Prince Street Projects

This is a rant. The children I once bled and sewed and shot full of antigens deserve better.

If you look up Stella Wright Homes on Google images, you will see photos of explosive demolitions.

"My late mother (left) came up from Monmouth County with my sister Sue Ann (right) to witness the festive demolition of the last four buildings of the Stella Wright Homes (background) on a bright spring day."

That's the caption to the second picture that comes up when you Google "Stella Wright Homes."

A couple of ladies from out of town, both with dust masks, are standing two blocks away from the neighborhood, minutes before it was destroyed.

***

I spent years working here on a mobile medical unit, the "Big Blue Bus." We parked in the center of the projects, surrounded by 7 buildings, 13 stories each. Stella Wright Homes officially held 1206 single-family units, though the interpretation of "single-family" gets stretched a bit in areas with scarce resources.

I saw people shot. I saw grandmothers doing everything they could to keep their clans together. I saw rats the size of Kansas. I saw a child with Apert's syndrome cared for by a father who made sure my falafel was ready at lunch time, but not because I asked him.

I saw a fireman run into a building with the child's father trying to rip off the fireman's jacket so that he, the father, could charge into the monstrous smoke to save his children. The firefighter wrestled the father off, and charged into the same smoke devil I could not force myself to enter.

The child came out limp, lifeless. I went with the child to the ER, covered with soot, soaked from the firehoses. The child survived. I believe in miracles.

I saw mothers die of AIDS, gallantly holding together their clan until they could no longer hold on.

I saw neighbors share asthma inhalers, food, clothes, furniture, money.

If I am ever in a position where I truly lose everything, I pray to God that my neighbors are as generous as those in the Prince Street Projects.

I heard laughter more raucous than any heard at a burlesque, and wails more heartworn than those of King Lear.

We pushed vaccinations, lanced boils, pushed vaccinations, treated strep, pushed vaccinations, diagnosed AIDS, more vaccinations, discussed various OTC treatments, shot some more vaccinations, asked some not to call us "motherfuckers," pushed vaccinations some more, cleaned out ears, sewed wounds, and spent a lot of wasted breath telling people things Medicaid insisted we tell them.

We got paid to do this.

In return we got food and love and stories and love and hugs and love and trust and love and pictures and love and invitations and love and love and love and love and love.

I used to ask pediatric residents if they could imagine white people living in the projects. If you cannot, you are racist.

Turns out most of us are racist. This surprises my paler friends.

***

I do not like Arne Duncan, our Secretary of Education. OK, I really, really dislike him, and I am not one used to disliking people. While I can be an annoying crank, I am not good at bearing grudges.

The dislike is more visceral than cerebral, though my cortex is slowly finding him every bit as unlovable as my limbus.

My instincts are usually pretty good, but this one puzzled me. Yes, Duncan's positions annoy me, but it was more than that.

I think I get it now.

Mr. Duncan prides himself on his history of ending a few neighborhood schools. I am not going to argue the particulars here. A school can become a disaster. Neighborhoods can spiral out of control. Our sense of order in a well-financed suburban neighborhood defies the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

Maybe a school deserves to die, maybe not--but anyone who can cut the financing to a neighborhood school with more pride than sadness deserves scorn.

We cannot continue to pretend that inner-city children are just the victims of poor schooling. We cannot continue to pretend that everything can be fixed with education, that we all can be princes and princesses.

I met a lot of decent, hard-working parents in Stella Wright Homes. I met a lot of decent, hard-working teachers in schools that served Stella Wright Homes. A few were cooked, true, but they did not head to Newark for that reason.

You tell me how to teach a child that cannot breathe because she is wheezing, that could not sleep because of lack of heat, that has moved to 4 new schools in two years so the clan can keep two steps ahead of the landlord, that has pain from an ear infection that cannot be treated, that is hungry.

Try teaching on an empty belly.

And the amazing thing? Crushing poverty does not crush kindness. Crushing poverty does not crush curiosity. Crushing poverty does not crush hope.

It does, however, crush the snot out of standardized test scores.

Lincoln logs

In the past couple of days I got to play tug-o'-war with a striped bass (he won), watch a loon chase spearing, and listen to the fog horn go on for hours--it is spring in Cape May.

Last night my brother surprised me with a few gifts. I slipped past fifty when I wasn't looking.

Rock'Em Sock'Em Robots. Labyrinth. A 007 spy camera/gun. A 1959 World Almanac. A classic rod hockey game (nobody ever beat me). A Tinkertoy set. Joe Pepitone, Jerry Koosman, and Tug McGraw baseball cards.

None of it expected, none of it deserved, all of it cherished.

This morning I built a cabin out of Lincoln logs. The container has both a girl and a boy (the boy with an odd expression on his face). Some of the pieces have been chewed on by a puppy who has long died of old age.

***

My Lincoln logs are made of wood. Some fit together better than others. Every single piece came from a tree, and had to be shaped.

I built a small cabin with a window and a door. I forgot to put in a log. I had to take apart a wall, and when I did, it fell down.

No reset button. Just Newtonian physics. A little bit of frustration.

I rebuilt my cabin. A lot of satisfaction.

***

Plastics are cheap, and easily shaped. (That's why they're called plastics.) Plastikos: moldable. About a century ago we figured out how to mold oil.

Ben, I got to talk to you.
I'm just going to say one word to you.
Plastics.

Very low doses of bisphenol A, found in many plastics, prevents chromosomes from lining up right in rats. It has been associated with breast cancer. It has been associated with prostate disease. BPA mimics estrogen.

A year or two this made big news because you can find it in baby bottles. But we knew that already. And we did it anyway.

***

My daughter loves to fish, but will only fish for what she can eat. She lives in New Jersey. This means she can no longer fish for bluefish. Or striped bass. Or eel. Or white perch.

She can eat one fluke a month, and one weakfish. We'll catch our fluke in June, our weakfish in July.

I'm not supposed to eat bluefish more than 6 pounds. I'm already addled. I'm no longer reproducing. I'm eating bluefish.

***

My grandfather was born in 1898. He could eat all the bluefish he wanted. He lived a long life, and finally died in the 1990's. He worked until a a couple of weeks before he died.

He never drank water from a Nalgene bottle, and if he ever had the opportunity to drink from Nalgene, water would not have been his first choice.

Plastics were not invented until he was 11 years old.

Toys were made out of wood because that was what was available. Wood is still available. Plastic is cheaper.

***

Imagine if the Soviet Union sold us baby bottles that harmed out children. Don't worry, it's Dow, GE Plastics, and Sunoco, not the Commies.

BPA was developed in the 1930s, specically as a syntheitc estrogen. Now the States make over 2 billion poinds a year of this stuff.

An estrogen mimic acts like estrogen. Wowzers, stop the presses!

I am a science teacher--hundreds of children have passed through my classes, and I bet not one of them worries about BPA.

Something is wrong.

***

Lincoln logs did not contain BPA in the 1960s--they were made of wood. In the 1970's, plastic replaced the wood because, of course, plastic is cheaper, and in our culture cheaper trumps just about everything.

Lincoln logs are wood again. The fish are still not safe, but at least a few people are aware of the problem. So this summer my daughter and I will catch a fluke or two, then maybe play Skeeball to replace fishing.

Should either of my children choose to have children, they will know what wood feels like.

I've lost face(book)

As mentioned last week, I saw Ian Jukes give an evangelical rip-snortin' talk last week, and he fired me up. I'm bouncing around like a jackrabbit on 'roids, trying to engage my lambs, even stooping to using chartreuse font on a blazing pink background.

(I think I sprained my left eye this week.)

One of his suggestions was to try new technologies, to engage in the same world our children now live in, to tweet, to friend, and to do all sorts of abominations that require converting nouns into verbs.

So I twaddled on Twitter, giggled on Google, blabbed on blogs, and (may God save my soul) joined Facebook.

Mr. Jukes has some wonderful ideas, and jumping headfirst into the digerati may be among them, but those of us on the short end of the mortal stick spend our hours like misers. I only have so many left.

If "friending" someone sounds offensive, do not join Facebook. Unless you friend someone (and I suppose they have to friend you back) playing on Facebook is as exciting as gazing at your own navel.

Untangling yourself from the Facebook world requires several steps, including a mandatory step explaining why you are leaving. For each possible reason you might choose to leave, a Facebook popup box will give a smarmy reply as to why you should stay. I do not like talking to machines, and I especially do not like them talking back.

The final step requires copying a barely legible pair of words.

The words I was required to copy to abandon the Facebook world?

this Prison

You cannot make this stuff up.....

Grace and gravity

WACKADOODLE: "Well, why is there gravity?"
ME: "I've no idea, that's a religious question."
WACKADOODLE: "It's not a religious question! Why is there gravity?"
ME: "OK, maybe not a religious question, but it's one science cannot answer."

Today in class

I love my wackadoodles, the students swimming in the lowest depths of the class rankings, who keep questioning everything, a prescription for disaster in public schools.

This particular wackadoodle unearthed one of my prejudices. If a question worth answering cannot be answered by science, I label it religious. Some thoughts I should keep to myself.

***

Teaching (on a good day) reflects the fine line between ordered cortical thought and the mad, wise ramblings of the limbus. I have been reading Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil, and I suspect that that's where my odd assertion about religion popped up.

I heard gravity, started thinking grace, and, not expecting the question, gave an unexpected answer.

I might consider rediscovering my frontal lobe.

I am hired by the town to teach a curriculum tailored to meet the requirements of the state. As long as public school remains public I am OK with this. (I trust the collective wisdom of the good folks in Bloomfield over the maniacal machinations of Bill Gates or Mike Feinberg or their puppet Arne Duncan.)

You cannot teach science without bumping up against limits of knowledge.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

Simone Weil

"What it is to know" is not limited by science, especially by the narrow view of what passes for science education here in the States.

Ah, look, there's an amoeba....and there's a corpse plant....over here is a yeti crab.

If you can look at a yeti crab and not wonder at the whole absurd and loving complexity of the biosphere, you may want to reconsider teaching children--they are far more interested by the fact that a yeti crab exists than its molecular make-up, and questions of existence put you on dangerous ground in a science classroom.

Charles Darwin was closer to the truth than we give him credit for.

And gravity? This inexplicable pull every object has towards every other object in the universe?


It may be a religious question after all.

The flying dancers are from the North Shore Civic Ballet.
The yeti crab is from the Pacific Ocean.

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust...."

April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.

T.S. Eliot

My seeds are sprouting. I put seeds in peat moss, water them, and the miracle happens.

I do nothing to deserve this. Nothing.

Grace.

***

We have long lost our commons. We are now close to losing anything public.

We are heading towards a brand new day in education. The corporate interests are winning. The monied class is winning.

Public is an honorable word, derived from the Latin publicus, which sprang from an even older word poplicus, a variant of populus, or "people." Public literally means "open to all in the community."

Still, a tiny portion of my town's public monies goes to buying peat pots and seed starter, lights and seeds. My kids get to plant in one of the few remaining public spaces left--school.

I will plant most of my seedlings on private land because we no longer have a commons. Back when folks knew that land meant food, this caused concerned. Today the connection of food to land seems as quaint as telling time using a sundial.

If I had to give up watches or sundials, I'd give up the watch. I own a working sundial. I do not own a functioning watch.

***

I dreamed last night of death, as I usually do in spring. The sun swings ridiculously quick to the north these days. Everything I do that matters requires sunlight.

Everything.

Without an influx of energy, things fall apart. At my age they fall apart anyway. My telomeres, cellular hour glasses, keep shrinking.

I pretend otherwise. I am bathed in light from my monitor, powered by coal stripped off the face of this Earth by huge machines powered by petroleum.

Graceless.

***

If you want to keep a plant alive in a classroom, you need to pay attention. You need light, you need water. Our breaths provide the rest.

I can rattle on about cytochromes, about chemiosmotic potentials and ATP synthase. I can make my students mouth off fancy phrases--we have post-graduate education classes designed to teach me how to keep my charges in check, to convince them that testable knowledge holds value, that they need the diploma to be complete human beings.

Preparing young people for success in life is not just a moral obligation of society. It's an economic imperative.

Arne Duncan

I know a lot of very bright adults. I know a lot of very educated adults. Sometimes an adult can be both. The most interesting adults I know all know where food comes from.

The most interesting adult I know outside of my immediate clan never finished high school. Don't worry, Arne, he's done his part to support our economy. He's produced far more than any superintendent or politician ever has, though he had help from the bees and the sun and the land.

He's a farmer, and a good one.

***

Farmers know death, and farmers know grace.
Hard to accept one without the other.

***

New Jersey tests all of its biology students in May. By then, a few of my students will have bean stalks hanging from their bonsai bean plants struggling to survive in a classroom.

If you own land and cannot afford the time to plant a bean, something is fundamentally wrong. People sense that things are fundamentally wrong, and we have good drugs for this--Zoloft will make you feel better, and might even help you on the state exam.

It won't, however, make you a better gardener.

When things settle down in this part of the world, when we remember what made our land and The Great Experiment such a source of joy, we may get less excited about telomeres, and more excited about beans again. Death will no longer be such a surprise.

Planting a bean in class will not help any of my students pass a standardized test.

I do it anyway.

Guerrilla gardening

Spring, finally.

Again.

I tend to wander away from the monitor once the sun heads north. In January puny words sustain me--in April germinating seeds do. I will become more scarce here as the sun arcs higher in the sky.

Leslie and I wandered along the edge of the world again today--a small flock of loons hunting by the ferry jetty called to each other. A bit later, a crow grumbled at us as we approached.

Crows never grumble at us in February.

***

Not so long ago I caught one of my students artistically applying ink to a mailbox, which would be fine if the mailbox was his. It is not.

I live in the same town I work, which is unusual these days in north Jersey, so reporting the child to the authorities was not in anyone's best interests.

Not saying I did, not saying I didn't.

Yesterday I planted basil and zinnias and oregano and cosmos. Today I put some garlic cloves in the ground. Tomorrow I'll plant more tomatoes or maybe peppers, egg plants or maybe nicotianas, who knows.

I'll run out off ground long before my interest wanes.

My neighbors mostly plant grass. Not the good kind like wheat or oats or corn. Kentucky blue grass (which would be interesting if it were truly blue). Chewings fescue. Bermudagrass. All clipped before they give off a hint of sexuality.

Straight. Green. Inedible.

At least I can eat my dandelions and wild purslane.

***

Should the authorities wish to pursue my graffiti artist, he may pay a fine. He may spend some time in the youth house. It will cost money, my money, and not much gets solved.

I have a better idea. I am short of land, but not of seeds.

Guerrilla gardening.

***

Guerrilla gardening is like graffiti, except it results in something useful.

Find a piece of land, and surreptitiously plant something. In these parts, think Indian. Corn, pumpkin, squash, blueberries, beans, sunflower--these were all here before the Europeans came.

The Europeans destroyed a lot of things, but they have yet to destroy the climate. (Give us credit, though, we're working on it.) If you plant a pumpkin in New Jersey, it will grow. So will a sunflower or a bean or a blueberry bush. They will grow if loved, but better yet, they will grow if neglected.

Pick a property with an absentee owner. We have plenty here in Bloomfield.
Plant a pumpkin seed.
Wait.

The child gets to buck the system. The neighborhood gets a few pumpkins. Passers-by get a chance to smile at a misplaced sign that God loves us even when we're not kneeling in a pew.

I know that God or nature or life or whatever you want to call all this matters, and I know I cannot understand any of it. That's as much as I know anything, and it's enough.

We plant seeds in the classroom, and they grow. The children are amazed, as they should be. (I am amazed, too, every time it happens, as I should be.)

I do not, of course, advise my students to break the law. I do not push them into lives of crime, sowing illicit vegetables around town.



Still, John Chapman is one of my few heroes, and I would be proud if one of my students emulated him.

Planting season

In the next hour or two, I will be filling up cut-up orange juice containers with peat moss and vermiculite, dropping a brandywine tomato in this one, a Pruden's purple in that one, and start the cycle again.

Today I saw Ian Jukes speak--he's dynamic, bright, and he shared evidence that today's children, the native digital generation, have altered minds.

I used to work on the Newark docks, he claimed to be a pro football player in the Canadian Football League (though a look at the all-time BC Lions roster doesn't mention a Jukes), so I cut him more slack than I would most pedagogues, and even though he quoted Thomas Friedman a bit and took a cheap shot at Clifford Stoll, most of what he said made sense.

The one thing that perked my interest was his aside that the news that children are different today than a generation ago, truly different in a neurological way, frightened him. He didn't elaborate, and why should he? He makes decent money chatting it up with high-tech futuristic sorts, and he's evangelical in his approach to education, but still, he said it.

I hope someday to pursue it with him, but his blog The Committed Sardine boasts over 78,000 followers, and I have 12, so my leverage is a bit limited.

If I did ever share a pint or two with him, here's what I'd say. Yes, children are different, yes, technology has a huge role in our lives, yes, all this visual noise is uber-cool but....

If I want fresh brandywines and Pruden's purple tomatoes this year, I still have to plant seeds in March.

If I want just-pulled-out-of-the-mud fresh clams, well, I will have to climb into my kayak, head towards my sekrit place, and rake them up.

If I want music that happens to reflect my limbic state at the moment, well, I have to pick up my guitar, or one of the many scattered harmonicas, or a flute or a trumpet, and play.

No way around it.

My kids are still my kids, altered brains or not, and brandywine tomatoes are still my tomatoes, as long as I am young enough to stoop in the garden.

Which gets to the real point--I plant in March for returns in August and September. I do not believe summer is coming, because my imagination always fall short this time of year. I plant by faith.

One of these years, what I plant in the spring may need to be harvested by someone else in the fall.

That's the way it is. And a CPU can't change that.



Two follow-ups:
Mr. Jukes replied in less than an hour. He's a mensch.

More important, I tried using some of his stuff--and my class woke up, engaged as though it was the first week of school. He's onto something. More as I learn more.