I started school in North Central New Jersey.  I remember four different elementary schools there before moving to Miami in 1964 just in time to start sixth grade.  In Miami I finished elementary school, started junior high school in one school and finished it in another, and managed to go the whole course in the same high school, from which I graduated in 1971, the year cigarette advertising on television was banned, All in the Family premiered on CBS, John Lennon released ‘Imagine’ and the Miami Dolphins played the longest playoff game on NFL history, defeating the Kansas City Chiefs on the foot of Garo Yepremian on Christmas day.  Six hundred nine other notable things happened that year as well, give or take depending on your perspective.

Personally, I finished high school and entered junior college, from which I would graduate in December, 1973.

My eleventh grade English teacher told me that the average Miami Dade County Waste Collection Agent (we called them garbage men back then); the individual who picked up our weekly deposit of curbside (said tongue in cheek – our subdivision didn’t actually have curbs) waste and garbage; earned more money in a year than the average tenured Dade County High School teacher holding at least one advanced degree.  Think about it.  Forty years ago, an individual with minimal education – probably junior high school or less; often non-English speaking – made more money in a year picking up my leftover cornflakes and spent toilet paper rolls than an English teacher with a master’s degree in his or her field of expertise, and six to ten years of education, training and internship.

Admittedly, I cannot validate that claim.  I did some research and couldn’t find verifiable numbers one way or the other.  And please don’t read this with the impression that this educator was in any way disparaging the people who collect our refuse.  To the contrary, her point was this:  There is something wrong in a society that remunerates its waste disposal employees better than those charged with the education of is children.

According to SimplyHired.com, the current average salary for high school teachers in he United  States ranges from $34k to $52k annually, a gap of around eighteen thousand dollars.  In 1971, I was part of an experiment.  A new school, integrated by design, and for the best part, an educational success.  Eleven hundred in, over eighty-five% out.  And while teacher salaries were and are important, they were not the reason for the success of our class and our school.

Plain and simple, we had teachers who cared.  This was back in the days when a teacher still felt obligated to teach, and if you weren’t learning, they wanted to know why.  The teacher and not the student controlled the class room.  The teacher understood that if learning was to take place, the teacher had to teach.  The responsibility of ensuring that learning was taking place had not yet been delegated to the student.

But times, they is a changing.  No longer can a teacher use discipline in a classroom without fear of retaliation or a law suit.  Teachers demanded and took responsibility from a society  not yet brow beaten into submission by liberal left wing civil libertarians more concerned about political correctness than education,

Someone said ‘you won’t pass through my doors without a clear understanding of things like college and business English’, how two plus two equals four every time, how a British insurgency became a colonial settlement, why democracy as a form of government is superior to socialism, and just exactly why it was so damn important that Rosa Parks stayed on the bus.

That graduating class ‘got’ it because our teachers got it.  It wasn’t all about money. My high school’s graduating class of 2011 will be just a fraction above fifty percent of the one which began three years ago, and the Miami Dade school system that let this happen should all be fired and their salaries repaid.

I’m not saying all teachers care about today is the money, or that none of today’s teachers care, but it’s time the people responsible for the education of our most precious natural resource – our children – opened their eyes to the realization that you can’t let the fox in the henhouse and expect to find chickens there three years later.
UPDATE TO THIS STORY - THIS JUST IN :

Here's an update.  I live in Pasco County now instead od Metro-Dade County.  Tonight's news (like two minutes ago) announced that 470 public School teachers in Pasco County will not have jobs next year.  Sure, the obvious issue is 470 families losing in some case their primary source of income.  But the real victims here are 10,000 students who will be squeezed into already tight classes that already exceed the state mandated class size caps.

A school district that an independent 2009 study reports needs to HIRE an additional 250 teachers is instead laying off 470 making the net shortfall 720 teachers.

Nor does that take into account program cuts.

Average salary for Pasco County teachers is $43,302 where the Median family income is iust $39,568

Naïveté

The  word of the day is naïveté, from :French naïve, feminine of naïf, from Old French naif, natural, native, from Latin nativus, native, rustic, from natus, past participle of nasci, to be born; see gen- in Indo-European roots.  The Klingon word for this is roughly translated ‘idiot’.

The formal definition from the American Heritage Dictionary is “The state or quality of being inexperienced or unsophisticated, especially in being artless, credulous, or uncritical. An artless, credulous, or uncritical statement or act.”

It can mean trusting, accepting, easily fooled or swayed.  Included in the group of the naïve are those who, for example, vote based solely on party, race, religion, or just because their labor union endorsed a candidate.

And it can include those who among us who are easily taken advantage of because we are trusting, or still have the absurd notion to take someone at their word.  We use a handshake as a contract, our word as law, and foolishly expect that in return.   That is the kicker, you know.  Not that we stand on such informality, but because we believe that those with whom we make such overtures are in agreement.  That’s the real naïveté, and I confess, I’m full of it.  Pretty much always have been.  Give me your word, and unless you have at some time in the past shown that your word has all the value of a three dollar bill, I simply assume that we’re on the same page.

I’ll paraphrase something my grandfather used to say, in his gruff German flavored English: “Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me Twice, you’re screwed.”  It’s a great sentiment, but it still has a sobering caveat.  I get to be fooled twice before I can invoke the ‘you’re screwed’ portion of the incantation.  I can’t even invoke Harry Potter’s ‘redikulus’ charm until I’ve been fooled twice.

This week alone I had a lengthy phone conversation and exchanges of emails with someone who is hovering on the edge of the ‘fool me twice’ part of the negotiation, and why?  Because I believed him the first time.  I took him at his word.  He fooled me once because we have a very different understanding of what a lie is, and what giving your word means, and mostly because as I have been most of my life, I am still full to overflowing with naïveté.

I used to say things like ‘I don’t know how you sleep at night’.  I no longer say things like that.  I’ve learned they sleep very well.  It’s not a case of being immoral so much as it is a case of being amoral.  No sense of morality.  The deal is the thing, no matter who has to be crushed along the way.

It’s disheartening, disenchanting, and probably a few other dis’s I can’t recall, but still leave me completely and irrefutably dissed.  All because of my naïveté.

So I’m thinking about reworking and rewording the ground rules.  “Fool me once, and you’ll have to prove everything else you tell me for the rest of your life.”

But then, once I invoke that rule, my naïveté will probably keep me awake at night wondering if I shouldn’t have given you a second chance.

The Great Experiment

A year ago I was flipping through Facebook links and I came across one that stunned me.  The high school graduating class that preceded my class was having two entirely different, racially segregated class reunions.  The big printed news outlet in the area made a huge deal out of it.  Major coverage, color photos and student interviews – the students in question having actually graduated forty years previously.  Local television picked up on it, and in a few places it even made brief sidebar mention in a few national outlets.

No one interviewed me.  Of course they wouldn’t – my class reunion was still a year away.  The first planning session hadn’t even been held.  I wasn’t class of 1970, I was class of 1971.

And for all of that I’m still thinking the report was on the wrong school.

I spent three years of my life in what was originally a grand experiment in our town.  Schools came in three flavors.  All white, all Black, and Catholic, with a small sprinkling of church run non-catholic schools.  There simply was no such thing as a truly integrated, racially balanced and diverse high school in the entire county.  Opening its doors for the first time in 1963, we were the test case.  We weren’t the Little Rock 9 – we were an entire new school district with an entire new school reaching out to an entire new demographic.  We were White, Black and Cuban, going to class, riding the bus, eating lunch, doing sports and other extracurricular activities, and doing it together with respect, dignity, and a very high degree of success.

In the fall of 1968, parts of the South were in flames.  Parts of our county felt the shudders of racial disparity and unrest. And in the midst of that confusion, and the peak of a war no one outside of Washington DC wanted or understood, too young to be hippies, but not quite old enough to be ravaged by the senseless scars of DISCO, we entered the grand experiment for the first time, eleven hundred strong, and by the grace of God, it worked!  It worked well enough that three years later over eighty percent of that original eleven hundred who would comprise the graduating class of 1971, finished the course, and walked, with pride and celebratory camaraderie across the stage of the city’s municipal auditorium in cap and gown.  I think we only had one ‘mooning’ incident.

Forty years later, a new building graces our hallowed halls of education, but the graduation rate is closer to fifty percent, and the grand experiment has faded into the memories of the few hopeful who remain to remember when it all began.  The diversity is gone.  The mix of cultures has dissolved, and with it, it would seem, the effort of an education system that once seemed to care.

Two months from now a few of those who can, will gather together at Pier 66 in Fort Lauderdale, to remember.  A week later, a larger group will assemble at the Embassy Suites in Fort Lauderdale for the same purpose.  Sadly, primarily due to the effort on a single individual who even forty years down the road and at almost sixty years of age, still doesn’t get who we were – WHO WE ARE, two groups will still gather on separate days and places to celebrating being one.  The single absurdity that won’t mark these events, is the knowledge there will not be segregated reunion celebrations.

Forty years ago, when there were whispers of racial unrest in the county schools, film crews and reporters with cameramen and notepads in hand showed up on our steps only to leave empty handed and without a story.

I don’t know what happened to the class of 1970, but for all our mistakes and stumbles along the way, the Class of 1971 will come together the way we last were together – Black, White, Hispanic.  One School, One Class, and for this one brief moment in history, the experiment is a rousing success.

May

By David Roth

©11^th May, 2011

Mornings

that tease with a hint that Old Man Winter

has decided to delay

his annual trek to

the southern hemisphere.

Mid-days

rolling towers of windswept

green-gray slate cottons balls

crying for attention,

tantrums of wind, rain and thunder

screaming to be heard.

Twilight

tucking the last rebellious vestige

of spring’s temperamental child

to bed for a nap.

Midnight

beneath a shimmering belt

of otherworldly summer diamonds

scattered in a puddle of milk

buckled in Orion’s Belt.

Spoiled and cranky transition

from winter’s ice

to summer’s sweat

wrapped in gay, chuckling ribbon.

Osama Bin Laden Swims with the Fishes

Yes, I heard the news last night, just like everyone else.  Let me try and summarize all the reports I’ve heard or read between then and now.

First of all, I was watching the season premier of In Plain Sight on USA Network, so my show didn’t get interrupted by either a ticker across the top or bottom of the screen, a stern sounding voice telling me my program was about to be interrupted by 10 seconds of the Presidential Seal looking all bold and, well, Presidential, followed by an actual human being who may or may not have been the President, and who might or might not, have looked particularly presidential, depending on the media’s current perception of appearance, and whichever of the white house aides in charge of making people look presidential…or not… happened to be on hand.

What I got was my wife telling me someone was telling her that Obama was dead, and I need to switch to CNN RIGHT NOW!  Instead, while looking CNN up on my channel guide, and discovering it was practically within walking distance – Channel 29 to USA’s 32 – I clicked on a more accessible local station’s news link and learned to my great relief that it was OSAMA and not OBAMA who was dead, not that the Navy Seals given credit for this accomplishment shouldn’t be praised regardless of which of the two targets was ‘disappeared with extreme prejudice’, but rather because the sudden reality of it all is that if Obama had been assassinated, Joe Biden would be President, and that thought gave me really bad flashbacks to November, 1963.  Fortunately the message to my wife was a typo, and Obama was alive, and well, and taking all the credit in living color over on the aforementioned CNN where Wolf Blitzer was already chilling the bubbly for Obama’s re-election party.

Meanwhile, a number of interesting stories have surfaced.  Everyone agrees that Osama (not Obama) is dead.  Beyond that, no one seems to agree.

One source (Obama) says he (Obama) personally directed and authorized the operation which he named, but I forget what he called it, and that an elite unit of black ops Navy Seals engaged in a carefully planned firefight which resulted in Osama’s death, that of one of his children, and another casualty, but no civilians were harmed during the filming of this pre-campaign commercial and no American servicemen were injured, and that these same Navy Seals ‘had custody’ of Bin Laden’s body and were returning to the US with the aforementioned Bin Laden in hand.  Obama assured the American people that Osama’s body would be treated respectfully in accordance with Muslim law and tradition, something we somehow forgot to do with Saddam Hussein, but back when that happened, the President of the US wasn’t more concerned with offending Muslims than Americans, so that could explain it.

Another story says Dubya was in office when Bin Laden was killed in a bomb blast (still at the hands of Navy Seals, who, it seems, use their title ‘Navy Seals’ as misdirection to trick the bad guys into thinking that because they are NAVY seals, they only work in water), his body brought back to the US, and kept in a giant ice chest next to the Bud Light for ten years.

All they agree on at this point is that in accordance with Muslim law and tradition, the desert rat was buried at sea.  Either that, or the crack team of Elite Seals accidentally dropped his dead sorry terrorist butt in the Mariana Trench and the whole burial at sea is just as cover story which may or may not have been accomplished with the aid of Somali Pirates or possibly Captain Jack Sparrow in exchange for a Royal Pardon.

And, of course, there is this photo of the dead guy’s face, which is so obviously photoshopped (the photo) that it could have been done by a 12 year old with a hacked copy downloaded from Bittorrent.

And with all this coverage, no one in the media has latched on to the curiously conspicuous timing of this week’s events. Which include the sudden appearance of the President’s birth certificate – just in time for another run for office, and the death of America’s Favorite Terrorist, the man you Love to Hate, Osama Bin Laden, for which Barack Hussein Obama is making certain the world, or at least voting Americans, registered or not, Americans or not, know he made it all happen, and may perhaps even have pulled the trigger.  And no one in the media finds the timing of these events in the least curious!  They would rather try to take our minds off of issues like this by posting questions on social media web sites asking if we’d like to see Obama’s mug shot taken, one assumes, just before he swam with the fishes.

I’m not normally a conspiracy theorist, although I am by nature a bit cynical, and frankly, this whole things smells too much like a street vendor selling herring sandwiches on the boardwalk at Zandvoort for my liking.  Methinks I smell a rat that someone is trying very hard to hide beneath sealskins and salt water.

And isn’t burial at sea a military honor, not to be confused with walking the plank?

I think perhaps the American People have had a fast one pulled on them, and Barry and Joe are laughing at us all while enjoying a fine glass of 75 year old single malt and a good Cuban cigar in the Oval Office.  And oh, by the way?  In Plain Sight rocked, Mary Kicked butt, and Marshall is way too tall for Mary’s overly conspicuous sun-faded navy blue ’67 ‘stang.