Friday, July 18, 2014

To Have And Have Not

Yesterday my husband and I who had a dinner date in Cambridge took advantage of the fine weather to go into the Square early and browse in bookstores.  After that we walked into Harvard Yard and sat in two of the chairs which have been provided throughout one of the green grass lawns.  Dappled shade fell upon us, the grandeur of the old brick architecture provided an aesthetically pleasing backdrop, just as the attractive young people sitting about on all sides reading and talking, their faces lit up with all the strengths that high intellect, sensitive perception, and a decent reservoir of wit can provide offered a reassurance of the power and goodness of humanity.  I had just read the latest New Yorker in which there is an article on the scandal of grade alteration in the Atlanta school system, in which the author describes the frequently high minded or at least utterly sympathetic motives which impelled teachers who loved their seriously challenged students to make them seem to perform better than they had.  It was all about the horrible effects of teaching to the test which to their minds had incalculably damaged their students.  So many of these youngsters battled with drug addicted parents, crime on every side of them, often even living alone abandoned in their homes by errant adults, factors which the adults considered to be as important an element in the statement of a child's progress as the actual score received on the test.  When you consider the grandeur of what Harvard has to offer, and in most instances to qualified candidates for admission who got to that point by having been raised with every conceivable advantage that upper middle class life has to offer (even if the Harvard publicity machine scours the campus for photo ops of students who came from humble backgrounds), you cannot but feel utterly depressed by the inbalances, not to mention feel for those teachers who could not take the false implications imposed by those tests.  I have taught at institutions as different as an Ivy League college and a local junior college in California, taught in places where working class parents sent their children because it was local and it would not disrupt the family, other places where the students had been away for their education since they started prep school in the ninth grade.  Often one is astounded by the utter naivete of a student, at other times dazzled by the sureness of control and awareness of an eighteen year old, and yet it is not about intelligence often.  It is about security, good meals, a warm bed, and for some of course exquisite grounds, shaded quiet places to sit and meditate while for others a station not too hot in the back kitchen whilst slinging the hash.  I remember once an American Latino student from the South Bronx who was interviewed in his freshman year at Harvard and the reporter asked him about how easy it had been to make friends with the other Latinos at Harvard, and he laughed and replied that the reporter didn't get it, the others were all rich, there were after all such a thing as rich Latinos, whereas he was from the South Bronx, dirt poor and had nothing in common with other students.  Poor, just not a word that you hear around Harvard.  Those kids destitute and desperate in that ghetto school in Atlanta had to keep it in their face that they were "failing" "failing" "failing" to meet the standard of the national test.  God bless their crooked teachers is all I have to say.  I am sure a de Maupassant or Zola could have done justice to this story.

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