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What a (in)difference a Day Makes

 

A version of the following blog post appeared as a column in the September 27th edition of the Newburyport Daily News

https://bit.ly/49AhomT

 

It would seem many of us have used the expression, “What a difference a day makes.”  It generally follows some weather event; recovering from feeling poorly; or perhaps some solution to a problem that has been an ongoing issue over a period of time.  For me though, it’s been the indifference…the non-act that leads to a larger difference for a local, regional or national community not being the best version of itself.

Recently, there were two intersecting occurrences that has me thinking more about our indifference to the choices we make personally and collectively that impact all of our lives. Those impacts include the human and economic costs we just don’t think about from day to day even though we acknowledge, sometimes loudly, that they are problematic and require action. It just seems too many of us don’t want to take the necessary action to make our community healthier overall.

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Language Builds and Divides Culture

It seems the dysfunction in communicating with each another; of hearing one another; or looking to gain a sense of understanding with one another is a centuries old phenomenon  playing out with increasing intensity in today’s political environment.  I was reminded of this when I checked out a  recently published book, The Power of Our Language by Viorica Marian, at our local library.  The first few paragraphs of her Introduction used Peter Brugel’s renowned painting, The Tower of Babel, to make a point and brought me back to a visit to the Historical Art Museum (Kunsthistorisches Museum) in Vienna, Austria where the original painting graces its walls.

The short version of the story behind the painting is that God considered it blasphemous to build a tower to the heavens, so he created multiple languages dividing people into linguistic groups, rendering them unable to understand one another. The result was a palatial building that went sideways instead of up. I purchased a print of the painting at the museum, had it framed when I returned home, and it hung it in my office as a high school principal. It sometimes provided a reference point for centering discussions to build common understandings as we worked with students and each other to make teaching and learning more constructive.

Today, our democracy seems to be moving sideways, perhaps our version of Tower of Babel, due to an increasing inability to speak with one another. In a recent Atlantic Magazine article entitled, “Do You Speak Fox?”, Megan Garber describes our current state of discourse as both a national and personal crisis. She writes that Fox uses two pronouns, “you and they…that you are under attack, and they are the attackers.”  She notes that Fox language includes words like mob, socialist agenda, hoax, and invasion or open borders… and it’s continually a language of grievance.

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Book Bans and False Altruism

Everyone has a moment when a world event occurs, great or horrific, when they remember exactly where they were at the time. Some such moments for me… The Kennedy assassination and my 7th grade science class; the space shuttle explosion and a high school library; the ball going through Bill Buckner’s leg for a Mets World Series win and my darkened home living room illuminated by the television; and again in our living room, this time brighter, as Barack Obama was declared the winner of the 2008 presidential race. Such moments can be triggered by other events over time bringing you back to those instances.

I find the surge in efforts to ban books in school curriculums and libraries along with the incursion on individual rights under the guise of parental control bring me back to a moment when one of the best basketball players in the world announced he had HIV/AIDS. At the time I was the K-12 Director for Health Education along with athletics and physical education for a New Hampshire school district made up of nine rural communities. I was in my car traveling between schools while listening to a live press conference regarding Magic Johnson’s sudden retirement from the NBA. My mind immediately jumped to thinking about the consequences on local health education issues as well as state policies and guidelines regarding sexual health education.  We had built good relationships and trust with parent and religious constituencies with our health curriculum, but this news inserted a hyper level of concern and oversight for what was being taught in health classes over the subsequent months and years.

It seems a through-line exists from the HIV/AIDS era’s hysteria to today’s conservative adult and political agendas for suppressing curriculum and limiting essential knowledge in health, science, and history. Certainly, the arc to ban books for adolescents spans the decades and include authors such as Judy Blume, Jason Reynolds, Margaret Atwood, and Toni Morrison to name a few. Supercharging the book banning efforts are politically motivated endeavors to limit or ban speech connected with sexual and emotional health and emerging LGBTQ issues as evidenced through changes in instructional and curriculum policies from the AIDS era to Florida’s most recent ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill. Florida isn’t alone in these efforts to silence voices or rewrite history. According to a recent NBC News report, 26 states have banned or opened an investigation of over 1,100 books over the last 18 months.

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Learning to Read the World Through My Radio

A tidy picture of simplicity sat in front of me.  A study lamp stood on one corner of a heavily lacquered wooden desk along with the obligatory dictionary and thesaurus. Offsetting the light in the opposite desk corner, was a radio.  The rectangular plastic box was one of my most prized possessions given to me during an earlier holiday period.  Its blackness demanded attention since the rest of the room was quite drab if honestly described; modest if the color of the lighter tan walls were added.  The radio’s presence also served as a primary companion for an only child who sometimes needed to hear voices of people other than his parents.

I was atypical of a mid 60’s teenager with a radio in their room.  There was never a moment where a parent needed to bellow, “Turn your radio down!”, while the Moody Blues, The Rascals or Jim Morrison were playing…most enjoyed though with the volume up. My radio strayed from the music scene of the FM band to the to the baseball and basketball games being broadcast on the AM side of the airwave universe.  The secretive affair that didn’t necessitate increased volume.  The only requirement was other contents in my desk that allowed my imagination to connect to a larger world.

Four drawers were available to keep needed materials and ‘stuff’ that perhaps made me an early minimalist.  The top thin, center drawer contained pencils, pens, rulers, and geometry tools; along with baseball cards, available for trade or flipping.  The top drawer to my right contained all the paper I’d need for schoolwork as well as stationery for writing thank you notes to relatives or the pro athletes of my choice.  Autographs in the 1960’s were obtained for the price of a postage stamp and the willingness to write to a star letting him know he was your favorite.  The second drawer contained an eclectic connection of important things that I didn’t want to misplace.  Items such as class pictures, award certificates and a Mad Magazine or two could usually be found in there.  The bottom drawer contained my spiral notebooks, which were turned into homemade scorebooks.  That bin held the real fruits of my labors and the parts of my study time that helped make real world connections to portions of my schoolwork…a sort of gateway for my imagination to overtake the mundaneness off reading and summarizing a period of history or doing the assigned even or odd numbered math problems.

Opening that drawer, along with powering up the radio, opened my mind and helped me discover new possibilities beyond the humdrum learning transpiring each day between yellow school bus trips to and from a large, bricked building with over a thousand minds at various stages of receptivity.  The drawer held a year’s worth of notebooks keeping running scores of most Boston Celtics and Red Sox games.  I could have been classified as a real ‘get a lifer’, but for me it was a labor of love.  And for a time, my schoolwork became secondary to scoring games.

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Trauma Can Travel Across Time and Place

A recent Boston Globe article clarified an anxiety, a despair I feel as an educator each time the news covers a traumatizing incident at a school. The article entitled, Mass Shootings Are Taking a Toll on our Mental Health, was in response to another horrific school shooting massacre in Uvalde, Texas killing 19 elementary students and 2 teachers. It’s the most recent example of the mounting carnage wrought by the political inaction of this century; a crass, immoral gun lobby; the ambiguous wording of the Second Amendment; and a continued indifference of the American voter when it comes to reforming gun laws.

My anxiety and despair is visceral when it comes to schools, teachers and students. As the Globe article pointed out, “No matter how far removed we might personally be from the events, experts say, they still take a toll on our mental health… It can be very personal even if it’s a distant experience.” I felt this way 23 years ago as a first year principal when news broke of the Columbine, Colorado shooting on April 20, 1999 taking 15 lives and injuring 24 others. We had a scheduled school board meeting that evening and the published agenda seemed trite. The discussion quickly turned to school safety concerns we seemingly never had to think about previously.  However, from that day to the present, schools have had to continually ramp up safety awareness and active shooter drills. Schools have been hardened and police officers added, yet school shootings proliferate as weapons of war easily fall into the hands of teenagers who can legally purchase and carry guns in too many states across the country. Each school shooting is a subliminal reminder that no matter the distance, your school or community could be next.

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