education

So Frustrated I Can’t Write Much, So I’ll Let Tom Hanks Speak for Me

/ Katie Winkler / Leave a comment

Today, I’m feeling once again minimized, like my efforts to educate people in my community, to try and instill in them not just skills but a love for learning and a desire to be a lifelong learner, to be a thinker, is seen by some people in power to be a waste of people’s time, that College Transfer Programs leading to four years degree are at best excessive and at worst wasteful.

So I come back to my office feeling a little depressed–go figure. Most people have gone home, but I have to type up a reading comprehension test for one of my classes tomorrow. I hate giving reading comprehension tests, but see, my students don’t read their assigned texts–as a whole they don’t do anything unless they get a grade for it. They don’t understand what it means to be educated and very few have any desire to be. I don’t blame them. They are products of a society that has people in power who seem to think that all education needs to be directly measurable, so they naturally do not understand what it means to read something because it will help them understand the material better, because it will help them write their papers better if they apply what they read. Oh no, if the reading does not have the price tag of a grade, then few students will do it. The idea of learning for learning’s sake is alien to them because it is alien to most of the people all around them, a product of the instant world to which they’ve become accustomed.

Anyway, so I haven’t started that quiz yet. Why? In my inbox was this wonderful article by Tom Hanks appearing in the New York Times that made me feel so much better. Did you know that Tom Hanks got a really good liberal arts education at a community college? Yep. So here it is: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/14/opinion/tom-hanks-on-his-two-years-at-chabot-college.html?emc=edit_ty_20150114&nl=opinion&nlid=69971608

Read it and then hear me saying, “What he said.” That’s my blog for today.

Everything Old Is New Again, Part I–Hard Times

/ Katie Winkler / Leave a comment

Gradgrindapprehendshischildren

One of my areas of concentration in my graduate studies was 19th Century British literature, specifically the Victorian Era. Something about this time period has fascinated me since I was a little girl. Public television, bless it, introduced me to works by Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, and of course, Charles Dickens.  I also read Dickens in school, and when I was eight, I saw the classic musical Oliver based on Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist, which fueled my desire to read his books. I remember as a young pre-teen, how I would settle in a corner and re-read A Christmas Carol by the lights of the Christmas tree. I’ve seen just about every film version of any Dickens’ novel that has been made–A Christmas Carol–many, many versions–Alastair Sim is still my favorite Scrooge, although Bill Murray and Patrick Stewart are right up there.

My interest in Dickens and Victorian literature continued into high school and then college. As an English major in undergrad school, I took a course called the Victorian Era where I read about Dickens’ role in educational reform, along with other great reformers, including John Henry Cardinal Newman (whose work The Idea of a University will be the subject of my next blog).

Then, in graduate school, preparing for my comps, I took a course called 19th Century British Literature and had the opportunity to read Dickens’ book Hard Times, a novel about Thomas Gradgrind, a wealthy retired businessman who believes in practical, tangible knowledge above all and does his best to wipe all “fancy” and imagination from his children’s lives as well as the people in the town he controls, effectively crippling them. Gradgrind founds a school, run by one Mr. M’Choakumchild, to further his utilitarian ideas of education.

Hmmmmmmm–an extremely wealthy businessman who knows little about education presuming to tell educators what and how they should teach and wishes to privatize education–sound familiar?

Well, I’m a decent writer, but I’m no Dickens, and I couldn’t possibly put into words the way I feel about the current state of education in my country better than he does, so here’s two passages from Hard Times. The first opens the novel and lays out Gradgrind’s educational philosophy. The second is a grim description of what life is like for the people indoctrinated by said philosophy. Let’s hope “our town” never looks like “Coketown.”

From Hard Times by Charles Dickens

CHAPTER I
THE ONE THING NEEDFUL

‘Now, what I want is, Facts.  Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.  Facts alone are wanted in life.  Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.  You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.  This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children.  Stick to Facts, sir!’

The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve.  The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall.  The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set.  The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial.  The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside.  The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders,—nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was,—all helped the emphasis.

In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!’

The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.

CHAPTER V
THE KEYNOTE

Coketown, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs. Gradgrind herself.  Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.  It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.  It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.  It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned.  The rest of its features were voluntary, and they were these.

You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful.  If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there—as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done—they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it.  The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs.  All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white.  The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction.  Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial.  The M’Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.

A town so sacred to fact, and so triumphant in its assertion, of course got on well?  Why no, not quite well.  No?  Dear me!

No.  Coketown did not come out of its own furnaces, in all respects like gold that had stood the fire.  First, the perplexing mystery of the place was, Who belonged to the eighteen denominations?  Because, whoever did, the labouring people did not.  It was very strange to walk through the streets on a Sunday morning, and note how few of them the barbarous jangling of bells that was driving the sick and nervous mad, called away from their own quarter, from their own close rooms, from the corners of their own streets, where they lounged listlessly, gazing at all the church and chapel going, as at a thing with which they had no manner of concern.  Nor was it merely the stranger who noticed this, because there was a native organization in Coketown itself, whose members were to be heard of in the House of Commons every session, indignantly petitioning for acts of parliament that should make these people religious by main force.  Then came the Teetotal Society, who complained that these same people would get drunk, and showed in tabular statements that they did get drunk, and proved at tea parties that no inducement, human or Divine (except a medal), would induce them to forego their custom of getting drunk.  Then came the chemist and druggist, with other tabular statements, showing that when they didn’t get drunk, they took opium.  Then came the experienced chaplain of the jail, with more tabular statements, outdoing all the previous tabular statements, and showing that the same people would resort to low haunts, hidden from the public eye, where they heard low singing and saw low dancing, and mayhap joined in it; and where A. B., aged twenty-four next birthday, and committed for eighteen months’ solitary, had himself said (not that he had ever shown himself particularly worthy of belief) his ruin began, as he was perfectly sure and confident that otherwise he would have been a tip-top moral specimen.

Then came Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby, the two gentlemen at this present moment walking through Coketown, and both eminently practical, who could, on occasion, furnish more tabular statements derived from their own personal experience, and illustrated by cases they had known and seen, from which it clearly appeared—in short, it was the only clear thing in the case—that these same people were a bad lot altogether, gentlemen; that do what you would for them they were never thankful for it, gentlemen; that they were restless, gentlemen; that they never knew what they wanted; that they lived upon the best, and bought fresh butter; and insisted on Mocha coffee, and rejected all but prime parts of meat, and yet were eternally dissatisfied and unmanageable.  In short, it was the moral of the old nursery fable:

There was an old woman, and what do you think?
She lived upon nothing but victuals and drink;
Victuals and drink were the whole of her diet,
And yet this old woman would NEVER be quiet.

Mama K and Her Kin, Part II

/ Katie Winkler / Leave a comment

Lanett

The 1963 Lanett Championship Football Team

In Part I of “Mama K and Her Kin,” I wrote about my grandmother Katherine Dabbs, who was educated at Jacksonville State Teacher’s College in North Alabama, where she met my grandfather Gordon Dabbs (we called him Daddy D) in a music appreciation class. I also talked about one of her experiences teaching in a one-room school house in North Alabama. But Mama K’s educational adventures didn’t end there.

Mama K married Daddy D, and they settled in the Ridge Grove area of Chambers County, not far from Dudleyville and Budston, you read right, Dudleyville and Budston. in between Camp Hill and Lafayette, Alabama, the county seat of Chambers County. Lafayette hit the big time in 1988 when the feature film Mississippi Burning was filmed there. Some people didn’t like how the town was portrayed in the movie, but it did bring some needed funds to the cash strapped county that has long been one of the poorest in the nation.

It was poor when Mama K and Daddy D settled there and Daddy D was the principal of the Ridge Grove school. My mother was born in the little house that is right down the road from the property that my grandfather bought before he took the job as principal of Lanett High School in Lanett, Alabama. I’m sorry that I never met my grandfather, he died of a heart attack the year I was born, but I feel like I know him from the stories people tell him, especially my mother. She is so proud of her papa!

From her I learned that he was a wonderful teacher and principal. He loved science, taught physics, and liked to build things. Mom says that he built a generator from scratch that the family used when they went camping. When I was little, my siblings and I rode on a little go cart that he built, and all of us rocked in the little rocking chair he made for my sister Ronda, the oldest of his grandchildren. My husband John repaired and painted that rocking chair for our daughter Hannah to use, and it is still sitting down in our garage, ready to be handed down to children who will have wonderful memories of rocking and reading and daydreaming. I’ll be sure to explain how that chair was built with love by their great, great grandfather.

Mama K was devoted to Daddy D and she was the quintessential principal’s wife. When my mother and then my Uncle El, (He was also a teacher–he taught Spanish) was born, Mama K stayed home and took care of them, but when they got older, she went back to teaching and taught Alabama history and conservation. Yes, conservation was an important subject for rural Alabamians in the 50’s, my mother tells me. The soil had been badly depleted during the over-farming of the depression and war years, so the public schools stepped in to teach new and sustainable farming techniques to high school students.

Mama K continued to teach during the late 50’s but in 1959 tragedy struck and Daddy D, who had a history of heart problems, died at his home in Lanett. He was greatly mourned by his family, of course, and the whole community, but especially the educational community, both black and white. Even before the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case in 1954, my grandfather had begun forming a strong relationship with Mr. Brown, the principal of the nearby black high school, but because of the resistance across the US and especially in the South to integration, there was not an immediate move to desegregate the schools, but my grandfather and Mr. Brown were anticipating the move towards integration. My mother remembers asking her father about desegregation, and he told her there might be “a lot of trouble” but that in the end “It’ll all work out.”

After my grandfather’s death, Mama K continued to teach at Lanett High School and the push to desegregate became stronger. Although my mother isn’t sure of the exact timing, my grandmother played a pivotal part in the successful racial integration of the county’s schools. Sometime between 1959 and 1963, the new administration asked for volunteers among the white teachers to go to the black high school to teach, while teachers from the black high school came to Lanett High. Mama K was the first white teacher to volunteer. She told my mother that as the widow of a beloved educational leader, she should set an example for the rest of the teachers.

Mom doesn’t know too many details about that time, but what we do know is that the Lanett City Schools were integrated successfully and without violence. Mama K didn’t teach much longer, however, because sometime in the early 60’s, I’m not sure of the exact date, my grandmother became seriously ill and was hospitalized, so it seemed to be a good time to retire.

My Great Aunt Jane, also a teacher, came to live with my grandmother following Daddy D’s death. As I said in Part I of this blog post, Aunt Jane taught math, including trigonometry and calculus. She continued to teach for years in nearby Valley, Alabama, and even though I was young, I can remember going on errands with her when she still taught and how students and former students would stop and talk to her, telling her what a good teacher she was. I was so proud to be her grand niece.

When I started teaching, Aunt Jane, who was like another grandmother to me, gave some extra special gifts that I continue to cherish to this day–one is a charm bracelet that she received when she retired that has all sorts of math and science teacher charms, including a math book, a beaker, a slide rule and an abacus. I’m an English teacher but I love it–the other is something that looks like an ordinary pen but extends out to be a pointer. I don’t use it any more but I did when I first taught because it always amazed my students–they were easily entertained back then. When Aunt Jane died, Mama K gave some of her things to the grandchildren and to me she gave a heavy marble pen holder that Aunt Jane got when she retired. I have it on my desk at the college where I teach, and every time I look at it and see her name, Jane Leath, I am reminded of the great teaching legacy I belong to and am so glad I have chosen this profession.

When times get bad and I get discouraged I remember them all–my grandmother and grandfather, mother, father, aunts, uncles, cousins, all the teachers in my life who have made a difference in this world–for good.

A

Good Beginnings–Mama K and Her Kin, Part I

/ Katie Winkler / 3 Comments

cheaha_mt1b

View of Mt. Cheaha near my grandmother’s birthplace in northeast Alabama

My grandmother, my mother’s mother, and one of my namesakes (I was named after my two grandmothers) was a teacher. We called her Mama K. She came from the mountains of Alabama, up near Chattanooga, that’s the tail end of the Appalachian range. It’s beautiful up there. If you ever visit, be sure you go to Mt. Cheaha, the highest point in Alabama.

My grandmother met my grandfather, also a teacher and a principal, at what was then called Jacksonville State Teachers College. Back then, the late 1920’s, a person could complete a teaching degree in just two years. They met in a music appreciation class. He was funny and boisterous, she was proper and reserved. He had grown up near Budston in Chambers County, Alabama, still one of the poorest counties in the nation, and she had grown up in the mountains, also surrounded by poverty, but their families, mostly farmers, managed to give their children good beginnings–childhoods filled with love, security and faith–teaching them self-sufficiency and discipline, but they wanted more for their kids than the hard scrabble life they had, so they managed to find a way to send them to the teachers college, where they could hopefully rise out of the poverty in which they were born.

All but one of my grandmother’s siblings became educators. Uncle John Taylor was principal of a school in Rome, Georgia for years. I didn’t know him well, but I went to his funeral with my mother, and I’ll never forget how packed that church was, how well-respected and loved Uncle John Taylor was.

My Aunt Jane, the baby of the family, completed all the course work for a doctorate in mathematics but didn’t see the need to write a dissertation as she was happy teaching algebra, calculus and trigonometry to high school students, mainly in Valley, Alabama, in the east-central part of the state near the Alabama/Georgia line. My daughter’s middle name is Jane in honor of my great Aunt Jane, who never married and had no children of her own. Her niece, my mother, became a teacher and high school librarian.  I, the grandniece, am a teacher too, having taught English composition and literature over 25 years in private at public schools, at the secondary and college level.

Aunt Dixie, the middle daughter,  also obtained a teaching certificate and maybe taught a year or two, but she went to revival services at the little County Line Baptist Church and fell in love with the handsome young preacher who was preaching that day, my Uncle Judson, and married him. His son, also Judson, became a teacher and principal in the Birmingham, Alabama area, now retired as Dr. Judson L. Jones. His daughter Lea is also a teacher and working on her doctorate in education.

Uncle Jim went into the navy and served his country honorably, becoming a farmer near Troy, Alabama, carrying on his parents’ profession, but it’s interesting to note that his daughter and granddaughter became educators, highly respected in their fields.

When Mama K graduated from Jacksonville State Teachers College, her first teaching position was in North Alabama in a one-room schoolhouse. I remember going through some of Mama K’s old school books from those days when I was a child. It was one of my favorite past times. I loved old books and still love them to this day, the way they smell and feel and look. In between the pages of one of the old textbooks was a little pamphlet about Harry the Hookworm, illustrated with funny little cartoon pictures of a hookworm and explaining how to avoid getting the parasites by using a latrine. The latter part of the pamphlet actually had instructions on how to build an outhouse.

I asked Mama K about it, and she told me this story. Once when she was teaching in that little schoolhouse in North Alabama, there was one little boy who was very poor and usually came to school wearing the same clothes, but she didn’t think anything of it because his clothes, despite being worn, always looked clean, but one day every time he came close to her, she noticed a horrible smell, a body odor that got worse in the next few days, especially now that it was getting colder, and she was keeping the windows and doors of the little schoolhouse closed.

Finally, the smell got so bad that she simply had to say something, so she kept him after school and asked as gently as she could, “Are you taking a bath from time to time?”

He said, “Yes’m”

“Are you taking off your shirt and your pants and getting into a tub?”

“Yes’m. My mama heats up the water on the stove and I get in.”

“Do you scrub all over?”

“Yes’m”

My grandmother didn’t want to embarrass the boy any more than she already had, but she wanted to find out what was causing the smell and she had her suspicions, so she said, “Are you taking off all your clothes, including your underwear?”

He looked surprised at the question, and said, “Why, no ma’am. My mama done sewed me into my underwear!”

She chuckled and I laughed, after she explained it to me as I didn’t have much knowledge of long johns, and then she got serious, telling me that when she taught at the little one-room schoolhouse, a large portion of her teaching was about how to live a healthy life day to day when you were poor and didn’t have much of anything. She talked about how poor her students were and that many of them didn’t have houses with running water or latrines. They didn’t know many of the basic things, so she taught those along with reading and writing and arithmetic. She felt good about the short time she taught those students because she believed she was helping them have better lives.

My grandmother wasn’t sure how the boy resolved his problem, but he never came to school again smelling bad and everyone, including his fellow students I’m sure, were happy about it.

I look back at that story today, as a teacher myself, and am heartened. Sometimes what I have to say is difficult to say and hard for some people to hear. It is embarrassing and uncomfortable. It sometimes leads to confrontations, but if something is wrong at my institution, if something smells bad, then it is my duty as a leader in my classroom and at the college to find the cause of that stink and start scrubbing.

I learned how to seek and scrub partly from my grandmother–Margaret Katherine Dabbs, a brave and honorable woman–and I am thankful for the good beginnings she brought to my life, especially my teaching life. I hope I can be her namesake in more ways than one.

Next up–A story about Mama K during the time of school desegregation in Alabama.