On Rape, Date Rape, and What Sensible, Well-Mannered Girls Do

Posted on December 15, 2014 by Kathy

 

Jonathan Kozol

In about 1995, I was writing a profile of the education writer Jonathan Kozol (Death at an Early Age, Savage Inequalities) for the alternative weekly Cleveland Edition. I was and am a big fan. I had read all his books and admired his firebrand, keep-the-faith advocacy for poor children in poor schools in poor neighborhoods. I was in my forties at this point, and Kozol was around sixty.

When I was making arrangements through his publisher, I was told that I should meet Kozol in his hotel room in the old Stouffers Inn on the Square in downtown Cleveland. Excited and nervous, I dropped my kids off at a friend’s and made my way downtown and up to Kozol’s room.

We sat for an hour or so at a small table in his suite and discussed education and current events. I recall Kozol’s pointedly complimenting my wardrobe selection—a blue sweater and matching blue print skirt, which, if you know me, you know my mother-in-law purchased for me. This compliment made me uncomfortable, but very, very slightly uncomfortable, mostly because he described it as the kind of outfit someone might have worn in the sixties. I had no idea what he meant, but, since Jonathan Kozol probably values most everything from the sixties, I assumed he meant it in the best way.

He offered me nothing to drink, but if he had, I would have accepted it. I could have had a glass of spiked wine or drugged cappuccino and who knows how I would have ended up. But it seems silly to me, and would have seemed silly at the time, to think that something bad could have happened to me in that room.

Reflecting on this experience, I can’t glibly say that other women shouldn’t have gone to famous men’s homes or hotel rooms.  I’m a cautious, sensible person. I’m not a gold digger, and I’m not blinded by ambition. I was trusting, and fortunately for me Jonathan Kozol either didn’t find me appealing or was not a sociopathic serial rapist.

 

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Comments on Cosby

Posted on November 29, 2014 by Kathy

 

Andrea Costand, a brave woman

Don’t read the comments. This is an important rule of modern media life. The comments following online articles, reviews, and even YouTube videos can be so hateful, so downright moronic as to obliterate not only your faith in humanity but your very will to live. So it is with the Cosby comments.

Some people—mostly men, but not exclusively—suggest that nineteen women (and counting) are lying in order to impugn the good reputation of Bill Cosby. They suggest a liberal conspiracy to bring down the guy who criticized poor black families. Ad nauseam, they chant “innocent until proven guilty,” a laudable legal principle which doesn’t necessarily apply when evidence and common sense suggest a guilty verdict outside the courtroom. Some assert that the women are uniformly man-hating feminazis.

Most of all, though, these commenters impugn the character of the accusing women. Janice Dickinson, for example, has apparently been on reality TV and is known as a publicity seeker. Others were ambitious aspiring stars. They’re not even good looking, for God’s sake. (Whereas, as I’ve commented on some sites, Bill Cosby is so very attractive.) They’re loose women, prostitutes, and gold-diggers. In bizarrely circular reasoning, commenters insist that drugged women can’t provide reliable testimony. 

Responding to these people is a waste of time and usually degenerates into name-calling. But, if I were to respond, here’s what I would say. Predators don’t usually prey on strong, independent healthy victims. They sniff out damaged people. Most of Cosby’s victims were grieving a loss, or were exceedingly young, desperate, and needy in some way. They were compromised to begin with.

Amanda Hess wrote about this, way back in February, on a website called XX Factor: “When the victims of rape are adult women, we focus on their behavior and mistrust their testimonies, softening our incrimination of their attackers. When I asked Newsweek’s [Katie J.M.] Baker why she felt that the victims she spoke with [about Bill Cosby] had been ignored, she told me: ‘I think it’s because they were imperfect victims, as victims so often are,’ Baker told me. The two women Baker interviewed were young at the time of the assaults, but over the age of 18. More importantly, ‘they were ambitious aspiring actresses and models who were hanging out with an older man who said he’d make them famous.’ Maybe we take their age and ambition–their self-determination, really–as an excuse to withhold our support.” They were not ideal witnesses, even before Cosby got to them. That’s part of the deal.

Years ago, a Catholic-school principal in our neighborhood got into trouble for sexually abusing a male student at his school. An acquaintance of mine attended the church and had her kids enrolled at the school. She liked and admired the principal and for a long time didn’t believe the accusations. I distinctly recall her saying, “You should see this kid! You should see his mom!” They were, I gleaned, unkempt and unattractive. She’d go on, “That kid was always getting into trouble, and his mom never did anything about it. Nobody should believe anything they say!” The principal eventually confessed and resigned his job.

I generalized from that experience that predators don’t usually choose top student athletes with healthy self-images and involved families. They pick the outliers. They pick people who can’t fight back.

Bill Cosby’s mistake (one of them) was to target Andrea Constand, director of operations for Temple University’s women’s basketball team in 2004.He invited her to his home, drugged her, and molested her. She was shocked and confused enough to wait for a year before accusing him, but only a year. Her suit brought forth thirteen other women with similar stories. Ten years later, this brave woman’s actions have finally received the attention they deserve.

The doubters and misogynists will never be convinced, I know. In the meantime, I’ve got to stop reading their comments, lest I lose the will to live.

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Bill Cosby: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed

Posted on November 23, 2014 by Kathy

A couple of months ago, my sisters and I cleaned out the attic of my mom’s old house, unearthing precious mementos amidst the junk. My treasures included my old Bill Cosby records, which I had thought lost. There they were, invaluable to me and maybe even valuable to collectors. I imagined putting them on our old turntable sometime soon for a nostalgic listen.

I have loved Bill Cosby since his early appearances on the Tonight Show beginning in 1963. I still recall his virtuosic miming of Revolutionary War soldiers frantically loading and reloading muskets while well-armed British solders relentlessly approached (at the end of this long routine). I noted both him and his name: he was black, the first black comic I ever saw, and his name was oddly like Bing Crosby, my mom’s favorite performer. I stayed on the lookout for that name in the TV Guide.  I saw his first Noah performance on the Tonight Show.

I didn’t collect many records, but I collected Bill Cosby’s. My junior-high friends and I memorized his routines and recited them to each other. I saw him perform in concert at least once.  I never much watched his sitcom The Cosby Show and never regarded him as America’s Dad. I was never smitten with his sweaters. I never watched Fat Albert. But I continued to try to catch him on late-night talk shows.

 I loved “I Spy,” his early TV show, which began in 1965, staying up late to watch it. In my 10th grade Latin class, I rehashed the previous night’s episode every Tuesday morning with a kid named Doug who sat in front of me. When I taught high-school English, I always showed my students the 1968 Cosby-narrated film “Black History: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed,” which belies the accusation that Cosby remained uncommitted regarding racial issues. I understood he wasn’t as cool or cutting-edge as Richard Pryor, but I believed he had prepared the ground.

Now, in November of 2014, I am reading obsessively about Bill Cosby online. This is a waste of time, and I’m hoping my writing about it will help exorcise my obsession with this now-painful topic.

About ten years ago, I was vaguely aware that Bill Cosby was in some kind of trouble and that he publicly admitted being unfaithful to his long-suffering and beautiful wife Camille. I thought this was too bad but could easily accept that he was a flawed person. I’d never been into the Cliff Huxtable/All-American Father thing, anyway.

As we all know now, of course, the accusations are way, way worse than a little adultery, or even a lot of adultery: drugging and raping women, sex with teenagers, sordid pay-offs.  I believe that the revelations fit a pattern we’re now familiar with from other badly behaved men in the news. Bill Cosby, it seems, is a controlling, violent person.

A smallish story amid the horrendous revelations helps confirm this description. The female staff of the Letterman show has revealed they’re relieved not to have Coz as a guest again. Seems he demanded the youngest and prettiest staffers gather around him before his appearances to silently watch him eat curry. They hated it, but they did it, and the show’s producers enforced the demand. Narcissism, anyone?

I’ve made the mistake, in my reading, of perusing the comments after online articles. People’s disbelief and vitriolic misogyny boggles the mind. They ask why the women went to his room, why they took the pills, why they waited so long to report the abuse.  Too often, they never bother to ask why this rich, famous man drugged and raped young, vulnerable women.

So now, what do I do with my records? Don’t tell me to separate the artist’s work from the artist’s life. This compartmentalization is impossible for me. I’m not celebrating rapists like film director Roman Polanski and singer R Kelly and Bill Cosby. The talented Bill Cosby is mentally ill, damaged, and dangerous. Not so funny anymore.

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“Pride” in Noble Acts

Posted on October 14, 2014 by Kathy

 

Paddy Considine and Bill Nighy in “Pride”

The new movie Pride is what my husband calls, with a hint of irony, a crowd-pleaser. A crowd-pleaser usually contrives not to challenge or surprise the audience but to make them smile and even pander to their world view. A crowd-pleaser can be well-made and fun, but usually contains predictable, almost stylized elements, such as lovable characters, an emotional climax, and clearly recognizable villains. With those caveats, I can recommend Pride. I’d recommend any movie in which the remarkable English actor Bill Nighy appears. An unlikely real-life story, the movie recounts the alliance of a London gay-rights group with striking Welsh miners in 1984. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was determined to close dozens of mines, not only depriving miners of their jobs but effectively destroying the villages around the mines. Thousands of miners went on strike in response, and violent attacks by police ensued. In the end, the government won, the strike was broken, and the mines eventually shut down.

In the meantime, however, an obscure group of gay activists decided to raise money for the striking miners. With mutual suspicion, the groups came together and eventually formed political alliances and lasting personal friendships. With no irony intended, I would call the story heart-warming. I cried at the end, as I was clearly intended to do.

Throughout the film, I kept thinking how particularly inspiring it is when one group takes on the cause of another. The 1964 murders, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, of civil-rights activists Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner are no more tragic than that of their black CORE colleague James Earl Chaney, but there’s a special poignancy in two white boys sacrificing their lives for the sake of people unlike themselves. The imprisonment and execution of the Christian Dietrich Bonoeffer on behalf of his Jewish brothers and sisters in Nazi Germany prick the conscience. We ourselves may not be oppressed, but what can we do for those who are?

Frederick Douglass

 

 

The film reminded me of one of my favorite stories from American history. In 1848, the great abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass attended the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention, in solidarity with the many early feminists who had spoken out, with him, against slavery.

Firebrand Elizabeth Cady Stanton resolved to introduce a motion at the Convention calling for suffrage for women. The men in attendance, all otherwise in sympathy with women’s causes, balked at this radical move. Even Mr. Stanton walked out in protest.

Frederick Douglass, in contrast, spoke passionately in favor of the women’s right to vote, saying, “We hold woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for man. We go farther, and express our conviction that all political rights which it is expedient for man to exercise, it is equally so for women.” Deprived of basic human rights himself, he recognized the consistency of supporting basic human rights for everyone.

Later, he wrote, “The case is too plain for argument. Nature has given woman the same powers, and subjected her to the same earth, breathes the same air, subsists on the same food, physical, moral, mental and spiritual. She has, therefore, an equal right with man, in all efforts to obtain and maintain a perfect existence.”

In later life, summing up the theme of this post more eloquently than I can, he expressed a special pride in his enlightened (and unpopular) position. “When I ran away from slavery,” he wrote, “it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights of women, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act.”

So the crowd-pleaser Pride made me reflect on these noble actions. It reminded me of my friend Tricia, a middle-aged white woman spending the week in Ferguson, Missouri, demonstrating on behalf of a young black man killed by police.

 

 

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R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Posted on July 29, 2014 by Kathy

An avid reader, my dad was a thoughtful, liberal sort. He opposed the war in Vietnam before I did, and he supported the Civil Rights Movement ahead of most white people I knew. Despite his enlightened ways, though, he was teensy bit sexist. Not largely and heinously. He admired the intelligence and insights of his wife, sisters, and mother, and encouraged his three daughters in all their pursuits, intellectual as well as athletic. But, born in 1911, he necessarily carried a burden of the attitudes with which he’d grown up.

My mother mentioned more than once that my dad didn’t read or like women writers, and I recall his sheepishly acknowledging this was so. I’m pretty sure he regarded them as lady authors who lacked the gravitas of the great ones. I trust that if he had lived longer (he died in 1971) his outlook on women’s books would have broadened.

Marilynne Robinson

Since his death, much has changed, and things are better for women and for women’s books. It seems clear to me, however, that women writers, as a class, rest on a lower tier than men. This summer I’ve reread the fictional output of Marilynne Robinson, one of our best, to prepare to review her new book Lila, due in October, and it’s reminded me we haven’t achieved equality yet.

Robinson’s first book Housekeeping (1980) is a Great American Novel. It’s a strange and haunting story about three women—an aunt and her two nieces—living in a small town out West. The aunt’s idea of housekeeping is to wash tin cans and stack them carefully against the walls of the living room. She’s a vagabond and a mystic, almost, who marches to a different drummer. The book consciously addresses themes raised by the greatest 19th century American writers: Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Melville, Twain. Robinson’s gripping story deals with the most profound questions of existence (one of her favorite words) in lyrical prose.

This novel enjoys a stellar reputation among many, including the critics, all male, linked in this post, but is not widely known. Robinson should rank with Updike, Cheever, Roth, Bellow, Franzen, and the rest, but who ever mentions her? I watched a Charlie Rose conversation a while back with the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik about modern American literature, and not one American woman was named. Not Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. Not Ann Patchett. Not Anne Tyler. Not Eudora Welty. Not Flannery O’Connor. Not Marilynne Robinson.

Her newest book Lila completes an astonishing trilogy, after Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). As I was reading all three, I kept thinking of John Updike’s prodigious Rabbit series (4½ books, really), cited by the English novelist and critic Julian Barnes as “the greatest postwar American novel.” Updike’s mammoth accomplishment gets its due. I’d assert that Marilynne Robinson’s trilogy deserves comparable accolades.

Robinson’s books deal with injustice, poverty, race, religion, love and relationships, hypocrisy, and American history. I don’t mean to whine, and I don’t blame men. Deep down, I find myself sometimes categorizing women writers as “women writers.”  Robinson wins awards and gets stellar reviews—but consider this question honestly. Do you agree men and women writers are judged differently? Are women writers, great though they may be, resting one step below male writers in your own mental pantheon?

 

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Animal + Music Book Titles

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Kathy

Awhile ago, I reviewed a book for the Plain Dealer called Frog Music* and soon after read a book with a similar title. My reactions to the two were very different, however.

Emma Donoghue, an Irish writer who lives in Canada, scored a big success with her novel Room (2010). It concerned a woman held captive for years by a crazy guy, a la Ariel Castro, and is narrated by her little boy, born in captivity. “Room” is all he knows of the world. Many book groups, including mine, read that book. I liked it pretty well but felt the ending went haywire.

In Donoghue’s new book, Frog Music, a French dancer and prostitute in 1870s San Francisco befriends a vivacious cross-dressing gal named Jenny, who catches frogs for a living–frogs being a delicacy among the French and the source of their derogatory nickname. The disgusting details–salacious sex, slippery frogs, sickening smallpox–overwhelmed me. Lots of other reviewers loved it, though, so don’t go by me.

Then, somewhere, I ran across the title Goat Song: A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese (2009) by Brad Kessler. This attracted me for several reasons: I understood it had a spiritual element, and I like spiritual books. I like to read about animals and also artisanal foods. And when I was a kid I raised a couple of goats. My grandfather had several acres of land, along with a chicken coop and a couple of other buildings. My sister Marge got it into her head to join 4-H and raise a sheep. I followed in her footsteps and then added my own creative twist, with goats: Katy the first year and Daisy the second. I learned to love the playfulness and curiosity of goats.

So do Brad Kessler and his wife Dona Ann McAdams, a photographer, who moved from New York City to a farm in Vermont and started raising goats. Novices, they read lots of books and consulted lots of old hands. They bred their goats and started getting milk and making cheese. One blogger/goat farmer* objected to Kessler’s spiritual meanderings, as well as his literal meanderings with his goats through the woods. But I viewed him as primarily a writer who was using his life experience (and his goats’ life experience) for his work, and his work (writing) to support his rural lifestyle. Although he and his wife grow a lot of their own food and make use of what the goats provide, they don’t pretend to be full-time farmers.

Here’s an interesting footnote about Brad Kessler’s books. He dedicates Goat Song to Annie Dillard, one of my favorite writers, who’s also concerned with nature and spirituality. Then, when I checked out his novel Birds in Fall, I noted that the epigraph which begins the book quotes the beginning of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, another favorite.

*http://www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2014/04/emma_donoghue_dives_right_into.html

*http://waywardspark.com/goat-song-by-brad-kessler/

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Connecting

Posted on April 30, 2014 by Kathy
He did send his beautiful book.

I’ve written here before about my dad’s experiences at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in New York City. Brush-Moore Newspapers, the company that owned the Canton Repository, where my dad worked, sent him to the Institute a number of times for surgeries and rehab, after he became a paraplegic in the early fifties.

I’ve noted in other writing his close encounters with Roy Campanella, the Dodgers shortstop who, injured in a 1958 auto accident, became a paraplegic, and his relationship with Alger Hiss, who visited him regularly when he was in New York for a long stint. Dad entertained us in his letters and after he got home in person with stories about these people, as well as Dr. Howard Rusk, the pioneering doctor who founded the hospital, and also other doctors, nurses, aides, and regular folk he encountered there. One of the people he met at the Institute, as we called it, was the artist Mark di Suvero, who had been seriously injured in a construction accident.

My dad would have been in his fifties by the time they met, when di Suvero was a thirty-something young artist. I remember that his real name was Marco Polo di Suvero and that he was born in Shanghai to Italian parents. He had a beard and apparently wore turtleneck sweaters and was already part of the counter-culture as it was then developing. My dad had educated, liberal sensibilities, but was a straightforward Middle American who eschewed affectation and regarded most eccentricities suspiciously. So, he was bemused and intrigued by di Suvero and liked him, too, all at the same time. They continued to exchange letters after my dad returned home. As far as I know, they’ve been lost.

At some point, a couple of decades ago, my sisters and I checked into di Suvero and discovered that he was a prominent artist, with sculptures at museums and public places all around the world, including the nearby (to us) Akron Museum of Art, who owns his Eagle Wheel. A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about Mark di Suvero and realized that in 2014 he probably had a website. Which he does, here.

I ferreted out the contact information and sent Mr. di Suvero a short email, wondering if he remembered my dad and expressed our appreciation to him as someone who befriended (and was befriended by) my dad in far-off New York. Soon after, I received a message, passed along by an assistant.

It begins, “I remember your father from more than 50 years ago. I liked him because he was a good man, intelligent, and he brought something positive to the climate of the room at Rusk.” He goes on to say that he’s still in touch with another roommate, a quadriplegic named Lenny, a name I recall, who played chess with my dad. Lenny recalls that he and my dad continued to play chess after they had graduated from Rusk. It’s true that my dad maintained chess games long-distance. He had a cool cardboard book with little cardboard chess pieces you could fit into slots; you communicated your plays to your antagonist via postcards. Those games, perforce, went on for months.

The message goes on: “I was forced by political conviction (anti-war) to leave the country so I lost contact with your father.” Interesting, this little division caused by the Vietnam War. My dad, too, opposed the war and disagreed with some friends and family and co-workers in doing so. He even grew a modest beard in the late sixties, but soon shaved it off, worried about those affectations I mentioned before. My dad read I.F. Stone’s Weekly and The New Republic and was way ahead of many college students, including me, in opposing the war.

Mr. di Suvero’s email message ends like this: “I am sure that he was one of the bright citizens and has made me think in a deeply positive sense of Canton, Ohio.” It’s a great thing to encounter someone who knew my dad, who was born in 1911 and died in 1971. Not many such people left.

At the end of his message, Mark di Suvero offers to send me a Dreambook, a collection of photos of his work, which I’m waiting for, with great anticipation, now.

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A Dog, Ovid, and Poetry

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Kathy

Prologue

Sometimes things connect. I find this frequently in my teaching life, my reading life, and my life life. Suddenly lots of themes and ideas keep recurring. I can’t connect the dots among the areas I’m about to describe. I’ll just describe them, and we can all reflect on the uncanny connections.

The Dog

In the midst of a February snowstorm, we found a little dog darting around in traffic on a busy street near us. I coaxed her to me, sent my husband on to the movie we were en route to, and took her home. She had no identification. Her fur was covered in ice, and she was shaking badly.

In the subsequent days (after warming her up, of course), we looked for her owners, to no avail. I bathed her and took her to the vet (7-pound Maltese mix, 1-3 years old, unspayed, possibly a breeding dog from a puppy mill, healthy), followed up leads, passed out flyers, talked to neighbors. No one claimed her.

To sum up, though we didn’t want a dog (that’s the topic for another post), we have a dog, a sweet, well-behaved, affectionate and tiny dog. We took many weeks to name her, because we didn’t know we were keeping her. And we’re not good at making decisions.

Ovid

We’re reading some of the mythological stories from the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses this semester in my upper-level Latin class. I love Ovid and first fell in love with Latin while reading him in my third-year high-school Latin class.

My students are a little suspicious of poetry and are not fans of love-related, nature-related, prettified subjects. One of them told me bluntly, “I’m not lying. I want violence.” Ovid has that aplenty, and so I assigned them to read the story of Actaeon, who accidentally witnesses the goddess Diana bathing in a forest glade. She punishes him by turning him into a stag. His own hunting dogs then turn on him and tear him to bits. That’s what you get for looking at a naked goddess.

In the course of the story, Ovid picks up the epic tradition of the catalogue, a long list of proper names. Scholars debate the purposes of these lists, which slow down the story for modern readers. They probably are intended to preserve some history and, in fact, to entertain the listeners (because ancient epics were recited) with the poet’s virtuosic skill in incorporating these names into a rhythmical poetic line. Homer catalogues ships’ names, and Vergil catalogues warriors’ names. Ovid, whom I often describe as a smart ass, catalogues the names of the dogs who attack Actaeon. He’s carrying on the epic tradition–I call it an epic meme–and playing with it at the same time.

Ichnobates, Pterelas, Harpyia, Dromas, Tigris, Leucon, and so on–the names go on for about 30 lines, all fitting in Ovid’s artful dactylic lines. Translators have lots of fun. Sometimes they retain the names (mostly from the Greek), or sometimes they translate them into related English words when possible. My favorite translator, Charles Martin, uses Blackie, Shag, Yipper, Brownie, and Buster, among others.

Naturally, my students suggested I borrow one of Ovid’s dog names for our little Maltese mutt. Melanchaetes or Therodamas. anyone?

Poetry

In March, my book group had decided to depart from our customary novels and nonfiction and try some poetry, coinciding with a visit to Cleveland by Robert Pinksy, former poet laureate and current advocate  for poetry, on April 8th. Someone suggested we read a new Pinsky book, called Singing School, which purports to introduce readers to poems.

In fact, the book turned out to be a sort of handbook for would-be poets. Its offerings were difficult, and Pinsky’s brief comments obscure for everyday readers who want to understand and enjoy what they read. For example, Pinsky includes Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” which goes on for thirty pages. Even the English teacher in the group, i.e., me, didn’t get through the whole thing.

So most people didn’t read much of the book. I was glad we used it, though, because I learned a few things and had fun deciphering the challenging poems, looking some of them up online for extra help. I worked my way through “Church Monuments” by George Herbert, whom I studied in grad school.

These efforts reminded me that great works are not always accessible immediately. Frequently, they require some labor, which frequently pays dividends. Understanding how things are made explicates their meaning. One appreciates the work that goes into an Emily Dickinson poem by discerning that her lines alternate between four iambic feet and three iambic feet. Unraveling the grammar of Herbert’s dense sentences helps clarify their intent.

This principle applies in all the arts. Knowing that Michelangelo took four years to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling (not really all on his back, but still) helps us appreciate it more fully.

Summary

Dogs need to be named. Our dog’s name is Roxie.

I learned to love Latin poetry by plowing my way through Ovid’s gnarly dactylic hexameter lines, day after day, when I was a teenager. Sometimes you want to tear your hair out, but you have to love a guy who names a dog Oresitrophos.

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Happy Valentine’s Day, Frederic Wheelock!

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Kathy

I am a teacher blessed with terrific students.

It has not always been so.  Through many years, I sometimes struggled with unkind, arrogant students, annoying ones, and lazy ones. I’ve had extremely unpleasant encounters with parents. I’ve been accused of racism. Sometimes, hatred of a teacher’s subject matter—English or Latin, in my case—bleeds over into hatred of the teacher. (“I didn’t make this up!” I plead. “I didn’t invent the passive periphrastic! I’m just the messenger!”) I’ve been told I’m too easy or too hard, too formal or too casual, and too many other things. This is a teacher’s lot. You’ll never please everyone.

In recent years, however, I’ve landed in an ideal niche, which I’ve written about before. At Cleveland State, my students are exceedingly nice, exceedingly interesting, exceedingly hardworking, and, often, exceedingly smart. I’m exceedingly lucky to know them.

They work full time and go to school full time. They raise children. They come to school sick and tired. They have had a variety of jobs and have lived in a variety of places. Even the “traditional” undergraduate (i.e., eighteen years old, just out of high school) usually has a pretty special story to tell.

Because my classes tend to be small (because, for some reason, masses of students do not study ancient languages), and because at least some of my students continue with Latin beyond the first semester, I often get to know them pretty well. We develop in-jokes. One class focused on chiasmus, my favorite rhetorical device. When we would find it in a reading, they’d resolutely cross their arms in front of them (signifying the “x,” or “chi,” formed by the words). In another class, we connected everything to the actor James Franco–all our sentences, all our examples contained a James Franco allusion. Some classes fixate on a particular writer to scorn and disdain, frequently Cicero. The history majors often teach me more than I teach them. In one of my current classes, the students most often provide the historical context for our readings.

They all, however, share one thing in common, our classic text, Wheelock’s Latin, first published in 1956 and now in its seventh edition. Frederic Wheelock (1902-1987) developed it from the lessons he prepared for his students at Brooklyn College, a text he intended to be “mature, humanistic, challenging, and instructive.”  He hoped it would not “break the spirit” of students attempting to master Latin.

In his thoroughness and attention to detail, Wheelock breaks the occasional spirit. Writing in 1956, he assumed that the mature student using his book would have a firm grounding in English grammar. When he writes, “The relative pronoun qui,quae,quod, as common in Latin as its English equivalent who/which/that, ordinarily introduces a subordinate clause and refers back to some noun or pronoun known as its antecedent,” he’s really presuming a lot of knowledge on the part of students. In 2014, some students have a flimsy grasp of what a noun is, let alone a pronoun, let alone a relative pronoun and its antecedent. Today’s students have, by and large, studied very little grammar. As I have frequently said, the teachers of today’s students never really studied English grammar.

This is all to say that my students like to give Wheelock a hard time. Sometimes they complain bitterly about him, but most often they regard him, almost affectionately, as a cantankerous old grandfather who blathers on about i-stems of the third declension and obscure uses of the subjunctive mood. We refer to him as Wheelock, or sometimes Frederic, and often our task is to tease out exactly what he’s trying to teach us.  What does he mean by saying most ablatives function adverbially, and why, oh why, does he include twelve different pronouns and all their endings in Chapter 9?

Today is Valentine’s Day, and my six lovely Latin 102 students gave me a few gifts. In the photo above, you’ll see among the gifts a picture of the man himself, Frederic Wheelock, gazing wisely and a little eerily on me, trying in a new century to translate his love of Latin to a new generation of students. You have to be a Latin student or teacher wrestling daily with Wheelock’s Latin to appreciate the hilarious perfection of that little gift.

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Joe Update

Posted on January 24, 2014 by Kathy

I wrote about my GED student Joe back in November, when I recounted our travails in trying to get him some extra time for the test, due to a learning disability originally diagnosed when he was nineteen. We weren’t able to get that accommodation. Joe retook portions of the test in December, without that time accommodation, hoping to bring his overall score up to passing. He needed 450 points. He earned 448 points.

Consequently, Joe is starting over this month. He needs to take all sections of the new, “improved” GED test, because none of his previous passing scores carry over. The new test is online, so he and our other students need to work on their computer skills, in addition to the academic and test-taking skills they need.

For example, the new test includes an essay portion, as did the old test. But the new test no longer requires the old five-paragraph essay, for which our students have practiced. Instead, it provides a reading of several paragraphs and then asks the student to analyze the reading. The student constructs a response of a couple of paragraphs agreeing or disagreeing with what he or she has read and types in this response. For the reading, the pre-writing, organizing, and the writing—for the whole process, in other words—the student gets 45 minutes.

Once again, these are by and large people who never learned to type and rely on public computers in the library for their email and other internet needs. Often they have learning disabilities and reading deficits. The students at the universities where I teach, in contrast, almost all grew up with computers in their homes and have owned their own computers for years. They have been typing essays and homework since they were little kids. Their reading, writing, and computer skills were handed to them as a birthright.

By the way, I never hear complaints like this among my GED students. They focus on their own failings and poor decisions beyond the most rigid and moralistic critic. They put their heads down and plow ahead. Fortunately, Joe is a determined and poised young man. “It wouldn’t make any sense for me to quit now,” he told us calmly. He’s planning to attend GED classes every day and begin all over again, from the beginning.

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