The riddle of education: Why is it the last priority?

by Alexandra Marshall
March 2, 2009

ALTHOUGH it wasn't favored to win, and it didn't, "The Class" was film critics' "should win" pick for best foreign-language film. Because this deeply engaging movie addresses the subject of teaching underserved public school students, it points to the obvious larger question of why education itself so often should win, but doesn't.

In the compromised version of the economic stimulus package, it was reported by the Los Angeles Times, education spending was "one of the main sticking points" in securing the necessary votes. While protecting funds for other needs such as healthcare, housing, transportation, green energy, infrastructure, the auto industry, and even banking, why cut education? Why are teaching and learning so routinely deemed expendable when everyone agrees they shouldn't be?
In a bracingly effective way, "The Class" confronts this riddle with the vivid example of a middle school French teacher in an immigrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris. FranÁois Bégaudeau is this teacher as well as the author of "Entre les Murs," the acclaimed novel/memoir on which the film is closely based. Onscreen, he and his actual students make the hectic "ordinaire tragi-comique" of the book three-dimensional. And under the sly direction of Laurent Cantet, their fragmented classroom interactions yield a film celebrated as "seamless" by actor Sean Penn, who headed the jury awarding it the Cannes Festival's Palme d'Or for best picture.

An English-language edition of the book will be published next month by Seven Stories Press, and though the American Academy failed to give the film its highest recognition, perhaps this vigorous translation by Linda Asher will recharge the conversation in a substantive way. "The Class" dramatizes many issues of universal importance, as in the example of its faculty meetings about discipline problems, when a teacher protests the premise of a system to punish "uncivil" behavior by arguing, "I'm sorry, but among the bad kids there are lots who are not poor students at all."
I know the anguish from my one year as a middle school teacher in a rural New Hampshire district where I taught first-, second-, and third-year French to 125 students a day. Trained in the so-called Direct Method, I was taught never to speak a word of English in the classroom. But in late October, this pristine strategy yielded the absurd revelation - "What's this 'je suis'?" a student whispered to me in the corridor - that I'd failed to convey how to say "I am"! This explains my permanent admiration for those who have persisted in this brutal line of work, but it also underscores my enduring conviction: There is no more important work than to help adolescents learn to express themselves - in any language.

"I like French class even if the teacher is no good," says Khoumba, one of the girls in Bégaudeau's class. To clarify their power struggle, she adds, "People say I am mean-tempered, it's true, but it depends if I get respect."

Another student says about French class, "Sometimes I like it, and sometimes I think it is totally useless to wonder about questions that have no answers." A majority of the kids in "The Class" speak other languages at home, and when one admits after class, "I don't understand anything about what we're doing," Bégaudeau tries to comfort her but feels "like a doctor reassuring a hypochondriac who's really sick."
The film version of "The Class" begins with Bégaudeau impatiently admonishing his students with a melodramatic calculation of all the minutes that are wasted by their not making productive use of the full hour. Khoumba notes with an impertinent accuracy that the class slot is only 55 minutes long anyway, to which the chastened teacher proves capable of replying, "Good point."

His classroom is not a stifled dictatorship but a nurtured meritocracy, is the point, and this provision of opportunity leads back to why it's wrong when school funds are bargained away in exchange for votes. Education is the "should win" in the economic stimulus package because all the other spending categories are dependent upon it. And if this is the problem, as the politicians are finding, it's also the solution.

SAVING EL SALVADOR 

by Alexandra Marshall
March 9, 2009

I visited El Salvador in the month before the infamous tipping-point killings, by government forces, of six Jesuit professors, their housekeeper, and her daughter. The war was in its ninth year, and the purpose of our delegation was to meet with representatives from both sides. I don’t speak Spanish, but I heard the discrepancy between the language of those in power – the President and an Army Colonel downgrading the “guerra civil” to “el conflicto” – and the savage stories told by everyone else.

It is no longer disputed that the criminal war in El Salvador was paid for by the American government, nor that, in a country the size of Massachusetts, there were 75,000 mostly civilian deaths. A peace agreement was reached in 1992, but to this day I carry a 5-colónes note in my wallet, a bill with little monetary value and rendered obsolete in 2001, when the country’s official currency became the U.S. dollar.

American intervention has persisted with steady support for the ruling hard-right ARENA party, but this week’s presidential election could change things. The opposition FMLN has a center-left candidate in Mauricio Funes, whose broad appeal has given him a lead of up to 20% in the polls. Still, his victory is by no means secure. A Salvadoran who went home for the first time in a decade in order to vote in the January round of municipal and legislative elections told me, “People say only one bullet can stop Funes from winning.”

Mauricio Funes is a 49 year-old former political journalist whose mentors included two of those six slaughtered Jesuits. Another influence Funes cites in interviews is his older brother, Roberto, a student leader who was kidnapped and killed in 1980, at the start of the war. It is widely noted that Funes is the first FMLN candidate for president never to have been an armed combatant. As a journalist he drew a large and committed television and radio audience because of his ability to appeal, in that polarized society, across the traditional divides.

What this means is that, just as people around the world monitored America’s recent historic presidential election results, many will be watching next Sunday’s vote in El Salvador with a similar mixture of hope and apprehension.

In the last Salvadoran presidential election five years ago, the Bush administration generated fear among the electorate with explicit statements that an FMLN victory could affect the status of Salvadorans living in the U.S. This proved to be a powerful threat, since these temporary residents send back $3 billion in annual “remittances” that support 22% of Salvadoran families.  

This time, there is hope for a different outcome. Letters have been written to President Obama by members of Congress, urging him to pledge to work with whichever candidate wins the election rather than to seek to influence the vote. A similar letter to Secretary-of-State Clinton warns of a highly politicized atmosphere charged by partisan interests, and it contains a September 2008 report citing pre-election instances of increased violence, fraud, and media manipulation, observations endorsed by more than 200 concerned North American academics familiar with Central and Latin American politics. This effort was initiated by Victor Perla, Jr., a Salvadoran-American professor of political science from the University of California at Santa Cruz, who told me in a recent phone conversation, “The point is that political campaigns based on slander, false information, and voter intimidation are a form of electoral fraud, because they limit a voter’s ability to freely choose.”

“Democracy vs. Authoritarianism,” is the shorthand for Mauricio Funes’s promise to bring “the change that all of you have dreamed of,” and at campaign rallies the broad coalition he has built is already demonstrating its strength in numbers. With the election of President Obama providing pointed reminders of our own Civil War, we in this country have now been given an opportunity to reckon with the injustices of our own violent history. El Salvador’s ongoing violence makes its need for reconciling voices more immediate, and Mauricio Funes is offering a uniting voice on behalf of the people. With a word from Washington, the United States could offer another: a word, for a change, of support for those people.

by Alexandra Marshall
March 16, 2009

The eternal life of Rabbit Angstrom assures his author’s too, but this is no substitute for knowing that, in a sequence of rooms at the top of a North Shore house with a wide view of the horizon line, John Updike is at work on something new.

True, a book of stories is scheduled for June, and from a volume of poems to be published next month a selection appears in the most recent New Yorker. But the final page proofs he signed off on, after 55 years in the magazine, are in last week’s issue. There is welcome consolation in the unanimous tributes, and Thursday his publishers are hosting in his honor a literary gathering at the New York Public Library. A day sooner, all of his fans can celebrate, by reading him, on the anniversary of his birth.  

In the days after his death in late January, as a deliberate means of keeping his voice alive and well on the page, I re-read his first two books in their slim antique 50-cent Fawcett Crest paperback editions. The 16 stories in The Same Door had all been published in The New Yorker during Updike’s first five years out of college, but the collection was even preceded in 1958 by the publication of his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair.  “Put his name down as someone whose books you will want to read, this year and in the future,” proclaimed The Houston Post. The New York Herald Tribune said about the novel, “It is startling as well as gratifying that one so young should prove, within a few pages, to write so well and be so wise.”  

His second story in that first collection, called “Ace in the Hole,” already introduces a protagonist who isn’t living up to the glory days of his all-time success as a high school basketball star. Fred “Ace” Anderson seems a prototype for Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, whose only claim (until becoming a literary all-star with the publication of Rabbit, Run in 1960) was local fame for twice setting the B-league’s scoring record.  With Updike’s own career getting off to such a slam-dunk start, perhaps Rabbit became the lucky charm Updike was carrying in his pocket to protect himself against the curse of peaking too soon.

As if taking nothing for granted, a new novel in the Rabbit series would appear at the beginning of every decade, and even after Harry collapses in Florida during a pick-up game and dies at age 56 in Rabbit at Rest, the sequel Rabbit Remembered made a surprise arrival with the new millennium. “He didn’t really have a calling, after high school,” was the bleak summary definition that Rabbit’s creator seemed determined to defy, and did.

In Updike’s series of writing rooms he had desks dedicated to fiction or poetry or criticism or essays, so while Rabbit is now relinquished, readers will continue to celebrate this prodigious diligence and its sparkling output. In last month’s anniversary issue of The New Yorker is a selection from the more than 800 Updike contributions to the magazine, a collection of “Picked-Up Pieces” by which to remember him. Or look back to an issue from last October, where the author searches, in a “Life and Letters” piece called “A Desert Encounter,” for a prized hat feared lost. “At this latitude, the elderly need to shelter their heads,” Updike knows, so when “an older man” happens by to both complicate and simplify the search, a perplexed but authentic kindness – no eastern irony, which “doesn’t carry across the Mississippi” – emerges between them.

This instance of the hierarchy of aging, with all its befuddled humor, recalls the other pair of old guys from Updike’s first novel published exactly half a century earlier. In my own first reading of The Poorhouse Fair I was too inexperienced to appreciate the critical distinction he makes on the second page, but now I see both its wisdom and the sad truth of its application to the loss of this writer. “Also, there was something in the relationship of Hook’s teaching the younger man how to be old; Hook at 94 had been old a third of his life, whereas Gregg, just 70, had barely begun.”

Correction: In last week’s column, it was Professor Hector (not Victor) Perla, Jr. whose work I cited with appreciation.

Alexandra Marshall is a guest columnist and author of “The Court of Common Pleas” and four other novels.

by Alexandra Marshall
March 23, 2009

The pair of new novelists had just been granted their first house mortgage when the banker leaned across his desk to ask, “But what is it that writers do exactly? I’ve always wondered.” This was long enough ago that everybody knew what bankers did, though these days that’s the better question.

It seems today that not even bankers can coherently explain what they’ve been up to, so don’t ask me to. My mother worked as a teller in the family bank on the main street of their small town, and as a conservative child I was given my weekly allowance in coins that I would divide up into envelopes marked “movies” or “candy” or whatever higher-priced item I was saving up for. Learning how to budget while in elementary school doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m still good at it, but I do get the concept. What it is that bankers “do exactly” seems not to be what they’ve been doing lately.

That fiction writers “make things up” is the usual definition, and while it might accurately describe our improvised reply to that banker, it’s not what the real work consists of. What all writers do – or try to – is what was exquisitely achieved in the #1 bestselling Dreams from My Father, where the admittedly unique author’s note on its newest paperback edition reads “Barack Obama was elected President of the United States on November 4, 2008.”

First published in 1995, Dreams tells the classic coming-of-age story of a young man’s journey of discovery, and this hard-won wisdom is present and evident in the man he has become. “Use words!” is how diligent parents and teachers coax children to reconcile conflict, and in Dreams we see Obama urged on by his mother. “‘If you want to grow into a human being,’ she would say to me, ‘you’re going to need some values.’” Honesty – Fairness – Straight talk – Independent judgment – these were her values. About his absent father’s imprint she would tell him, “‘But your brains, your character, you got from him.’”

The subtitle of Obama’s Dreams is “A Story of Race and Inheritance,” and the book’s journey is launched in “Origins” when, with “her face as grim as a hearse,” Obama’s mother challenges him, “Don’t you think you’re being a little casual about your future?” She’d felt for his father “a love that would survive disappointment,” but the demand she is making of her adolescent son is to grow up.

In the second section called “Chicago” he begins to find through community activism “the sense of place and purpose” he was looking for, but he also sees that he has to know his father to locate “the attributes he sought in himself.”

The final section “Kenya” brings Obama to the graves of his father and grandfather, where he recognizes the faith “that pulsed in the heart of the first African village and the first Kansas homestead – a faith in other people.”

And so the question he returns home with is this: “How do we transform mere power into justice, mere sentiment into love?” He feels “modestly encouraged, believing that so long as the questions are still being asked, what binds us together might somehow, ultimately, prevail.”

There’s no surprise ending when Dreams reveals Barack Obama to be the self-knowing, self-accepting grown-up man – with his father’s brains and character and his mother’s values – whom America elected and instantly entrusted with the critical task, among others, of rescuing our country from its self-inflicted chaos. Last week’s chorus of outrage against the AIG bonuses was given fiercest expression by Obama himself, whose ability to “Use words!” to articulate anger – that fundamental childhood lesson – is a corrective step on our collective behalf, especially in these times of economic near catastrophe.

The inspiring personal story of Barack Obama has quickly boosted the status of community organizing and raised the profiles of Kenya, Kansas, Hawaii, Indonesia, and Chicago, plus all the schools he ever attended. And while his official title is Commander-in-Chief – Banker-in-Chief too now, of necessity – his honest use of language to create identity in Dreams from My Father is what makes him our Writer-in-Chief as well. It’s about time we had one.

by Alexandra Marshall
March 30, 2009

The official start of spring in the northeast always seems to mean we’re not there yet. We get previews of coming attractions with Big Papi’s spring training homers hit into the palm trees of Fort Myers, but these can seem like rumors when it’s too soon here to hose down the bleachers. We see pictures of the floppy pink and white magnolias in full bloom, mid-coast, while ours are still in their gray fuzzy buds, timed for the Marathon. The muted hint of color in our drab landscape can be faulted for its subtlety when we’re this sick of waiting.

But wait. A recent Provincetown Banner reports “Early spring brings scores of endangered mammals to Cape shores,” and whether we’d be willing to call this particular spring “early” or not, there’s plenty of action in Cape Cod Bay. “Right whales return in droves,” is the headline describing their reappearance from winter birthing grounds in the waters off North Florida and Georgia. And because the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies tracks the numbers by boat and plane, we’re reliably informed that 60 to 80 right whales are massed in these waters at this time of year, a significant percentage of the total North Atlantic right whale population of less than 400.

            Not unlike summer tourists, the right whales arrive in spring to feast on the local specialties, which in their case means consuming three species of animal plankton that, though virtually impossible to see, are assumed to be their primary diet. Dr. Charles “Stormy” Mayo is the Center’s director of right whale research, and in a phone conversation he describes this microscopic food source as “the unseen engine of the North Atlantic.”

            “There’s a hint of spring in the sea,” Dr. Mayo says, “when the ocean is tinted green by phytoplankton,” the plant counterpart of the zooplankton the right whales feed on. The elevated sunlight causes these plants to explode – think millions of cells in a quart of water – to reach the “spring maximum” when the cycles of phytoplankton and zooplankton are timed to meet. “The right whales have a way of knowing all this,” he says admiringly, with the implication that it’s the job of scientists like him to learn by observing these marine mammals that he characterizes as “cows grazing on fields of plankton.”

            This pastoral comparison is not meant to obscure the serious problem that, though right whales are protected by strict federal regulations, their endangerment due to ship strikes or fishing gear entanglement keeps them at risk. Big and slow – and when dead they float – Dr. Mayo confirms that they got their name by being the “right” whales to kill for their abundant oil and whalebone. When I ask him what he thinks about this, he replies that his own ancestors were whalers working from those same beaches, including his father who hunted pilot whales in the 1920’s.

“What do I think about this? We learn,” he answers. But he calls it “the arrogance of the intellectual present” when we judge the past for its incorrect assumptions, so he is cautious about “what we don’t know now about ethics and science.” At the same time, the Center’s statement of purpose asserts, “At the heart of our mission is conservation biology, what sociobiologist E.O. Wilson calls ‘a discipline with a deadline,’ for what we do not save today may be gone tomorrow.”

At the moment, though, there’s reassurance in how much more there is than meets the eye. The commercial whale watch fleets will begin their season in a couple of weeks, and even from the federally restricted distance of 500-yards it may not be too late by then to see these right whales before they move on to spend the summer in northern waters. The irony at the moment is that from the Provincetown beach they’re sometimes only 100-feet offshore, with many amateur sightings of mother-calf pairs and, one recent evening at sunset, of mating.

On other days of course it remains necessary to wait and watch and see nothing more than what appears to be the unremarkable sea on a chilly spring day. The difference now is in knowing it isn’t.

THE DEMOCRACY OF DANCE

by Alexandra Marshall
April 6, 2009

I’m on my way to Guadeloupe, a French Caribbean island whose active volcano is tame compared to last month’s eruption of rioting following a 44-day general strike. Protests were initiated by a coalition of union groups demanding for low-wage workers a $250 monthly raise to compensate for the high cost of fuel and food, but with an unemployment rate of 60% for people under 25, “bands of armed youth” in hooded sweatshirts manned the barricades.

Ignoring the demonstrations for a full month, French President Sarkozy and Prime Minister Francois Fillon are accused by the coalition of “treating the troubles as a distant colonial flare-up.” And though a settlement was negotiated and the violence has now reportedly subsided, once those initial demands came to be defined in terms of race and class, tensions simmering since slave days boiled over in this society where the traditional landowning families still control up to 90% of the estimated wealth.

My own connection there is to the antidotal Academie de Danse Deshauteurs, where the descendants of Europeans and Africans – the daughter of the island’s police chief paired in dance with a street kid – are defined only by their talent and ambition. For nearly twenty years the academy has attracted dancers from around the Caribbean Basin to a festival culminating in an international competition, and though this year the crisis has forced cancellation of classes, the show will go on.

The competition’s jury is headed by Denise Jefferson, director of the world class Ailey School where most of the dancers of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT) have been trained. She and I go way back, and so does her relationship with the academy’s director, Lydia Deshauteurs, whose son Samuel has danced with AAADT along with his wife, Rosalyn Deshauteurs, a current member.

In this 50^th Anniversary year, the celebration of Alvin Ailey’s legacy makes for a full dance card, with the tributes including 75 Ailey School students in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. They danced down Broadway in the “Wade in the Water” section from “Revelations,” the 1960 signature Ailey ballet masterpiece estimated by former New York Times dance critic Jennifer Dunning as having been performed in its first 20 years more often than the century-old “Swan Lake.”

In her biography of Ailey, Dunning writes that he “re-created onstage the gestures and ceremony he remembered from his own baptism, exaltation rising up from the stirred waters of the snake-ridden pond behind the church in Rogers, Texas.” The classic piece prompts audiences around the world to dance in their seats, and by popular demand, almost all performances on tour end with that primal “Revelations” experience of sin and salvation.   

The Celebrity Series first presented the company here in Boston for two performances on a January Saturday in 1968, and Walter Pierce, later the executive director of the series, was in that audience. Calling AAADT “the most successful modern dance company in history,” he still vividly recalls the moment when legendary dancer Judith Jamison appeared onstage in “Wade in the Water,” her towering height made theatrical – this is Ailey’s genius – by the still higher thrust of a ruffled umbrella.

Before his death in 1989 Ailey named Judith Jamison the guardian of his company, and having already entrusted the school to Denise Jefferson and the repertory ensemble Ailey II to another of his early dancers, Sylvia Waters, he ensured that AAADT would remain true to his original vision. Housed today in a state-of-the-art glass tower on West 55^th Street, the promise lives on in the legs of the next generation, whose capacities are being stretched to meet Ailey’s exacting expectations, and whose devotion to dance is a reciprocal means of fulfilling his faith in them.