Fast Times

Teaching in a junior high school can often be like working in one of those old fashioned insane asylums without access to tranquilizers. This week I report back to the institution.

We teachers generally go back to school at least one day early. This is to give us time to prepare our rooms, write some lesson plans, and, most importantly, make up seating charts designed to separate the kid who can’t stop talking from the kid who throws textbooks at kids who can’t stop talking. This gets trickier the stronger their throwing arms get.

Our first day back as teachers will not be tremendously different than what it will be for our students.

We’ll walk into school a bit groggy, unaccustomed to functioning so early in the morning. Many of us will be wearing our new school clothes. We’ll gather in our cliques and make up stories about our summer vacations, embellishing golf outings, family trips and domestic projects in order to have something halfway interesting to talk about. Some will scan the crowd to check out the “new kids” from Eastern or Greenville or SIU, to size them up to see if they’ll be cool enough to hang out with us. Soon the superintendent will take the microphone and ask us to please find our seats. This request will be adhered to very, very slowly, as most of us are way too hip to do exactly what we’re told the first time we’re asked.

Five minutes later we’ll finally be seated and perhaps quiet enough to actually begin the annual drill: a welcome back, an introduction of new staff, a keynote address reminding us of how important our jobs are.

Everyone will be thinking about where they want to go for lunch.

There is an old saying that life never really evolves past junior high. This is partially true. Many of the hopes and fears and behaviors we had as adolescents follow us throughout adulthood.

For example,

Am I cool enough? Attractive enough? Will I fit in?

What if I forget my locker combination? My house key? Where I parked?

Do these new jeans make me look fat?

Will this information actually be on the test? The audit? The questions my child asks in the middle of the night?

Who’s the new kid? He doesn’t look like he’s from around here. He might be trouble.

They call this food?

(The) Gym stinks!

Can you believe what she’s wearing?

What a nerd!

Do you want to hang out this weekend?

Can’t. Gotta’ mow the lawn. Or babysit. (or hangout with someone cooler than you.)

Any of this sound familiar? Life can be pretty adolescent, even for those who’ve had enough time to get past such “junior high” behavior. So perhaps the big difference between us as adults and them as kids is that we’ve had time to practice pretending like we know what we're doing. We’ve had time to supposedly figure it all out.

Schools will be starting up these next few weeks, and that can be a stressful time for those going back. With that in mind, I’d like to ask you to take a few moments out of your day to say a quick prayer for everyone involved: the teachers, the parents, but especially the students, because none of it has gotten any easier since you graduated.

Especially for the kids who dodge textbooks.

Those things are thick.

This Little Light

Normally I don’t use this forum to comment on political events. Doing so would necessitate actual research on my part, and it’s really much easier to write a dozen or so paragraphs about pop culture or something even more depressing, like my parenting skills. Recent events, however, have convinced me to take a closer look at some particularly unfortunate beltway melodrama: namely, the Shirley Sherrod incident.

Mrs. Sherrod, as I’m sure many of you know, was asked to resign from her position as Georgia State Director of Rural Development for the USDA a few weeks ago due to a now infamous clip of her speaking at a NAACP meeting this past March. Taken out of context, the clip suggests that Mrs. Sherrod is a racist and used her influence to do racist things. For a short while, much of the media demonized her while the White House and the Department of Agriculture called for her head. Shirley Sherrod was a momentary pariah; a vile symbol of “reverse” racism.

Once given the opportunity to explain, however, it quickly became evident that a giant mistake had been made. The speech in its entirety actually portrayed Mrs. Sherrod using her own intellectual journey, one that many Americans have made throughout their lifetime, to make a broader point about the potential for racial harmony. Seen from this light, the Obama Administration and nearly everyone else really had no choice but to offer her a big apology, along with another job.

Whoops.

Now, I find a number of elements about this story curious, but the most damning, by far, is that a large number of people who should have known better simply took for granted that what they saw on the Internet was true.

The Internet.

The Internet is not new. It’s been around awhile, and making important decisions because of what you see on You-Tube or read from someone’s blog is like choosing your prom date based on the detailed information you read on the wall of a public restroom.

Anyone can make a blog. I have a blog. You’re reading it right now, and if you have half a brain, you will not order off a Chinese menu much less fire someone based on what you see or read from this website. Technology exists that allows a dirty-minded twelve-year-old to make it look like a squirrel is making love to an ostrich.

And I think that merits repeating. With very little effort, a person can make it look like a small, woodland mammal is making love to the world’s largest bird.

And yet someone lost their job because of similar technology.

The Internet.

Each Spring I try to teach my 7th graders how to write a research paper, and one of the first things I tell them is that just because it’s on the Internet does not mean it’s true. Clearly there are millions of reputable websites out there full of well written, thoroughly researched, fact-based articles. And then there’s this blog, for example, or any other homemade, nut-job, agenda-driven tirade pretending to be an actual news source capable of, somehow, convincing our government to fire a lady for using her own life journey to make a larger point.

This is not to say that just because someone has an obvious political agenda they’re amoral liars. But it does make them suspect as credible sources of authentic information. It does mean we should read their words warily. It does mean we should examine what they have to say with a grain of salt.

Too often what passes for political discourse in this country are simply liberal media outlets reinforcing liberal ideas, conservative media outlets reinforcing conservative ideas, while the audiences of each merely scream at each other while patting themselves on the back.

That’s not how things get done in a democracy, particularly one as old and as complicated as our own. The very nature of our federal system is based on the art of compromise. There’s a reason why we have both a Senate and a House of Representatives, and it’s not so we can be inundated with political commercials every other year.

It seems to me that there was a time in our history when a set of divergent political arguments could be heated, hammered and forged into something new; an alloy that left no one entirely satisfied but at least kept the peace, and, more often than not, ended up benefiting a large number of people anyway.

I fear that time has passed.

Our White House has called this most recent embarrassment “a teachable moment.” This much is true, and, if I may be so bold, here are a few lessons we might learn from all this nonsense.

Read between the lines before you rush to judgment. Read, period. If you watch a lot of MSNBC, spend a couple evenings with Fox News. If you’re a Sean Hannity fan, give Keith Olbermann a try. If you read the New York Times, listen to Rush Limbaugh for awhile, and vice versa.

And, if you’re like me and you get your news from Jon Stewart, it’s probably time to pick up an actual newspaper.

The point is, seriously listening to and considering an opponent’s argument doesn’t mean you’re “betraying the cause” or that you’ll somehow wake up with an entirely new political schema. If anything, especially if your own opinions are logically constructed, it should help you strengthen your own arguments. At the same time, you’ll also have a better idea of how the other side thinks, which can only help everyone in the long run.

Calling each other names won’t revive the economy. Blaming each other isn’t going to stop any terrorists. Misrepresenting your opponent and then rushing to judge in order to score political points is not patriotic.

It’s stupid.

It’s distracting, and it keeps us from focusing on the things upon which we do agree. It paralyzes us from taking action to fix the problems we all agree need fixed.

The truly great civilizations were never really destroyed by external enemies. They were weakened from within, sometimes over the course of centuries, sometimes over the course of decades. They were weakened by immoral behavior, by corrupt officials, by generalized apathy and basic ignorance.

There will always be barbarians at the gate.

And right now they’re having a great time listening to us argue.