The inconvenient truth about education

Posted on March 20, 2012 by sheilawill

I needed a large iced coffee to head to the Loft Cinema on a sunshiny Saturday morning  a movie, a documentary at that.  “The Inconvenient Truth behind Waiting for Superman” was too New Yorky, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some truth to it.

The film brought me back to the early ’70s when I was in graduate school getting my M.A.T. degree. We knew then — and we know now — that the most important elements of good schooling are classrooms with fewer than 18 students, led by experienced teachers.

And I’ll add, let those teachers be learners who care about kids. Provide “a culturally relevant curriculum.” We sure know about that here in Tucson where a highly successful ethnic studies program was wiped out as being racist. Huh, maybe too culturally relevant?

(My son, Ethan,  a graduate student at Rice, just called after hearing a University of Arizona professor speak this evening about Tucson’s defunct ethnic studies program, one of  the latest in unfathomable educational decisions made by Arizona’s powers that be.)

During the 2000 presidential election, when Gore and Bush were talking about education, I figured that was a good thing. Somebody cared. I was wrong, oh so wrong. Naive maybe, even after all my years as an educator.

I couldn’t figure out why the Gore people weren’t talking to educators like Yetta and Ken Goodman, now UA professors emerita and emeritus of the Department of Language, Reading & Culture, or Phyllis Brazee, professor emerita of education at the University of Maine, who almost singlehandedly trained teachers to raise reading/writing skills in students by uh, reading real books and engaging kids in their own lives.

Kids don’t vote. And unfortunately, many parents don’t complain about their children’s so-called education, which has become more political than educational, overladen with meaningless testing. Enough.

I’m addicted to “The Wire.” The fourth season focused on the plight of middle-school kids in inner-city Baltimore. The kids who didn’t have caring parents or clean clothes or the confidence to imagine themselves doing anything but selling drugs on street corners broke my heart.

I had a few students at Mt. Desert Island High School who weren’t going anywhere, were into drugs or booze,  and didn’t care much for education. Somehow, we connected.

I liked that they weren’t shy about expressing their opinions. I joked with them. One of my favorites started asking me for books he could read on his own. He became a lobsterman, may still be a rowdy guy, but he sure could think. 

Posted in Fight wimpiness, Mount Desert Island/Maine, The inconvenient truth about education | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Quickie on context

Posted on March 18, 2012 by sheilawill

The story’s in the details, says Gus, city editor at the Baltimore Sun in the last season of “The Wire.” We’re doing an all-day watch of the last 10 episodes so no spoiler alerts please! Wish I could start all over again; as the Washington Post or NYT review said this show is/was the most literary, authentic show ever made for TV.

Give me context or give me death. Keep pitching that context. I’m a journalist digging this fifth season. How much context is enough, that’s the question. Enough to make it real.

Though the extreme violence upsets me on “The Wire,” I keep watching. I won’t go to violent movies. The bigger context is that the conflict of telling truth to power and how that plays out in a major American city plays out repeatedly in “The Wire.”

In the third episode of the journalism season the new mayor’s chief of staff, Norman, is having a beer with Gus, the Sun’s city editor, who’s an old colleague of his. “From one whore to another,” he says to Norman, what’ve you got?

This is rich stuff. It stopped raining so I’m going outdoors for a short walk before having dinner with Dan’s folks. Then we’ll be back to watch the rest of season five.

 

 

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Tucson Festival of Books Afterglow

Posted on March 13, 2012 by sheilawill

When I come to the last sentence of a book I’ve loved, there’s a little sadness and quiet exhilaration. I sigh. I sit quietly. I may say wow or dang that was good! 

Today I had all those feelings. And I also felt high. The Tucson Festival of Books dazzled readers/writers this weekend on the University of Arizona campus. Now it’s over.

I drove cross-country to Tucson in 2002, clueless about what I’d do for work. I quit my teaching job, I closed my bookstore in 1997, and there was no way I’d make a living teaching yoga dance. 

 Greg Brown CDs blaring across the miles through Knoxville, Tenn.; Fort Worth, Texas; and who knows where, N.M., I sang along. Maybe I could plan author events for bookstores. After all, I figured, Tucson is a university town.

My first six months in Tucson I tried to line up author visits for schools but came up with only one gig for the Tucson Unified School District’s Young Authors’ Conference, bringing my children’s author pals Ashley Bryan, Thacher Hurd and Vera B. Williams to town. 

I was told that “Tucson isn’t a literary town.” “We’re not on the author circuit.” All that changed four years ago with the Tucson Festival of Books, the inspired vision of Bill and Brenda Viner, and a few others.

 Every author I spoke to this past weekend at the festival said something like, “I’ve been to lots of book festivals but none have been so well-organized as this.” There’s a lot more to it than if you build it they will come…where have these 115,000 book lovers been (it was reported today that attendance rose from 100,000 last year).

If you do something right, people will come. Tucson is on the author circuit! I’m in book country again. 

Kudos to the Viners. Kudos to Helene Woodhams, who heads the author committee, receiving and responding to so many emails. Kudos to my incredible colleagues on the author committee, especially Holly Schafer, Gwen Harvey and Bruce Dinges. Kudos to Ken McDonald, who for months sends updated author grids, in three different formats. Kudos to 1,500 volunteers who escort authors such as Richard Russo, Kim Edwards, Mary Johnson, Elmore Leonard to their workshops, panels and interviews where we listen, ask questions and celebrate words.

Luckily, we won’t dawdle before reconvening to start planning next year’s TFOB on March 9-10. I’ll only have a month to feel sad about the festival being over. It brought a book-loving community together. I feel high.

Posted in Tucson Festival of Books/good books, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 10 Comments

Children’s books/authors are on my mind

Posted on March 6, 2012 by sheilawill

Maybe it’s owning a bookstore for all those years, maybe it’s remembering all the fun we had with authors at Oz Books in Southwest Harbor, maybe it’s the impact that author friends and books have had on me my whole life. I’m so excited about the Tucson Festival of Books, and proud to be part of it this weekend!

Takes me back to Maine summers, a chilly breeze coming in off the harbor. Barbara Cooney introduced “Miss Rumphius,” my all-time favorite picture book, in 1982 as part of the first OZ Guest Author Series at the Southwest Harbor Library. She had a great sense of humor; she was always gracious in public but could be a little sarcastic. A baby kept crying during her presentation at the library. When the mother got up to go, Barbara said, “Don’t worry, the crying doesn’t bother me. It’s not my baby.”

A few years later, she returned to sign books at the bigger, expanded Oz Bookstore. Adoring customers were lined up outside the door. One woman asked Barbara to write something like “To the most beloved grandson, may you enjoy this book forever. Love, Barbara Cooney.”

“That’s not my message,” Barbara said. She asked me to get her a drink —  a stiff whiskey — after signing what must have been hundreds of books. We sat around talking into the night, she with her unbraided long white hair and gleaming blue eyes, me knowing she would be always be one of my role models. She was irreverent. She was always nice to small children. She chuckled a lot. She used the most exquisite blues in her illustrations. (I still think of Barbara when there’s a perfect, cloudless sky,  and say it’s an “Island Boy” blue day, after her picture book.)

“To be at all creative I need to spend time away from lots of people, alone in my garden tending flowers,” she told me. I listened.

Robert McCloskey was another icon of Maine children’s books. When we visited his beloved Scotch Island he picked us up in his little lobster boat, just like in “One Morning in Maine.”

He would visit me at OZ, quietly striding into my office to sign books generically and sip a cup of tea. Customers  generally left him alone, allowing him his privacy. He must have been in his late 70s,  a few years after he was widowed,  when his “girlfriend” moved from her apartment in their retirement complex to his.

“Everybody in the whole town knows who I’m shacking up with,” he told me. I almost fell off my chair, but managed to not burst out laughing.

There are lines from Brook and Ethan’s favorite children’s books I’ll never forget: “Happy Winter rise and shine, I love the early morning time” or “Born at sea in the teeth of a gale, the sailor was a dog. Scuppers was his name.” Or little Alice sitting on her grandfather’s knee, listening to him tell her, “Go see the world. Come home to live in your house by the sea. Do something to make the world more beautiful,” in “Miss Rumphius.”

See you at the Tucson Festival of Books! I always stroll around the children’s section. Maybe you’ll be there too.

Posted in Mount Desert Island/Maine, Tucson Festival of Books/good books | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Restored Faith: an Independent and a Republican

Posted on February 29, 2012 by sheilawill

A brain is a terrible thing to waste. Education isn’t about being a “snob”; it’s about questioning your own views and considering those of others, reading and listening and evaluating. It’s called critical thinking, not making up your mind about everything on blind faith.

This morning I went to my car repair establishment for an oil change. Scott, the owner, is trustworthy, considerate, smart, and a Massachusetts native so we have that New England connection. Every few months we have a thought-provoking political discussion.

Scott is an Independent. He voted for Barack Obama in 2008 but tells me he won’t vote for the prez this time around. Consider who he’s up against, I tell Scott. He wishes Obama had a stronger opponent to really debate the issues. He’s not done thinking about what he’ll do on Election Day.

And there’s something else nagging at Scott.

“I don’t think religion has any place in politics,” he says.

We agree. Faith — whether it’s based on religion or no religion, the color of the sky at sunset, or some deeply held ethical principle — is a personal affair. So-called conservatives who insist that religion belongs in government are missing the entire backbone of their supposed political philosophy. Don’t conservatives spout the need for government to stay out of our lives? Whose view of religion wouldn’t make Santorum throw up?

More important,  the separation of church and state is a key element of the U.S. Constitution. The First Amendment assures that all Americans have the right to freedom of religion, and it does not prohibit the establishment of a new religion, which inherently means no government intrusion. (OK, I’ll stop being Ms. Social Studies Teacher).

Sen. Olympia Snowe, a moderate Republican (one of the last two, along with Sen. Susan Collins from Maine), announced today that she won’t run for re-election. She’s tired of  the “my way or the highway” politics in Washington today. I commend her, as I did when we chatted at a cocktail party on Mount Desert Island years ago. She refused to jump into the partisan fray against President Clinton during the ludicrous impeachment proceedings against him. Olympia Snowe is civilized.

Thank you Scott for running an honest Tucson small business.  Thank you Senator Snowe for representing Maine honorably for more than three decades. Today I have faith — and it’s not religious — that sensible Americans (not just Mainers and other New Englanders) — will vote for a presidential candidate who uses his brain.

Posted in Fight wimpiness, Mount Desert Island/Maine, politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Brains, tradition and family history

Posted on February 19, 2012 by sheilawill

Mayim Bialik is intense — and not that different from the geeky scientist she plays on TV’s #1 sitcom  “Big Bang Theory.” I resisted the show for a long time because of its canned laughter, which for me indicates phony silliness. Whoa, not so fast. “Big Bang Theory” is seriously funny. And now I have some backstory.

Recently I interviewed Bialik for a preview story on a major Jewish fundraising women’s brunch, which took place this morning. Bialik bounded onstage looking pretty much like Amy Farrah Fowler, only missing the glasses and the bobby-pinned hair.

In real life Bialik is an actress, mother, wife, religious Jewish woman and a neuroscientist, what most interests me. Studying neuropsychology at UCLA she discovered that all that good oxytocin — often referred to as the bonding hormone — has positive affects on the brain. No surprise, really, but science is about the evidence.

Once she and her husband had kids they decided that a lot of closeness — natural childbirth, breastfeeding, children sleeping near or in the same bed with parents, homeschooling — all part of attachment parenting, was the way to go.

Bialik spoke a lot this morning about taking on the values of her maternal grandmother, being closely connected to her grandmother’s Orthodox Jewish religious traditions.  “Attachment parenting” reminds me of many of the childrearing beliefs my post-1960s friends and I had about raising our kids, especially holding our babies a lot and nursing on demand.

Where am I going with this? Sure family history and tradition influence our behavior, how our brains work. To stimulate our brains as we age we’re supposed to learn new things, stretch our thinking…that’s what all the studies tell us these days.

From the online newsletter “Brain Pickings”: Neuroscientist David Eagleman, author of the excellent Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, explores the concept of “the umwelt” coined by biologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909 – the idea that different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different elements of their environment and thus live in different micro-realities based on the subset of the world they’re able to detect. Eagleman stresses the importance of recognizing our own umwelt – our unawareness of the limits of our awareness:

I think it would be useful if the concept of the umwelt were embedded in the public lexicon. It neatly captures the idea of limited knowledge, of unobtainable information, and of unimagined possibilities. Consider the criticisms of policy, the assertions of dogma, the declarations of fact that you hear every day – and just imagine if all of these could be infused with the proper intellectual humility that comes from appreciating the amount unseen.”

Me again: When does family history or habit or dogma allow us to leap into original thinking? Is there such a thing? How do we best nurture our brains?

Guess I’m  little intense too.

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“The Way” is authentic, worth seeing

Posted on February 17, 2012 by sheilawill

I have a stuffy head, so I cancelled all my appointments and went to the Loft Cinema. Maybe I wanted some clarity, or at least to focus on something other than myself. My friend Kathleen walked the Camino de Santiago through Spain, around 450 miles. Known as an ancient pilgrimage for religious or spiritual seekers, it could also be a worthwhile long walk, with stops in villages for sleep and eat and good wine along the way. 

Martin Sheen plays the lead, a distraught father who decides to make the trek, honoring his son who died in an accident after his first day. It would be too pat to say that he gets over his loss. He gets angry, he gets feisty, he gets drunk and causes a ruckus. Sheen plays an staid ophthalmologist in his early 60s from California whose wife has already died and he’s alone. He’s an upstanding guy. He steps out of his restrained life to walk in his son’s shoes.

Although the pilgrimage — or whatever it is for the participant — is  often solitary I’ve heard from Kathleen that you meet others along the way, people for all over the world with their own stories. In “The Way,” Sheen at first wants to be left alone he ultimately develops a bond with three unlikely strangers: Jost the Dutch fat guy who wants to lose weight, Sarah the Canadian who says she wants to stop smoking, and a wild Irish travel writer whose name I can’t remember. It’s kind of like an adult play group. 

I don’t know if I could walk 450 miles carrying a backpack. And I didn’t like the sleeping arrangements — beds lined up in old buildings in dorm fashion (guess I’m more of the B & B type). But mingling with people from different countries while achieving a similar goal is appealing. 

Maybe I should start with a walking tour of English gardens, having my own room, stopping for a proper cup of tea along the way. 

Posted in The Rest of the World, Visual Entertainment | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Like a snowflake…Noam Chomsky

Posted on February 11, 2012 by sheilawill

I’ve been reeling from my heavy-duty Noam Chomsky experience: to write or not to write, my responsibility as an educator, my loyalty to the ’60s and my mentor Howard Zinn, the need for more open-mindedness in the world, speaking the truth through knowledge not stereotypes…

Chomsky strode onto the stage at the University of Arizona in his MIT office garb, an old charcoal sweater over professorial trousers not jeans, longish gray hair that was somewhat subdued. He didn’t look like Einstein, although his presence on campus was compared to a hypothetical Einstein visit; that’s how members of the UA linguistics department spoke.

I didn’t understand  much of Chomsky’s talk on linguistics to around 1,500 faculty and students (as advertised) on Wednesday, Feb. 7. A few glimmers emerged: “Language exists only in the sense that that weather exists. It exists,” he said. “Learning modern language is not something a child does. It’s something that happens to him.”

The philosopher/psychologist William James in the late 19th century-early 20th spoke of the newborn infant “all in one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” The way s/he absorbs language has to be intimate, not just in some social context, which is the way animals — or even bacteria, as Chomsky said — communicate. That’s not the same as language.

And even more complex is that acquisition of language is disassociated from other cognitive capacities. Chimps have the same auditory system as humans, said Chomsky, but they don’t take anything out of the “blooming confusion.” Infants do. And for most toddlers, the acquisition of language happens perfectly, according to the laws of nature, like a snowflake.

No need to think too much, if that’s not where you’re at. What I’m marveling at is the extent of Chomsky’s knowledge, and as a history person, how thrilled I was to hear where his theories come from, not just “This is the way it is” or the gibberish that often passes for truth in the public arena today.

This was old school, an 83-year-old world-reknowned intellectual who let us in on what he’s learned for more than 50 years as a student/teacher at MIT.

The UA professor who introduced Chomsky at his Feb. 8 lecture on education  — to more than 3,000 people — said that Chomsky is quoted more than any other living person. The UA prof also opined that Chomsky was the third most quoted smart guy in history after Plato and Freud. How does he know, I question that.

I do know that my brain hasn’t work as hard in a very long time.  I’m grateful for Chomsky’s visit to Tucson, or as one of my high-school students once pronounced, “I’m grated full of information.” Go brain!

Posted in Bopping Around Tucson, Fight wimpiness, For Love of History | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Who’s a V.I.P. anyway?

Posted on February 2, 2012 by sheilawill

I don’t mind rich people, I really don’t. It’s the snooty ones that bother me. And a friend reminded this morning that everyone I know is financially rich compared to everyone else in the world.

But sometimes I get confused. Last Friday I went to the Frida Kahlo exhibit opening at the Tucson Museum of Art. Members and media (me) were invited to a reception at 6 p.m., but I arrived around 5:40 p.m.

The museum greeter promptly stuck a VIP sticker on me as I blurted, “I don’t know if I’m a VIP or not.” She asked who I was. “Well, I’m media,” I replied.

“OK, you’re VIP.” The doors to the exhibit hadn’t opened yet. Around 50 fancily dressed people munching on spicy meatballs, chips and guacamole were mingling in the foyer. I was wearing jeans and an oversized sweater. VIPs apparently got free wine, which wasn’t too shabby. I chose Oregon mixed red.

Here’s the strange part: I’m a VIP, I thought to myself. It didn’t matter if I wasn’t dressed as snappily as the others, and damn, even VIPs weren’t allowed into the exhibit early. It was only about seeing and being seen.

These people think I’m one of them. I’m wearing the special black and gold sticker. I’m special.

This is really stupid, I figured, going back and forth in my mind, shocked that I was feeling like a bigwig because of some silly sticker.

Maybe folks who make a hefty million or more annually always feel bigger than the rest of us. I’ve never let fame bother me; I’ll talk to anyone. Maybe the top earners are  clueless, like when Romney said he’d bet $10,000 to a fellow Republican candidate at a recent debate. I’d bet a dollar, maybe five, if I was really sure of something.

After his Florida primary win, Romney said he was concerned about the middle class: “I’m not concerned about the very poor. They have a safety net.”

Meanwhile, we’ve become more and more polarized in American society. NYT columnist David Brooks thinks VIPs and non-VIPs should spend more time together. Most VIPs are probably happy with their lot: Mitt paid 13.9 percent of his income — all from investments — in taxes last year. His father, George Romney, started the tradition of releasing tax returns as a Republican presidential contender in 1967. And his tax rate was a whopping 44 percent.

Yup, I guess supposed VIPs who imagine that really poor people have a safety net are pretty confused, even more than me. They just don’t know it.

And what I really don’t like are when angry Republican candidates thoughtlessly whip up hatred and fear, and don’t mind letting more Americans fall into that ripped safety net.

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Only five weeks till the Tucson Festival of Books!

Posted on January 31, 2012 by sheilawill
Proud mama that I am, I’m thrilled that my daughter, Brook Wilensky-Lanford, author of “Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden” — a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice — will be coming from back east to participate in “The Best Book Festival Under the Sun” on the University of Arizona campus, Saturday and Sunday, March 10-11.

 
Please mark your calendars:
 
 
Brook’s workshop: “Researching/Writing a True Story with Style,” Saturday, March 10, 1-2 p.m., Integrated Learning Center, Room 137
 
“Eden Seekers” panel, Saturday, March 10, 4-5:30 p.m., Integrated Learning Center, Room 150, moderated by Rabbi Samuel Cohon of Temple Emanu-El
 
Brook Wilensky-Lanford, “Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden”
 
Carolyn O’Bagy Davis, “The Fourth Wife: Love, Polygamy & Revolution”
 
Matteo Pistono, “In the Shadow of the Buddha: One Man’s Journey of Discovery in Tibet”
 
For more information, visit brookwilensky-lanford.com and tucsonfestivalofbooks.org. 
 
 
Hope to see you there!
 
Sheila
 
 
Sheila Wilensky
TFOB History/Memoir/Biography Committee
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