Four Schools: Section One

Maybe a year ago I thought about writing up my experiences in the four schools I've worked in: a public school, a charter school, a school abroad, and a private school.

This is a very rough draft of the first section, on public schools. Who knows. Maybe some day I can whip it all together into a book.

Note - the next posts on the blog are not likely to be part of this series. I'll add them as I get to them. Also, feedback is kindly appreciated.

The Public School:

Dad Works at the Factory

Part One

I was five years out of high school when I began teaching it. Over the summers I’d had some practice, taken on an internship the year before, and was now getting my Masters.

The best part of my Graduate program was that it required a full year of student teaching. From August to June I’d be co-teaching and running my own classes at a typical public school, with some 1,000 students. For reference, it was one of the largest high schools in Vermont.

Previously I’d been nestled amongst the green hills of that state, nourished by the rich yolk of seminars, parties, lectures, and girlfriends within a protective college shell. I’d never interacted with the townsfolk and knew nothing about their lives. Besides working at the College, I wasn’t sure what else people in the town even did to make ends meet.

My college bubble didn’t pop, like soap, but deflated, like gum. A class was taught senior year by the headmaster and dean of the high school I’d be working at, fittingly titled ‘Classroom Teaching: Theory into Practice’. Gone were the theorists, Piaget, Dewey and Freire. We instead spoke of realities. What do you do, as an elementary teacher, when you read ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ and they can’t stop laughing at ‘pussy’? What happens if, as a high school teacher, one of them tries to knife you? The idea was to ease the transition from college debutante to rookie teacher.

No one is a great teacher their first year. Your beginner year of teaching is when you make mistakes, are shocked by students’ abilities, disillusioned by their vulgarity, and moved by their sincerity. From this point on in your life you will be remembered. Perhaps you’ll be the one they hated, or the one who came through when no other teacher would. It’s a heavy weight, an emotional triage, and, while all this touchy-feely stuff is going on, you’re also supposed to make sure they know who Ferdinand Magellan is.

History was my subject, world history my specialty. I’ve noticed, wherever I go, that this usually peters out around World War One. Content is a serious difficulty for history teachers. Why, you could ask, learn content at all? The Internet has now made content knowledge so accessible, on a student’s phone, that if a student wants to know what became of Louis XIV they can find it out, in less than 20 seconds. This is one of the many questions that aren’t seriously asked, why still learn content? These are the sorts of questions I was thinking on, as well as the more pedestrian, such as why the copier seemingly hated me.

Most of us weren’t raised in Vermont (I wasn’t), but most Americans did go to public school. That’s where my teaching experience started. It was the 2008/09 school year, and none of us knew the recession was here to stay. In light of the economic downfall tens of thousands of teachers were laid off, and public schools were hurting. But this precariousness in public education was nothing new.

Part Two

The sturdy Oak, it was the tree

That saved his royal majesty.

Peter denies

His Lord and cries.

Queen Esther comes in royal state,

To save the Jews from dismal fate.

The above are from The New England Primer, published as the first school textbook in the Colonies, in the 1680s. But the Puritans and their ilk aren’t the originators. After all, the Spanish were in Florida, the Southwest and California nearly a century before the Primer was printed, and Native Americans could get a basic Christian education in the missions.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that, as a history teacher, I started looking at the story of public schooling. Beyond these early progenitors, though, education didn’t take off until the 1840s. The federal government played little role in education, so states differed widely in their support for public education, as opposed to the well-established private schools. The force behind this change was Horace Mann, Secretary of Education, who worked to ensure all Americans had the ‘three Rs’ of Reading, Writing and Reckoning.

America, industrially, was beginning to flourish by this time. The rise of this industrialism would determine Mann’s innovations in the States. Here the factory model begins to infiltrate education. When we regard, sentimentally, the one-room school house, with children of all ages learning from the kindly teacher in the front of the room, we are thinking to what Mann began to erase. The new idea, fundamentally industrial, was that we begin educating kids by age, with first graders being separated from sixth graders and so on. Sir Ken Robinson, a contemporary educationalist, has identified how Mann’s changes still apply today:

“We still educate children by batches. We put them through the system by age group. Why do we do that? Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are? It’s like the most important thing about them is their date of manufacture.”

But, as Robinson continues, we all know of cases where different students excel and different subjects at different ages. Boys, typically, don’t take to math until later than girls, for example. Reading, multiplication tables, analytical writing – these are skills that we all develop at different ages. Sure, there are broad trends, you’re not likely to be doing complex multiplication in kindergarten. But some do. And some do in eighth grade. And maybe that’s okay.

What Mann set in motion was a process of standardizing education. It’s a concept that would cycle back periodically throughout our history. It arose with the industrial revolution because that was the concept that the industrial world prized. When Karl Marx complained about the factory system he griped that it took away autonomy. (His communist cures, of course, were inadequate to deal with the very real problem he identified.) This lack of individualism that factories in the industrial revolution created was passed on to the schools that were designed like factories.

The process of implementing this was a long time coming. The Civil War disrupted things, as a start. Frontier states had to develop solid boundaries before tackling systematic education. But once unified, the nation’s schooling would start to have problems.

Part Three

There’s around 99,000 public schools in the U.S. The problem is numerical. Those schools serve over 50 million students. It ends up averaging to some 507 students per school. The student-teacher ratio stands around 15:1. But these are national averages – most schools do not have 507 students and classrooms capped at 15 students.

Why is this? The reason is population, which is not evenly distributed. Wyoming has 366 public schools serving 88,000 students. As such they average 240 students per school, not surprising for a sparsely populated state, with large distances between towns. New York City, by contrast, with a dense population, has 1,700 schools, serving 1.1 million students – averaging 647 students per school.

That’s a lot of people to keep track of. Public schooling was designed to promote basic literacy and competence. Idealistically it’s designed to make good citizens. Being a good citizen not only means knowing how to vote, but also how to work, how to raise a healthy family, and how to improve the quality of life in America. That’s why the federal government is involved.

The big shift came in 1965. That year a law was passed called ‘The Elementary and Secondary Education Act’ (ESEA) during Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty”. The reason for this development was due to shifting historical factors. Between the turn of the century and 1965 something totally distinct from education had taken place, which would radically alter education: World War One.

Modern war required modern soldiers, but who were they? Bayonets take less training than an airplane to use. Intelligence was the problem – cannon fodder farmers weren’t good enough anymore. Alfred Binet applied the principle of quantifying things, assigning a number to measure accurately, to psychology and intelligence, while a professor at Stanford, Lewis Terman, popularized it. The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale is more commonly known as an IQ test. The SAT really is the child of Binet. One of its first applications was being given to soldiers in WWI, to determine readiness for modern warfare. The descendants of that test are obsessed over by parents and students worldwide. Binet never intended any of this. Terman, however certainly did. But Terman’s goal of standardized testing was more in line with eugenic purposes, a grave reminder of the danger of assigning a person a number.

The SAT had been around since the 1920s before Johnson’s ESEA law made such tests a cornerstone of our education system. In the 1920s Progressive education was hitting its peak, not coincidentally perhaps. Progressive education focused on the individual student, and the role of exploration and democracy in the classroom. American philosopher John Dewey had been the biggest name in the movement. But there were others, Italian Maria Montessori, and Austrian Rudolf Steiner, most notably. What they have in common is active engagement, instead of passive learning. Not surprisingly this was antithetical to the rising dominance of standardization in the post-war years. With the Cold War on, and a concern for competition, individualism was on the decline. Just as war had provided an impetus to creating standardization, so too it would continue to fight it after another World War, three decades later.

Conservatism of the McCarthy stripe was skeptical of individualism, and aberration. At the same time an anti-Progressive work, ‘Why Johnny Can’t Read’ was published in 1955. This work had a solid intention, to teach kids to read with use of phonics. However, at the time, Progressive elementary schools were using context reading, and so it stood as a criticism of their system. It’s no surprise then than Johnson passed a law with standardization as a cornerstone of education.

Public schools today are now under No Child Left Behind, passed in 2001. This is the most significant update of the ESEA, and education generally, since 1965.

Part Four

Vermont, small as it is, is divided in two parts. The leaf-peeping, syrup-tapping, Ben and Jerry’s creating north, known as the Northern Kingdom, and the South. I was in the South, and it basically felt like an extension of Western Massachusetts, or upstate New York. Albany was closer than Burlington. Southern Vermont, unlike the Northern Kingdom, once attempted to industrialize. The ubiquitous cows are not so ubiquitous down there. There are Wal-Marts and chain stores, and poverty.

Still, according to the numbers, agriculture and related industries make up a third of the town’s economy. It’s a rural setting; a Winter’s Bone atmosphere soaks the back roads (although meth hasn’t blighted the town as far as I know). Fittingly, amongst the foliage, Robert Frost is buried on a hill. It is a mix of modern strip and New England charm, rural town and developed settlement. Excepting the cities, it represents what most kids in America will experience in high school. Approximately 65 million teens will live in this, with nothing better to do on a Friday night than bum cigarettes, think of James Dean and Eminem, and get drunk.

Mount Anthony Union High School has about 1,000 students, their mascot is the Patriots, and their colors are red, white, and blue. Mount Anthony has been ahead of the curve with education reform, in large part due to their population: a solid portion of the students and their families, are simply getting by.

For example, they built a dentist’s office on-site. “If a kid has a toothache, how can you expect them to focus on a test in class?” asks MAUHS Principal Sue Maguire. Once a week a dentist comes in, looks at the teeth of kids whose family can’t afford such attention, and continues to help alleviate the effects of poverty on schooling.

Educational statistics are often debated counter-argued, and misinterpreted. A classic example was the supposed connection between classical music and intelligence in young children. This was an inflation of a study that suggested listening to classical music right before a test on spatial relations improved performance. From this, “Baby Mozart” ^TM.

However, studies have consistently confirmed, over decades, that poverty is the greatest factor on educational performance. Most basically, poverty leads to increased absenteeism and dropouts. If a child of 13 is also the primary care-provider for their siblings, school becomes far less important. Development is also delayed disproportionately in poor children, just as learning disabilities increase.

Bennington, Vermont, has a poverty level around 25% of the population. For under-fives that increases to around 40% for male children, and stays around 25% for females. 67% of this poverty is represented by single-female households. Bennington is not unique. The national figures show that under-18 around 22% of students in the U.S. live in poverty.

Increasingly the demarcation between poverty and ‘just getting by’ is blurring. Middle class is defined as around $50,000 for annual income, maybe less in semi-rural Vermont. (Although for the Northeast the median hovers a little above that at $53,000.) The average male income, almost $10,000 more than female, stands at $39,400 in the town I first taught.

But there was more to it than numbers. It was an obvious condition of the student’s lives, with kids wearing the same shirt to class every day. Not that every kid fell into this category. Many, indeed likely most, were doing fine, no different from the city and suburban kids in other towns and states.

Part Five

No Child Left Behind was bipartisan. Ted Kennedy and John Boehner both supported the bill.

It’s been more than a decade since the law was passed, and we can start to study the data of what exactly has come of this major shift. Many students have gripes (nothing new) as do teachers and parents. But anecdote is less reliable than what we can measure, and since measurement is the main point of the law, there should be clear data answering whether students are doing better by NCLB or not.

First off, many teachers and administrators scoffed at the goals. 100% proficiency sounds admirable, but if you gave every kid in the US a test to write their name, some would still screw it up. 100% is not achievable. So a decade later, it’s not surprising that nearly half of American schools haven’t reached the law’s proficiency goals, 48%. The number should strike us as high, though.

Reading stayed the same in 8^th and 12^th graders. The disparity between blacks and whites, well-off and poor, these remained too. NCLB hasn’t addressed the problem. It made teachers focus on the test and, as testing hours increased per year, diminished active learning hours.

According to a 2012 study by the National Center for Fair and Open Testing this led to a serious problem:

“Then there is the cheating epidemic that has erupted across the nation. In Atlanta, where cheating was confirmed in 44 public schools, involving 178 teachers and principals, a Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) report described a culture of “fear, intimidation and retaliation spread throughout the district” (GBI, 2011). As 2011 came to a close, Georgia investigators released another report documenting widespread cheating on tests in Dougherty Country, 200 miles south of Atlanta. They found evidence of cheating in each of the county’s 11 schools and similar evidence of teachers coerced into correcting students’ wrong answers. The report cited three main causes of the cheating. Reason number one: “Pressure to meet adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind Act.””

Furthermore “According to published reports, incidents of cheating in the past three years have been confirmed in 30 states and the District of Columbia” raising alarming questions about the nature of this new testing environment’s effects on communities.

A broad social observation could argue that the reason we didn’t reach 100% was due to the recession – and since the U.S. doesn’t fund/prioritize education in amounts comparable to other developed countries – the cuts that resulted in the lackluster results. But to suggest this merely confirm that NCLB is nowhere near as important as economic factors in determining success, not some matrix of standardized tests and incentives.

The students entering college now are the recipients of this poor education. Our youth vote.

Is it surprising then, with such a failed policy doing a decade’s worth of damage, that colleges and universities have seen a rise of 28-40% of undergrads take a remedial course? Or that the gaps black and white are still apparent, with 42% of black students needing remediation compared to 31% of white? If the tests are so standard, these socio-economic factors wouldn’t have an effect, would they?

Part Six

Student teaching is not easy. You are basically apprenticing – seeing if the career choice you picked is what you wanted it to be. It’s the first time you have adult powers in the classroom setting.

Back at the college, there were only a few in my graduate program – six or seven. It was the fall of 2008. Being as it was Vermont there was a lot of celebrating when Obama was elected. For prospective teachers, though, there seemed to be more menacing clouds rolling in over the green mountains. As grad students we were all wondering if we’d have jobs next fall. Looking over my old reflections and work from the time, I find a consistent theme in writing. From my official portfolio, ‘First Student Profile’:

“‘I can't stand you and I can't stand this class.’

“Lyndsey has proved to be one of my most difficult students.

“When the Dean and I pressed her for details none were forthcoming. She seemed convinced that she was going to fail, but why she thought so was unclear.

“From my perspective the reasons were obvious: she didn't do work, would walk out of class (when she showed up) and was, in general I thought, a disrespectful and rude kid.

“However, I was prepared to work with her and get her back on track, which is why I had arranged this meeting with Dave the Dean in the first place. That, and because the last interaction we'd shared was her screaming at me and storming out of the computer lab…

“… This case has been vital to my understanding of teaching in that with some students their performance is a combination of external and internal pressures. Sometimes as a teacher, you have to recognize your limitations and allow other forces to work with you in tandem to help the student succeed. In this case Lyndsey's success, while mild, required a combination of patience on my part with greater parental and administrative pressures, and finally her own self-discipline to get done what needed to be done. ”

Looking back, Lyndsey was a typical kid, and I wouldn’t blink my eyes at her conduct now.  I now work almost exclusively with difficult cases.  Hers was an early and important lesson. But beyond the frequent bouts of confusion, frustration, and enjoyment, I ended the portfolio with the following:

“As regards where I may be teaching next year my net has been cast wide. The areas and schools that need teachers are many and distributed across the country. I may find myself working in Washington, or Washington D.C. This seeming complacency is not due to a lack of interest in where I teach – there are certain places I have ruled out – but instead stems from an acknowledgment that strong teachers are needed almost everywhere.

“Similarly I have not ruled out working in a public, private, or charter school. Depending on the vacancies and areas any of these positions could be beneficial to the community. I am attempting, in as much as I have learned from my practicum experience, to be flexible, patient, and dedicated to wherever I end up, and whomever I end up working with.”

Sure enough my path through education across the next five years would encompass all that and more. I left Mt. Anthony with recommendations in my pocket, a year of classroom experience under my belt, and a Masters in Teaching in hand, ready to take on the impersonal system of America’s public schools. 

A Classic Logic Puzzle: Who Owns The Fish?

There are five houses in a row and in five different colors.

In each house lives a person from a different country.

Each person drinks a certain drink, plays a certain sport, and keeps a certain pet.

No two people drink the same drink, play the same sport, or keep the same pet.

1.      The Brit lives in a red house

2.      The Swede keeps dogs

3.      The Dane drinks tea

4.      The green house is on the left of the white house

5.      The green house owner drinks coffee

6.      The person who plays polo rears birds

7.      The owner of the yellow house plays hockey

8.      The man living in the house in the center drinks milk

9.      The Norwegian lives in the first house

10.  The man who plays baseball lives next to the man who keeps cats

11.  The man who keeps horses lives next to the one who plays hockey

12.  The man who plays billiards drinks beer

13.  The German plays soccer

14.  The Norwegian lives next to the blue house

15.  The man who plays baseball has a neighbor who drinks water.

So to solve this on you own, don’t read further. Otherwise, follow along below.

First draw five boxes in a row, to represent the houses.

Then put down the basic stuff we know without other information. This includes 8, 9, and by deduction from 9, 14.

Next we know from 4 and 5, that the furthest right house must be the white house with the green to its left. It can’t be shifted over any, due to the prohibition of the middle house drinking milk.

Now we can figure out the next two colors from 1. Since the Norwegian lives in the first house, it can’t be red, and is yellow by default.

We can now, knowing the yellow house, complete 7 and 11, since 11 can apply to only one house. 

This is the tricky step. Based upon a couple of clues we need to do some guesswork. We know the Swede can only live in one of two places, and the Dane can only live in one of two places, based on 2, 3, and 13.

If we consider further clues 12 and 15, then it is a pretty safe bet that the Dane lives in the blue. You can of course reverse this, but in the next step you’ll find logical inconsistencies. We now need to figure out which is German and Swedish.

 Like the last step, we can make a choice. If we say the Swede is in the green house, we run into problems in the next step with clue 12. If we assume the contrary, we are presented with no difficulties.

We can plug in 12, and 15 now safely.

By default, clue 6 must be the middle house, and we can safely say from 15 that the Dane plays baseball.

Clues 10, and for dramatic flair, 2 (which we could’ve done earlier) can now be figured out.

Finally we have our answer:

Declaration of Interdependence

Back in 1970 Howard Zinn, an American historian, proposed the need for a 'Declaration of Interdependence'. You can see Matt Damon reciting the speech here: http://vimeo.com/48834336

The speech addresses the following:

• That the wrong people are in jail, and that the wrong people are out of jail
• That the wrong people are in power, and the the wrong people are out of power
• That the wealth in the world is distributed in such a way as to not require small reform, but as to require a drastic reallocation of wealth
• Civil disobedience is not our problem, our problem is civil obedience
• History abounds with examples of obedience leading to horror, under the pretense of the rule of law
• The rule of law is the darling of the leaders, and the plague of the people, which should be a clue to its real purpose
• We have to transcend national boundaries in our thinking
• Seemingly disparate world leaders have more in common with each other than they do with us. They continually work on securing their own ends, namely power
• As such we need to get back to the aims and spirit of the Declaration of Independence. This spirit is resistance to illegitimate authority, especially emphasizing the right to abolish government
• To preserve this spirit will require going outside the law, to redistribute wealth, to put those in jail who need to be there, and take those out who do not
• People in all countries need the spirit of disobedience to the state. Therefore we need a Declaration of Interdependence

So I got to thinking about what this would say, given the need to address the dilemmas of our time. 

It was incredible how little of the language I had to change from the original document, written over 230 years ago.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of humanity requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Us, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that we are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right ourselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of the common people, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present world leaders is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over our collective humanity. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

They have refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
They have forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation plutocratic Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, have utterly neglected to attend to them.
They have refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. 
They have passed legislation at places unusual, secret, and distant without knowledge of the governed, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. 
They have dissolved legitimate governments repeatedly, for opposing with firmness their invasions on the rights of the people.
They have refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the people remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of theft from without, and abuse within.
They have endeavored to prevent the population from freedom of movement; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations.
They have obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Just Representation.
They have made Judges dependent on their alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
They have erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass us, and eat our substance.
They have kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies and carried out surveillance upon their own people without the Consent of the people.
They have affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
They have combined with others to subject us to an illegitimate authority foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving their Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Maintaining large numbers of corporate criminals among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of all countries:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: 
For depriving us in some cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For abolishing the free System of Laws, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render the people powerless and to serve fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into all parts of the globe:
For taking away our Freedoms, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our rights to Privacy, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
They have abdicated Government, by declaring us out of  their Protection while waging War against us.
They have plundered our seas, ravaged our land, burnt our resources, and destroyed our environment. 
They are at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Heads of any civilized nation.
They have constrained our fellow Citizens to expatriate and become criminals to preserve our Fundamental Rights, to become separated from friends and Kin, or to fall themselves at the Tyrant’s hands. 

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. These Leaders whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, are unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to the Tyrants of other nations. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our means of habitation here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. These leaders too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Revolution, and hold them, as we hold the rest of civilization, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united peoples of earth, in General Congress, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People, solemnly publish and declare, That these Nations are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to proclaimed Plutocratic Leaders in any State, and that all political connection between them and these Oppressors, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Nobel Update and Life Update

A quick life update.

I spent the past weekend in Boston, up from CT, where I work. The point was to celebrate Thanksgiving, albeit early. For actual Thanksgiving I'll be in Ithaca, surrounded by cold and grey.

My family is split, and has been as long as I can remember. In Singapore I had to make Thanksgiving dinner on my own, with a surrogate family of expat friends and acquaintances. Also on that day my long-term girlfriend broke up with me.

Last thanksgiving I was seeing someone, but that ended in June. It's now been about two months since I've seriously been seeing anyone. The interval has, however, provided dating.

Dating sucks. Due to the 80 hour a week commitment of my job, I long ago took the millennial route with an online profile. So here are the dates I've had so far this fall:

The one where she told me she didn't like politics and generally would be considered center-right, because she hates Obama.

The one where after getting coffee I offered to walk her home, only to find it was 45 minutes, and then she said she wanted to remain Platonic.

The one where it went well, and we kept rescheduling a second date, and then she cancelled last minute, telling me her place burned down, and did not reschedule further.

The one where it went really well, and after a really nice date she messaged me the next date saying she liked me and unfortunately she can't date anyone right now, and deleted her profile.

So I'm not particularly optimistic about this Thursday's date, if it happens, but hey - the dates are going better each time, even if the reactions are also getting more ridiculous as a consequence.

Regardless, this past weekend was filled with turkey and mashed potatoes, stuffing and pie. It was good. I'm getting better at scrabble as well. Maybe I need to give dating a break and focus on food instead - that's where I can find real happiness.

Or maybe not.

In Other News:

Two-plus years ago I listed the living Nobel laureates, and their ages. That included all five categories, but after Doris Lessing's death the other day, I revisited the list, as can be seen below:

Literature 20

Nadine Gordimer – 1991 Age – 89 South Africa

Dario Fo – 1997 Age – 87 Italy

Gunter Grass – 1999 Age – 86 Germany

Gabriel Garcia Marquez – 1982 Age – 86 Colombia – Longest Holding

Imre Kertesz – 2002 Age – 84 Poland

Derek Walcott – 1992 Age – 83 St. Lucia

Toni Morrison – 1993 Age – 82 USA

Tomas Transtromer – 2011 Age – 82 Sweden

Alice Munro – 2013 Age – 82 Canada – Shortest Holding

V.S. Naipaul – 2001 Age – 81 UK

Wole Soyinka – 1986 Age – 79 Nigeria

Kenzaburo Oe – 1994 Age – 78 Japan

Mario Vargas Llosa – 2010 Age – 77 Peru/Spain

Gao Xingjian – 2000 Age – 73 France

J.M. Coetzee – 2003 Age – 73 South Africa 

J.M.G. Le Clezio – 2008 Age – 73 France/Mauritius

Elfriede Jelinek – 2004 Age – 67 Austria

Orhan Pamuk – 2006 Age – 61 Turkey

Herta Muller – 2009 Age – 60 Germany

Mo Yan – 2012 Age – 58 China

Top 20 Old Disney Cartoons

A look back at Disney from 1960 and earlier. Here are the top 20 old Disney cartoons:

20. The Ugly Duckling – 1939, Silly Symphony

Oh the feels. The classic story is given a particularly poignant update in the sequence when the duckling seems to have found happiness with a decoy.

19. Who Killed Cock Robin? – 1935, Silly Symphony

A weird little retelling, with caricatures of Mae West, Harpo Marx, and Stepin Fetchit, amongst others. Amusing, musical little short.

18. The Little House – 1952

A Mary Blair short, with her trademark visuals. Though best in her longer works, this adaptation of the picture book is saved from saccharine by Blair’s artistic quality.

17. The Brave Little Tailor – 1938, Mickey Mouse

Visually beautiful, heroic Mickey takes on a giant, with a little twist at the end. It is the most successful of the attempted adaptations of existing fables and fairy-tales in shorts.

16. The Truth About Mother Goose – 1957

Disney decided the fifties were an era to educate America with their shorts. This unusual cartoon explains the history behind old nursery rhymes.

15. Music Land – 1935, Silly Symphony

Symphony and Jazz are at odds, with a pair of discordant young lovers…not an original plot. But it is perfect to showcase the ‘Silly Symphony’ format, with music in place of words, high imagination, and a tender quality, without being pap (at one point King Sax is seen ‘tickling’ a Ukelele hula girl…)

14. Ferdinand the Bull – 1938

Academy Award-winning, this adaptation of the classic children’s book is perfect Disney of the late 30s. A quiet protagonist, an obvious moral, plenty of humor and a little action. This is the first of Disney’s trademark gentler cartoons.

13. Clock Cleaners – 1937, Mickey Mouse

Disney came close to Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd in this short. It’s the mark of a great cartoon when Goofy’s high-teetering antics can keep you on the edge of your seat. This is an example of a short whose staying power resides in the timing and gags.

12. Ben and Me – 1953

Disney only did a few shorts longer than ten minutes. (‘Paul Bunyan’ jumps to mind.) The difficulty is holding the audience’s attention with, well, two-dimensional characters. The ‘Me’ of this short is colonial Amos Mouse a Sterling Holloway narrated-character almost as interesting Ben Franklin.

11. Goofy Gymnastics – 1949, Goofy

“Boy, did you see that? Nobody takes a wallop like Goofy. What timing! What finesse! What a genius!” So says Roger Rabbit, viewing this cartoon. Goofy was never my favorite. I preferred the irascible Donald to the dope. But this cartoon may be the apex of physical comedy in Disney.

10. Donald Applecore – 1952, Donald Duck

Donald’s humor, much like his Loony counterpart Daffy, lies in quality of his foil. The nephews never got the best laughs out of Donald’s anger, probably since they were family. With the nephews we always see the plot from their point of view, and predictably watch the follow-through. But Chip and Dale, wily and surprising, get Donald explosively mad in this cartoon. The comedy escalates quickly.

9. In the Bag – 1956, Humphrey the Bear

Humphrey the Bear got his own series – for two cartoons. His humor is not subtle. Leonard Maltin supposedly said these shorts were ‘belly-laughs’ which typically is not Disney. But the quality of the humor is the question. Humphrey is hapless, with just enough guile so we don’t feel bad at laughing at his consistent failures, losses, and fumbles. The portly ranger, too, is an underappreciated character.

8. Thru the Mirror – 1936, Mickey Mouse

This is a jazzy short, loosely based on ‘Through the Looking Glass’ and ‘Alice in Wonderland’. It’s a great product of its era. The short earns high points in the imagination category, transforming a living room and den into a world of living beings, some sixty years before ‘Beauty and the Beast’. Not only that, it succeeds in creating a unique animated dance scene worthy of Astaire, and duel worthy of ‘Stardust’.

7. The Band Concert – 1935, Mickey Mouse

The first color Disney cartoon. The first time Goofy, Donald, and Mickey shared a short. Goofy was still a peripheral character, but Mickey and Donald’s antagonism had already been developed in earlier cartoons. What makes the two so great in ‘The Band Concert’ is that each gets in a number of quality potshots at the other. Nor is either, really, to blame for their actions, making the escalation even funnier.

6. A Cowboy Needs a Horse – 1958

In 1951, UPA won an Academy Award for their excellent ‘Gerald McBoing Boing’. The UPA style – angular, flat, modern – was almost antithetical to Disney’s artistic style, coming out of the 40s. Disney spent the decade developing their style (compare ‘Ichabod’ to ‘Sleeping Beauty’). In 1958 they created the best artistic answer to UPA’s challenge, and arguably did it better.

5. Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom – 1953, Adventures in Music

Academy Award-winning, this short blends the new UPA-influenced style with Disney’s drive to educate in the 50s. So we get an animated music history lesson, how all instruments were developed. Attempting to be global in scope, shots at multiculturalism come off as vaguely offensive. Yet the music, artistry, and unusual subject matter combine to create an unforgettably smart work.

4. Steamboat Willie – 1928, Mickey Mouse

This is the first Disney cartoon with sound, and the oldest entry on this list. Mickey Mouse had only starred in two previous cartoons, and his appearance quickly became iconic. Walt Disney had been making animated films since 1921, but for most, ‘Steamboat’ is the moment Disney became recognizable. The amusing short also features audience’s first chance to see Mickey go toe to toe with his nemesis Pete.

3. Donald in Mathmagic Land – 1959, Donald Duck

From the earliest on the list, we come now to the latest. Walt Disney decided to dust off this excellent Academy Award-nominated short in 1961, as the first program aired on Wonderful World of Color. A generation grew up with it, showed it their kids, and now their grandkids are learning the beauty and wonder of mathematics through a visually stunning blend of animation and live footage. Artistically ‘Mathmagic Land’ is a high point of the 1950s UPA style, and marks the decline of the short era until quite recently, with works like ‘Paperman’. Unlike Goofy and Mickey, both of whom have had features since 2010, Donald hasn’t had another feature since 1965, and the last few are the worst examples of educational films that Disney used their animation department for in that decade. With luck Donald will return to his former position in the near future.

2. The Skeleton Dance – 1929, Silly Symphonies

The first ‘Silly Symphony.’ A weird plot, as we watch a quartet of skeletons dance in a graveyard. That’s it. There are no words in the short, setting a trend for the Silly Symphonies to follow. Simplicity leads to timelessness. Anyone can understand the humor, the visuals, the appeal of the cartoon. Unlike later Symphonies, there is no moral or lesson. When I show people this cartoon they are still entertained, often puzzled, and always laughing. It gets to the root of animation’s greatest talent, which is the presentation the bizarre, even the absurd. This dance macabre comes years before Fleischer will master the black and white surrealism in Betty Boop shorts such as ‘Minnie the Moocher’ and ‘Snow White.’ It also helped Disney diversify – for the next almost ten years shorts will be divided between the ‘Mickey Mouse’ series, often repetitive, and the new breadth of imagination in the ‘Symphonies’.

1. The Old Mill – 1937, Silly Symphonies

Academy Award winning is the least of the accolades. For this cartoon Disney’s team invented the multiplane camera, which allows for a three-dimensional effect. This camera will, henceforth, dominate animation. As far as the plot, we follow the story of a night in the mill, again, so simple as to be impossible not to understand. Visually stunning, the timing and use of music is also perfect to create suspense and engage the viewer. If I could pick only one Disney cartoon to show people, ‘The Old Mill’ would be my choice. With drama and humor, triumph and tragedy, in ten minutes it is surprisingly diverse for a seemingly limited subject. This short also marks a definitive break from the older, repetitive style of animation found in works like ‘The Skeleton Dance’. Even the repeated sequence of the swallow going round the gears is done with alternating perspectives, zooming, angles, and panning. Animation so often creates the incredible – flying anvils, King Neptune’s palace, fantastic beasts – but this shows the potential for the ordinary, an old mill, being beautiful and captivating.

Zoom Out, Swell, 'The End'

"We really shouldn’t be talking like this.”

It was a line out of a David Lean movie. And at the time it felt like I was living in noir tragedy. I’d done everything right, played the cards of a winning hand, and had an ace up my sleeve. But the ace wasn’t enough, and I found myself with nothing.

My world was crumbling around me, and fast. I needed to get to Santa Fe, quick. But the train was leaving without me. ‘Brief Encounter.’

“We really shouldn’t be talking like this.”

Ten years later, it’s always sunny when the scene cuts to ten years later. I never made it to Santa Fe, the admissions director told me I wasn’t going to St. Johns College. I went to Vermont for five years, did my best with second best.

Then the wilderness years, the roving and tramping, trying to find myself, never forgetting my real purpose, working away slowly, biding time and remembering. Like a Dickensian shoe-maker, working away at my task. If the story were more pulp I’d have been planning a revenge for wrongs done. But this story wasn’t hard-boiled.

“Then as it was, then again it will be /An' though the course may change sometimes /Rivers always reach the sea.” Led Zeppelin, ‘Ten Years Gone.’

I’ve reached the sea, but know not what to make of the shore. The horizon stretches on and ever on. Painstakingly, doggedly, I went about reading the classics – the great books of the western world – the St. John’s curriculum. Roughly 200 books, tens of thousands of pages. Copernicus, Homer, Nietzsche, Heisenberg, Austen, Plato, Tocqueville, Mendel. Literally months of my life.

I read them as I got my hands on them. I had my college library purchase the obscure mathematical works: Ptolemy’s Almagest, Lobachevsky’s Theory of Parallels. Wrote to science departments across the country for charitable offerings of Huygens and Viete. Indeed, the maths and sciences were the hardest to acquire.

And I went further. In Santa Fe they only read selections of Plutarch, I read the whole work. They only read parts of this and that – I read the whole. It’s an exclusive club, and although I was turned away at the door, in the end I paid premium membership.

Reading these books has defined me. My ethics, my view of life, my appreciation of literature, my view on narrative, on the language we use, what civilization is, our role on the planet and the universe, all of it. Where our music comes from. What humans are capable of. What humanism really means.

But the horizon looms. St. Johns has been an institution in America since 1696, and has committed to the great books since 1937. Back then they weren’t reading Einstein, or Watson and Crick. Likewise, there is a great deal of literature on my shelves that in 1696 probably seemed necessary, and has now dropped out: Fibonacci, Galen, Marco Polo, Burke, Cicero, Erasmus.

I always assumed the consummation of the list would lead to further reading, but I never grasped how much. The great books are just the skeletal frame on which the rest – the sinews, colloids and capillaries – hang. The end, just the start. There’s a lifetime’s worth to contend with. I got what I wanted, and now don’t know what to do with it. The guy at the top rubbed out, but the bigger challenge now of figuring out what to do with yourself.

Just like a noir tragedy.