camp. Between battles, several regiments held formal debates on subjects like the constitutional issues raised by the war. “Ideological motifs almost leap from many pages of these documents,” McPherson reports. “It is government against anarchy, law against disorder,” a Philadelphia printer wrote, explaining his desire to fight.
The letters were also explicitly moralistic. “The consciousness of duty was pervasive in Victorian America,” McPherson writes. The letters were studded with the language of personal honor, and, above all, a desire to sacrifice, as one soldier put it, “personal feelings and inclinations to ... my duty in the hour of danger.”
One of the most famous letters was written not at Gettysburg but on July 14, 1861, on the eve of the First Battle of Bull Run. It was written by Sullivan Ballou, an officer from Rhode Island. Ballou had lost his own parents when he was young and, having known “the bitter fruit of orphanage myself,” he declared himself loath to die in battle and leave his small children fatherless.
“My love for you is deathless,” he wrote to his wife. “It seems to bind me to you with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; yet my love of country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.”
It’s not just love of country that impels him, but a feeling of indebtedness to the past: “I know how strongly American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the Government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution. And I am willing — perfectly willing — to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt.”
These letter writers, and many of the men at Gettysburg, were not just different than most of us today because their language was more high flown and earnest. There was probably also a greater covenantal consciousness, a belief that they were born in a state of indebtedness to an ongoing project, and they would inevitably be called upon to pay these debts, to come square with the country, even at the cost of their lives.
Makes today’s special interest politics look kind of pathetic.
Living With Fire
By ALAN DEAN FOSTER
PRESCOTT, Ariz. — WHEN you build a fire in a fireplace, you start with paper, add kindling, and finally arrange the larger logs on top. That perfectly describes the summertime environment in the southwestern mountains of the United States.
Yet many thousands of us choose to live here.
I live in Prescott, Ariz., where a wildfire called the Doce fire is now almost completely contained, after burning 6,767 tinder-dry acres. It started two weeks ago, six miles or so from the house where my wife and I have lived for more than 30 years.
We live in the bottom of a small canyon, and it took a moment for me to realize that the smoke I was seeing from the study window was all wrong. Distant fires, which we are used to, score the blue sky with a thin haze, like a watercolorist’s brown wash. But this cloud was massive, a darker brown, moving too fast, and flush with orange.
I drove to the top of the highest hill behind our house and as I swung around the crest, between homes with neat desert landscaping, a view opened before me that bordered on the apocalyptic. Someone had switched the channel of my life.
The mountains were on fire. At that moment the wind was so strong that much of the smoke was lying down, the flames blown almost parallel to the ground. It didn’t look like a movie. I could smell it.
Confronted by the immediacy of destruction, technology is the first thing that flees. I was reduced to tossing bits of dried weed into the air to check the direction of the wind. You think: water, family, pets. What do I put in the car first? By then the mass of orange-brown smoke had taken over the north sky.
Move, your mind tells you. Yet you can’t stop staring. If you stare at it long enough, perhaps it will go away.
But the monster doesn’t go away. It burns north-northeast, luckily almost directly away from our house. It burns right into the backyards of some homes, but no structures are lost, no lives are lost, thanks to the coordination of multiple fire units.
Among the best of these, the front-line fighters, are the Hotshots. They’re the best trained, the best conditioned, the hardest working of all. They go right up to the fire line, and sometimes into it.
On Sunday they showed up to fight another fire, near the small, picturesque town of Yarnell, some 30 miles southwest of here. At first it wasn’t a big fire, nor was it considered a dangerous one.
But a monsoon blew up. The southwest monsoon is not technically a monsoon, but that’s what we call it. Rain poured down in Prescott — welcome, drenching rain. Out in front of the storm, however, winds rose, turned erratic.
The fire essentially flipped over a team of Hotshots, the Granite Mountain Hotshots, from Prescott. Nineteen of them died, the worst loss of firefighter life in a wildland fire in Arizona’s history, the worst in the country in 80 years. The greatest tragedy to strike the firefighting profession since 9/11.
I did not know any of them personally, but based on the group photo that has been widely distributed, I think some of them went to my gym. It’s strange to think I won’t see them again. Small blank spaces in one’s existence that used to be occupied by actual people.
Terrible calamity, the television anchors keep repeating. Horrible tragedy. If you live here, you don’t need those words. You call those you know to make sure they’re O.K. You meet people in the drugstore, on the street. A knowing look, a regretful nod convey all that needs to be said. People living in proximity to disaster don’t shout; they just prepare in case it turns and comes for them.
Two major fires in two weeks. Why stay there, people who live elsewhere must wonder as they watch such tragedies unfold. Why not move someplace where you don’t spend every summer wondering if your house is going to burn down.
Why do humans live on the slopes of active volcanoes? Why do they live atop major earthquake faults? Why on earth do people continue to dwell, year after year, in a part of the country called Tornado Alley?
Because such places are beautiful, are peaceful and, for better or worse, are home. No place is safe. Not on this planet. So you choose your home for what you love about it, and not what you fear. If we let fear dictate where we should live, we would all end up huddled together in one great shivering ball of humanity, and that wouldn’t be safe, either.
The Doce fire could have been infinitely worse. All it would have taken was a shift in the wind. Yarnell is still burning. But I have to go feed the towhees and the hummingbirds, maybe shoo away a too-curious coyote. This is my home, and I’ll deal with Mother Nature’s dark side when and if it comes my way. As must we all.
The Humanist Vocation
By DAVID BROOKS
A half-century ago, 14 percent of college degrees were awarded to people who majored in the humanities. Today, only 7 percent of graduates in the country are humanities majors. Even over the last decade alone, the number of incoming students at Harvard who express interest in becoming humanities majors has dropped by a third.
Most people give an economic explanation for this decline. Accounting majors get jobs. Lit majors don’t. And there’s obviously some truth to this. But the humanities are not only being bulldozed by an unforgiving job market. They are committing suicide because many humanists have lost faith in their own enterprise.
Back when the humanities were thriving, the leading figures had a clear definition of their mission and a fervent passion for it. The job of the humanities was to cultivate the human core, the part of a person we might call the spirit, the soul, or, in D.H. Lawrence’s phrase, “the dark vast forest.”
This was the most inward and elemental part of a person. When you go to a funeral and hear a eulogy, this is usually the part they are talking about. Eulogies aren’t résumés. They describe the person’s care, wisdom, truthfulness and courage. They describe the million little moral judgments that emanate from that inner region.
The humanist’s job was to cultivate this ground — imposing intellectual order upon it, educating the emotions with art in order to refine it, offering inspiring exemplars to get it properly oriented.
Somewhere along the way, many people in the humanities lost faith in this uplifting mission. The humanities turned from an inward to an outward focus. They were less about the old notions of truth, beauty and goodness and more about political and social categories like race, class and gender. Liberal arts professors grew more moralistic when talking about politics but more tentative about private morality because they didn’t want to offend anybody.
To the earnest 19-year-old with lofty dreams of self-understanding and moral greatness, the humanities in this guise were bound to seem less consequential and more boring.
So now the humanities are in crisis. Rescuers are stepping forth. On Thursday, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences released a report called “The Heart of the Matter,” making the case for the humanities and social sciences. (I was a member of this large commission, though I certainly can’t take any credit for the result.)
The report is important, and you should read it. It focuses not only on the external goods the humanities can produce (creative thinking, good writing), but also the internal transformation (spiritual depth, personal integrity). It does lack some missionary zeal that hit me powerfully as a college freshman when the humanities were in better shape.
One of the great history teachers in those days was a University of Chicago professor named Karl Weintraub. He poured his soul into transforming his students’ lives, but, even then, he sometimes wondered if they were really listening. Late in life, he wrote a note to my classmate Carol Quillen, who now helps carry on this legacy as president of Davidson College.
Teaching Western Civ, Weintraub wrote, “seems to confront me all too often with moments when I feel like screaming suddenly: ‘Oh, God, my dear student, why CANNOT you see that this matter is a real, real matter, often a matter of the very being, for the person, for the historical men and women you are looking at — or are supposed to be looking at!’
“I hear these answers and statements that sound like mere words, mere verbal formulations to me, but that do not have the sense of pain or joy or accomplishment or worry about them that they ought to have if they were TRULY informed by the live problems and situations of the human beings back there for whom these matters were real. The way these disembodied words come forth can make me cry, and the failure of the speaker to probe for the open wounds and such behind the text makes me increasingly furious.
“If I do not come to feel any of the love which Pericles feels for his city, how can I understand the Funeral Oration? If I cannot fathom anything of the power of the drive derived from thinking that he has a special mission, what can I understand of Socrates? ... How can one grasp anything about the problem of the Galatian community without sensing in one’s bones the problem of worrying about God’s acceptance?
“Sometimes when I have spent an hour or more, pouring all my enthusiasm and sensitivities into an effort to tell these stories in the fullness in which I see and experience them, I feel drained and exhausted. I think it works on the student, but I do not really know.”
Teachers like that were zealous for the humanities. A few years in that company leaves a lifelong mark.
Saying Less and Doing More
By CORNELIA DEAN
Saying Less and Doing More
By CORNELIA DEAN
When I received a diagnosis of breast cancer in 2009, my friend Caitlin was one of the first people I called. And when she came to see me, she said the perfect thing: nothing. Instead, she burst into tears, gave me a hug — and then took me shopping for wigs.
Caitlin has a genius for friendship. And because she had received her own diagnosis a year before, as a guide through breast cancer she was unparalleled.
She arranged for me to have eyebrows tattooed, so I would not look faceless when all my hair fell out under chemo. After my first treatment, she shaved my head in my kitchen sink. And after my mastectomy surgery, she presented me with a material assertion that there would be a life after reconstruction — a lacy bra.
Unfortunately, most people — even the most warmhearted — lack Caitlin’s intelligence and good sense. Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s new book is for us.
Ms. Pogrebin, a writer who, among other things, contributed to the founding of Ms., the feminist magazine, has produced a guide for people who have friends facing a wide range of troubles, including their own illness (or imminent death), the loss of a loved one, or the mental illness or drug addiction of a child.
She wrote it after her own bout with breast cancer, successfully treated with lumpectomy and radiation. It is full of the gaucheries of her well-meaning friends, but also the stories of friends and family members who have faced serious trouble, as well as accounts of fellow cancer patients she encountered in her journey back to good health.
A lot of her advice is common sense, but some of it is surprising.
As Ms. Pogrebin notes, greeting someone with the seemingly innocent question “How are you?” can prompt all kinds of unwelcome thoughts. Better, she advises, is a simple “It is good to see you.” For sure, you should not ask “How are you really?” If you are close enough to merit that information, it will come to you.
Like Ms. Pogrebin, I found it irritating when people told me they were inspired by my “battle” with cancer. Military analogies are not appropriate. Most of the time, being ill is not a battle. It is just an unpleasant experience.
Ms. Pogrebin has some other useful dos and don’ts.
■ Don’t talk about people you know who had something similar and are now fine.
■ Don’t tell your friend she looks great when it is obvious that she looks anything but.
■ Don’t say “I know what you’re going through” unless you actually do.
■ Do draw up a list of possible chores you could perform — picking up children at school, grocery shopping, mowing the lawn. Look and listen to cues from the sick person, or his caregivers, as to when it is appropriate to show up, and when it is a good time to leave.
■ Do realize that in the end you are powerless in the face of your friend’s illness, particularly if it is terminal. If you think a terminally ill friend wants to say goodbye, Ms. Pogrebin suggests, “gently open the door to a last conversation and leave it up to the patient to either close it or walk through.”
But perhaps the best advice Ms. Pogrebin offers is the simplest: Listen. Take your cues from the sick person.
That’s what Caitlin — and several other good friends — did for me when I was sick. I turned to those people often, and they never let me down, I think because they were paying such close attention to how I was and what I needed.
I wish I could say the same for me, when it came to helping Caitlin.
Because I can find writing therapeutic, I suggested she keep a journal — and even sent her a notebook to write in and a recorder she could dictate into. To cheer her through chemo, I sent her DVDs that I think are hilarious.
In short, I was doing for her what I might like someone to do for me. That was hardly the point.
But we forgive the lapses of our friends and hope they will forgive ours. Meanwhile, this book will help save us from a lapse or two.
A Firebrand on Campus
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
AMES, Iowa — As the car pulled into the parking lot of a Starbucks, William Sanford Nye unknotted his trademark bow tie and slipped it off.
“This might buy us a couple of minutes,” he said.
Roughly two minutes later, before his drink was ready, he was recognized anyway. Two awed young women approached to ask if he was really Bill Nye the Science Guy. Like more than a dozen other college students who would approach him over the next several hours, they asked if they could take a picture with him. He smiled, took a proffered iPhone, scooched the students in and, in a practiced gesture, stretched out his arm to take a shot of the three of them that you just knew was totally going on Facebook.
Mr. Nye had come to talk to them, and a few thousand of their friends, at Iowa State University. If he were a politician, college students would be his base. Instead, he is something more: a figure from their early days in front of the family TV, a beloved teacher and, more and more these days, a warrior for science. They, in turn, are his fans, his students and his army.
They have gone from watching him explain magnetism and electricity to defending the scientific evidence for climate change, the age of the earth and other issues they have seen polemicized for religious, political and even economic reasons.
He takes on those who would demand that the public schools teach alternative theories of evolution and the origins of the earth — most famously, in a video clip from the site BigThink.com that has been viewed some five million times. In it, he flatly tells adult viewers that “if you want to deny evolution and live in your world — in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe — that’s fine. But don’t make your kids do it, because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future.”
In any given week, you’re likely to see Mr. Nye, 57, somewhere on television, calmly countering the arguments made by people like Marc Morano, the former Republican Senate staff member whose industry-funded organization, climatedepot.com, disputes the increasingly well-understood connection between rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and warming. In an exchange several months ago on “Piers Morgan Tonight” on CNN, Mr. Morano denied that warming is occurring, and scoffed that Mr. Nye’s arguments were “the level of your daily horoscope.”
Mr. Nye quietly rebutted his opponent with the gravity of scientific consensus. “This will be the hottest two decades in recorded history,” he said. “I’ve got to disagree with you.”
Sometimes his advocacy can step out in front of scientific consensus, however. In May, after a monster tornado devastated large parts of Moore, Okla., he took a jab on Twitter at one of that state’s United States senators, James Inhofe, who has written a book calling climate change “the greatest hoax.” He mused: “Has anyone asked Oklahoma Senator Inhofe” about the frequency of such destructive storms? Yet a link between climate change and tornado activity has not been established.
On the night the tornado hit Moore, Mr. Nye explained to Mr. Morgan that “you can’t say from any one storm that ‘this is a result of, let’s say, climate change.’ ” But he noted that “if there’s more heat driving the storm, then there’s going to be more tornadoes,” and added that the question “is worth investigating.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, said that he considered Mr. Nye “among my best friends” and complimented him for “hitting controversial topics head on.”
But, he said, his own style is a bit less confrontational: “I’m looking to stimulate curiosity so most people can go out there and learn on their own.”
Phil Plait, the creator of the Bad Astronomy blog at Slate.com and a fierce advocate himself, is more like Mr. Nye, willing to take the gloves off in rebutting those who might deny that men landed on the moon, or the evidence for human effects on climate change.
Mr. Plait said admiringly of Mr. Nye, “He will very calmly tear them apart,” adding, “His big advantage is, he’s right. We know that climate change is real. We know creationism is wrong. These are no longer scientific controversies.”
“When people call these ‘controversial topics,’ that’s misleading,” he continued. “They are only controversial politically. And politics is not necessarily evidence-based.”
There was nothing in Mr. Nye’s early days that suggested he might be a firebrand for science. Born in Washington, D.C., he studied mechanical engineering at Cornell, where he got to know a professor named Carl Sagan. He moved out West to do engineering for Boeing, where he spent some three years designing a hydraulic tube for the 747 that served to dampen vibration in the steering mechanism. He refers to it lovingly as “my tube.”
He tried his hand at stand-up comedy — his first time onstage was during a Steve Martin look-alike competition, which he won. He would achieve escape velocity from Boeing with an idea for a television program that would teach science to children in a wacky way. The best-known version of “Bill Nye the Science Guy” ran from 1992 to 1996, and won 18 Emmys in five years.
Mr. Nye’s past teaching and present crusading have made him a rock star for scientifically inclined students across the country. That celebrity has allowed him, as executive director of the Planetary Society, to push for the kind of interplanetary exploration that, he said in an interview, “leads to the reverence that we have for our place in the cosmos.”
“Space,” he added, “brings out the best in us.”
On the day of Mr. Nye’s visit to the Iowa State campus, students began lining up by midafternoon to make sure they got into the evening lecture. Stephens Auditorium holds about 3,000 people, and as many as a thousand would ultimately be turned away.
They came, many said, because “Bill Nye the Science Guy” helped shape their lives. “He was probably the one who inspired me to keep going in the science career track,” said Betsy Salmon, the first person in line at one entrance to the auditorium. She majored in animal ecology.
Kaci McCleary, an “aspiring neurobiologist, or neuro-something,” said that Mr. Nye was “a very inspiring person in the field of science — he tells people to make science part of their lives, even if it’s not their career.” Ms. McCleary, who knitted as she waited to be let in, said a friend had joked to her, “I hope to be able to touch the hem of his lab coat, so he could cure me of my stupid.”
Mr. Nye did not disappoint. In a lecture that gave evidence of his stand-up roots, he started out with rambling asides on his his family and its generations-long fascination with sundials. He talked about the bluish tinge of shadows on Earth compared with the orangy shadows on Mars, and described the sundial that he convinced NASA to send up with the Curiosity rover. He got a little risqué with a joke about the gnomon — the part of the sundial that sticks up, you know — and bounced into a discussion of the hellish heat of Venus and that planet’s high concentration of greenhouse gases.
He told the students that if they figured out ways to solve problems like greenhouse gases and global warming, “You could — dare I say it? — change the world!” And what’s more, he added, throwing his head back for a hearty mad-scientist laugh, “you could get rich!”
Over the hour-and-a-half talk, those statements started out as a laugh line that got funnier through increasingly manic repetition. But he shifted his tone gradually, from goofy to fervent. By the end of his speech, it was an exhortation, a command: Change the world.
During the question-and-answer session, a student brought up Mr. Nye’s comments on evolution and creation. The problem, he explained, is that some people advocate requiring public schools to teach religious apologia as science.
“The earth’s not 4,000, 6,000, 10,000 years old,” he said. “I’ve got no problem with anybody’s religion. But if you go claiming the earth is only 10,000 years old, that’s just wrong.”
The students roared their approval. As the audience streamed out — did those dudes really rip off their shirts to show that they had painted, in all capital letters, “Bill Nye” on their chests and “science” on their backs? — Mr. Nye looked like someone who had just run a triathlon. And then it was time for more pictures.
Earlier in the day, he had marveled at the chain of events that made him the Springsteen of the nerds. “I was making a TV show. It had commercials for toys.” Yet, he noted, “It stands the test of time. It’s very gratifying.”
What he did then, and what he does now, are all part of the same crusade, he said. “There’s nothing I believe in more strongly than getting young people interested in science and engineering,” he said — “for a better tomorrow, for all humankind.”
He stopped, realizing that sounded grandiose, or at least corny.
“I’m not kidding,” he said.
Saying Less and Doing More
By CORNELIA DEAN
When I received a diagnosis of breast cancer in 2009, my friend Caitlin was one of the first people I called. And when she came to see me, she said the perfect thing: nothing. Instead, she burst into tears, gave me a hug — and then took me shopping for wigs.
Caitlin has a genius for friendship. And because she had received her own diagnosis a year before, as a guide through breast cancer she was unparalleled.
She arranged for me to have eyebrows tattooed, so I would not look faceless when all my hair fell out under chemo. After my first treatment, she shaved my head in my kitchen sink. And after my mastectomy surgery, she presented me with a material assertion that there would be a life after reconstruction — a lacy bra.
Unfortunately, most people — even the most warmhearted — lack Caitlin’s intelligence and good sense. Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s new book is for us.
Ms. Pogrebin, a writer who, among other things, contributed to the founding of Ms., the feminist magazine, has produced a guide for people who have friends facing a wide range of troubles, including their own illness (or imminent death), the loss of a loved one, or the mental illness or drug addiction of a child.
She wrote it after her own bout with breast cancer, successfully treated with lumpectomy and radiation. It is full of the gaucheries of her well-meaning friends, but also the stories of friends and family members who have faced serious trouble, as well as accounts of fellow cancer patients she encountered in her journey back to good health.
A lot of her advice is common sense, but some of it is surprising.
As Ms. Pogrebin notes, greeting someone with the seemingly innocent question “How are you?” can prompt all kinds of unwelcome thoughts. Better, she advises, is a simple “It is good to see you.” For sure, you should not ask “How are you really?” If you are close enough to merit that information, it will come to you.
Like Ms. Pogrebin, I found it irritating when people told me they were inspired by my “battle” with cancer. Military analogies are not appropriate. Most of the time, being ill is not a battle. It is just an unpleasant experience.
Ms. Pogrebin has some other useful dos and don’ts.
■ Don’t talk about people you know who had something similar and are now fine.
■ Don’t tell your friend she looks great when it is obvious that she looks anything but.
■ Don’t say “I know what you’re going through” unless you actually do.
■ Do draw up a list of possible chores you could perform — picking up children at school, grocery shopping, mowing the lawn. Look and listen to cues from the sick person, or his caregivers, as to when it is appropriate to show up, and when it is a good time to leave.
■ Do realize that in the end you are powerless in the face of your friend’s illness, particularly if it is terminal. If you think a terminally ill friend wants to say goodbye, Ms. Pogrebin suggests, “gently open the door to a last conversation and leave it up to the patient to either close it or walk through.”
But perhaps the best advice Ms. Pogrebin offers is the simplest: Listen. Take your cues from the sick person.
That’s what Caitlin — and several other good friends — did for me when I was sick. I turned to those people often, and they never let me down, I think because they were paying such close attention to how I was and what I needed.
I wish I could say the same for me, when it came to helping Caitlin.
Because I can find writing therapeutic, I suggested she keep a journal — and even sent her a notebook to write in and a recorder she could dictate into. To cheer her through chemo, I sent her DVDs that I think are hilarious.
In short, I was doing for her what I might like someone to do for me. That was hardly the point.
But we forgive the lapses of our friends and hope they will forgive ours. Meanwhile, this book will help save us from a lapse or two.
A Child’s Wild Kingdom
By JON MOOALLEM
IN a couple of weeks, my daughter will turn into a dolphin. Right now, she’s a fox. Last year, she was a cricket.
That’s just how it works at the Montessori school where she goes. Instead of “4-year-olds” and “5-year-olds,” or even “preschoolers” and “kindergartners,” each class is given an animal name and, at the end of every school year, the children graduate into being a different species entirely, shape-shifting like spirits in an aboriginal legend.
It can be a little alarming to step back and realize just how animal-centric the typical American preschool classroom is. Maybe the kids sing songs about baby belugas, or construction-paper songbirds fly across the walls. Maybe newborn ducklings nuzzle in an incubator in the corner. But the truth is, my daughter’s world has overflowed with wild animals since it first came into focus. They’ve been plush and whittled; knitted, batiked and bean-stuffed; embroidered into the ankles of her socks or foraging on the pages of every storybook.
Most parents won’t be surprised to learn that when a Purdue University child psychologist pulled a random sample of 100 children’s books, she found only 11 that did not have animals in them.
But what’s baffled me most nights at bedtime is how rarely the animals in these books even have anything to do with nature. Usually, they’re just arbitrary stand-ins for people, like the ungainly pig that yearns to be a figure skater, or the family of raccoons that bakes hamantaschen for the family of beavers at Purim. And once I tuned in to that — into the startling strangeness of how insistently our culture connects kids and wild creatures — all the animal paraphernalia in our house started to feel slightly insane. As Kieran Suckling, the executive director of the conservation group Center for Biological Diversity, pointed out to me, “Right when someone is learning to be human, we surround them with nonhumans.”
SCIENCE has some explanations to offer. Almost from birth, children seem drawn to other creatures all on their own. In studies, babies as young as 6 months try to get closer to, and provoke more physical contact with, actual dogs and cats than they do with battery-operated imitations.
Infants will smile more at a living rabbit than at a toy rabbit. Even 2-day-old babies have been shown to pay closer attention to “a dozen spotlights representing the joints and contours of a walking hen” than to a similar, randomly generated pattern of lights.
It all provides evidence for what the Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson calls “biophilia” — his theory that human beings are inherently attuned to other life-forms. It’s as though we have a deep well of attention set aside for animals, a powerful but uncategorized interest waiting to be channeled into more cogent feelings, like fascination or fear.
Young children have been shown to acquire fears of spiders and snakes more quickly than fears of guns and other human-manufactured dangers. And in this case, the researchers Judith H. Heerwagen and Gordon H. Orians offer one logical, evolutionary explanation: if you are an infant or toddler spending a lot of time on the ground, it pays to learn quickly to fear snakes and spiders. Fear of big predators like bears and wolves, on the other hand, doesn’t kick in until after age 4, around when the first human children would have begun roaming outside of their camps.
Children also fixate on animals in their imaginative lives. In her book “Why the Wild Things Are,” Gail F. Melson, a psychologist at Purdue, reports that kids see animals in the inkblots of the Rorschach test twice as often as adults do, and that, when a Tufts University psychologist went into a New Haven preschool decades ago and asked kids to tell her a story that they’d made up on the spot, between 65 and 80 percent of them told her a story about animals. (The heartbreaking minimalism of one of these stories, by a boy named Bart, still haunts me: “Once there was a lion. He ate everybody up. He ate himself up.”)
The psychologist David Foulkes concluded that 61 percent of the dreams that children have between the ages of 3 and 5 years old are about animals. But as kids grow up, Dr. Foulkes found, the percentage of animal dreams goes down. By the time they are 12, it’s only 20 percent. At age 16, it’s 9 percent.
Similarly, fears of exotic beasts like lions and sharks peak during preschool, then are gradually replaced by more sociological terrors, like kidnapping and not fitting in at school. I found a melancholy subtext in this research — the way our grittier human world intrudes on, and then finally blots out, even the wildlife in children’s heads.
Still, it’s also true that we foist animals on our children. Adults have always tended to see kids and animals as vaguely equivalent, or at least more like each other than like us. “Children,” Sigmund Freud wrote in 1913, “show no trace of the arrogance which urges adult civilized men to draw a hard-and-fast line between their own nature and that of all other animals.” Kids begin life naked, unable to speak, and appear motivated only by instincts and urges. Like a pet dog, a baby needs to be fed, housebroken, and taught to sleep through the night without howling.
For Freud, this animalness was problematic: socializing children meant molding their wildness into humanity. But these days, it’s easy to feel that societyneeds the taming — it’s despoiling so much of the natural world. And so, unsettled by the loss of wild things and places, and separated from those landscapes in the cities and suburbs that replaced them, we may be prone to romanticizing our wild children the same way we sometimes romanticize wild animals — as purer and gentler spirits than the society we’ve brought them into.
I’m not arguing that seeing a link between kids and animals is an exclusively modern phenomenon — that it’s some anxious, overcompensatory affectation of nature-deprived Americans, like those elaborate stone shower stalls, made to look like waterfalls and grottos, or the Paleo Diet. The link has always been there. (Dr. Melson notes that many of the oldest, prehistoric toys discovered include animal-shaped rattles and little wooden crocodiles.) But the meaning we wring from that connection clearly changes over time. In short, maybe we keep giving animal stuff to kids because their imaginations already brim with animals. But maybe, now, it’s also the other way around: maybe we long to see children and animals together, as free creatures living in an innocence we’ve strayed from.
THERE’S really no way to know: most psychology research about kids and animals dissects children’s one-to-one relationships with pets, not their abstract feelings about wildlife or the many representations of it they encounter. The best investigation of those vicarious relationships I found dates from 1983. That was when Stephen R. Kellert, a social ecologist at Yale, and Miriam O. Westervelt, of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service interviewed kids at 22 schools in Connecticut, in grades 2 through 11, to gauge their attitudes toward wildlife. What they discovered is an obvious but deflating truth: little kids arelike animals, too necessarily consumed by their own interests to register much concern or compassion for other animals in the abstract.
Kids under the age of 6 especially “were found to be egocentric, domineering, and self-serving,” Dr. Kellert later wrote, summarizing the study. “Young children reveal little recognition or appreciation of the autonomous feelings and independence of animals” and “also express the greatest fear of the natural world.” It was the younger kids, not the 8th or 11th graders, who were more likely to believe that farmers should “kill all the foxes” if a particular fox ate their chickens; that it’s O.K. to slaughter animals for fur coats; that most wild animals are “dangerous to people”; and that all poisonous animals, like rattlesnakes, “should be gotten rid of.” It was the younger kids who were more likely to agree with the statement “It’s silly when people love animals as much as they love people,” whereas virtually none of the teenagers believed it was silly. Most second graders agreed with the statement “If they found oil where wild animals lived, we would have to get the oil, even if it harmed the animals.” Eleventh graders overwhelmingly did not.
“Our society frequently romanticizes young children’s attitudes toward animals,” Dr. Kellert has written, “believing that they possess some special intuitive affinity for the natural world and that animals constitute for young people little friends or kindred spirits.” But the data was clear: the younger the kids, the more “exploitative, harsh and unfeeling” they were — the more their relationship to wildlife was based on the satisfaction of “short-term needs and anxiety toward the unknown.” Older kids wanted to go camping in wildlife habitats; younger ones wanted “to stay where lots of other people were.”
We like to imagine our children as miniature noble savages, moving peacefully and naked among the beasts. But they’re more like the colonists: greedy, vindictive, wary, shortsighted and firing panicky musket shots at any rustling in the woods. It’s not their fault. They are behaving like children.
And maybe, I’ve come to realize, that’s exactly the point. It may not matter whether the connection between children and animals is real or imagined; if watching my daughter chase butterflies on a sunny day feels so good and life-affirming because she’s fulfilling some innate impulse — momentarily finding her ecological niche — or only because she’s fulfilling some wistful, pastoral fantasy of mine. Maybe it’s a little of both. Maybe, as with so many parenting questions, the truth gets lost in that mysterious wilderness between our children’s identities and the ones that we are urging them toward.
Ultimately, all these animals that we fill our children’s lives with — the frustrated goats who learn to compromise, the worried skunk who makes it through her first day of school, the teddy bear that needs to be hugged and tucked in — are also just proxies. They are useful, adorable props, props that we sense command our kids’ attention in some deep, biophilic way. And so we use them to teach our children basic lessons of kindness or self-possession or compassion — to show our kids what sort of animals we’d like them to grow up to be.
MORE IN OPINION (8 OF 26 ARTICLES)
Op-Ed Guest Columnist: Beyond the Code of the Streets
Sunday Dialogue: A Talent for Teaching
Readers discuss what goes into making a gifted teacher.
To the Editor:
What makes a great teacher? Not every college graduate is cut out to teach, regardless of his or her innate intelligence, G.P.A. or previous career success. Only those with specific talents and training become gifted teachers who, working with a talented mentor teacher and a variety of tools and learned techniques, can motivate students to want to learn.
As a former mentor to Teach for America corps members, I have seen their tears, anxieties, heartaches, successes and achievements. Unfortunately, the latter are far fewer. I have seen novices train novices to follow simple, formulaic scripts. They can do so much more if better prepared.
Corps members should intern for a year under the supervision of a talented mentor teacher, then teach for at least four years, not two. That may discourage some. Good. We want career teachers. A “temp” work force does not improve education or erase the achievement gap. Rather it helps to create havoc in schools desperately trying to gain stability, a key factor in any school’s success.
Teach for America has changed since its inception as a Peace Corps for American education. Then, I was in support of its efforts. Not now. Today’s Teach for America has morphed into more of a leadership institute. It describes itself as a “growing movement of leaders, nearly 28,000 strong, [that] works at every level of education, policy and other professions, to ensure that all children can receive an excellent education.”
Seasoned professionals know what works: being creative, independent, spontaneous, practical and rule-bending. Often it is the least orthodox teacher who most engages and excites students. Scripts and rules and models strictly followed cannot replace what the best teachers have: practical wisdom. In our anti-teacher world and scripted teaching climate perpetuated by corporate reformers, what room is there for the teachers we want for our kids?
DAVID GREENE
Hartsdale, N.Y., April 29, 2013
Hartsdale, N.Y., April 29, 2013
The writer is a staff member of WISE Services, which offers programs for high school seniors, but his views do not necessarily reflect those of WISE. He is also treasurer of Save Our Schools.
Readers React
As a former teacher, I could not agree more with Mr. Greene. There is a dangerous myth that has pervaded modern education reform efforts that a school can teacher-proof its curriculum — that if it just provides the right script or computer program or set of 25 best practices (one size fits all!), it doesn’t really matter what kind of teacher the school hires. It will hum along nicely on autopilot and everyone will go to Harvard.
It turns out that schools that treat teachers as barely competent automatons get teachers who fail to meet even the most basic expectations and students who are not inspired or challenged to learn and succeed.
So how to solve this problem? Fix teacher education, recruitment and pay, of course. Stop treating teaching as a pit stop on the way to a more exciting career, as Teach for America does. Give new teachers wise, compassionate mentors who are themselves master teachers, as Mr. Greene suggests. Try not to cluster all of the newest, most struggling teachers in certain (invariably high-needs) schools. And, finally, kick the factory model to the curb: Kids aren’t widgets, teachers aren’t robots and everybody loses when we treat them that way.
JANE DIMYAN-EHRENFELD
Silver Spring, Md., May 1, 2013
Silver Spring, Md., May 1, 2013
Contrary to what Mr. Greene argues, Teach for America is right to develop leaders as well as teachers. Many corps members recognize the need for systemic change and leave the classroom to pursue better outcomes for students through other means. Difficulties with unwieldy school districts, outdated legislation and poorly allocated resources will persist even if better teachers are brought into classrooms.
Indeed, innovative former corps members like Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, founders of the KIPP charter network, promote just the “creative, independent, spontaneous, practical and rule-bending” leadership that Mr. Greene advocates for inside the classroom. Students attending KIPP middle schools are certainly better off for the leadership of these former corps members.
Teach for America should continue to balance leadership with instruction; it is only by working in the classroom as well as at the local, state and national level that we can provide all students with the education they deserve.
MAC LeBUHN
Washington, May 1, 2013
Washington, May 1, 2013
The writer, a former Teach for America corps member, works at Democrats for Education Reform.
Mr. Greene sees the need for fledgling Teach for America corps members to receive a year’s internship with a talented mentor teacher, then be required to teach for four years. To my mind, far more entitled to the internship are candidates who have chosen teaching as a career and will be working in the profession for 40 years. They have no internship, but instead shoulder the same responsibilities as veteran teachers from their first day on the job.
I do agree with Mr. Greene that a “temp” work force does not improve education. And that often describes Teach for America. Let’s put our money behind people who will teach until they become really good, then teach some more.
MARY ELLEN LEVIN
New York, May 1, 2013
New York, May 1, 2013
The writer is a former principal.
Mr. Greene’s comments sound nice until you ponder the implications. Apply his ode to creativity to your doctor: “Seasoned professionals know what works: being creative, independent, spontaneous, practical and rule-bending.” No, Mr. Greene, I want my teacher/doctor to know professional “best practice” and to use it fluently and flexibly. Teaching is not merely art; it is science — just like medicine. We now possess a body of expert knowledge about how the mind works, how motivation works, how to design effective work and how to adjust learning in the face of results that I expect every teacher to know and use.
It is simply a false romantic notion to say we must choose between scripts and creativity in teaching. Using professional expertise fluently is the “practical wisdom” Mr. Greene seeks.
GRANT WIGGINS
Hopewell, N.J., May 1, 2013
Hopewell, N.J., May 1, 2013
The writer is the president of Authentic Education and the author of many books about curriculum and assessment.
He walks in five minutes late to first period, half-shaven, cup of coffee in hand. He walks over to the white board, his stage, puts his coffee down, and looks into the eyes of every student. He’s not given the best students, and so his standardized test scores are average. Instead, they leave with something more; they leave inspired.
He tells them about life: the challenges, the problems, the reason he’s half-shaven. He turns “Romeo and Juliet” into a lesson on love, algebra into a philosophy discussion, and science into an art appreciation class. Vocabulary, equations and historical dates will enter and leave children’s memories, but the inspiration, motivation and wisdom that he gives them will remain throughout their lives.
It’s that teacher who is worth the five-minute wait, the smell of coffee — and if anyone questions his half-shaven beard, he’ll learn a whole lot more about life.
DERL CLAUSEN
Escondido, Calif., May 2, 2013
Escondido, Calif., May 2, 2013
The writer is a high school student. His letter was among dozens submitted for a class assignment.
Mr. Greene makes a strong case against “scripted teaching” and in favor of teaching that “engages and excites kids.” Having observed excellent mathematics teachers in elementary and middle-school classrooms this year, I have come to understand that while student engagement is essential, it is not sufficient on its own. He comes closer when he writes that the best teachers have “practical wisdom.” What might that look like?
A great teacher doesn’t need a script, but always has a plan with specific objectives, fully expecting to adjust the plan continually as the class proceeds. She knows that how she listens is as important as how she speaks, and has developed a skill for asking productive questions. She is prepared in case some students are ready for a deeper challenge and others need more support. She knows how to assign and evaluate written work that will give her a detailed picture of each student’s understanding, and she responds accordingly.
A great teacher takes time to reflect on how each lesson went. He’s ready to identify in detail what worked well and what didn’t, and to incorporate those reflections into his planning for the next lesson.
A great teacher is in it for the long haul. Whether she’s been teaching for six months or 20 years, she wants to learn more about the subjects she teaches and about how she can help her students learn. She has at least one colleague or mentor whom she trusts for honest feedback. Ideally, she has a principal and a superintendent who support her efforts to engage in high-quality professional development, and who foster collaboration among all of the school’s teachers.
Of course, the desired end of all this is deep learning. The students I’ve observed are learning facts, but that’s just the beginning. They are actively engaged in challenging activities. They are using relevant language appropriately and accurately, orally and in writing. They are able to make connections among related ideas and to explain their thinking. It’s hard to imagine that kind of learning coming from a script, but neither will it come from creativity alone.
PRISCILLA BREMSER
Middlebury, Vt., May 1, 2013
Middlebury, Vt., May 1, 2013
The writer is a professor of mathematics at Middlebury College and an instructor in the Vermont Mathematics Initiative, a professional development program for K-8 teachers.
I am a teacher myself. I look at the great teachers I had in the past, and I look at what I try to achieve, with varying success.
A great teacher turns the light bulb of insight on. A great teacher inspires you to be who you actually are. A great teacher imparts his or her subject matter in a way that makes you want to learn more, helps you understand what’s important and why, and helps you see connections between all subjects.
A great teacher helps you when you need help, but also knows when to leave you alone. A great teacher knows when you need a shoulder to cry on and when you need a kick in the pants. Often you think a great teacher hates you — only to realize, later, that he or she was pushing you to be and do your best.
The lessons a great teacher gives you stay with you your whole life.
LESLIE OWEN
Pensacola, Fla., May 1, 2013
Pensacola, Fla., May 1, 2013
As a 10-year veteran educator, I respect Mr. Greene’s point of view, but his words do not describe my experience as a Teach for America alumnus and employer.
Teach for America was key in getting me to the point where I am, as an educator and an advocate for social justice. I currently serve as principal of KIPP Denver Collegiate High School, overseeing the education of 323 students in grades 9 to 12. Ninety-six percent of our students are Latino, and 94 percent are from low-income backgrounds.
Every year I hire Teach for America corps members. These teachers are well prepared. The five-week summer institute is a deeply enriching, no-nonsense environment. I am continually impressed by the teaching coaches, who push corps members to retain a sharp focus on student achievement and help keep them on track throughout the year.
I also like that Teach for America teachers have an entrepreneurial spirit. They take risks and go above and beyond when placed in leadership positions. And they are committed and passionate; when I hire a Teach for America teacher, I aim for him or her to stay for at least four years, and possibly many more.
There is still a great need for new faces and fresh ideas in education, and Teach for America is doing a uniquely effective job of getting skilled people into the classrooms that need them.
KURT PUSCH
Denver, May 1, 2013
Denver, May 1, 2013
The best candidates for teaching, with few exceptions, are ultimately going to quit regardless of how long Teach for America requires them to work in a public school. The climate of education is simply too harsh, for reasons we are all aware of. Most of the teachers who have the “specific talents” to which Mr. Greene refers are smart enough to translate them into positions that will get them out of the classroom.
In my school I would say there are only a handful of truly gifted teachers. Over the past year I have discreetly asked all of them: “Do you look forward to coming to school in the morning?” All of them have not only said “No,” but have in turn outlined to me their plan for escaping the classroom.
I agree with Mr. Greene that training is important, not only for new teachers, but for the seasoned professionals. However, I have worked for three different public school systems in my state, and I cannot remember the last time I received professional development that did not involve someone who makes three times my salary reading me a 50-slide PowerPoint presentation.
In terms of growing professionally, many of us are on our own trying to apply the “practical wisdom” that Mr. Greene values.
MATTHEW HOWERTON
Calabash, N.C., May 1, 2013
Calabash, N.C., May 1, 2013
The writer is a seventh-grade English language arts teacher.
The Writer Responds
This is too complex an issue to be resolved in 300 words. As we expose Teach for America’s hype, those in its fold will continue to defend it. I will defend many corps members, just not the organization.
The practical wisdom of good teaching is more than being creative or spontaneous. It is knowing when and how to use best practices. It includes how to prepare and use great questions, and knowing when to veer to places students take us. It includes when and how to use the science of teaching as well as the art. Practical wisdom is not following a script prepared by others who do not know your students and how they work. Teaching is both an art and a science, as Mr. Wiggins states. I am a fan of his and used authentic assessments and backward planning long before he wrote.
Ms. Owens knows a great teacher inspires. Derl Clausen will be a great writer, no doubt inspired by that very image of a teacher described in that letter. The shame is that teacher and his students are falsely measured by those standardized tests, not by what he has inspired them to do and become.
Ms. Bremser and those like her need to be heard. She describes the teachers we want and need. She also describes those who have left and are leaving teaching far too soon because of the worsening conditions public educators face, including the best Teach for America has to offer, such as the corps members I mentored, several of whom are still teaching, and with whom I am still in touch.
Finally, I can’t agree more with Mr. Howerton, Ms. Dimyan-Ehrenfeld and Ms. Levin. Teaching must be a lifelong career worthy of those we want to teach.
DAVID GREENE
Hartsdale, N.Y., May 3, 2013
Hartsdale, N.Y., May 3, 2013
Once earmarked for closure, a school outside Manchester, England, uses iPad, Mac, and iTunes U to achieve a 100 percent pass rate.
The inspiration
Growing up in Bolton, England, a town on the outskirts of Manchester, Showkat Badat was not allowed to attend Hayward School, the state-run school that served his neighborhood. “Parents like mine believed that if you went there, you were never going to succeed,” says Badat.
In 2009, when Badat returned to his hometown to take the helm as principal of the struggling school, that belief still prevailed in the community. The school’s dreary physical environment — a series of dingy and, in some cases, dangerous buildings — was matched by its low test scores. More than 70 percent of students were failing their classes, and Hayward School was at risk of being shut down.
The surrounding community, home to large immigrant and refugee populations, ranked among the most economically disadvantaged in England. The school’s 900 students speak more than 40 different languages, and many were struggling to overcome language and cultural barriers. “Every minute we weren’t making a difference to our young people, it was costing the community lives,” says Badat.
Badat knew he had to make drastic changes. He applied to designate the school an independent academy and renamed it Essa Academy. This new classification would give administrators more autonomy to make decisions about curriculum and staffing, and allow them to pursue new investments to supplement government funds. But it would not be enough to turn the school around.
In his previous job as principal of a different school, Badat had witnessed the power of technology to engage students. He believed that reinventing Essa as a hub of technology-assisted learning would reflect the new leadership’s commitment to the community and, more important, remove barriers to academic achievement. “I don’t see technology as an add-on, a nice option to have,” says Badat. “It’s what enables learning and creates an environment that sparks creativity.”
“Apple has helped us create a complete learning ecosystem where the building itself, and everything contained within it, is centered around how students actually learn.”
— Abdul Chohan, director,
Essa Academy
Essa Academy
The implementation
Like its buildings, Essa Academy’s technology was outdated. Teachers who wanted to give students opportunities to use interactive software or access online resources had to go through multiple steps to sign out a laptop trolley and log students in. Badat charged Director Abdul Chohan, a member of his leadership team, with researching technology to create a more dynamic learning environment.
Essa’s first move was providing every student with an iPod touch. “We needed to give them direct access to information,” says Chohan. Almost immediately, administrators noticed a difference in students’ enthusiasm for learning. In one instance, a group of students was spotted playing soccer with headphones on; they were listening to a podcast about atomic structure to prepare for an exam.
As students got excited about discovering apps and online materials to help them learn, their test scores improved. This early success helped Essa administrators secure funds to build a new facility. Every aspect of the new classrooms was designed to support interactive learning. Each teacher was given a MacBook Air and iPad to directly access online resources and educational apps. Every classroom was outfitted with a large-screen TV connected to Apple TV, allowing teachers and students to use AirPlay to share relevant content — 3D renderings of plant cells, a slideshow of Viking vessels — with a tap. Teachers find creative ways to integrate iPad into their teaching, directing small groups to record conversations in French and practice their pronunciation, or filming P.E. drills and playing back the video to help students better their game.
Essa administrators also decided to provide every student with an iPad to use in the classroom and at home, letting them learn in a more hands-on way. Students create Keynote presentations to share in class and use the built-in camera to snap photographs for reports. The iPad has proved particularly beneficial to the school’s many non-English speakers. Before, these students were pulled from lessons for one-on-one language tutoring. Now they stay in class and use translation apps to follow along and improve their comprehension.
Every department in the school uses iBooks Author to create interactive textbooks for iPad. iBooks Author provides Essa teachers with a simple way to refresh their textbooks to reflect current events and to weave together traditional reading materials with multimedia content. “You’ve got videos and 3D graphics in front of you, and you can highlight and take notes. It’s a more interactive way of reading, and it really helps us learn,” says seventh grader Hamza Umar.
Essa Academy is one of the only schools in the UK to make all its courses available through iTunes U. Students use the iTunes U app to access all their learning materials in one place, keep track of assignments, and receive notifications anytime a teacher updates information. Teachers use the iTunes U collection to discover podcasts, videos, and other resources that enrich their lessons. “iTunes U gives us access to content created by gifted teachers and experts around the globe,” says Badat.
“By using iPad, students can go at their own pace. We can individuate learning, and set up all our students to succeed.”
— Catherine Chadwick, science teacher,
Essa Academy
Essa Academy
The results
Essa Academy’s turnaround has been dramatic. Within two years of the pilot iPod program, the pass rate at the school jumped from 28 percent to 100 percent. Test scores have increased significantly for all students. “Students never walk in the door thinking, ‘It’s going to be a boring day,’” says modern languages teacher Jennifer Greenwood. “They’re excited by all the things we’re doing with iPad, and eager to learn.”
What makes the school’s accomplishments even more exceptional is the fact that operating expenses have decreased. Previously hefty budget items like tech support, one-on-one tutoring, and textbooks have all been slashed.
Educators from around the country and beyond visit Essa Academy to learn from its successes, and people anywhere can access the school’s iTunes U courses. “With Apple, we can create complete learning journeys,” says Badat. “We’re helping our students achieve good grades, but more than that, we’re changing lives and empowering the community. Every door is now open.”
Two articles from the Science Times;
Here Comes the Buzz
By CRAIG GIBBS
IT may not be as grand as the wildebeest migrations across Africa’s eastern savanna or the march of emperor penguins across miles of Antarctic ice to their inland nesting areas. But it is a wildlife phenomenon not seen elsewhere in the world.
Over the next few weeks, as soil temperatures reach a sustained temperature of 64 degrees, cicadas from Connecticut to North Carolina will emerge from their subterranean world for the first time since they burrowed underground as nymphs in 1996, returning in numbers that dwarf those other spectacles. The buzzing of males will be heard in a mating ritual that stretches back to at least the ice age. Then, within six weeks, they will all be dead, hundreds of millions, if not billions, of them, and their progeny will not be seen until 2030.
These are the Brood II cicadas, one of the longest living insects in the world, seen only once every 17 years along the East Coast. (There are 11 other broods that follow the same cycle, though in different years; this is one of the largest.) Of the roughly 10 million insect species on earth, cicadas constitute about 3,000. Of those, a mere seven, collectively called periodic cicadas and found only in eastern North America, spend either 13 or 17 years growing underground, until it is time for them to emerge and take their adult form.
They also harbor a mystery that has confounded the biologists who study them: why did their synchronized life cycles evolve? One theory among several suggests that it was a response to the atmospheric cooling during the Pleistocene, to ensure sufficient populations for successful mating. If so, the cicada may yet reprise its role as climate indicator if its cycle is disrupted by a warming planet.
What we do know is this: Their buzzing can reach 90 decibels, equivalent to some power motors. They have been seen in clusters of up to 1.5 million per acre. As if from some horror movie, cicada nymphs have been described as “boiling out of the ground.” Snow shovels are sometimes employed to clear them away.
But there is no reason to fear these insects, which grow to about 1.5 inches in length, with big red compound eyes. Cicadas don’t bite. And don’t worry about your plants. They’ll be fine. There’s no need to reach for the bug spray.
While the ecological role played by some insects is important for our own survival (bees and pollination, for instance), they seldom get the credit or attention they deserve. Bigger creatures tend to dominate the spotlight. The fascinating cicada life cycle returns our gaze to the microcosmos beneath our feet, where these insects are sustained by sucking the juices of tree roots.
They emerge at night from tunnels they dig to the surface. Once mates have been secured, the females will deposit their eggs in the twigs of trees and shrubs, laying up to 600 eggs each. This does little permanent damage to trees; some small branches may be broken, but the end result is often the same as that from pruning — healthier plants.
The cicadas also provide an overwhelming smorgasbord for other animals. (Another theory about the evolution of their long life cycle and mass synchronous emergence is that it confounds predators — birds, reptiles, mammals, even other insects — and that, even though these predators may consume cicadas voraciously, there are so many of them that the population is not seriously depleted.)
They are also a culinary cornucopia for the adventuresome among us. You can find recipes for cicada dumplings, tacos and stir-fries, among other dishes, on the Web. The Onondaga Indians of New York credit the arrival of cicadas as having once saved them from famine.
These insects offer other benefits, too. By tunneling to the surface, nymphs aerate the soil. Predators that feed on them increase in population, while their other prey get a reprieve. And the decomposing bodies of those cicadas return much needed nitrogen to the soil.
The last year Brood II was seen, Bill Clinton was president, Charles and Diana agreed to divorce, the Dow Jones industrial average closed the year at just under 6,550 and the Internet was in its infancy. Now there is a network of citizen-based science groups poised to start collecting data that may help shed new light on this phenomenon. One worry is that the unyielding creep of development continues to decimate cicada habitat. So if you hear the buzz of the cicada, take a moment to revel in their remarkable survival strategy.
What Do the Birders Know?
By BRIAN KIMBERLING
A BIRD-WATCHER is a kind of pious predator. To see a new bird is to capture it, metaphorically, and a rare bird or an F.O.Y. (First of the Year, for the uninitiated) is a kind of trophy. A list of birds seen on a given day is also a form of prayer, a thanksgiving for being alive at a certain time and place. Posting that list online is a 21st-century form of a votive offering. It’s unclear what deity presides.
There was prestige in knowing birds in ancient Rome, and there is prestige today. There are also competitive insect enthusiasts and tree connoisseurs and fungus aficionados, but they lack the cultural stature and sheer numbers of bird-watchers. There are 5.8 million bird-watchers in the United States, slightly more than the number of Americans in book clubs or residents of Wisconsin. That’s a huge army of primitive hunter-mystics decked out in sturdy hiking boots and nylon rain gear, consulting their smartphones to identify or imitate a particular quarry.
There is nothing especially new about them except for their gear. Two hundred years ago the heartland teemed with second sons of wealthy European families who could have stayed home dissipating in traditional style, but chose to go to the New World and find a new animal instead. Reporting your sightings to the Audubon Society is decidedly less glamorous than dispatching a new specimen to a museum in Paris or London, but it’s a kindred enterprise.
Today’s birders are not exploring new territory geographically, as the early naturalists did; rather, they are contouring the frontiers of climate change. It’s April, and the kitchen-window bird observer is limbering up, too. Are the birds nesting early, nesting late? (Do they know something we don’t?) The reporting such observers do is crucial.
And what are today’s birds telling us? The Audubon Society estimates that nearly 60 percent of 305 bird species found in North America in winter areshifting northward and to higher elevations in response to climate change. For comparison, imagine the inhabitants of 30 states — using state residence as a proxy for species of American human — becoming disgruntled with forest fires and drought and severe weather events, and seeking out suitable new habitat.
The Audubon Society’s estimates rest largely on data supplied by volunteers in citizen-science projects like the Christmas Bird Count (first proposed in 1900, nine years after the first known use of the word “bird-watcher,” to set the hobby apart from the more traditional Christmas pastime of shooting birds). The birds in question have shifted an average of 35 miles north over a period of about 40 years — seemingly insignificant in human terms, but a major move ecologically.
Such documentation, drawing on databases and the practices of citizen science, is descended from folk wisdom, where birds are ascribed a certain predictive power. Folk wisdom holds that they nest high in anticipation of warm weather (not true) or fly low when they expect to get wet (true).
Folk wisdom has deep roots. “Auspice” and “augury” share a Latin origin with “avian.” An augur was a priest in ancient Rome who studied birds to determine the will of the gods (Cicero was one). When an elected official is inaugurated today, he or she is etymologically promoted to bird-watcher in chief. Mr. President, your binoculars. There are no accidental hawks or eagles in the “Iliad” or the “Odyssey,” either. This says more about humans than about birds. They remind us of time, hence the venerable history of the cuckoo clock. As James Baldwin noted, the whisper beneath the word “time” is death.
The ancient wisdom of fretting obsessively over bird behavior has obtained the vindication of modern science. Hawks and eagles do not appear by accident. When, where and whether they appear is, absolutely, a portent. The spotted owl is a bioindicator, a species that can be used to monitor the condition of an ecosystem. In other words, bioindicator is just modern parlance for omen.
And so the practice of bird-watching, no matter how geared up and teched out, cannot escape its ancient roots; or, rather, it has come back around. Birds are not moving north in anticipation of climate change; rather, they are moving in response to it. Still, they are becoming predictive in a manner not founded in superstition but well-documented in reported behavior.
We can’t escape trying to see the future through birds. Too many canaries were deployed to detect gas leaks in coal mines, too many ravens launched from ships to find land — bird anxiety is an essential component of the human predicament.
There is no telling what kinds of perverse ecological arrangements we will create for birds in the future, or what new technologies will be introduced to bird-watching. Google Glass, for example, has implications, and binoculars that double as digital or online field guides can’t be far away. We have reached an era when our instincts, anxieties and gadgets collide; our classical relationship with birds is reinforced and our understanding is enhanced. Unfortunately, we may need to start moving north.
A Senate in the Gun Lobby’s Grip
By GABRIELLE GIFFORDS
WASHINGTON
SENATORS say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets. The fear that those children who survived the massacre must feel every time they remember their teachers stacking them into closets and bathrooms, whispering that they loved them, so that love would be the last thing the students heard if the gunman found them.
On Wednesday, a minority of senators gave into fear and blocked common-sense legislation that would have made it harder for criminals and people with dangerous mental illnesses to get hold of deadly firearms — a bill that could prevent future tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., Blacksburg, Va., and too many communities to count.
Some of the senators who voted against the background-check amendments have met with grieving parents whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook, in Newtown. Some of the senators who voted no have also looked into my eyes as I talked about my experience being shot in the head at point-blank range in suburban Tucson two years ago, and expressed sympathy for the 18 other people shot besides me, 6 of whom died. These senators have heard from their constituents — who polls show overwhelmingly favored expanding background checks. And still these senators decided to do nothing. Shame on them.
I watch TV and read the papers like everyone else. We know what we’re going to hear: vague platitudes like “tough vote” and “complicated issue.” I was elected six times to represent southern Arizona, in the State Legislature and then in Congress. I know what a complicated issue is; I know what it feels like to take a tough vote. This was neither. These senators made their decision based on political fear and on cold calculations about the money of special interests like the National Rifle Association, which in the last election cycle spent around $25 million on contributions, lobbying and outside spending.
Speaking is physically difficult for me. But my feelings are clear: I’m furious. I will not rest until we have righted the wrong these senators have done, and until we have changed our laws so we can look parents in the face and say: We are trying to keep your children safe. We cannot allow the status quo — desperately protected by the gun lobby so that they can make more money by spreading fear and misinformation — to go on.
I am asking every reasonable American to help me tell the truth about the cowardice these senators demonstrated. I am asking for mothers to stop these lawmakers at the grocery store and tell them: You’ve lost my vote. I am asking activists to unsubscribe from these senators’ e-mail lists and to stop giving them money. I’m asking citizens to go to their offices and say: You’ve disappointed me, and there will be consequences.
People have told me that I’m courageous, but I have seen greater courage. Gabe Zimmerman, my friend and staff member in whose honor we dedicated a room in the United States Capitol this week, saw me shot in the head and saw the shooter turn his gunfire on others. Gabe ran toward me as I lay bleeding. Toward gunfire. And then the gunman shot him, and then Gabe died. His body lay on the pavement in front of the Safeway for hours.
I have thought a lot about why Gabe ran toward me when he could have run away. Service was part of his life, but it was also his job. The senators who voted against background checks for online and gun-show sales, and those who voted against checks to screen out would-be gun buyers with mental illness, failed to do their job.
They looked at these most benign and practical of solutions, offered by moderates from each party, and then they looked over their shoulder at the powerful, shadowy gun lobby — and brought shame on themselves and our government itself by choosing to do nothing.
They will try to hide their decision behind grand talk, behind willfully false accounts of what the bill might have done — trust me, I know how politicians talk when they want to distract you — but their decision was based on a misplaced sense of self-interest. I say misplaced, because to preserve their dignity and their legacy, they should have heeded the voices of their constituents. They should have honored the legacy of the thousands of victims of gun violence and their families, who have begged for action, not because it would bring their loved ones back, but so that others might be spared their agony.
This defeat is only the latest chapter of what I’ve always known would be a long, hard haul. Our democracy’s history is littered with names we neither remember nor celebrate — people who stood in the way of progress while protecting the powerful. On Wednesday, a number of senators voted to join that list.
Mark my words: if we cannot make our communities safer with the Congress we have now, we will use every means available to make sure we have a different Congress, one that puts communities’ interests ahead of the gun lobby’s. To do nothing while others are in danger is not the American way.
April 8th NYT
Teachers, take a look:
April 1st, NYT...........
Given my constant worrying and fretting very early every morning about, among other things, my attempts to write, this cartoon in yesterday's NYT caught my eye over breakfast.....
Good, eh?
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