35 Years Before The Big Bang Theory

UPDATE: A million thanks to my old friend Naomi, who brought to my attention that James Wolcott's original article on Star Trek fandom is in fact online right here. As I said to Naomi, Wolcott was an even bigger dick than I realized back then. His reductive condescension and dismissive misogyny is - well, icky.


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Originally written a few years ago:


I am more than a little verklempt. 

Today I was looking through a folder of my stuff that my parents had given me several years ago -- mostly report cards, high school papers, school play programs, you know the kind of stuff I mean. So I'm turning the pages, and suddenly, there in front of me is a little piece of my personal fandom history that I thought was gone forever. 

It's a letter to the editor of the Village Voice (at that time a widely read alternative New York weekly, for those who don't know) responding to an article about a Star Trek convention I'd attended -- one of the earliest. The letter was published February 23, 1976. I was barely 14, and amusingly enough I called James Wolcott, now culture critic for Vanity Fair and a writer for the New Yorker, a Klingon spy. He did not have kind words for Star Trek fans, and in all my youthful earnestness, I gave him what for. I wish I had a copy of his article, but I'm afraid that really is gone for good. 

Better yet, I even found a photo taken about a month later of me posing proudly in my room in front of the posters and photos I'd no doubt acquired at that same Star Trek convention. I look exactly like the kid who would have written the letter. 


Here's the text:

Dear Editor:
I was shocked by James Wolcott's article, "Big Brother is Trekking You," (Voice, February 2). I find it hard to believe that anyone can so thoroughly miss a point as he has.
Mr. Wolcott is correct in noting that kids (and adults) at Star Trek conventions are serious but he fails to realize why. Star Trek deals with many real problems, and says that we can handle them. This is a message which drives home to today's youth. While the rest of the world doesn't know if it will survive, these kids believe that we can overcome our problems and differences.
I also refuse to believe that the bases for Star Trek's popularity are "sex, cool, and technology." Do thousands of fans come to a convention only because they enjoy playing with gadgets? Are all those women fans because Captain Kirk turns them on? Do thousands of kids watch the show faithfully solely because they envy Mr. Spock's cool? I find it difficult to believe that all those people of all ages and all walks of life completely miss the messages of a show in which a monster who attacks men is really only protecting her children; in which the racial problems of a planet are overcome through rational thinking and many other such episodes. And why should the cooperation of two men such as Kirk and Spock be macho when they are in fact serving the interest of peace?
I have found that many critics of Star Trek, including Mr. Wolcott, look only at the fans instad of at the show itself. How can anyone understand Star Trek fandom without examining Star Trek? 
Mr. Wolcott must be a Klingon spy.

Education Reform and What I Learned at Taft High School

Here's what education reformers like:

- Tenure reform, which would end tenure to stop protecting “bad” teachers who supposedly are responsible for “failing” schools.

- School turnaround, where lots of teachers at “failing” schools get fired in order to stop the failing.

- Closure of “failing” schools. Self explanatory.

- Merit pay, where teachers get extra money to teach better, because presumably, without financial incentive, they’re not teaching as well as they could, resulting in - you guessed it - more “failing”.

- High stakes testing, based on which teachers are evaluated and “bad” teachers are identified. Again, this is supposed to cut down on the “failing.”

- Ending LIFO (Last In First Out), a system said to promote failing because it grants greater job protection to teachers with seniority, favoring “bad” older teachers over “good” younger ones. 

Get the common thread here? To get rid of the "failing problem," you have to tackle the “teacher problem.”

Here’s my response: Gerry Cohen.

In 1988, I was a student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism when I received an assignment to do a story on education. So I called Gerry Cohen.

The father of one of my oldest, dearest friends, Gerry was an English teacher at William Howard Taft High School in the South Bronx. He’d taught there for...well, I have no idea how long. A really long time. I asked him if I could shadow him for a day. He said yes.

I’d known Gerry since I was five years old, when I became friends with his son. He was a warm, laid back guy who made every visitor in his home feel like family. He was what people in the heartland would have called a real New York character: a left-leaning, intellectual, vaguely bohemian Orthodox Jew with the accent of a cab driver and the laugh of a longshoreman. In the New York of my youth, he was just a dad, and just a teacher.

In 1988, I was a 26-year-old grad student who would never have confessed this truth: I was terrified about visiting Taft. A lot of things I did at the J School were kinda scary, but the prospect of spending a day in a South Bronx high school was near the top of the list.  My ideas about poor urban public schools were formed entirely by the media, and mostly involved violence, drugs and general mayhem. Having gone to a Jewish private school and an ivy league college, I was as sheltered as one could possibly be in urban America. I planned to stick very close to Gerry.

When I showed up at Taft that morning in 1988, Gerry greeted me with a huge smile and a warm welcome, and proceeded to overturn many of my misconceptions. Not that he was intentionally doing anything of the kind. He was just having a normal workday.

I have a few strong memories of that day. One is of sitting in the back of Gerry’s class while he led a discussion on Macbeth. It was a good discussion. Most of the kids weren’t participating, but those who were had clearly read the play and understood it about as well as you’d expect of a high school kid. Gerry was a skilled teacher who guided the conversation with practiced ease, explaining difficult passages, leading his students to make their own discoveries and offering his own insights. He was very much in control of his classroom without looking like he had to work at it. It seemed to me that the students liked him, though that might have been my own bias, because I couldn’t see how anyone wouldn’t like him.

I remember walking the hallways while students rushed to classes in between bells. There were no lockers - something to do with security, I was told. The place was pretty run-down - depressingly so. No fights broke out in my presence, and I didn’t feel particularly unsafe. Kids mostly ignored me. As I wandered among the students, it seemed that the only demographic not represented was American-born whites. I remember Gerry telling me that there were a dozen different languages spoken among Taft’s students. They’d had a recent influx of Guyanese immigrants. 

I also remember sitting in the back of the auditorium during a midyear graduation ceremony. It was a special program for girls who were graduating late because they’d had babies. There was a lot of pride in that room along with all the fussy babies, and a lot of huge smiles under the tasseled caps. The whole thing took me off guard - I knew teen pregnancy was common, but I was surprised to see it treated so openly.

The final thing I remember of that day was asking Gerry one last question: “Why do you do it?” And his exact answer: “If I don’t, who will?”

I left at the last bell. Gerry stayed late. The walk to the subway through those South Bronx streets was by far the scariest part of the day. There’s no sugar-coating it. That was a really bad neighborhood.

Here’s how Taft High School is described in Wikipedia: 

Demographic changes in the sixties, the exodus of the homogeneous population, and the advent of specialized magnet schools brought about shifts in enrollment at Taft HS. During the Abraham Beame (1974–77) and Edward Koch (1978–89) Administrations, there was no priority given to the needs of the shifting demographics in the school community. City-wide, crime rates were high and unfavorable publicity further accelerated the decline of the school. Entering the 1990s, as a non-selective high school, it was unable to compete with the newer schools housing magnet programs that attracted prime students from throughout the borough. Crime intimidated vibrant young professionals from teaching at the high school. The danger was highlighted in May 1997, when Jonathan Levin, an English teacher at the school and the son of former Time Warner chairman Gerald M. Levin, was murdered by a former student in his Manhattan apartment.

Due to the above-mentioned demographic changes, of the 629 students attending Taft in the 1990s, the majority were Hispanic and African-American. On any given day, attendance hovered around 86%. The impoverished community, lacking in political clout or a cohesive PTA, was provided 10 truancy officers, rather than improved education strategies. The last graduating class of Taft High School was in June 2008.

By today’s definition, there’s no question Taft would be seen as a failing school. 

And Gerry Cohen? He was NOT a failing teacher. He was a dedicated teacher and a wonderful man. His commitment to his ideals and to his profession brought him back to that school day after day, year after year, despite everything. It’s likely many of his students would have struggled on standardized tests. A lot. But NOT because of Gerry or the other teachers I met that day.

I know. It was one day at one school. It doesn’t prove anything. It’s hardly scientific. But my experience certainly convinced me of this: It’s total madness to say that the biggest problem at a school like Taft is the teachers. Worse, it’s clear that those who would say such a thing are motivated not by a desire to improve public schools, but by a desire to demean and disempower teachers.

Gerry Cohen passed away a couple of years ago - not long after Taft High School closed, though he’d retired many years earlier. I often think of Gerry when I read about education reformers who blame teachers for “failing” schools - the teachers who show up every day in neighborhoods that a lot of people wouldn’t even drive through without locking the car doors.  It’s somewhat reassuring to know that Gerry’s educational legacy will outlive theirs - because he was a teacher. A really good teacher in a “failing” school.

Note: After I finished writing this, I found this 2003 New York Times story about Taft. Looks like I wasn't alone in my impression of the place.

On little girls, torpedo bras, and clutching at pearls

Have you heard about the latest Toddlers and Tiaras shocker? (Okay, maybe it’s not the latest, but I don’t keep up with these things.) Some two-year-old - yes, I said two - did a pageant routine in which she came out dressed like an angel, then stripped off the robe to reveal a  pint-size version of Madonna’s  gold-colored Blonde Ambition costume, complete with torpedo-tit bra.

And, as is the intention behind Toddler and Tiaras, mothers everywhere gasped in horror and clutched their pearls. When I stumbled across this on the Internet, I gasped, too. (I rarely wear pearls, but if I’d happened to have them on that day, I would have clutched furiously.) It’s truly horrifying. See it here if you have the stomach.

This Madonna-and-child tale reminded me of some other incidents that had elicited pretty much the same reaction last year: A popular retail chain (Abercrombie) introduced push-up bikini tops for little girls,  and then a French company rolled out a line of sexy lingerie for little girls.

The underlying issue, of course, is the sexualization of pre-pubescent girls. These examples are so over the top, so blatant, and so tasteless, one can’t help but be shocked.

But there’s something that’s been eating at me ever since the lingerie story broke last year, and little Mia, with her weapons-of-mass-destruction bra, compels me to say it.

Sexualization is not just about a bra, nor is it just about a way of dancing or posing. Sexualization is about the awareness of, and involvement in, your own sexuality. It’s about the willingness - desire, even - to make yourself the object of sexual desire. It’s about the need to feel sexually attractive, and to devote your time and attention to making yourself sexually attractive. All of which is, within the bounds of reason, appropriate for adults.

A great many of the mothers who are driven to pearl-clutching by a toddler wearing a gold cone-bra Madonna costume, and by an ad for little girls’ lingerie, are active participants in the premature sexualization of their daughters.

Yeah, I know, that’s pretty harsh, and I’ve been hesitating to say it. But let’s be real.

For over half a century, the rules of childhood have been loosening. With the rise of movements seeking to empower previously disenfranchised segments of society came a new awareness of children as individuals, with ideas and opinions that adults should acknowledge and respect. And of course, hot on the heels of that change came businesses eager to sell clothing and accessories that emphasize the new, elevated status of children - basically, by dressing them more like adults. In no time, an enormous industry was born, selling fashions to girls that looked more like miniature versions of their mothers’ wardrobes than like the childish clothes of yore.

It’s no surprise that, with girls looking more adult than ever, and with the general loosening of societal restrictions on childhood, lots of mothers took it even further, taking license to treat their young daughters to special, grown-up-ladies stuff. Manicures. High heels. Facials. Makeovers. And what is all that, if not the devotion of time and attention to making yourself sexually attractive? In short, sexualization?

I’ve heard it said many times that these kinds of things aren’t designed to create sexual appeal, but rather to just “feel pretty” and “pamper yourself.” It’s fun, they say. To which I reply, bullshit. A 5-year-old, or even an 8-year-old, has to be taught to consider it fun to sit still for an hour while her nails and hair are done. And I’m sorry, but if you believe in the inherent aesthetic value of heels and makeup, divorced from their sexual connotations in the human mating game, you’ve been drinking the wrong Kool-Aid. The fun in looking and acting like a sexualized adult is learned behavior. If you don’t believe me - watch Toddlers and Tiaras.

So this kind of direct sexualization of children is something relatively new. But it’s particularly nefarious in combination with the pitfalls of traditional femininity, which teaches girls to value appearance over achievement, beauty over intelligence, allure over comfort. Most of us still model at least some of that for our daughters. When we obsess about our weight, won’t be seen without our makeup, destroy our feet in heels, and console ourselves with “retail therapy,” the message is pretty clear: How we look is as important - hell, more important - than what we do, what we know, or how we feel.

One of the toughest truths about parenting is that the rationalizations we use with ourselves don’t work on our kids. We can tell ourselves that the yo-yo dieting is all about health, or that the frequent primping is our way of pampering ourselves - but our kids know better. They intuit the psychology behind these behaviors - and they internalize it. Every time we pass the full-length mirror and check to see if our butts look big, they get the message loud and clear: For a woman, looking good is job one.

And, yes, that’s sexualization, too. The old-fashioned kind that’s been going on for a long, long time.

I guess I should feel heartened that we still experience the communal gasp over the more extreme version, the outrageously overdone toddler fembot. But my gut is telling me that we’re actually heading in the wrong direction: not toward giving our daughters the strength and confidence to value what they know and what they achieve over how they appear, but away from it. And I’m afraid that, in the not-too-distant future, the toddler fembot will barely raise an eyebrow.

On the Road to Market-Driven Education

I have a great idea.

All kinds of regulations restrict what we can do on roads owned and operated by the government. Speed limits, traffic lights, safety inspections - it all keeps us from getting to where we’re going as fast as possible. The government is slowing us down. Worse, it’s hampering commerce, making us less competitive in the global economy.

Just think of the economic benefits of a privatized, less regulated road system. We could all drive as fast as we want, wherever we want. Those who lack the skill to drive fast - or those weirdos who want to enjoy the scenery along the way - can just get off the road. Let them take another road where people drive slower - if they can find one. Sure, those roads will have been allowed to fall into disrepair, but that’s where the slow drivers belong, anyway.

Yes, there will be a higher accident rate - more casualties, more people who never arrive at their destinations. But that’s only a small proportion of drivers. The rest of us will be zooming along, getting there faster, getting our business done, and benefiting from efficient, unregulated roads.

After all, why should the government have a monopoly on roads? Let the private sector determine what roads we need and where to put them, and then build the ones they deem necessary, based on potential profitability. Those who happen to live in an out-of-the-way place where they don’t put a decent road can move. And if they can’t afford to move - well, if they work hard, someday they might be able to.

What if two competing companies want to build roads in the same area? Let them! Competition is good. Drivers will vote with their wheels. The failing roads will eventually close. And what about companies trying to make a quick buck by creating poor-quality roads on the cheap? They’ll fall apart eventually and people will stop using them, of course.

And how about all the money the government would save by no longer enforcing traffic laws? Think of the tax cuts!

That’s basically what competitive, business-model education reform is all about. It’s what Milton Friedman wrote about in the 1980s in his paper, “Public Schools: Make Them Private,” and it’s what the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice remains dedicated to. It’s what the Broads, Waltons, Gates, Kochs, DeVoses and others are spending large fortunes to achieve. It's what ALEC crafts model legislation to do. It’s what charters and vouchers are stepping stones to.

Let the private sector build and operate schools that get kids from A to B as fast as possible, as determined by scores on standardized tests. If a kid can’t keep up, she can find someplace else to go, like her neighborhood public school. Sure, a large part of its funding will have been diverted to charter schools and vouchers, but that’s the price she must pay for living in a speedy 21st-century society.

Competition is a good model - for some things. It promotes profit-driven innovation, and that can be good. But not all innovations are good. Some are downright terrible, but, through the power of marketing, they still sell well - at least for a while. Think low-tar cigarettes and miracle diet aids - market-driven innovations based on junk science and flawed research, just like so many education reforms being promoted today.

In a free market, everything is out there, the good, the bad, and the deceptive. Is that how we want to run public education?

UPDATE: ALEC is one of the key forces in the privatization of public education. Learn more about what they're up to here.

License to carry

"Please allow my daughter to carry her backpack during the school day. She needs it because she has to carry a lot of books."

That's the note I wrote for my kid to bring to school this morning. I wrote it because she was told by her home room teacher yesterday that she can't carry her backpack around her middle school unless she has a note from home. Carrying a backpack violates a rule. My daughter wasn't sure why the rule exists, but she figured it has something to do with drugs or weapons. After all, she explained, they're not allowed to have water bottles because some kid once brought vodka to school in a water bottle.

Here's what school should be: A place where kids feel safe and respected.

Here's what school shouldn't be: A place where kids feel that adults assume the worst of them and where they are unfairly punished for the infractions of others.

The intention behind such rules is no doubt good, but it's like burning down your house to deal with termites.

Homework, history, privilege, guilt. It's all so complicated.

So did you hear about the school in Georgia that, in an attempt to integrate the social studies and math curricula, wound up sending home a math assignment that asked questions like, "Each tree had 56 oranges. If 8 slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?” and, “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in 1 week?” Yeah, really. That happened.

So here’s a piece exhorting public schools to do a better job with racial sensitivity. It reminded me of another, related issue:  They also need to do a much better job with socioeconomic sensitivity. We all should.

I’m amazed how often my kids have come home from school with assignments like, “Bring in a photograph of your house,” or, “Write about your family vacation.” These are such enormous cans of worms to open. It’s got to be tough on the kid who lives in a cramped apartment in a run-down building or even a shelter, seeing his classmates’ houses and even McMansions; or the kid whose parents are working multiple jobs to support the family and have precious few hours at home, hearing her classmates’ stories of ski trips, summer camp and cruises.

And then there are the assignments that require kids to bring in materials. My kid comes home with a list of stuff he needs to complete a group project; rather than tell him to divvy up the list with the group, I purchase the lion’s share of the list for fear that the expense will be a burden to a kid who really shouldn’t have to bear it. Most of the time, these projects could be simplified to require fewer materials - so why aren’t they?

This is a very socioeconomically diverse school district; don’t teachers think about these things?

But then again, I often don’t, either. I got schooled, so to speak, when one of my kids came home with an assignment to write about an object of importance to his family. This rang no alarm bells with me - it’s an object, not a house or a trip. Every family has some object that matters to them, right?

The afternoon the kids read their essays to the class, my son came home and told me it was his most emotional day at school. One essay had brought most of the class to tears. This student wrote that he had no object about which to write, because he’d been in foster care for a long time and he owned nothing of importance to his family.

That stopped me cold. The word “family” is an alarm bell, too. One I’d forgotten all about.

As it turned out, the kid did an excellent job writing an essay that educated his classmates (and I suppose his teacher, too) about his situation. I will never know what it cost him to do that; whether it was a positive experience for him, or one he would rather have lived without. But I feel pretty damn certain that he should have had a choice; that if he’d wanted to, he could have worked his story into some other essay. He should never have been put on the spot like that.

I hope schools are starting to recognize these problems and give teachers guidance in avoiding these situations.  And I’m rethinking what I tell my kids, too. Because, let’s face it, you can’t expect a kid not to mention her summer vacation to her friends for fear they can’t all afford the same, but you have to teach kids to be aware of their privilege. How do you navigate these tricky waters? Or am I the hopelessly patronizing white liberal trying to pad the world for people whose problems I don't truly understand? I remain unsure.

Wherein I walk a thin line on tenure

As a parent of public school kids and a vocal opponent of what I like to call education reforminess (the corporate-style, data-driven, high-stakes-testing-loving brand of education reform being foisted on the nation by everyone from Bill Gates to Chris Christie to Arne Duncan), I have a confession to make: I feel deeply ambivalent about teacher tenure.

Tenure reform is one of the key planks in the reformy platform. I have no doubt that this is primarily an anti-union measure driven by big-business interests that hate all unions generally and want to privatize education in particular. The Waltons, Kochs, and Gateses of the world would have us believe that American schools are failing in large part because tenure is protecting the jobs of lousy teachers.

This is absurd. Where schools are troubled, kids and their communities are poor, and they’re not getting the support they need. More affluent schools are doing just fine, and the tenure rules are the same in the best-performing and worst-performing schools. To blame the underperformance of troubled schools on tenure is like blaming World War II on Romania. The Allies couldn’t win the war by defeating Romania, and you can’t improve troubled schools by reforming tenure.

But that doesn’t mean tenure isn’t problematic.

I fully appreciate that, as public employees tasked with a job that depends heavily on many outside factors and that is subject to political pressures, teachers need job protection. I also understand that the “tenure is a job for life” argument is a myth, because tenure allows for dismissal after due process. And I believe wholeheartedly that teacher assessment based on students’ standardized test scores is a stupid, stupid idea.

But there seems to be general agreement that the “due process” provided in New Jersey and elsewhere under tenure is burdensome in the extreme. If you can’t nudge a teacher out some other way (and more often than not, you can), and you have to go to the formal process, it’ll take way more time and money than most districts are able or willing to expend in most cases.

Why does this worry me? Because, like most parents of kids in the public school system, among the dozens of wonderful, caring, competent, hard-working teachers my kids have had, I’ve encountered a tenured teacher who was really not cut out for the job. REALLY not cut out for the job.

I know what a lot of people will say: As a parent, I don’t have the whole story. As a parent, I’m not objective. Job termination is not necessarily the right answer. Professional development and/or transfer to a more suitable position might be viable options.

All true. I could be wrong. But I could be right. If I’m not right about this individual, someone somewhere is right about another teacher - someone who isn’t doing the job well and isn’t fired because it’s simply easier and cheaper not to.

Again, let me emphasize - I don’t think this is a systemic problem that is destroying public education. I don’t even think it happens much at all. And I certainly don’t think, as Perth Amboy superintendent Janine Walker Caffery implied in a recently published column, that kids are endangered by druggies and abusers who remain in the classroom because of tenure. In no way do I want to contribute to that brand of “education in crisis” reformy hysteria.

So what to do? The NJEA has made a very sensible tenure reform proposal: Add a fourth year before tenure is earned, and streamline the process for removing a tenured teacher using an arbitration process.   It seems to me that this would address my concerns quite well. Unfortunately, in the current highly charged atmosphere in which teachers are under attack from politicians and the Billionaire Boys Club, it must feel to teachers like capitulation on the part of the union. I fully understand their resentment. The way things are these days, if it were me, I’d be the Fox Mulder of teachers and trust no one.

But I hope that, at some point, we can move beyond the grandstanding and mistrust and do the right thing. It won’t affect the big picture, but every once in a while, kids in a particular classroom might be spared a few hours a week with an unqualified teacher. That would be a good thing.