ANGELA CRIDER NEARY, AUTHOR: BILL CRIDER'S YEARS BEHIND BARS

 ANGELA CRIDER NEARY, AUTHOR: BILL CRIDER'S YEARS BEHIND BARS

Guest Editorial: Assault on Education by Vince N. Spencer

Back before I and Sandi got sick and disabled with our respective health nightmares, we both worked for a local school district. Looking back at it now, from my perspective a decade later since I was last able to work, one can see the beginnings of the current chaos in education. We had these same issues over a decade ago. The difference now is that like minded individuals are banning together to agitate and are being actively encouraged by some elected officials. But, enough how I see things. Below is a guest editorial from an active teacher who is doing his best to deal with the current environment. Please welcome Vince N. Spencer to the blog today.

 

 

Assault on Education by Vince N. Spencer

 

I started out thinking I would write a piece about finding common ground to help render the local education topography less dramatic. The problem with that thinking is that it’s wrong. Public education in the United States has been a hotbed of controversy since Horace Mann created the first school board in the early 19th century.

 

His fight was centered on increased pay for teachers, social equity and using public education to overcome poverty. Teachers are still not paid commensurate with the educational requirements and demands of the profession, social equity is still a concern in the classroom, and school budgets still favor demographics with greater privilege. Political agendas have driven school boards since their inception. Boards have been taken over by extremists before, but not on as wide a scale, and not as quickly.

 

Confrontational scenes at board meetings have become commonplace, and in some instances, even violent. This is not a sudden, spontaneous “awakening” of parents on a national level. It’s a targeted, special-interest narrative driven by obscene amounts of money and a savvy, nationwide social media blitzkrieg of messaging about the evils of teaching equity. The misinformation alone might not have been enough to ensure sweeping victories, but here’s the thing: The fuel behind it, the money, came from special PACs created by right-wing groups with the purpose of destabilizing our educational system. Why do that? Follow the money to the private sector.

 

Follow it to charter schools and other private or corporate-owned institutions that would benefit greatly from destabilizing public education to the point that publicly funded voucher systems might look attractive, despite the questionable constitutionality. There’s a lot of money to be had there, and so a lot of money was fed into the elections across the country. They know these board elections historically have low voter turnout, so securing seats on the boards is a matter of money, marketing and a checklist of easy-to-remember messages. Then bus in enough vocal and “angry” people from outside the district to give the appearance of a massive groundswell of grievances, and suddenly boards across the country fall to activism.

 

It’s a targeted, special-interest narrative driven by obscene amounts of money and a savvy, nationwide social media blitzkrieg.

 

As of this writing, superintendents have been voted out of their jobs by agenda-driven activists across the country in deals that seem to violate transparency rules. The (wrong) belief that critical race theory [CRT] is being taught in classrooms is still alive and well and being fueled by social media accounts that suddenly sprang into existence right around the time Donald Trump brought the graduate-level law class into the national spotlight. The “CRT” issue has become a catch-all that conservatives use to label anything that has to do with student equity. Without stopping for a moment to consider what is best for students, conservative activists have moved forward with their own personal beliefs and agenda and damn the facts. Who will suffer for it? Their own kids — if, in fact, the newly elected board members have ever had kids in the systems they’re attempting to dismantle — and, of course, everyone else’s. 

What’s clear is, once again, teachers are being used as pawns in a political battle fueled by propaganda and arguments filled with so many logical fallacies as to be laughable if it were not for the harm they’re causing students. As a teacher, I see more disrespect between students, more lying, more dishonesty, and more direct confrontation. What I am seeing is a mirror of what is being brought into board meetings. Students are mirroring the behavior of their adult examples, thinking the loudest voice in the room is the one that wins. And that really isn’t the case, is it? We say no. Teachers say no. 

While it is true this kind of behavior can sometimes be expected from children, we expect those raising them to set better examples. We expect integrity to drive the decisions of our boards of education. We don’t expect the loudest and rudest voices in the room to “win.” That’s not the way adults act, is it? 

 

Vince N. Spencer

Monday Markets and Jobs for Writers for 12/23/19

Monday Markets and Jobs for Writers for 12/23/19

Guest Post: Experience Into Mystery Novels by Judy Hogan

Please welcome Judy Hogan back to the blog today … 

Back in the fall of 2004, I realized I wasn’t getting in enough students for my independent creative writing courses to pay my bills, so I searched frantically for a job, and heard of a possible one teaching at an historically black college in Raleigh. I applied and was accepted. I had taught black students before through a library program, but never in a black college. I wasn’t prepared for the reaction of the students as soon as the chairman walked out of this Reading class.

I put into the book Killer Frost which I wrote later exactly what happened that morning:

But when Oscar slipped out the door, everything changed. It was the turn of a girl sitting in the back row. “My name is Sheila Green. I’m a Drama major from Petersburg.” She paused, glanced around. “I hate St. Francis so far. The dorms have roaches, the bathrooms are nasty, the food makes me puke.”

            Penny saw the smirks on the faces of the girls around her. The football boys, as she would come to think of them, laughed but stopped when Penny looked at them.

Sheila had more to say. She looked very happy as she said, I have to go to the restroom. May I be excused now?”

            Then Lashandra, who had already introduced herself, raised her hand.

            “Yes?”

            “Can we leave now? The class ends at 9:00, and Miz Avery always let us go early.”

            Penny glanced at her watch. It was 8:30. “No, Lashandra. This class ends at 9:15.”

            “No, it don’t.” Lashandra had a mulish look.

            “Miz Avery allus left us time to get us our breakfast. She never kept us till 9,” chimed in Sheila.

            Penny reacted blindly before she took time to think. “Sheila and Lashandra, I’m not Ms. Avery. We have only seventy-five minutes together twice a week. I will dismiss class at 9:15. You can use the restroom at 9:15. Now, who’s next?” She nodded to the plump young woman sitting next to Ronny and deliberately didn’t look at Sheila or Lashandra.

            In the book Penny has a good friend Sammie, who also teaches there, and laughs at Penny for not letting her students go to the bathroom, but when I taught that first class, I was on my own. Yet I hit conflict, and conflict is the name of the game in a mystery, so I used it. I added a murder, of the provost, to unravel. I got to know some of the students quite well. Some became serious and studied as I insisted, but others could barely read and write, and one semester of Remedial Reading was not enough. Some of my students I had over and over–three or four times, until they finally flunked out. They tried all kinds of games on me, even suggesting sex for grades. Most of my students did learn to read at college level, but some kept losing, and what kind of future was there for them?

So, in 2012 I published Killer Frost. Later, in 2018, still thinking of those kids, I published The Death of a Hell-Razor. I went back to my fictional college and put in reforms, a new president, a boot camp in the summer to work on reading, writing, and arithmetic.  They also had the opportunity to be interns to various college employees, cooks, plumbers, electricians, and a new drama coach put on the play Fences by August Wilson using students both those doing well and those still failing. Yet the college did better by most of the students. Here was a section of The Death of a Hell-Razor, pretty close to what actually happened in a teacher conference;

She was reviewing her notes when Tony Stone knocked on the open door and looked around the corner to see if she was in.

            “Miz Weaver, can I ast you somethin’?”

            With another month of classes to go, Tony was averaging a low D.  He’d had a C until the mid-term exam, which he’d flunked.  “Come in.  What’s up?”

            He came around her desk and sat down carefully in the chair to her left.  “See, Miz Weaver, I’m in that play we be doin’ with Miz Koval?”

            “I know about it.  Fences.  You play Cory, right?”

            “Yes, ma’am, and Miz Koval–she say I do real good at my part.  I play football–Cory does–and I do, too, here at St. Francis, long as I can keep my grades up.”  He smiled.  He had a lovely smile.

            “But, Miz Weaver, my grades–Prez say I can’t be in no play lessen my grades are C or better.”

            “You don’t have a C in my classes now.  You did until the mid-terms, but you flunked both of them.  Right now you have Ds in both Reading and Pre-Composition.”  She waited.

            He frowned.  “I knows.  Ima do better now.  See, last week we had religion week, and I heard this preacher speak to us yesterday, and it made me think.  I knows I needs to do better.”  His shoulders sagged.

            “What will that take, Tony?  How will you raise your grade?”

            He smiled again.  Here was this big muscular young man.  He’d been at St. Francis two years.  So far, he’d flunked all his English classes and was on academic probation.  If he didn’t do better this spring semester of his sophomore year, he’d be sent home.  Oscar said he thought Tony’s main problem was motivation.  The new president of St. Francis, Jared Marlowe, agreed with Oscar, and had said to let him be in August Wilson’s play Fences, when Tony did well at the try-outs.  But Penny wondered if that had been wise.  Tony was explaining how he’d bring his grades up.  “See, the preacher man said some of us be like the little pig that built his house of straw.  We be like that when we don’t listen in class.  I know you bees a real good teacher, Miz Weaver, and tries to help me, but sometimes I don’t listen.  So Ima listen now.”  He smiled again.  He was quite handsome when he smiled, if only his ears didn’t stick straight out.  She knew he got teased about his ears.

            “That’s a start, Tony, but it takes steady work, too.”

            “Oh, I knows, Miz Weaver.  That preacher said it needed work, yes, ma’am, every day.  See the second little pig, he built his house of sticks.  He listened, okay, but he didn’t do his homework; sometimes he didn’t even come to class.”

            Penny nodded.  This seemed promising.  He even understood the metaphor, which was hard for most of her students.  “Yes?”

            “Okay, then the preacher told us how we could build us a house of bricks, and then we could pass our classes and be a success.”  He grinned.

            Penny waited.  Let him say it in his own words.  She didn’t want to flunk him.  It would be the third time for both his courses with her, but could he change?  She thought he had the intelligence, but, like so many of her students, he had none of the consistent study habits that he needed for college.

But one of the students who had given Penny a hard time in that first class, Sheila, took well to acting. Here she is, talking with Penny. This is imaginary, but in real life some of the those early difficult students made big changes and began coming to me for advice.

“Miz Weaver, I know Rose is sad and angry, but when I read stuff like that, I feel like laughing.  I mean it ain’t funny.  It’s tragic, Miz Koval say.  It be a big scene, and I got to get it right.  She say I do the other part better, but when he talk about when he laugh and it reaches all the way down to the bottom of his shoes, I can’t say my next lines.  I want to cry or laugh, but Rose is angry.  She say, ‘Maybe you ought to go on and stay down there with her ... if she a better woman than me.’  I can’t seem to do it right.

            “Then when he say, ‘I done locked myself into a pattern trying to take care of you all that I forgot about myself,’ I get mad, but maybe too mad?  Rose say, ‘What the hell was I there for?  That was my job, not somebody else’s.’  It make me so mad I want to cry, so mad I can’t say my lines right, you know?  They won’t come out right.”

            Sheila began to cry.  Penny moved over to the big armchair where Sheila was sitting.  “Maybe you needed to be mad, needed to cry?  About something in your life?  Then that jumps into your mind when you try to act it?”

            Sheila cried harder.  Penny found a clean paper towel in her pocket and handed it to her.  Then she waited, patting her back.

            “I don’t know,” Sheila sobbed.  “I want to do Rose perfect.  It be my big chance, and Miz Koval has friends from Yale who might be comin’ down.  It might be my big break.  I always wanted to be an actor.  But it bees so hard sometimes.”

            “I suppose anything worth doing is going to be hard sometimes.”

            “I know.  I ain’t afraid of work.  But my feelings got so tangled up lately.”

            “Acting, like writing, like any art, is more about feelings than anything else.  Okay, let’s try this.  I’ll be the one playing Rose who can’t quite get her lines right.  You be my friend trying to help me.  Now what would you tell me?”

            Sheila looked dismayed, shook her head, tears standing in her eyes.  She didn’t say anything for a few minutes, and then she said, “Okay.  What would I say?”  Her tears were forgotten.  “I’d say, ‘This ain’t that hard.  You already mad, and mad is mostly what she’s feeling.  You can use that same feeling, let it get in behind your words.  If you laugh–well, some people do laugh when they real angry–and if you cry, well, anger can make you cry, too.”

            Penny said, “Good, that’s the idea.”

Judy Hogan ©2019

Judy Hogan’s newest book is The Death of a Hell-Razor: The Ninth Penny Weaver Mystery.. In 2015 she decided to set up Hoganvillaea Books, her own publishing imprint, in order to publish more of her mysteries The Sands of Gower: The First Penny Weaver Mystery was her first release under this new imprint. Her Penny Weaver series takes up interracial community issues. Most of the novels take place in the central North Carolina fictional village of Riverdell, but three take place on the Gower Peninsula in Wales where Penny meets and falls in love with Kenneth Morgan, a Welsh Detective Inspector. She has published seven volumes of poetry and three non-fiction works with independent presses. She is also a small farmer, a community activist, currently trying to stop coal ash dumping in her community. She lives in Moncure, N.C., near Jordan Lake.

Monday Markets and Jobs for Writers for November 21, 2016 (The Practicing Writer)

 Monday Markets and Jobs for Writers for November 21, 2016 (The Practicing Writer)

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