Yesterday we went to the KU Cancer Center for the complete series of tests.  The day went smoothly: first was the bloodwork, during which they left in a port since I'd need an IV for the contrast part of the CT scans.  Next came the full-body x-rays.  The tech took about 20 x-rays, which is more than usual, but it will be good to have a complete picture.  Then I drank two full glasses of the barium-laced drink, which has gone from a "smoothie" to a fizzy fruit flavor to what tastes like plain water.  CT scans aren't as difficult as MRIs, though the drink and then the contrast cause chills.  After several scans, they told me I was done, but as I started to get up, they decided to take some more.  Finally, I went to the third floor, where there are many small cubicles, all with TVs and DVD players since some patients are staying for hours to have their chemo drips.  I was just there for a shot, so my stay was only about 15 minutes.  Shots don't bother me (a good thing since Mohamed gives me an anti-coagulant shot every morning), but these do hurt a bit as the nurse slowly injects the fluid.  Then it was 2 o'clock, and I hadn't eaten yet, so we had sandwiches at the cafeteria and headed home.  I was rather amazed because usually I crash at about 1 every afternoon, and I felt energetic--until we hit the outskirts of KC when I passed out until we got home.  And then I could barely climb the stairs to get into bed for a continuation of my sleep.  I'm not sure why this is so tiring, since none of the tests is particularly difficult or stressful, but there were three hours when I simply couldn't stay awake.  One of the reasons I rarely drive is that one minute I'll be feeling lively, and then without warning my mind and body shut down. 

Usually I'd do my next post on Friday, but since Friday we go back to KC for the results of the tests and the consultation with the oncologist, I'll wait till Saturday to write the next entry.

To continue the previous topic, here's one last example of teaching in a non-American university.  During 2003-04, I had my last Fulbright to teach at the university in Meknes, Morocco.  Once more, I had a happy and fascinating year: the students were sweet and tried to learn, my colleagues were friendly, and everyone was incredibly generous.  But there were no resources of any kind, and the system gave dysfunction new meaning.  For perhaps 20 years after the French left Morocco, there were only two universities--one in Rabat and one in Fes.  But the country needed more educated citizens, the demographics showed a high percentage of young people, and there was severe unemployment, especially among the young.  So the country created twelve new public universities, including the one in Meknes.  At the same time, the king began a policy of the 'Moroccanization' of education, meaning that the many new positions were filled by Moroccans rather than the remaining French.  Unfortunately, there was a very small pool to staff the positions, especially in a field like English.  So many of the professors were unqualified but held the positions and taught very bad English to a new generation who, in turn, taught bad English to the next generation.  In my department in Meknes, there were perhaps three professors who spoke passable to good English--and all of them had stopped teaching to go into more lucrative administrative posts.  Department meetings, which seemed interminable, were conducted in French and Arabic.  Several of my colleagues never spoke to me in English.  My favorite was Nfissi, who lived in Fes and so rarely came to campus.  When he did, we often had lunch together (he had perfected the technique of ducking under the table to tie his shoe when the bill arrived).  Nfissi was a Falstaffian sort whose English seemed to consist entirely of titles of Shakespearean plays. When he told stories, they were in French.  When others told stories, he would listen, laugh jovially, and then contribute, "All's well that ends well" or "Much ado about nothing."  Those two were his favorites, but if the story was gossipy, he might use "Romeo and Juliet" or, for sadder stories, "A winter's tale."  I never knew whether he actually spoke English or not.

Meknes was known as a hotbed of political dissent, so when the new university was built, it was divided into three campuses, each on the edge of the city and each distant from the others.  That meant that they were relatively far from where the students lived, so getting to them involved some effort.  That problem was complicated by the fact the the city bus drivers were on strike for the entire year I was there, so the only public transportation was to walk in the heat or to take a petit taxi, which cost about $1 one way from the center of the city--not a lot for me, but almost prohibitive for the students.  For the first month I was there, there were no classes because there was no schedule.  Every two or three days, the chair and I, along with a couple of other professors, would spend hours over coffee in one of the many coffee shops to complain about how difficult it was to do a schedule--and not do one.  Since all the students took exactly the same classes at times the professors determined, I was never sure what the difficulty was.  Meanwhile, day after day, the students would gather outside the university walls, waiting for a schedule to be posted.  The three campuses in Meknes were all surrounded by high walls with only one gate for students to enter in order to prevent potential rabblerousers from coming on campus.  Everyone had to show a student or faculty ID, and there were security forces, both uniformed and in plain clothes (though because of their age and their clustering around the gate, it wasn't hard to identify them) to keep out non-students. 

When in October the schedule was at last finalized, it was Ramadan.  We were supposed to operate on a condensed schedule, but neither students nor professors showed up, so there were no classes till mid-November.  The first days were not promising.  The university was beginning its first master's program in English, so a few of us conducted interviews with potential students, and the decisions were absolutely arbitrary.  The student who had the highest grades as an undergraduate was blind, so he was rejected because he could never, according to the consensus, do the work--despite his record.  Another student was rejected because he was growing a beard and was thus considered a potential Islamist and threat.  One professor asked every student to explain X's theory of something or other, and when the student couldn't shook his head to ask me whether I could believe the nerve of the student.  Since I had never heard of X or his theory (and can't remember now who and what they were), I could indeed believe the students' deficiency.  Those students who had had that professor did know, however, so they were admitted.  Late in the year, as another example of how arbitrary the system was, I was teaching a graduate course in public speaking (another instance of teaching something I knew little about).  One of the students complained to the chair that I was asking them to do public speaking rather than teaching theory, and the chair told me he was going to expel the student from the program for criticizing me.  I said that in the U.S., students evaluated professors all the time, and we were frequently criticized, so he shouldn't oust the student.  But the chair didn't listen and the student was kicked out not just of the course, but of the entire program.

In mid-November, when classes finally seemed to be about to begin, we had our first full department meeting.  Professor Amar was already present when another professor, who hadn't spoken to Amar for years, greeted him as Professor Hamar.  The word 'hamar' means donkey in Arabic (and hamir were everywhere) and is an insult like calling someone a jackass.  Amar punched the other professor, who hit him back, and then we all went in and had the meeting as if nothing had happened.  Surely now classes would start.  But the students in Meknes are known for being politically active and for the rest of the year they were almost continuously on strike.  I would start teaching a class, and after five or ten minutes, the door would burst open, and a group of strikers would come in, start yelling in Arabic, and the students would leave.  The issue that year was that the administration was introducing mid-term exams, which the students were refusing to take.  The week of the tests, none had been given anywhere on campus by the time my Thursday class met.  Writing a mid-term wasn't easy, since I had barely taught, but I arrived at the class with 40 or 50 copies of an exam in my hand.  I was greeted by the students standing outside the classroom and asking whether I was going to try to give them a test.  I said that that had been my plan, but I knew that they wouldn't take it, so I suggested that we meet as a class, go over the exam, and at least they would know what material I thought was important and how I tested.  They agreed that was a good idea, so we started the exercise.  To no one's surprise, after about ten minutes, the strike leaders arrived and started yelling.  The students explained, the leaders were not pleased, and a huge dispute broke out.  Some of the students formed a cordon around me saying that they knew I'd like to try to reason with the strike leaders, but that it was better if I stayed out of it.  Finally, about half the students left, though half stayed.

The administration threatened to give everyone a zero on the midterms, but the students won and no tests were given.  Prof. Hamar, er, Amar, who was not liked by the students (or by me) got punched again, and his tires were slashed.  One evening during this period, I was sitting alone in the building that housed the English office (students were never allowed to enter the English office--or the one hall on campus where professors gathered to drink coffee), the lone light shining in the darkness.  This night the strikers had thrown rocks at the security forces, who then shot at the students, hitting one.  The next day, I could still see the blood on the sidewalk. 

After the winter break, there was actually some semblance of normality.  Strikes continued, but not so frequently, so I taught a few classes.  I liked the students very much.  They truly wanted to learn (when they weren't striking), but there were no books (everything I taught I had to photocopy at my own expense, but the real problem was finding material to copy), many of the professors rarely showed up, and when they did, they were only interested in teaching theory.  Students who could neither understand nor produce an English sentence were forced to do the current version of Chomsky's diagramming, which at that point (tree diagrams having been renounced) consisted in covering pages and pages with a diagram that began at the upper left hand corner and moved diagonally down the pages.  When the year was about to conclude, we started giving the only exams of the year.  These were given on an arbitary schedule, often proctored by a professor who had not taught the class.  The students cheated constantly, and I rapped my knuckles, yellling "Skoto" (quiet) more often than Judge Judy raps her pen.  I reduced one student to tears (is there a pattern here?) by moving him away from his friend.  They thought I was kicking him out, which would mean he failed the year.  After all the tests had been given and some had been graded, the professors went on strike.  When I heard from the chair of the department the next September, the exams had finally been graded, but classes hadn't begun because it was so difficult to arrange the schedule.

Once more, I had had a wonderful, exciting, and endlessly interesting year.  And despite the horror stories, I enjoyed the students, who were doing the best they could in a system that made me want to come home to convince my students here of how lucky they had it.  All's well that ends well.

Monday I go to KU Med for the whole battery of tests: blood work, full-body x-rays, barium-laced drink, CT scans, and finally my $12,000 shot to strengthen the bones.  Usually we have the consultation with the oncologist the same day, but because of scheduling problems, we go back Friday to discuss the results.  I feel as if I've remained on the same plateau as during the last several months--the same ups and downs--but who knows what's going on on the inside?  Since there won't be anything to report till next Friday, I'll do a couple of blogs about teaching abroad and some of the problems with the university systems there, problems that make our system look healthy indeed.

I do want to say, however, that the four years I taught abroad, three in poor countries (Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Morocco), were among the happiest years of my life.  The people were unfailingly welcoming and generous, the students were usually eager and enthusiastic, and I loved the immersion in the different cultures and languages.  Always a sucker for compliments, I still remember the clerk at the post office in Skopje, Macedonia, who asked me, when I was sending packages home and trying to communicate in Macedonian, "When did your parents leave Macedonia?"  Little did she know I'd hang on to that remark 32 years later. 

My year in Metz, France, was the only year that wasn't a Fulbright.  This was 1987-88, i.e. pre-Internet.  I decided I wanted to teach in France, so wrote to the French embassy for a list of universities that taught American literature and studies.  I wrote to all the names that they sent and got two offers: one in Caen, the other in Metz.  I knew nothing about either city, but I looked at maps (the old-fashioned way: by going to the library), and the university in Metz was located on an island at a confluence of two rivers, a site which seemed picturesque to me, so off to Metz I went.  One of the things I've learned is that, especially for the Fulbrights, you are expected to write a long description of the courses you would offer and why they would be important, and then once you get there, you teach whatever they need.  In Metz, I taught a one-semester course for first-year students in which we spent the entire semester reading Jack London's Call of the Wild.  Since outside America, universities do not teach general education courses, when you go to the university to study English, that's all that you study.  The curriculum--courses, teachers, times--is prescribed for all students.  That meant that whatever their previous degree of preparation, all first-year students are in the same classes: those with years of English classes mixed with those who had few or none.  Moreover, the French have two different kinds of tests: examens, which are like most American tests with a fixed point for passing (as 60% or 75% may be on a test here), and concours, which are like, say, the bar examinations: each state determines a certain percentage who will pass.  The passing score may vary wildly from state to state.  At our university in Metzs, 50% of the first-year students passed, so those students who had little experience had almost no chance of making it into the top 50%.  It was discouraging to try to help those students who simply weren't going to make the cut.

I also taught a course called Langue orale.  This class met in the language lab where absolutely nothing worked.  We studied such important matters as how to tell the difference between American, Irish, Scottish, and English accents--something I never mastered myself.  For the American accent, we used an old Mike Nichols-Elaine May routine in which they talked in exaggerated New York Jewish accents.  The sketch was funny, but hardly seemed typical.  We also used a book that delineated eight degrees of stress in English speech, and we'd go through sentences putting little numbers above each syllable.  My numbers never coincided with those in the answer key.  Ironically, Langue orale was the only course that had a written exam as opposed to all the others that had oral finals.  And despite my halting efforts, most of the students actually passed, a fact that irritated the regular teacher of the course who was proud of the number of students who failed each semester.  (Another professor was equally proud of the low grades he gave.  The French system is 0-20 with 11 needed to pass.  No one ever gets above 17--there's no grade inflation in France--and 16s and 17s are rare.  Prof. Springer was famous for giving out numerous 0.5s as grades.)

But most of my time was spent preparing students for the locally administered Master's, which was tested orally, and the national exams, the CAPES and Agregation, which were written tests given in Paris, one on anglophone literature, the other on anglophone culture.  For the tests on literature, every student in France in 1987-88 prepared the same four books, and if everyone who has ever read this blog got together to guess the four books that represented the entire history of American and British literature, I doubt if even one title would be right.  Here they are: Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, selected poems (maybe 30 or 40) from The Selected Poems of Louis MacNeice, Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, and Grace Paley's slim volume of short stories, The Little Disturbances of Man.  This seemed a mighty peculiar list to me, but that's what someone in Paris had chosen.  Since there are no tests or papers other than the final, most students put off studying throughout the first semester (their rationale is that they don't want to forget what they learned), and then there were vacations, and then it was still too early, and then, about April, panic set in.  Moreover, they were going to be tested on only one of the four books, and the one they feared most was MacNeice, but since they had only a 25% chance of being tested on him and since my class met the first semester on Saturday mornings, almost no one attended.  (I did some make-up sessions during the second semster, and they had better attendance.)  I had prepared the students on all the writers except Maugham; that was done by a prof. from Paris who came once a month to deliver her lectures.  The day of the exams, she didn't show up (no one seemed surprised or upset by this), so we took Maugham off the table, or rather, out of the hat.  The exam worked like this: the students would arrive and draw the name of one of the four authors (though it was only three authors, a fact we didn't tell the students) out of a (figurative) hat.  And then they would draw a second slip with one of several passages I had selected for each writer, go away for 30 minutes to prepare an explication de texte of that passage, and then return for a 30-minute oral exam with me as the only judge.  Luck was not on the students' side that day, and five of the six drew MacNeice.  One student cried for the entire thirty minutes of her exam.  I would say, "You don't have to do an explication.  Just start by telling me what you think of MacNeice."  She cried.  "Just describe some of his main ideas or techniques, and then we can look at some specifics."  She cried.  Sad as it was, I failed her.  In fact, I failed five of the six candidates.  I felt awful, but they had shown no understanding of the material.  A couple of weeks later, one of the students called me and said the six would like to have a small party for me and give me a gift.  "Do I dare open the package?" I asked.  But they harbored no grudges, and we had a small get-together with a souvenir of Metz for me.

The subject of the exams in anglophone culture that year for every student in France was American Foreign Policy and Expansionism: 1885-1908.  In 45 years of teaching, I've never felt like such a fraud as I did teaching that course.  Luckily, for once, I knew in advance what I was going to teach, so I lugged a number of books with me and prepared madly.  But if a student asked me about something in 1903 when I hadn't read that far ahead, I was in danger of being exposed.  Every Wednesday night, 30 students from Nancy would take the train to Metz and join 30 students from my university.  They would seat themselves and take out some blank paper (the European paper for students has not only many horizontal lines, but also regularly spaced vertical lines, the purpose of which I never understood) and a pencil box like the one I carried in third grade.  They would remove and line up blue, black, and red pens and pencils, an eraser, a small bottle of White-Out, and a ruler.  Then all 60 of them would write the name of the course and the date and underline it, using the ruler.  And then they'd be ready to write down everything I said.  I asked the department chairman once why I was teaching this course, and he said that he was sure I had something unique to bring to it.  So one night, I decided to talk about how American literature during this period reflected expansionism and internationalism.  No one wrote down anything: this was clearly material that wasn't going to be on the test.  There were no texts for the students; the recommended text had long been out of print.  I had trouble (in the pre-Internet days) finding a copy in the U.S., so none of the students had it.  What they did have were my notes and a collection of essays by French professors.  A group of perhaps eight French professors wrote articles on the subject (and hence could claim publication), collected them, and sold them to students all over the country.  One of my colleagues who was grading the essays of the CAPES and Agregation complained that they all sounded alike.  But since every student had read the same eight essays, how could they expect a different result?  None of the students took the master's exam in Metz, and I never learned how my students did on the national exams.  It was probably better that I didn't.

The students were extremely nice, and I enjoyed them very much.  But the system itself was so narrow and inflexible that teaching was frustrating, not only for me, but also for the French professors who complained incessantly about their oppressive workload and the poor quality of the students.  Since none of the professors published, since they never met with students or had papers to grade, and since they taught the same classes and gave the same lectures over and over, I wasn't terribly sympathetic.  No professor kept office hours (when I announced mine, the students didn't know what I meant).  There were no papers or exams until the finals, and much then depended on chance and on individual teachers' whims.  There were no appeals and few second chances.  Even for a devoted francophile like me, I found the French university system stifling and unforgiving.

American universities are largely free from many of the problems that plague K-12 education.  Having spent a year each in four universities abroad--Macedonia, France, Bulgaria, and Morocco--I always come home thankful for the experience, but reminded of how strong our university system is and wanting to tell students how very lucky they are to be a part of our system, especially with its flexibility and resources.  In the foreign universities where I taught, the students had no choices about what classes they'd take, when they'd take them, or what professors would teach them.  The libraries, if they existed at all, were pathetically inadequate.  Grading was often harsh and arbitrary.  And there were rarely any second chances.  The students were eager and usually hard-working despite the sad conditions.  But the systems themselves led to constant frustration for both students and professors.  (I see a blog entry about one of these years abroad in the future.)

Probably the direst problem faced by American universities at the moment is the cost.  As a chair advising students, I'd be horrified by the huge amount of debt that students had accumulated--and Washburn is a comparatively inexpensive school.  But I want to focus today on a couple of examples of how the business model is gaining purchase in American universities: as I said last time, students are viewed as customers who shop around for schools as if they were looking for the most comfortable new Nikes.  In a business model, the bottom line is just that: the bottom line, i.e. profit.  Marketing becomes more important than curriculum.  A student welcome center is a higher priority than an expanded library.  Reliance on adjuncts and non-tenured lecturers becomes more economical than a stable, experienced, and tenured faculty  And because many people love to teach, we were always able to find enthusiastic and dedicated teachers who would move to Topeka to teach four classes a semester for $30,000 a year.  All that is not what education ought to be about. 

Example #1:  One semester when I was chair of the English department, there was suddenly enormous pressure to remove our cap of 22 students in each section of freshman composition.  The administration demanded a justification, since the more bodies in each class, the greater the profit.  So I took time out from teaching and administering to make the case, including, of course, what I thought was the self-evident notion that small classes, especially in a labor-intensive course like composition, made for better teaching.  That propostion wasn't self evident to those in charge, so I was asked to supply a bibliography of sources that supported the idea.  That required more time to compile.  Grousing silently, I made a list with annotations.  And the response from the president's assistant was, "I hope you don't think the president has time to actually read these sources."  Was there one argument I made that got attention?  Yes.  I suggested that instead of removing the cap, we lower it to 19.  The U.S. News ranking of colleges, which, whatever its validity, can be (and is) used as a key marketing tool, gives universities extra weight for the number of small classes--and  <20 is the cutoff point.   In the long run, however, I was just stubborn, knowing that after awhile, the administration would have other things to worry about, and the focus would move elsewhere if I didn't give in. 

Example #2.  The most unpleasant experience I had in my nearly 40 years at Washburn was the two years I spent on an ad hoc committee on general education.  The second most unpleasant had been a similar committee to revise general education requirements twenty years earlier.  At that time, our committee began work by literally throwing the two years' work of the previous interation of the committee into the wastebasket.  I had thought the previous gen ed requirements worked very well; they provided both rigor and flexibility, but the administration had decided it was time for new ones.  It was, until 20 years later, the most acrimonious committee I'd ever been on.  Much of our time was spent in a power struggle between the faculty member who was the putative chair and the vice-president for academic affairs who wanted to--and eventually did--control the outcome.  My continuing argument with the VPAA--and one I lost--was whether general education courses had to be limited to those taken in the first two years of college.  In what we produced, a student couldn't get general education credit for Shakespeare or American literature or any majors course, but could get credit for science fiction.  As in so many academic discussions these days, the what, the content was less important than a set of consistent, if arbitrary rules.

The ad hoc committee I was a part of twenty years later was formed because the Academic Affairs committee had been trying for two years with no success to revise the general education program.  The main motivations for the revisions were marketing (with so many students transferring, how could we make our gen ed program less onerous and therefore more attractive) and "accountability," which equals making sure that we pleased our accreditation agency by making everything "assessable."  The VPAA who formed the committee was new and had little sense of the history of the debate and less of the vested interests that were involved.  Her degree was in nursing.  Now, after the last 14 months, I have enormous respect for nurses, who are a valuable part of my treatment.  But her speciality did mean that she had never taught a general education course or even worked in a department that taught gen ed.  She was a nice person (I use the past tense because she was soon fired) who simply didn't understand the issue.  She trusted me and would sometimes come to my office to discuss what was happening, or more accurately not happening.  But no matter how much I explained, her most frequent response was, "I can't seem to wrap my head around that."  To head the ad hoc committee, she appointed a professor who held an endowed chair in the business department.  In addition to his being the single most disagreeable colleague I ever worked with, he, too, had no experience with general education.  One of the first things the committee did was rule all discussions of curriculum off the table.  We were also told that just like in a corporation, we had to be team players and present a united front.  When I wrote a dissenting opinion to my fellow committee membes, he hit 'reply all' to say that he would no longer read my e-mails and recommended that my other colleagues just delete them as well.

After two years of frustration, the committee declared itself a success and sent the issue back to Academic Affairs, where it had originated.  It is now six years later, the VPAA has been sent packing, and here's what the committees have accomplished:  the word 'skills' (since curriculum wasn't being considered) was replaced by 'learning objectives.'  The number of skills, er...learning objectives, was reduced from nine to seven.  They are all formless and vague; most of us could come up with a pretty good approximation in a few minutes--critical thinking, ability to analyze and synthesize, appreciation of diversity, etc.  It's not that they're objectionable (unless you're a Texas Republican who doesn't approve of critical thinking); it's that they have no shape or content.  And finally, instead of having to satisfy three of nine, new courses must satisfy only one of the seven "Single Learning Objectives."  Hanging over all six years of argument was a fear of our accrediting agency, once called the North Central something-or-other, now renamed the Orwellian sounding Higher Learning Commission.  The first question that greeted any proposal during the six (and counting) years of debate was would the HLC view it as assessable.  Innovation was always suspect.  And how were courses like freshman comp. to be assessed?  The buzzword was rubric.  For composition or literary analysis, just reduce the qualities to a checklist, each given a numerical value.  Once everything has been reduced to a number, every student, every teacher, every class can now be assessed with a certain assurance. 

I'd like to think that my two examples aren't representative of current thinking or that if they are, the pendulum will swing again, and universities won't succomb to the business model of profit and "accountability."  But as economic pressures increase, especially at public universities, I'm not optimistic that a turnaround is about to occur.

I have a friend who teaches in the Texas public school system.  Every time he sends an e-mail during the school year, it seems that he is preparing the students for the state tests, the students are taking the tests, or he is writing reports evaluating the results of the tests.  I always respond with "When do you actually teach?"  At the end of the last school year, he wrote that there were only two weeks left, but that there was nothing to do because they had just finished the state testing and most of his students wouldn't show up for the last two weeks.  I was baffled.  Aren't there courses to teach?  Material to cover?  But his prediction was accurate: for the last two weeks, he said, only four or five students bothered to come, so they just watched movies and then went home.  Well, he couldn't go home, but the few students did. 

Diane Ravitch's recent book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, is a depressing critique of how wrong-headed the current received wisdom about the state of and the proposed remedies for the American educational system are.  The title of the book is misleading, since it implies that life is returning, when in fact the momentum toward more testing and more choice is unabated.  Moreover, it has bipartisan support (President Obama's "Race to the Top" differs only negligibly from Bush's "No Child Left Behind," and Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, based his career on this business-modeled paradigm) and it has huge infusions of money from philanthropic organizations, particularly the Gates Foundation, the Eli Broad Foundation, and the Walton Foundation.  Some of the support may be well-intentioned (but then 'well-intentioned' is never an unalloyed compliment), but it is coercive and based on the faulty analogy that education should be run like a business and that educators, i.e. professionals with actual experience teaching, are usually an impediment to successful schools.  One egregious, but extremely popular, representation of the current ideas is the film Waiting for "Superman," which seemed to have only two ideas: teachers unions are bad and school choice is good.  The Gates Foundation gave $1M to publicize the movie. 

The first obsession that Ravitch debunks is that of constant testing as a measure of schools' and individual teachers' effectiveness.  First, as both NCLB and Race to the Top require, testing focuses only on reading and math.  Thus, as schools spend excessive amounts of time preparing for the tests, other subjects are necessarily slighted, since nothing depends on them.  Second, the tests, which are always multiple choice on bubble sheets, are notoriously unreliable and show little validity.  Third, the tests frighten schools into "gaming" them--sometimes through outright cheating (as several scandals have revealed), more often through lowering the "cut rate," therefore making it seem as if schools' scores are improving.  Fourth, inordinate amounts of time are spent on test-taking strategies instead of actual learning.  And fifth, and perhaps most alarmingly, the schools and teachers are punished--often by schools being closed and teachers being fired--for failure to make year-to-year improvement as measured by misleading testing and interpretation.  In the place of educators who are fired, non-professionals (again, often well-intentioned) are brought in to take charge.  Few of them stay.  Meanwhile, an atmosphere of fear and mistrust becomes prevalent among teachers who are experienced.  The so-called "reformers" invariably rant against teachers unions and tenure, but since 50% of all beginning teachers leave the profession within the first five years, the much greater problem is retaining good teachers.  The states that have the most dismal records in education (even by the reformers' own bubble testing methods) are all non-union states.  The states that have the highest rankings all have strong unions.  In Finland, the country that both sides of the debate cite as having the most effective educational system, the teachers are 100% unionized.  No one can reasonably be against "accountability," but it's clear that the carrot-and-stick (with much more emphasis on the sticks), business-modeled testing system that is drawing so much political and financial support is restrictive, unreliable, and misguided.

The second part of Ravitch's attack is on the supposed panacea of school choice, in its first incarnation the voucher system, now more often in the form of charter schools.  Despite all the ballyhoo, there are few data that actually support the effectiveness of charter schools.  There are good ones, dreadful ones, and a lot of mediocre ones.  And this is in spite of the fact that they often get increased funding from foundations and from the government, money that could have been used to improve public schools.  In addition, charter schools are likely to attract students from families that are the most motivated and that understand the system the best.  Most of them have a dismal record in admitting students who are disabled or for whom English is a second language, since such students are less likely to apply and would probably drag test scores down. Meanwhile, these students are pushed back into the public schools, which then need additional resources and commitment to teach them.  When the idea of charter schools was first incubated, they were intended to be laboratories for innovative teaching methods that could then be adopted by public schools; instead, they tend to be insular and focus on exactly those two areas that are subject to state testing.  Since there are many fewer requirements for the establishment and running of charter schools (these vary widely from state to state), there are significantly fewer controls.  Many are run, again on the business model, by for-profit businesses and staffed by non-educators.  Despite at least a decade of a very mixed record for charter schools, for most politicians of both parties and most grant-dispersing foundations, they remain the solution of choice.

Ravitch is in a particularly advantageous position to make her arguments because she was once an advocate of both testing and choice, indeed was an assistant secretary in the Department of Education under Bush 43.  And then she experienced her Aha moment when, as a historian and professor of education, she studied the actual data and came to realize what a failure the current prescriptions are.  In passing, she makes two other important points.  One is that if you look at the best American schools, they're actually very good indeed and outperform the schools of other countries by almost all measures.  But these best schools tend to be in affluent and racially homogeneous communities.  The current obsessions deny that poverty or family structure or other "extrinsic" factors are important: the boogeyman is bad teachers.  A second point is that, despite the enormous successes of American education, it is impossible to look back over the last century and find a moment when it wasn't "in crisis" and when there wasn't a silver bullet on the horizon to fix the problems.  When I was growing up in the 50s, the crisis was described in best-selling books like Rudolf Flesch's Why Johnny Can't Read and, of course, the Sputnik flight provoked a panic about our falling behind in science.  But, as Ravitch insists, there are no magic bullets.  Improvements in education come about slowly, include a strong emphasis on content, i.e. what is actually taught, and understand how inextricably education is linked with such issues as poverty. 

My 45 years as a teacher were spent in higher education, as it's called, but one of the reasons that Ravitch's book is so troubling is that I've seen the business model increasingly infiltrate university teaching.  Students, we are told, are "customers," shopping for colleges.  It's more important to build a new Welcome Center so that prospective customers won't be confused about where to start their shopping than to increase the size and resources of the library.  Innovation is stifled in the name of  "assessment" and "rubrics," two words that made retirement seem increasingly attractive.  This, too, shall pass, I hope.  During 45 years in academia, I've seen a lot of fads that suddenly piddled out.  For a decade or so, everyone talked about holistic grading.  I haven't heard the word 'holistic' in many years.  We'll see whether Ravitch is right in stressing the death and life of American education.  We can only hope that she has the sequence correct.

The long weekend of visitors and dinners ended Tuesday when our friends Mark and Noel came from Kansas City for lunch, once again at our one French restaurant.  They came frequently to see me in the hospital after my surgery 14 months ago, but we hadn't seen them since, so we had a good and laugh-filled time catching up.  Now it's back to le train-train quotidien, suffering through day after day of 100+ heat with at least seven more forecast for the next week.  Although I'll take summer over winter any time, reading on the back deck isn't an attractive option.  My health has continued at what I hope is a plateau.  The G-I problems seems to have lessened a bit, though why I have no idea.  But at least I made it through all four restaurant meals with our friends without any emergencies.  The fatigue seems stronger and more frequent, a fact that is a little worrisome.  It's difficult to explain what it feels like, usually twice a day, when I "hit the wall," as one expression goes.  The onset is sudden and complete.  My mind shuts down as thoroughly as my body; if I'm reading, I see individual words on the page, but none is connected to the next.  It's one reason I rarely drive: I don't want the crash, either figuratively or literally.  For my whole life, when I've awakened, I've moved from sleep to wakefulness with no transition.  I've never used the snooze button in my life.  Now, waking is an ordeal.  Step by slow step my mind and body move toward consciousness and finally action.  It's an unfamiliar feeling.  I've been very lucky that the chemo hasn't caused any nausea, but it has taken some of the pleasure away from eating (and food has always been not only a source of pleasure but also associated with happy, shared moments).  Sometimes I have no appetite; other times the food looks and tastes good for a few bites, and then suddenly I no longer have any desire to chew or swallow.  For the past few weeks, sushi and small steaks seem the most appealing--not bad options.  And in the last few days, nothing has tasted better than watermelon.  I go back for all the tests on July 30, but because of scheduling, I won't have the consultation about the results till August 3.  This is the longest I've gone between testing.  What happens on days like this costs $22,000.  Because of Medicare and supplemental insurance, I will pay none of that.  But what choices would someone have to make who had no insurance?  Or who was too young for Medicare? 

In recent days, I've been reading a lot.  Richard Ford is a novelist whom I've always liked (especially his Frank Bascombe trilogy).  And his latest novel, "Canada," was no disappointment.  My friend Carol, who coincidentally read it at the same time, dissents from my view, feeling that Ford is bad at rendering how people actually speak.  But I'm not sure that any novelists write dialogue as people speak with all our non-fluencies, hesitations, digressions.  And I'm not sure that anyone would want to read a fictional "transcript" as opposed to a transformation.  Ford's main character is fifteen years old, but the entire novel is a flashback as the narrator, now in his sixties, retells the events.  So the author has what's always a difficult problem: balancing two very different perspectives and trying to make both voices convincing.  And even though I became totally engrossed in the story as it unfolds, Ford reminds us, in almost casual ways, that this is a flashback.  We're told from the beginning that the narrator's parents rob a bank and are sent to jail.  We know that there will be a murder.  In what seems like an aside, we learn that the mother commits suicide in jail.  We are constantly teased by what the narrator knows but isn't yet ready to tell us.  (In the hands of a less talented writer, I think the teasing might seem too coy.)  One important character in the novel is the desolate and unforgiving landscape of Montana and later Canada.  Even though the mainstream of American fiction has never been "realistic" in the sense of, say, British novels of manners, the great American novelists have always been grounded in the reality of place: Hawthorne's New England, Melville's seas, Twain's river, James's international borders, Faulkner's Mississippi, Roth's New Jersey.

After Ford, I read Jeffrey Toobin's "The Nine," a look at the Supreme Court from roughly 1980 to 2010.  Although the book is a thorough reminder of the important cases during those years, it's most interesting for its portrait of the individual Justice's personalities.  John Paul Stevens is clearly the Justice whom Toobin admires the most.  The fullest and most nuanced portrait is of Sandra Day O'Connor and the relish she takes in her role as the swing vote between the four liberals and the four conservatives during the last twenty years of the period.  The least attractive for Toobin are Warren Burger and Anthony Kennedy, both of whom come across as pompous, Kennedy especially for his flights of purple rhetoric, which Scalia came increasingly to detest and to snipe at (along with O'Connor's searches for a middle ground) none too subtly in his opinions.  Although Scalia has often been the most visible because of his intemperate writing (and speeches), Toobin describes him as generally isolated, having little real influence over his colleagues.  He once described Thomas's "originalism" as "nuts."

And now, sticking with non-fiction, I'm reading Diane Ravitch's "The Death and Life of the Great American School System."  Ravitch seems to me one of the few sensible voices in the current debates over education, and perhaps her position gains more purchase since until three or four years ago, she was a prominent advocate of conservative solutions based on a business model.  I'm sure I'll have more to say about the book once I've finished it.  Of all the issues that demand our attention, it's health care and education--for obvious reasons--that most engage me now.  And it's on education that President Obama has been the most disappointing.

   

And so I've begun a new year--two days into year 68.  The weekend was fun with all the visitors from KC and the meals out (one more couple is coming from KC for lunch tomorrow), the cards (both paper and e-cards), texts, e-mails, and phonecalls, including several from France (I'll admit that I've got an easy birthday date to remember), and I'd be disingenuous if I didn't include the presents, including a beautiful pink gold watch from Mohamed. 

I've always wondered whether teachers were more conscious of time passing than people in most other professions.  Most of our classes are 50 minutes long, and that rhythm became, for me at least, absolutely instinctive.  When I'd give a talk outside the classroom, I never timed it or worried about how much material to prepare.  Speaking for 50 minutes was just natural.  In the spring of 2011, I gave a lecture in the Last Lecture series at Washburn.  When I accepted, I thought I was in good health, but by the time I gave it, the cancer had been diagnosed.  Still, I stuck with my original plan to talk about luck and serendipity in my career and avoid "words of wisdom" (i.e., platitudes).  I knew I had material for a 45-minute talk and was happily moving through the speech when, at about the 30-minute mark, I noticed the organizers whispering about wrapping it up.  Now that threw me.  I wasn't going to abandon my conclusion, but my second major point was truncated (and disorganized).  For teachers, our lives are also marked out by the rhythm of semesters: four months of teaching, a month off, four months of teaching, three months off.  Dusting off an old syllabus and adjusting the dates, ordering books, writing exams, and grading, grading, grading--these are all parts of a regular cycle.  Sometimes I'd tell a joke in say, Advanced Comp., one of those regular bits of humor that I'd try to pretend were spontaneous rather than tried-and-true, and I couldn't remember whether I'd already told it--and if so to another section of the class or last semester or sometime in the distant past.  And we watch time pass as the gap between our age and that of our students keeps growing.  When I started teaching at OU, I was 21--three years older than the traditional students.  By the time I retired, the gap was nearly five decades.  References and allusions that I had shared with students for many years fell completely flat.  E. A. Robinson's poem "Richard Cory" was made into a song by what group, I'd ask.  It wasn't just that no one knew, but that no one even knew who Simon and Garfunkel were.  It's hard not to be aware of time's passing when you teach.

Now, in a more diminished life, there are still but constant small markers of time.  Every night, it's preparing the coffee so that I'll come downstairs to the smell of morning joe and the viewing of "Morning Joe."  Every morning, it's trying to remember which side of my stomach gets the anti-coagulant shot.  If it's Tuesday one week, it must be the right side; if it's Tuesday the next week, it must be on the left.  Every three days it's writing the blog.  Today, like every Monday, it's taking the trash out.  Was it really a week ago that we did it last?  It seems like just a couple of days ago.  Every month or so, it's inventoring the many bottles of pills to see which ones need re-ordering. Every six weeks (it used to be every month), it's a trip to KU Med for tests (at least bloodwork) and a consultation.  Every three months it's the whole battery of tests.  On the 30th, I'll go for bloodwork, CT scans, a full-body x-ray, a bone-stengthening shot, and normally a consultation.  This time the oncologist isn't available on the 30th, so we go back on Aug. 3 to talk over the results with him.  The day of tests isn't painful or even particularly unpleasant or worrisome, but it's long and tiring.  It also costs the taxpayers $22,000, $12,000 of which is just for the shot.  And every three months, the seasons change.  The giant cottonwood tree in the back yard starts to lose its leaves early, already in the heat some of the leaves have fallen, but it hangs on to its last few leaves until winter is here.  Every year I think of Shakespeare's sonnet, "That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves or none or few do hang..."  and wonder about the sequence: shouldn't 'few' logically come before 'none'?  In the late fall, the cottonwood is often full of blackbirds, and I think of Stevens's poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."  Some at least of the poetry (and stories and novels) that I taught for so many years are etched in my mind. 

Another day and week and season and year pass.  I'll put on my new watch and hope that friends notice it so I can show it off, as it mechanically and indifferently ticks off the passing seconds.

Happy (but prudent) Friday the Thirteenth, and Happy (but imprudent if you want) French Fries Day.  Tomorrow is my birthday.  I turn 43.  I've decided that the decimal system for calculating age is too harsh, what with the counter's left digit increasing relentlessly every ten years.  The hexadecimal system seems more humane, so I'm going with that.  Dog years aren't very scientific (and who would want to celebrate his 9 and 4/7th birthday?).  And if I used the binary system, the screen would be filled with 0's and 1's, so 43 it is.

My parents must have been prescient in knowing they'd have a francophilic son.  I always loved being in France on le quatorze juillet.  There are parades, flyovers, and a gigantic fireworks displays at the Eiffel Tower.  The French don't call the 14th of July Bastille Day.  A couple of years ago when I was in Paris for the summer, I was watching the French version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire."  One of the questions was "What do Americans call the 14th of July?"  The four choices were Liberty Day, Revolution Day, Independence Day, and Bastille Day.  The contestant ruled out Independence Day, because that was the American holiday, and Bastille Day, because that didn't make any sense and then unwisely chose between Liberty Day and Revolution Day losing his chance at being a millionaire.

This year my birthday will be spent in Topeka, but tonight TJ and John will come from Kansas City for dinner at our French restaurant (I have to keep up the French connection).  TJ visited me every single day that I was at KU Med after the surgery on my femur.  Tomorrow afternoon, my Bulgarian friends Ivan and Stefan will come (Ivan is now an American citizen), and then later Scott and his wife Kelly (a pediatrician at KU Med) will come in for dinner.  Le tout Kansas City vient chez nous.  What great friends I have--here, in KC, around the US, and in France.  I'm very grateful to all of them for all that they do for me, keeping my spirits up with bright, lively, and often funny conversations. 

The fourteenth of July is always a little bittersweet, since my father died on that date exactly thirty years ago tomorrow. After a three-year battle with lymphoma, he died in the same hospital in Ames, Iowa, where I had been born 37 (decimal) years earlier.  The experience at the hospital wasn't a good one; the general atmosphere was one of indifference.  It was not only discouraging, but the experience scared my mother.  She had been in Story City's small hospital, where everyone knew and cared about each other, and she thought that the bigger the city, the less caring the hospital would be.  When three years later, she had moved to Topeka and was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, she was frightened of what she assumed would be an even more impersonal attitude here.  Instead, her few days in the Topeka hospital before her death (three weeks after the diagnosis) were as comfortable as possible.  A couple of the nurses had gone to nursing school at Washburn and knew me, and they paid her extra attention.  My experience at KU Med, where I had my surgery and where I now go for treatments and consultations, has also been as pleasant and reassuring as possible.  Of course having the best, most competent doctors is the primary criterion for treatment, but it's impossible to underestimate the psychogical component of feeling that the doctors and nurses and other staff actually care.  And for that atmosphere I'm also very grateful.

I don't remember last year's birthday very well.  The biggest gifts were Mohamed's presence in my life and the fact that after 46 days in the incredibly uncomfortable abduction brace, it had finally come off.  I remember wondering whether I'd be around this year (the prognosis wasn't encouraging), but here I am, looking forward (with a little help from my friends) to turning 44 a year from now.

For twenty-five years, one of my closest friends in Topeka was Mona, a woman twenty-five years older than I was.  I can date the friendship exactly: from 1973 to 1998, when we stopped speaking.  Mona was born in Cairo to an Egyptian father and a French mother and educated in France.  Her father was the Minister of Irrigation for King Farouk, and her family was the richest I had ever known; they lived all over the world.  One of her sisters had married a Russian, who owned the largest travel agency in Colombia and lived half the year in Paris.  He was awarded the French Legion of Honor for his import-export business in France.  For the six months that Alec lived in Paris, where he had a mistress, whom everyone in the family knew about and whom I met once, his wife lived in Colombia; six months later they'd change locations, his wife moving to Paris while Alec lived in Colombia.  For Mona, this relationship was proof of French sophistication and a rebuke to what she saw as American Puritanism. Alec and his wife had separate apartments in Paris's rich 16th arrondissement.  Alec's was a penthouse with suede wallpaper; his wife's wallpaper was silk.  One summer when I had a sabbatical to study in Paris, Alec offered me free use of the separate apartment in his building that he had for his bonne de chambre.  The maid's apartment had a piano.  Here's another example of what seemed to me their wealth and sophistication: once when I went to Mona's, there was a painting lying on her kitchen table among a litter of papers.  "What does it look like to you?" asked Mona.  I said that it looked like a Daumier (the operative word for me was 'like').  "It is," said Mona.  "My brother stopped at our vault in Switzerland and brought it to me."

Her family thought it was very strange that Mona had chosen to live in Topeka, but Mona's greatest love in life were wolves and coyotes, and for the entire time that Mona and I were friends, Mona had three coyotes, five dogs, a cat, and a cage of doves.  I always pronounce 'coyote' as a two-syllable word since that how I heard it for all those years.  The coyotes had individual runs, and every morning until she was in her 90s, Mona entered the runs to clean them.  When Mona would go to France, I would housesit.  I'd take care of the menagerie, hating cleaning the doves' cage the most.  I didn't go into the coyotes' runs, though over the years, a couple of them would let me pet them through the wire.  I had to be alert because they'd often turn and try to bite my hand.  Mona would buy 50# buckets of chicken necks for her coyotes and for the wild ones that came into the ravine behind her house.  She skinned the necks that she was giving to her own coyotes and put the others in baggies to be set out at night for the wild coyotes.  She insisted that I take the chicken for the wild coyotes out after dark.  I did what I was told, but always wondered whether the coyotes might not wait for their food till I was safely back in the house. 

My friends all worried about my stays with the coyotes, but the only problem I ever had was with one of her dogs, Numa, a Rottweiler.  It was totally my fault.  As I let the five dogs out, Numa got into a fight with a smaller dog, and although I know better, I tried to separate them.  Numa turned on me, and we wrestled, eye-to-eye over my arm, which Numa succeeded rather well in shredding.  I finally got back in the house (not before Numa had added insult to injury by biting my derriere).  I didn't trust my driving abilities, so called a friend to take me to the hospital.  When we got back to the house, I realized I didn't have a key to the front door, so the only entry was to climb over the fence into the backyard where Numa was waiting.  Over the fence I went.  Numa, who was normally the sweetest of dogs, ran happily over and sniffed the bandage, welcoming me home.

No one could have been more charming or generous than Mona--when she wanted to be.  I ate at her house at least once a week for all those years, and when my parents came to town, she always entertained them.  Dinners were in the French style with aperitifs and appetizers, three courses with wine, and afterwards always the question, "Un peu de Drambuie?"   My parents almost never drank, so by the end of the meal my mother especially was giddy and giggly.  After my father died and my mother moved to Topeka, Mona was incredibly gracious and caring to her.  When Mona was good, she was very very good, but when she was mean... 

Over the years Mona quarreled with almost everyone.  Her meanness was predictable and unrelenting.  When she broke with me, whom she called her fils spirituel, I wasn't surprised, since she had also broken with her real son.  Mona had a French friend here named Mimi.  Whenever Mimi did anything that Mona disapproved of, she would say in front of Mimi, "Poor Mimi.  She's just a poor, ignorant French woman," and then she'd add, "I mean 'ignorant' in the French sense so it's not an insult."  Sorry, Mona, 'ignorant' is an insult in English and French.  Mona had dragged her second husband, Rene, who was a doctor, to Topeka.  When I first met Mona, Rene was in the last stages of cancer.  The first time I met him, they had come to dinner.  By this time, they detested each other.  As we ate, Mona suddenly said, "Isn't Rene charming?  It's such a pity that he will be dead in a few months."  In the late 80s, I was taking another sabbatical in Paris, and at the last minute I decided to take a friend, Ken, who had AIDS, with me.  Mona was unstinting in her criticism of my decision.  Her last words to me before I left were, "I hope you find someone as stupid as you are to take care of you when you're dying."

And that comment, which came back to me a few days ago, leads me to my point (and I do have one).  I was writing to a friend, listing the reasons that I shouldn't complain (though complaining was what I was doing) when I realized that I had omitted the most important reason of all: that (bracketing Mona's word 'stupid') I'm not going through this alone and that I don't take sufficient time to acknowledge how difficult, infinitely more so, all this would be if it weren't for Mohamed.  So let me say--and not in a shy way--that we're doing this our way and that plural pronoun has made and is making all the difference.

Just a few random thoughts on this Saturday morning:  The last 24 hours haven't been particularly good ones, although I slept late this morning, partly because I was up a couple of times in the night to visit the john (equals bathroom, not client), and now that I'm up, my stomach is cramping, so I doubt if this is going to be a very cohesive series of thoughts.

Since my Fourth of July post began with a cynical poem, I want to mention one change that makes me optimistic about our country.  When I grew up in the 50s, there were almost no Blacks on TV (except Amos and Andy and Rochester on the "Jack Benny Show").  There were no Blacks in magazine advertisements except in magazines like "Jet" or "Ebony."  When African-Americans first started appearing in ads, I remember hearing lots of comments about "token" appearances.  Now, when I watch TV or look at ads, what I see reflects what America really looks like.  News shows are hosted by Blacks, and panels are racially diverse.  When I watch "Dancing with the Stars" (you have to take your optimism where you can get it), the couples are often mixed and scantily clad; they are doing overtly sexual dances; and no one thinks anything of it.  That's a huge change in the American psyche in the last 60 years.  I've also noticed that people of color also now include Asians, Arabs, and other "browns."

A couple of qualifications seem in order.  One is that the LGBTQ community, in advertisements at least, seems still stuck in an earlier era.  When I get the monthly magazine from the Human Rights Commission, lots of major companies have advertisements with gay or lesbian couples, but that hasn't moved into mainstream advertising.  There are, of course, more gay characters on TV dramas and sitcoms, but in other areas, like news, gays remain relatively invisible (Ellen is the most obvious exception), even after they come out.   NBC's legal correspondent, Pete Williams, was outed years ago, but I've never heard him used as a commentator on the law and gays.  It will be (moderately) interesting to see what path Anderson Cooper takes.

In the African-American community, the ideas of W.E.B. DuBois have been pitted against those of Booker T. Washington for over 100 years.  Washington, always more popular among whites (those of us who grew up in the era of legally segregated schools remember when a high school named Washington was named after Booker, not George, and was always a Black school; none was named DuBois) argued for vocational education for all and scoffed at Black higher education.  DuBois, the Harvard educated intellectual, argued for the a more complete education, especially for what he called the Talented Tenth.  Among scholars, DuBois always won the debate. Now it seems that the talented tenth are doing well and are rather seamlessly integrated into mainstream society (though the arrest at his home of Henry Gates might call that into question).  But what of the other 90%?  They seem trapped in a cycle of poverty, de facto segreation, and a draconian legal system.  And as Asian and Hispanic immigrants increase in numbers, will 90% of African-Americans become even more invisible?

Political outrage of the week:  I had thought that the Saxby Chambliss (what a name!) race against war-hero Max Cleland would be the most disgusting of my lifetime.  But now we have Joe "You Lie" Walsh, who never served in the military, attacking Colonel and double-amputee Tammy Duckworth.  As Joe Welch once said to Joe McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?"  And the answer is clearly no.

SCOTUS caution of the week:  Although what Chief Justice Roberts did validated the Affordable Care Act, a great deal of his opinion, especially all the time he spent writing about how the ACA was not constitutional under the Commerce clause, wasn't encouraging.  And in its next session, the Court will rule on affirmative action in university admissions and probably on whether the cleverly named Defense of Marriage Act is constitutional.  I don't think we should be too hasty in buying one of the t-shirts with his picture and the word "Hero."

Anti-climactic private irritation of the week:  Two TV commercials that grate on my nerves:
"There's nothing worse than going to the post office and having to stand in line" (stamps.com).  Even allowing for hyperbole, that seems overkill.
"Sure, I like reading and all, but who has enough time?" (audible.com)  Maybe the guy should stick with the "all" part.

A Fourth of July sonnet by e. e. cummings, one which is particularly appropriate given the rhetoric of the current campaign season:

          "next to of course god america i
          love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
          say can you see by the dawn's early my
          country 'tis of centuries come and go
          and are no more what of it we should worry
          in every language even deafanddumb
          thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
          by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
          why talk of beauty what could be more beauti-
          ful than these heroic happy dead
          who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
          they dd not stop to think they died instead
          then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

          He spoke.  And drank rapidly a glass of water.

I suppose the cliches are more nuanced (i.e., tweaked to appeal to whatever focus group is being addressed) now, but the nearly ninety year old poem is unfortunately still relevant.

Last year on the Fourth, I was counting down the 46 days till the removal of the confining abduction brace.  Believe me: I counted every day.  And when I was just a week or so from the end, the surgeon called and postponed our appointment for five or six days.  It was discouraging to have to reset the counter backward, but shortly after the Fourth I finally got my own small independence day when the brace came off, and I could actually, among other things, take a shower. 

We took Kimber to the vet on Monday.  The growth turned out to be simply a fatty tumor, which the vet removed.  He stitched Kimber up, and she was home by 5--without even a cone on her head.  She was very groggy the first night, especially after I gave her a doggy tranquilizer because, like so many animals, she's frightened by the fireworks.  She looked (and probably would have sounded) like Deputy Dawg.  Yesterday she was much livelier, though once she took the tranquilizer, she was, well, tranquil for the rest of the evening.  This morning she seemed back to old self; she ran for the first time, chasing a rabbit (which escaped under the fence).   Today will be one more day of fireworks, so one more day when she gets a pill or two to keep her calm.

My own health remains stable.  I still crash twice a day, but that's predictable and manageable.  My G-I problems seem to have shifted, however.  Now, by late afternoon or early evening, I have terrible cramps, and they make the thought of dinner completely unattractive.  Mohamed often runs out to bring me sushi, the one dinner that is light enough, that seems healthful (that English teacher pickiness again), and that doesn't seem to upset my stomach.  Man cannot live by sushi alone, but I'm making an effort, it seems.  The last week I've been taking a Percocet in the afternoon, and that helps.  For the last few months I've taken a Percocet every morning, but rarely another one.  I don't know why I've resisted.  As an old hippie, I liked to brag that I had never met a drug I didn't like, and you'd think that I might have realized that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the pill and the energy and lack of pain that mark my mornings and make them the best times of the day (the pill as well as having slept through the night).  It's true that Percocet is addictive, but, as the physician assistant said none-too-tactfully, "We don't have to worry about that in your case."  I see the oncologist for the full battery of tests next at the end of the month.  My oncologist, btw, looks just like the doctor in the Nexium commercial (tagline: "you wouldn't want your physician trying to do your job") who is inexpertly using a jackhammer.  I have a feeling Dr. Van wouldn't be great with a jackhammer either.

I have been saddened this week, however, by the news that someone who was like family--no, who was family (sometimes the distinction between simile and metaphor does make a difference)--during the entire decade of the 70s but whom, as circumstances changed, I haven't seen since 1980, has been diagnosed with cancer of the brain--inoperable, untreatable, and advanced.  I don't have the imagination to visualize Billie, her husband, and their three kids as anything other than the way I last saw them--a young, lively, smart, and funny family even though I know that the "kids" are now in their 40s (at least) with children of their own.  A few days ago, Billie began taking a shower, thinking possibly about the family vacation that was about to start, and then collapsed.  A few days and many tests later, she got the diagnosis and is now in hospice.  She had been kept up-to-date about my condition, and then--how quickly the wheel turns--she is the one who is in our thoughts.  "Choose life" goes the proverb, and indeed we must as long as we have the independence, physical and mental, to profit from it.  As Eliot (T. S.) reminds us, "We who were living are all dying / With a little patience."  So it becomes even more imperative to choose life while we can and, in my favorite quote, this from another Eliot (George), " have patience with the makeshift of human understanding" as we do so.

After all my personal history, what is an atheist's perspective on living with cancer?  It's clean and uncomplicated.  There's no asking why me? since there's no one to ask and there are no final causes.  There's no thinking about an afterlife--either with smug confidence or with trepidation.  The end is the end.  There's no fruitless prayer, since again, there's no one to pray to and no assumption that "He" would be more interested in my fate than that of the other seven billion people on this earth.  Each of us who are atheists may react to the facts differently, but for us religion and god are empty categories that have nothing to do with what we're facing.

Some have asked, if what I just wrote is the case, why bother with spending so much time delineating an atheist's perspective.  In part, my choosing to do so at the moment I subtitled the blog was a reaction to other people's responses.  If friends or acquaintances say that they're praying for me, that's fine; their intentions are kind, and I accept them as such.  But when someone said to me that I should put myself in the hands of the Great Physician because He's the only one who could heal me, I have to bite my tongue not to suggest that if He is all-powerful (or at least all-knowing), He could've saved Himself some work by not causing (or in a weaker form allowing) cancer in the first place.  Or when, as I wrote before, while watching a black, liberal woman with whom I had agreed completely on the points she was making and thinking it would be fun to have a drink with her, she responded to the death of Christopher Hitchens with a rant about atheists' shoving their ideas in the faces of Christians and suggesting that they (we) should just keep quiet, I know that I can't be silent.  I can't imagine that there has ever been such a dominant majority as American Christians who whine so frequently and loudly about their supposed persecution. 

And if abstract arguments about the existence of god don't interest me, the power of organized religion in America is also something I can't keep quiet about.  In the one year of tax returns that Mitt Romney did release, he claimed an income of $42M, of which he tithed $4.2M to the LDS.  If he wants to tithe, that's his business, but that he gets to deduct those millions as charitable contributions affects me.  It's not charity to send mssionaries around the world to convert others or to send millions to California in support of Proposition 8.  The National Conference of Catholic Bishops is unceasing in its reactionary politics.  And, of course, the evangelical/fundamentalist Christian sects are relentless in their conservative politics and their (tax-exempt) attacks on what's left of American progressive ideas.

All of that is well known, and examples aren't really necessary, but here's one that I hadn't known about.  For several years now, hundreds of fundamentalist churches drop any pretense of avoiding political discourse (not that there was much to begin with) and have something they call "Pulpit Freedom Sunday."   This year, it's October 7, a month before the election.  On this day, they explicitly and provocatively preach politics, and then in a further act of provocation they send tapes of their sermons to the IRS, which from lack of funds, manpower, and perhaps will does nothing about it--no investigation of the blatant violations of the churches' flouting already weak restraints.  'Weak' here equals non-existent.  So I'll keep my atheist ideas to myself when religious people do the same--and it'll be a cold day in hell, so to speak, when that happens.

On a different note, Kimber, our 75# German shepherd mix, has a tumor on her underside.  We take her to the vet tomorrow to have it removed and biopsied.  The vet said it's probably benign, but "nothing to mess with" as it could be mammary cancer.  We're hoping of course for good results.  In the meantime, I assume she'll have to wear a cone for several days.  Since she's not the world's most graceful dog in the first place and is so scared of fireworks that she's constantly trying to squeeze into small, safe spaces these days, the next week is going to be hard for her.