Potluck

My grandma Lou made the very best cheesy potatoes.   They were peppery with mounds of Velveeta, soft on the fork but firm.  Delicious.  They tasted like the last day of May, and although she’s been gone for nearly twenty years now, I have yet to eat cheesy potatoes up to her remarkable standards.

Whenever we had a potluck dinner at church, these were her specialty.   She brought other things, too, but you could usually count on those potatoes at least once or twice a year.   After all, that’s what makes a potluck dinner so good.  Everyone brings their very best to the table.

Speaking of their very best, my sophomores just recently finished up their PARCC testing.  PARCC, as you might imagine, is an acronym that means something.  It is one of many federally mandated exams designed to make us all feel bad about ourselves, particularly in relation to other countries with indoor plumbing.  These sophomores were tested for two to three hours per day for at least three days, while many of them were even tested for six. 

They hated it.

Now, before accidently jeopardizing my very satisfying career, it’s important to remind everyone that these tests are a mandate.  That means a school district basically has to give them or lose much needed funds, and, personally, I think our district handled it all rather well.  I even put up a picture of a rabbit on my Smart board to “lighten the mood,” and get the students eager to participate.  They didn’t seem convinced, but there’s always next year, right?

And that is the sad part, because not only was over a week’s worth of curriculum basically hijacked in order to give these tests, we also lost instructional time actually prepping for them in the first place. However, the real problem is not that the tests take so long to administer, it’s that they cover so very little of what it means to be a student in the first place.

A long time ago, I was a student. I went to teacher’s college and was taught many theories on education.  Some of those theories turned out to be dumb.  One of the most useful theories, however, was developed by a cognitive psychologist from Harvard by the name of Howard Gardner.

            Gardner is most famous for his idea of “multiple intelligences.”  Whereas we often have a tendency to group people into one of three broad categories—book smart, street smart, and not smart—Gardner hypothesized that in reality humans respond to and affect their environment in a variety of ways.  He defined intelligence using many big words, but to paraphrase, I think he basically meant intelligence was simply “using your gifts to make the world a better place.”  This definition, then, necessitated a much broader understanding of the concept itself.

Certainly there was “book smart,” so to speak, on which most standardized tests still focus.  (Gardner actually divided “book smart” into linguistic intelligence, for people who were good with words, and logical-mathematical, for people who were good with numbers.)  He went on to expand the idea and considered five more “intelligences:” bodily-kinesthetic, meaning the ability to coordinate mind and body, like athletes and surgeons;  visual-spatial, meaning the ability to visualize the world in three dimensions, such as a carpenter or an artist; musical-rhythmic, which is kind of self-explanatory; interpersonal, meaning the ability to understand other people, such as a CEO; and intrapersonal, meaning the ability to understand his or herself and write self-absorbed newspaper columns.

            He later even added an eighth intelligence, that of naturalist, for people who seemed to have the innate ability to understand and thrive with nature, such as farmers, biologists, or veterinarians.

            Now, before continuing, it should be noted that Gardner never intended these concepts be used as a way to classify people, particularly young students.  People are not one “intelligence” and none of the others.  The point was to help identify a person’s inherent strengths to also help them achieve their best potential. 

Unfortunately, standardized tests can cripple this process.

            Because we often put so much emphasis on these tests and what they cover, anything not covered—music, art and P.E., not to mention civics, history, and a bunch of other very important disciplines—gets the shaft.  Some might argue that these subjects are not as important as reading, writing and math, and as an English teacher, I suppose I should agree.  However, many of the most well-rounded and productive people I know were not good at any of these subjects in school.  Fortunately, somewhere along the way, they figured out what they were good at and made it work.  Somewhere along the way, they figured out their recipe.

Speaking of recipes, have you ever been to a potluck when all you have is fried chicken and the stuff that goes with it, and not actually homemade fried chicken, but the kind that comes in buckets?  That’s not really a potluck.  That’s just different plates of chicken.  Great potlucks have something for everyone, because everyone is bringing their best to the table.  Due to budget woes, standardized testing, and all the other headaches that come with them, too many of our students never get that chance to bring their best to the table.  They’ve been told, in the coldest, most economical way possible, that “your recipe doesn’t count.  We’re only interested in this and that; we don’t have any room at this table for whatever it is you want to bring.”

            If that’s not a good way to run an after-church social, why have we decided it’s an OK way to treat our kids?  It seems that if we want a potluck worth coming to, don’t you think, at the bare minimum, we could go ahead and set the table?

Lift

Russel, Ralph, and Homer Robison
Circa 1924

 “It took four of us to get this piano on the truck.”  My brother told me a few weeks ago while standing in my driveway.  A light rain added unwanted drama to our chore.

I glanced at my cousin, the former college lineman, and then back to my sibling, the former construction worker turned farmer.

“But there’s just three of us.”  I replied, glancing down at my own biceps, taught from years of grading papers.

My cousin nodded as he unlocked the tailgate. “Yep.”

Somehow, though, we did move the piano.  As promised, it was much heavier than it looked, but still we somehow grunted it off the truck, across the concrete driveway, and into my living room.  Fortunately it has wheels; fortunately my two relatives are not built like me.

Now the piano sits, cozy, decorated with framed photographs, occasionally being plinked on and plunked upon by one of my children, but really it just waits for the day it will be put into beautiful use, after years and years of lessons.  At least this is the narrative I have promised by wife, who is thus far less than thrilled that yet another piece of furniture has been added to our already cluttered home.

The piano had to go somewhere, though.  My grandfather Ralph, who would have turned ninety-six this past Valentine’s Day, no longer needs it as accompaniment to his banjo.  Over the next two years my brother will update his old farm house, and in these new blueprints no piano sits.

Of all the grandchildren, I guess it makes sense I inherit this heirloom of an instrument.  Our newborn daughter has very long fingers, we have been told, and thus will make a suitable pianist.

Reflecting on my grandfather’s passing, I suppose funerals can tell us important things about a person.  The size of the crowd can give us hints about the person’s public persona; the eulogies give us the well-edited highlights; the tone of grief can give us clues to other questions:  how old were they?  How sick were they and for how long? 

What was their relationship with God?

We can perhaps get a better gauge of the person’s true character, however, when it comes time to divvy up the socks.

Despite his age, my grandpa Ralph put on his own socks up until this past August, when a fall broke his hip and sent him to the hospital.  The hip was fixed, but he never came home again.  He lingered in a twilight of months, his days filled with whispering nurses, winter sunlight through windows, many visits from family and friends.  We gathered to bury him in late January.  A month later we gathered again, this time to go through his stuff.

We were not a frantic collection of people.  Seven grandchildren, all well into shades of adulthood, drew numbers from a hat.  I was number three, which was fitting, I guess, as I was his third grandchild anyway.  Dad, though, as the lone survivor of grandpa’s three children, could have picked where everything went.  That was his legal right, but it wasn’t his style.

Instead we took turns.  We asked questions, like, “Does anyone want the bed?’ or “Who could use this desk?”  None of us truly needed anything and none of us were in a hurry.  We spent hours ambling from room to room, trying on hats, opening up drawers, laughing at pictures worn from use.

We play-wrestled with various memories, like childhood Christmases, when we all opened up more presents that we deserved, the living room full of crumpled up wrapping paper.

Like sitting in the drive way on upside down five gallon buckets, shucking sweet corn piled high in the back of the truck, or countless Sunday dinners, grownups in the dining room, kids in the kitchen, stories and laughter going back and forth between rooms.

The kindness of this man seems to be a common thread in so many of these memories, and it seemed as though a very real kindness thread itself into this memory, too.  As my father reminded us that morning before we started rummaging, for some families the process of inheritance can be most unkind.  It can be a headache at best and a disaster at worst.  Some families end.

This, though, will not be the case for Ralph’s family.  Granted, many acres of Illinois farmland will now change hands, but it will unlikely change plows.  Season will still fall into season; plant, grow, reap, repeat.  This steadiness has much to say about our grandfather and our grandma Lou and the life they lived, the examples they taught their own children.  This steadiness says more about them, in fact, than perhaps it says about any of us.

In a way, this may be their best legacy all along: a family at peace with itself and with each other, a family lifting up very heavy pianos instead of fighting over them.

Pocket Change

Global warming strikes our front yard

Leonardo DiCaprio and I have a lot in common.  Besides both being American men with feet, we also believe it is high time somebody does something very serious to save the planet.

"We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters or the big corporations, but who speak for all of humanity,” DiCaprio told us in his recent Oscar acceptance speech, imploring us to “not take this planet for granted.”

The problem, apparently, with Mr. DiCaprio making such comments lies somewhere hidden inside a giant walk-in closet in one of his six, giant, walk-in mansions.

“He has six mansions!” Many people shouted in the days following his acceptance speech.  “How dare he tell us to stop polluting?”

This is a common rebuttal often heard whenever a celebrity tells us to stop polluting.  People point out that the celebrity has no real moral foundation to make such a declaration because, after all, their particular carbon footprint is much larger than the average person and so they should just go shut up.

This argument does have merit.  After all, if I was to make the much-needed declaration to my own children that “Hey, we need to stop eating so much sugar” while simultaneously pouring syrup on their pancakes, something would be lost in translation.  It’s not that Mr. DiCaprio is being disingenuous about his concern for the environment, or that I am not sincere about the need to limit sugar, it’s just that pancakes taste good.

This, then, is the rub. How can we even meet to discuss limiting carbon emissions when such a meeting, like the one in Paris this past year, in itself creates more carbon emissions?

One place we could start is to simplify the “debate,” as much as possible, by accepting something very obvious:  the planet is getting warmer.  It just is.  The ice caps are melting and the average ocean temperature is rising. These are simply quantifiable scientific facts.  A person can argue about why the ice is melting all they want, but at the end of the day, it’s still melting.

Just look at a satellite image of the North Pole taken over the course of the last twenty years.  Better yet, ask an insurance actuary living in Miami what his spec sheet looks like for 20 years out.  These guys are hardly tree-hugging environmentalists eager to social engineer this place into a hippie compound.  These are people mostly driven by data, not political schemes, so if they are hedging their bets on higher sea levels by mid-century, why wouldn’t we?

Now let’s ask another question.  Will a warmer planet be a plus or minus for our way of life?  Well, unless you’re a Russia president trying to get easier access to your tremendous Artic oil reserves, a warmer planet is not really in your best interest.

So, if the planet is getting measurably warmer and that is to our detriment, the next logical question to ask is, so what?  What are we going to do about it, if anything?

One solution is to basically do nothing.  Earth will be fine regardless.  Earth is not going anywhere.  A warmer planet will be better for many Earth species, in fact, it’s just that humans are not one of them.

 Another idea, however, is to use the situation as a catalyst to make our quality of life better.

Before elaborating, it’s important to understand that climate change will not be fixed by driving less, walking more, or turning off your lights when they are not in use, although those are all great habits to get into.  We are not going to solve this by forcing people to change their behavior.  Every polar bear on earth will drown before we stop driving.  Remember, we are the species that let’s our own people drink lead-saturated tap water.  Do we honestly think enough of us would do anything to make our lives even remotely less comfortable for the sake of polar bears we will never meet?

This does not mean inaction is reasonable, however. 

The United States had the potential to do something quite reasonable in 2009.  For a brief moment, we lived in that rarest of political seasons: obtuse plurality.  Not only did one party control the White House, the Democrats enjoyed comfortable margins in both branches of Congress.   Perhaps just as importantly, President Obama was still fairly popular with most Americans and he had a mandate to fix a very real problem:  the tanking economy.  With wise leadership America could have used this opportunity to begin the process of alleviating numerous dilemmas and done so in a way that could appeal to people from both political persuasions.

We could have invested our enormous resources into rebuilding outdated and thus inefficient infrastructure.  We could have invested heavily in research and development toward the creation of renewable energy sources.  These moves would have created jobs, helped the economy, and would have made us less beholden to foreign energy sources.  As “pie in the sky” as these ideas might seem, they are certainly no more idealistic than stopping Hitler sounded in 1940, or reaching the moon seemed in 1961.

Had America dedicated itself, seven years ago, to becoming energy independent, our military would be able to rest at least a little easier.  Had we truly committed ourselves to renewable energy, we could have grown our own economy while lessening the strain we place on an increasingly fragile environment.  These are laudable goals for conservatives, liberals, and everyone in between.

Unfortunately, that opportunity was mostly squandered on unpopular domestic legislation, as evidenced by the 2010 mid-term elections.

Regardless, much of the world is making strides toward these ends for both environmental and economic reasons already.  Much of America, particularly at the state and local level, is also making strides towards these same ends.

Energy sustainability just makes good sense, which is why, when it comes to leadership on the issue from Washington, we should probably just expect more hot air.