January 19, 2016--Mr. Cuba and His Boys

A friend and I have been having a back-and-forth about the eight films nominated for Academy Awards.

So far she's liked a number of them while grumpy me has been unhappy with most. I half-enjoyed Joy but didn't feel it worthy of Oscar designation either for best picture or for Jennifer Lawrence's phoned-in acting. I disliked The Big Short feeling it was more documentary than feature film and not that great a documentary at that.

Coming from the corporate world, my friend liked it quite a lot, which I  respect. We both liked Bridge of Spies and Brooklyn, with her decidedly feeling better about them than I. (By the way, we're both from pre-cool Brooklyn.)

I'm not sure if she has yet seen The Revenant, the only movie thus far that I feel is close to being a masterpiece. I'm eager to hear what she thinks.

Room is at the top of my list of the remaining films and I am looking forward to discussing it with her. I sense we'll be on the same page and will find it memorable.

For me, and I suspect my friend, no matter the special effects, I have no intention of seeing Mad Max. I can handle only so much post-apocalyptic violence. There's enough of that going on in the real world and I still go to the movies to escape.

Then there is Spotlight.

I thought it was considerably better than OK and though about an important and deeply disturbing subject--abuse by Catholic priests of children in their charge--for me it unintentionally gives the impression that horrendous crimes of this kind, and the institutional coverup that attempts to hide them from public attention, implies that these kinds of aberrations are confined mainly to priests and their cardinal enablers.

Mt friend disagrees, finding it's focus to be appropriate and claims, perhaps correctly, that to allude to similar forms of abuse--say by clergy from other religions or coaches--would dilute the power of the film and turn it into a miss mosh. She finds it more effective to focus solely on the Catholic church.

She's probably right, but I couldn't help writing the following e-mail to her, partly derived from my own experiences with child abuse--

To tell you the truth, it may be unfair, but I have general suspicions (until proven otherwise) about men and smaller numbers of women who are attracted to work at single-sex organizations and institutions. Priests and nuns and rabbis (I knew a few of the latter who in my old neighborhood put their hands on kids they were preparing for bar mitzvahs), boy scout masters (mine I feel certain had a thing for prepubescent boys--me included!), and teachers.  

Believe it or not, I had a "shower teacher" at PS 244--Mr. Cuba--who loved drying us off after he taught us to wash what he called--in Yiddish--our heinies. Then I went to an all-boys high school and we had a number of male teachers who had roaming hands. And forget some of the coaches I knew about and played under.

I should have but didn't add, "pun intended."

My friend took this in and responded that it was unfair and to limiting to focus so exclusively on same-sex institutions. After all, she pointed out, one of the worst recent examples of coaches taking sexual advantage of young boys happened at co-ed Penn State where assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky enticed athletes to perform sex acts with him in the shower.

Touché to that, I acknowledged, but this got me thinking again about some of my own experiences.

My bar mitzvah rabbi not only used a wooden pointer to smack us when we made mistakes while reading Hebrew (not one word of which he taught us to comprehend) but for repeat offenders, including stutterers, he would call us into is office, get us to drop our pants and underwear, and beat us with a wooden paddle.

When my turn came, after doing what this "scholar" directed, I never returned to Hebrew school and fought with my mother, hinting at what had happened, until she agreed not to force me to be bar mitzvahed. I never was.

The scout master of my East Flatbush's Boy Scout Troop 152, spent more time getting us to line up and march around the gym where we met each week than teaching us about how to administer first aid or start fires using flint and steel. And when we went on overnight hikes to Alpine, NJ, without other adult supervision, he would routinely rouse us from sleep in the middle of the night, scaring and blinding us with flashlights held six inches from our eyes, and then would fill us with stories about the dangers lurking in the surrounding woods. And then when he had us fully terrorized, he would take us, clad only in our shorts and undershirts, in his arms to protect and comfort us from these fictitious threats. Retrospectively, it is obvious what he was really up to.

My high school baseball coach, after a long and punishing practices that rendered us soaking wet from perspiration, would supervise, before we hit the showers, the gathering of our discarded shorts, T shirts, and especially jockstraps. He didn't touch any of us, as far as I know from my teammates, but it was obvious even then, in our naiveté, what turned him on.

Most perverse, though, was the mandatory Shower Class at PS 244, my elementary school.

Perhaps because most of us were children of immigrants, it was assumed that we had not been taught at home the virtues of hygienic practices available to Americans. Every mooring our homeroom teacher would check our nails to see if they had been properly cleaned and she inspected our cloth hankies to see if they were neat and clean.

And then every Tuesday after gym class, as with my Boy Scout troop a class almost entirely devoted to militaristic drills with orders barked to us as if we were in basic training--there was no dodge ball, no rope climbing--the boys were ushered off to the shower room where Mr. Cuba lurked.

We were forced to strip and then huddle together in a steamy communal shower that had at least a dozen shower heads in a row. As we cringed under that alternating cascades of hot and cold water, the administration of which Mr. Cuba supervised--to open then close skin pores, he said--he paid inordinate attention to our nether parts, barking at us to get enough soap up into our heinies and then ordered us to turn around and, while not facing him, bend over. When we all had "assumed the position," as he put it, he commanded us "spread 'em" then after we did to make sure the scalding spray would in turn wash away the soapsuds.

When we stumbled from the shower his attention turned to "teaching" us proper toweling techniques. His focus was on making sure our feet and toes were thoroughly dried--to prevent Athlete's Foot, he said. And to be sure they were, he forced us, while sitting on rows of benches, to hold our feet in the air so he could see for himself by moving down the line of shivering, naked boys.

He also made sure our crotch areas were dry, again, he insisted to prevent fungus from growing. To "assist" us he would snatch the towels from our hands and complete the job himself.

So though I get my friend's good points about Spotlight, I wish someone would make a movie about Mr. Cuba and his boys.

October 21, 2015--Teakettle Game

In Mrs. Peterson's 6th garde class at my elementary school, PS 244, to get us interested in vocabulary and spelling (not an easy matter), every few days she let us play the Teakettle Game. More technically, the Homonym Game.

When it was your turn you would try to challenge and frustrate your classmates (more the latter) by posing the following kind of question--

He teakettled down the canal rather than driving on the teakettle.

The other kids, from the context, were supposed to come up with the two words for which the teakettles stood. If they couldn't, you'd give them another sentence--

She parked the car on the teakettle and then teakettled in the lake.

That was usually enough for the smartest girl in the class, waving her raised hand frantically, to shout out and spell--"road" and "rowed."

It would then be her turn to come up with a stumper.

I later learned that some homonyms were of a different sort--they were pronounced the same, as road and rowed, but unlike these that are spelled differently, others are spelled the same but pronounced differently. Technically, they are homographic homonyms.

For example, lead (as in the metal) and lead (when it means being at the head of a line) are homographic homonyms.

Got it?

To see if you do, here are a couple of more Teakettle posers, homonyms of different sorts--

I will teakettle a letter with my teakettle hand.

In my hotel teakettle I bought a teakettle from the minibar and then listened to a Bach cello teakettle on the stereo.

Three or more in a sentence makes it easier to solve but is fun to construct.

There are so many of these various kinds of teakettles, sorry, homonyms, that for some time there has been a movement to simplify the spelling of some English words to limit confusion and make it easier for both native born and second-language people to learn and perfect English.

(Perfect itself, of course being a homographic homonym.)

In fact, playwright and over-all curmudgeon, George Bernard Shaw called for the development of an alternative to our 26-letter alphabet, contending that a phonetic one of at least 40 letters and orthographic symbols would make it easier to spell tens of thousands of English words. In the 1930s he sponsored a contest to attract interest in this project.

There are as a result quite a few examples of Shavian Alphabets but none caught on any more than attempts to get Britain and the United States to switch to the much more rational metric system.

Wouldn't tawt work better than taught? But then tawt would be a homonym for . . .

Here it is in one last teakettle example using tawt--

He was teakettleed to be certain the sheets were teakettle when making the bed.

April 27, 2015--Testing One, Two, Three

All over America school kids are being tested. Some are taking tests that derive from what their states require while others are being tested to see how well they have absorbed the material associated with the controversial Common Core curriculum which 44 states have adopted.

And then there are the hundreds of thousands of children not taking any tests at all. This, for many, to protest the importance assigned to tests that supposedly call for rote learning or have high-stakes consequences. Consequences for the kids, their schools and districts, and for their teachers.

Let me be clear that in virtually all instances it is the parents lodging these protests by keeping their children home, not the kids themselves making these decisions. Sort of like the anti-vacine parents.

There are many layers that require unpacking in order to understand what is going on. It is not as simple as it may seem.

First, whose fault is it that we have all these tests? Some say it's former president George W. Bush's since he allegedly wanted to break teachers' unions by holding them accountable for the results. And Teddy Kennedy's, who wanted to show he could work in a bipartisan way and made a deal with Number 43 when he signed off on Bush's signature school reform program, No Child Left Behind that required universal testing and meet certain standards in order for states to leverage federal funds. And, of course, like everything else people do not like, it's Barack Obama's fault since he has a radical agenda for the federal government to snatch authority from the states and take over the education of our children, very much including indoctrinating and testing them. Some feel, through the imposition of Common Core.

If you live in New York and watch TV, you are being flooded with ads paid for by the state's teachers' unions that claims it's governor Andrew Cuomo's fault. He's doing a Scott Walker, they say, by showing how tough he can be on teachers, using testing as a way to fire teachers he doesn't like. All this presumably to get ready to run for president if Hillary Clinton continues to falter.

And then there are those (me included) who feel requiring some forms of achievement testing is one way, one way, to see if kids are learning and to use what the tests show as part of the mix, part of the mix, of evaluative tools available to hold everyone involved accountable for how well students are faring--individual teachers, school principals, school districts, states, and the children themselves.

Then there is the matter of using test results to distinguish between the achievement of individual students. This is very complicated business in a society that conservatives sees as guided by meritocratic values--that there is a natural hierarchy based on talent, hard work, and success--while at that same time to others, progressives, there is the belief in human equality and thus call for polices to assure not just equality of opportunity but equality of results.

This in a society that often overpraises children, awarding trophies to all, including to those who come in last. Awards for showing up and trying. Or maybe just for showing up.

Often the anti-testing people are the very ones seeking advantages for their own children at all levels of schooling, especially those that can afford to supplement what is available even in private schools to assure their own children's ultimate advantages.

Some years ago when the arguments about testing first roiled discourse about schooling and its outcomes, I had a colleague at the very progressive Ford Foundation, actually the vice president to whom I reported, who was a fierce critic of traditional forms of testing and a strong advocate of what was thought to be "authentic assessment." Approaches that called for more nuanced and three-dimensional methods to measure student achievement. Including non-traditional forms of assessment where student outcomes would be evaluated by things such as portfolios of their work. It was felt that this was a fairer approach than the usual testing and would thus contribute to narrowing the achievement gap.

She at the time had high-school-age twins who attended a selective private secondary school. At that school, as you might imagine, they emphasized authentic assessment. One Saturday mornings we ran into my colleague on lower Broadway. We stopped to chat. It turned out that she was there, far from where she lived, to take her daughters to an SAT-prep workshop.

I not-so-innocently asked her how come, if she rejected the validity and fairness of tests such as the SAT, she was paying for her daughters to prep for it.

"Because I want them to do as well as possible," she said, "So they can get into good colleges."

I asked, "Then in your Ford Foundation role how come you resist funding programs that would help low-income students have the same test prepping opportunities?"

She stammered something I couldn't quite hear and ran off to an appointment.

I am still waiting for her answer.