The Harmony of Discord

I was a teacher in several classrooms and on nearly every level a person can be a teacher, and during most days of all twenty years in all my classrooms, I spoke with several students individually and, yes, I will admit it, I touched at least a student a day. Nowadays, when someone says “touched” a student, we assume a sexual connotation. I never intended a sexual connotation or anything remotely like that. The kindly touch would come as a hand on the shoulder, a pat on the back, and sometimes a hug.

Times have changed. In the Age of Accountability, thinly veiled anti-public education groups, reinforced by federal laws like No Child Left Behind, supported by the doomsday scenarios of the anti-tax groups, and invigorated by politically motivated voucher programs, attack public schools from all quarters. Public schools are portrayed as monsters somehow consuming our precious children and have somehow become dangerous places where lives are wasted or torn apart by terrible forces.

In this context especially, the denizens of these these dark places, the teachers, cannot touch students without risk of being misinterpreted and subjected to student complaints (yes, they do it to get back at a teacher who they think is creepy), or be accosted by crazed parents who take a child’s comments completely out of context.

Earlier this year, there was a series of articles that came out over AP about all the perverts who were lurking in schools, waiting to take advantage of the trusting children and their families. And every time a teacher does commit a sex crime against a student, the criminal is always reported as a teacher, as though being a teacher somehow defines the criminal. These vicious stories seek to tack all teachers with the label of sex predator, and call into question the whole public school enterprise as though sex predators were rampant in schools. In one particularly onerous series of articles, the problem is compared to and declared “worse” than the sex scandal in the Catholic Church, as though the sex scandal had already defined the Catholic Church, and every priest is a suspected child molester.

Very few sex criminals are teachers, or priests, for that matter. Teachers are caring, loving people, who have chosen to give their professional lives to help children learn. Teachers choose to do this even though they understand the stress they will be under, the criticism they will receive, and the complaints they know are coming. They choose to enter and remain in the profession in spite of knowing how they will struggle financially. Teachers choose to be teachers because they wish to serve, to change lives for the better, to nurture children.

There are a few teachers who get into trouble, and there are a few who should not be teachers. Those few teachers who do commit crimes against children should be (and are) prosecuted, removed from the profession, and punished, but their crimes are not the fault of the public school system. No one in public schools, least of all teachers, protects sex criminals. The safest place for a child to be is at school under the care of a loving, certified, professional teacher. And yes, school is a great place to get a pat on the back, a touch on the shoulder, and maybe even a hug.

I hope that never changes.

For the first time in many years, we are having a normal winter here in the mid-west-north. That makes it an unusual normal winter. We get snow every few days, the temperature ranges in the crisp zone between just above zero Fahrenheit to just below freezing. Red cheeks prevail and people shuffle quickly between their cars and houses, but the snowmobilers and skiers and fisherman are out without complaint.

A normal winter has become an oddity in this time of heightened concern about global warming. The issue won’t leave us, but instead will become part of our lives. We have affected the climate: that’s a fact. No longer something to fear, or at least a fear we have grown used to. Instead it will be an economic event coupled with a series of “natural” disasters such as Katrina, droughts, and flooding. Global warming has already become a political football – not longer an issue of science, but an issue of political advantage.

We can’t call it Christmas, or we are told we are offending someone from a religion that celebrates something other than Christmas. Indeed, Christmas may be anathema to some people’s religion. We can’t call it “the Holidays,” since the Christians view this as a denigration of Christmas, possibly even a capital offense. It’s similar to naming a stuffed bear Mohammad, this calling Christmas a Holiday. We ought to take the guy out and crucify him or something.

Therefore, I suggest a new name. With all due respect, we should call it Chrustmas. Chrustmas calls up smells of baking bread, slightly tense but enjoyable family times, and crunching through the snow. No one has to be offended in any religion.

May all your Chrustmasses be merry.

They seem to be on the run, but don’t look for things to get better for a while. With 9/10ths of the human beings on the planet living in something close to abject poverty or worse, it isn’t clear that the people like us, who have access to the internet, wealth enough to buy coffee at Starbucks, and mostly drive cars, are really going to catch on to how high the stakes really are.

But what the hell. Al Gore is admitting that America is wrong on global warming. China is the great hope in leaping from coal to renewable in their search for latte, Bush looks fairly irrelevant, and the horrid reincarnation of NCLB is languishing, awaiting impetus from the new President. Unfortunately, the slate of candiates on both sides seem to be doing more to obfuscate that clarify, and the establishment is waiting patiently for the field to sort itself out. Everything seems to be in the balance, as indeed it always is. We just know it this time.