The Back to School Post: A Critique of Waiting for Superman.

            This summer while I was staying with a friend of mine in the hills north of  Montpelier, Vermont we got into a discussion about what it feels like to hear public schools and teachers critiqued.  My friend Tom, a veteran high school history teacher of at least twelve years, who happens to also be the president of his National Education Association union local, remarked:  “I don’t know of any other profession that is criticized by anyone who has ever sat in a desk (as a student) and feels they have the right and credibility to criticize teachers.” 

I agreed with Tom.  While lawyers and doctors are frequently the subject of derision at dinner tables and bars around the country, in stark contrast to critiques of  teachers, the purveyors of said derision rarely ever think they can either join the profession and/or do better than the people they are critiquing—much less a public oversight body, such as a school board, and put their ideas, “knowledge,” and “skills” to use improving the practice of law and medicine—despite often having no professional training or content area knowledge.  Somehow former students, most being years, if not decades, out of a contemporary public school classroom, feel they know better. . .and this, among many factors, is contributing to a general decline in respect of teachers and our profession—a profession that educates and trains most of our population for work and life, therefore maintaining a reasonably stable society in America.

This brings me to another former student, and current parent of students enrolled in private school, who feels he can do better, by making a film entitled Waiting for Superman, that being its director Davis Guggenheim.  Guggenheim begins the film by telling us some of his personal motivation to investigate why our schools are “failing,” deciding with his wife to put his children in private school in order to avoid having them have to enter a lottery for the “best” public schools in their city.  Guggenheim makes his first mistake here (though this seems entirely premeditated) by not delving into how politicians and bureaucrats in the Department of Education, with the help of academics, are defining “failure” by standardized test scores, required by law as of the first term of the “Bush II” regime in the No Child Left Behind legislation of 2001.  Throughout the entirety of “Superman” Guggenheim never significantly investigates, or challenges, the belief that standardized test scores, such as the Measure of Student Progress (MSP) and High School Proficiency Examination (HSPE) in Washington State, whose proponents claim they provide accurate measurements of what middle and high school students, respectively, have learned during their academic years.

As many of you who either follow education issues, work in public education, or who have students enrolled in public schools know, the claim that standardized tests provide us with accurate assessments of student learning is extremely controversial.  I won’t take the time to elaborate on research data that supports this (You can look it up yourself.), but suffice to say we have very current research data obtained from prominent education researchers at major universities and colleges that shows that standardized tests are unfairly biased against students of color and working class/poor students, kids who aren’t good at taking tests, or who suffer from test anxiety, and are not an effective measurement of real deep learning and skills.  It turns out that filling in the right circle or answering a writing/problem prompt in forty minutes to two hours (if you have a diagnosed disability and an Individual Education Plan, or IEP) provides a merely superficial snapshot at that moment of your career, year, month, week, day, and hour as a public school student learner.  Because of this, a majority of public school teachers, and our unions, our professional and labor organizations, are against standardized testing.

But Guggenheim does not report any of the afore-mentioned information in his film.  Instead, he toes the Department of Education’s line that tests are the major measure of learning, and all but completely cuts out classroom teachers, and our unions’, voices out of his film. This fact comprises the second portion of my critique of his film as, in the words of Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis recently on the internationally acclaimed progressive news and investigative reporting program Democracy Now!:  “We are trying to have people understand that when people come together to deal with problems of education, the people that are actually working in the schools need to be heard.”

While Guggenheim’s film does feature brief sound bites from both Randi Weingarten, the President of the American Federation of Teachers, one of my past employers, whom I served as an organizer of teaching hospital staff and community college faculty, and Dennis Van Roekel, the current President of my national union and professional association, the National Education Association, they are never given an extended period of time in the film, and are instead intentionally overshadowed by critics. Among these critics Guggenheim prominently features Michelle Rhee, former Chancellor of Washington D.C. public schools, and an avowed opponent of teachers’ unions, who sought to break the teachers union in D.C. schools during her three year stint in office, and former public school administrators and teachers, now working in charter and private schools.

All of the voices that Guggenheim includes in his film have some thought-provoking, interesting, if not important, things to say in the dialogue about our public schools, but I can’t ignore that he obviously and intentionally leaves out the voices of public school faculty, staff, and administrators. . . the people that work with, and for, the next generation five, six, or seven days a week, for eight, ten, even twelve hours a day, for relatively little money, and some decent benefits—doing it because they care about kids, and want this next generation to do better than our own.

If you want to know why students aren’t learning in public schools—ask a teacher, or a school staff person, or even a building principal. . . don’t just rely on one more film by someone with an axe to grind against teachers and our unions and professional organizations.  Ask us and we’ll tell you that our government, and society, simply doesn’t fully fund public education, so we never have the resources that we need to be successful:  more teachers for smaller class sizes, more specialists and support staff to assist students with special needs, more curricula supplies and access to current technology, more professional development opportunities to aid, support, and motivate us to become the best we can be and stay current with our skills, less emphasis on testing so that we can focus on creating learning environments that support relationship building and deep learning for, and with our students, and—shockingly—maybe even more time in class during the school day and a longer school year.  

Our unions and professional associations are not to blame for students not learning.  We organized teachers unions to defend everyone’s right to a free, quality public education in this country—not to get rich and have good health care.  But to be able to do the work in an effective and quality manner, we have to be part of the dialogue, and have access to the resources that are essential to do our jobs well--to teach kids so they’re ready for the very real, harsh, and competitive, world that we are leaving them in this country.  And yes—part of what we need to be effective and have the support to work the grueling hours the job requires is a dignified salary and benefits that allow us to see a future for ourselves, and our families, in this profession.  But our politicians and bureaucrats don’t spend enough time talking to us, and really listening (along with kids and parents), as well as actually spending time in public schools during the school day.  They simply do not understand what it is that we do, how challenging it is, without taking into account the latest mandates they have served us--and how important it is to the children and adolescents we teach and the communities we serve. 

This is also apparent in Guggenheim’s film which, at its worst, seemingly disregards public schools and writes them off as a failed experiment, and at its best keeps people thinking and talking about education, kids, and our country’s future.  The latter is what we need, versus a write-off that does nothing to help kids, their families, and our communities.  We also need to understand the essential services that teachers and school staff provides our society, and the best way to do this is to ask good questions of the people doing the work, listen to us when we answer you, which we want to do, and visit your communities schools with an open mind, clear vision, and warm heart.  Then go back to your state capitals and Washington and give us the resources and policy changes that we need to effectively do the job our communities hired us to do:  teach the next generation the skills they need to survive, solve the problems they’ll inherit, be effective citizens, and make their communities and lands better places.

             Here's the trailer: check out "Waiting for Superman" yourself and get back to me with your thoughts.

“’Wasted Years: A Trip Down Memory Lane with Maiden at the White River.”

 

           Just before the end of the second guitar solo in “Wasted Years” lead singer Bruce Dickinson sprints fifteen feet across the lower stage and leaps off his vocal monitors, giving him a two-to-three foot advantage to launch himself, knees-up, six feet into the air and landing, as the upper stage explodes in pyrotechnics behind him, in front of a screaming sold-out crowd of true heavy metal freaks at the White River Amphitheater in sunny Auburn, Washington.  This is Iron Maiden, and this is the story of how I survived the best metal show I’ve seen to date.

Iron Maiden used to scare me.  Granted, I was just an eleven or twelve year-old boy, a good Christian kid and a Boy Scout to boot, who’d been raised on The Beatles, The Beach Boys, CCR, and nothing more edgy than the Stones.  But, when these bands, their stage shows, costumes (or lack thereof), and musical sound came up against, for instance, Maiden’s “Number of the Beast” album for the first time, they pretty much got run over by a mack truck going seventy-five on Interstate 5.  But let me back up, because this story actually starts with Kiss.

When I was in fifth or sixth grade, this was in about 1983/’84, my best friend was a guy named Derek Draper.  Derek had an older brother named Michael.  I never knew Mike that well, he was in high school and pretty quiet, but I knew him enough to think that he was cool, funny, and seemed to be some kind of rebel.  My evidence for this resided chiefly in his long hair (mullet and skuzzy mustache), clothes (jean jacket with metal and hard rock pins, jeans, and high tops), and music, particularly hard rock and metal, and especially  Kiss.

When Derek first showed me Mike’s Kiss albums in his bedroom, it was mostly for their liner photos.  I was terrified, and mesmerized;  it felt like we were looking at some kind of porn car crash that you just couldn’t look away from.  These guys looked part Japanese Kabuki theater, part Times Square drag show, and part vampires that were going to come into your room at night and force you to be part of a sexual Satanic ritual.  Yes, they were definitely having sex, whatever that was, and they were definitely doing drugs. . . whatever they were.

But when we finally dropped some vinyl ( I can’t remember exactly which album. . . maybe “Destroyer (Who named their albums like that?).”) on the turntable they really had me.  It was the loudest, swaggering, over the top, guitar-driven rock music I’d ever heard, with lyrics that, despite the band’s reputation of being Satanists (“Knights In Satan’s Service,” claimed the PMRC and like ilk.) and general hedonists (very true), seemed to be more about partying, having a good time, and maybe having sex—or at least kissing, and maybe dating.  I felt like I was listening to contraband. . . I felt guilty, turned on (in a preadolescent way), mesmerized, and totally cool.  I didn’t know it then, but this was the beginning of what has become a life-long love affair with hard rock, heavy metal, and punk, which brings me to Iron Maiden.

I can’t remember when I first heard them, but the first image of Maiden that comes to mind is, of course, “Eddie.”  Eddie is the iconic symbol of the band, not to mention an essential part of their marketing strategy.  He looks essentially like an evil zombie, an ex-man stripped of his flesh and, despite his costume (American Civil War soldier (“The Trooper”), science fiction action hero, World War Two aviator, or an anti-hero fighting the Devil in hand-to-hand combat (slasher axe vs. pitchfork), among others.) is a multi-pronged symbol of the band, the evil of men, horror, and a grisly anti-hero defying death and judgment in the shadowy wings of a man’s ego.  The image of Eddie that first pops into my memory is from the cover of the “Live After Death” double live LP, which features him, in true horror genre form, bursting out of the grave under an indigo sky being rent by lightening. 

The first album—tape that is (My first real musical medium of choice in the mid-1980s.) –that really found a crow-like roosting place in my musical heart was, and still is, 1982’s “The Number of the Beast—though I didn’t borrow it from my main Maiden connection, and “frenemy,” Matt Sartwell (whole other story) until probably 1985 or ’86.  “Beast” featured a classic of Maiden cover art: a grinning Eddie (long blond hair metal head Eddie) pulling the puppet strings of the Devil, who’s pulling the puppet strings of an Eddie, etc., etc..  Now, forgoing an analysis of this image and what it might symbolize (There is no God or Devil. . . there are only humans and our choices. . . anybody?), that’s a bad-ass cover—but then there was the music   

Two tracks still stand out in particular, and remain some of my many favorite Maiden tunes: the title track and “Run To the Hills”—the “Number Of the Beast” mainly because of its bad-ass intro, a gloriously creepy sample out of some old horror film.  The audio excerpt features a very deep and authoritative voice reading the infamous lines from the book of Revelation about the Devil/Beast coming to Earth in later years to take over the sinful human race (very Vincent Price), and that it’s number is “…six hundred and sixty-six”. . . . I was terrified, but sure as hell going to keep listening.  With that, the song begins with just a rhythm guitar track and lead singer Bruce Dickinson’s urgent introduction of the song’s narrator recounting the horrifying events he witnessed one fateful night.

I loved “Run To the Hills” mostly because of its kick-ass drum beat—very eighties and done perfectly by Nicko McBain, with alternating high-hat sixteenth notes followed by a tom quarter note.  At first the song’s lyrics seem terribly politically incorrect—a U.S. cavalry soldier’s celebration of the massacre and displacement of Native Americans on the Plains during  “Westward Expansion” in the early nineteenth century.  At the time I was not politically correct, though I didn’t identify as a racist, and definitely not particularly educated in history or politics, so I chalked up Dickinson’s lyrics as typical metal fare:  focusing on violence, war, and horror—for shock value and entertainment.  But when I started listening to Maiden again, after at least a fifteen year hiatus, the song’s lyrics struck me differently.

Dickinson, who’s actually fairly well read, for a metal front-man (As well as a champion fencer in his day and a pilot who flies the band’s plane, a big commercial bird, on tour.), incorporates at least two narrators into the song:  an indigenous voice witnessing the events, and the cavalry soldier, and the end result does not make the soldier’s side look good.  In fact, Dickinson is a major figure in the tradition of metal lyricists and/or singers, going at least back to Ozzy during his Sabbath days, who engage in a lot of critical social commentary by creating narrators from the wrong sides of history, along with greedy businessmen, psychopathic generals, corrupt politicians, and your usual smorgasbord of serial killers, scared teenagers, horny boy-men, etc., etc..  Speaking of horny boy-men and scared teenagers—it’s time I got to how I ended up in a heavy metal beer garden full of them.  But before I got to them I’d have to chase the Phantom Drunk Bus at the Auburn Super Mall.

Whole other story. . . but the short of it is that the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, which owns the White River Amphitheater, where the show was, used to run a free bus service from said mall to shows at the theater.  Given that parking at White River is infamous as being a one-way-in-one-way-out nightmare, growing to an all-out cluster fuck when you’re tired and wrung out after a show, and just want to leave, the bus seemed like a great option.  But when I arrived at the mall, found the Red Robin, landmark for bus pick-up parking, and identified people who looked like Maiden fans (black t-shirts, jeans, beer cups) I quickly found that the bus wasn’t running.  Seconds after Joey was leaning in my window:

“Hey, there’s no bus service.  Do you have room for my wife and me?  We’re from Portland and our friends from Puyallup just dropped us off at the show.  We were planning on the bus was running.”

Well, I passed his test;  so I took a look at Joey:  he’s a handsome dirty blond, tall, blue-eyed, and buff in that gym way, probably an ex-athlete and/or fraternity member—definitely straight, compared to me.  He looks all right though, not sketchy, and  his wife Marie, a curvy, slightly heavy-set, attractive blonde Swede, seems nice as well, if a little shy, or not knowing what to make of me.  I blink a couple times and say, “Sure. . .” and twenty minutes later we’ve used the Red Robin’s bathrooms and are piled into my empty Outback making small talk and looking for the highway to the amphitheater.

Twenty minutes after this the small talk has turned into a decent rapport, for people who were total strangers forty minutes ago, and we’re getting close to the venue, driving past a rather stark series of dichotomies on the Muckleshoot Reservation:  a massive, mint green casino of warehouse proportions, design, and, presumably, décor, well. . . warehousey and, down the road, short, scrappy-to-decrepit ranch homes and trailers guarded by rusty, gated chain link fences and a variety of dogs;  quirky-looking small businesses and tourist traps, bars, gambling dens, and campsites (This is one of the main west-east entrance highways for Mount Rainier National Park.) entered by pot-holed u-drives, past tackily-colored, weathered mini-billboards.  And then we’re there, and then we’re in—being waved down a smooth-paved, fresh-painted hard road by what could just as well be a drive-in theater, but it’s an eight thousand capacity amphitheater.  Despite the rather negative reviews of parking and driving to White River, the reality of the drive-in, about a half hour from the mall, with ten to fifteen minutes of largely stand-still traffic, wasn’t that bad.  And then we’re parking, hiding belongings in the car, and striding, at times shakily, more due to the crushed rock of the parking lot than the Irish whiskey we drank out of Joey’s flask on the way in, into the show.

On our way, in line at the gates, and throughout the entire show experience, I am surrounded, for the first time in my life, by metal heads—thousands of them.  The easiest to spot are those with a seemingly infinite variety of black metal and punk t-shirts, complete with jeans and sneakers, a sort of modified American youth uniform.  Filling the insides of this diversity of sweaty cotton tribal symbols (Metallica, Megadeth, Maiden (of course), Judas Priest, Lamb of God, Anthrax, and even obscure Brit anarcho-punk bands from the 80s like Antisect (Worn by actual punk-looking thirty somethings—though their gear seemed too clean and pressed and made me suspect that they had “real” jobs.) is at least three generations of Americans, and probably Canadians too, from their teens to their late fifties.  And they’re all so happy and friendly; the truth is, though I may have seen a few of the boy-men I mentioned earlier, our crowd is mostly grown men and women, really excited, drunk, and/or horny, and totally ready to rock the fuck out with Maiden.

And they show it; as soon as we’re in after a perfunctory bag/coat check we hit the beer garden.  Luckily there are seemingly bars everywhere, serving decently priced domestics and ridiculously over-priced nine dollar regional microbrews, and wine.  We hop in line, picking up on the energy and beginning to talk excitedly about the show soon to come.  While we wait the sounds of Coheed and Cambria, the show’s opener, echo out of the amphitheater at random intervals, amidst a constant bass drone.  They sound entertaining, albeit in the way that most radio-friendly rock bands marketed to the Hot Topic generation after me sound, and the crowd’s cheers tells me they’re a decent opening act, but the gardens are much more interesting. 

We buy beers, toast in Swedish, taught to me by a now-smiling, patient, and friendly Marie (“Skol!”), and quickly jump into the reasonably-sized line for the Honey Buckets.  There I spot a woman who bartends at my work local standing drinking beer with a number of guys who look vaguely familiar from the same establishment.  She sees me, smiles, and walks up to the line to chat.  I find out that one of the bar’s owners, who’s rumored to play bass in a solid Maiden cover band, is also in the garden somewhere.  After we take our respective leaks, Joey and I meet up with Marie and dive into line again.  By this time we’ve got a pretty good beer buzz and are equally high from our surroundings;  not that there’s a lot of marijuana smoke around—more so the happy, wild, partying vibe that has taken over as Coheed wraps up their set and the crowd noise surges up.

You can talk to any of these people, and they feel the same.  People walk by, commenting on each other’s shirts, talk start-time logistics, t-shirt shopping, and how drunk and/or excited they are.  I haven’t been in an environment with this many strangers who I feel completely comfortable talking to in years.  We ride this to the even longer t-shirt sales kiosk, complete with ATM.  I went back and forth briefly about whether I wanted to buy a ridiculously expensive Maiden tour shirt (forty bucks), a rare choice in my life and, along with Joey and Marie, I decide that there’s no debate.  Eddie’s Trooper personality riding a screaming horse in U.S. cavalry regalia, replete with a bloody sabre?  Of course!  We drink our beers, make small talk, chat with our line neighbors, and are finally ready to hit the pisser and rock out.

Once we climb the stairs to the back of the concrete amphitheater we split up to get to our seats.  I find myself next to somewhat snooty teenager/early twenties white rocker on my left, with black hair and bangs, wearing a jean jacket over her hoody, and standing next to her date for the night.  To my right is a thirty or forty-something white dude, with a t-shirt and baseball cap on (if I remember correctly)—right on the demographic for this show:  dudes who are Mike Draper’s age.  The band has already taken the stage, and the crowd is totally with them—rocking hard!  Everyone who knows the lyrics is singing them, and Dickinson is working the stage from every access point he has available—running out the ramps and up and down the stairs, while the guitarists hold down their respect sections of stage, and Nicko keeps it all together on his kit.  Behind the performance the band’s legendary visuals hold court:  a massive banner featuring Eddie’s visage waves slightly in the breeze, changes regularly throughout their set to fit their song choices.  At one point the Civil War cavalry incarnation of Eddie strides out on stage in the form of a twelve-to-fifteen foot puppet moving threateningly behind Dickinson and company.  Later on various pyrotechnics, a female vampiric-looking pipe organist, and various malevolent statues of Eddie with illuminated eyes are employed at the beginning of songs.

The band’s formal set ends with howls from all of us—demanding an encore immediately, and the band doesn’t disappoint, seemingly taking enough time offstage to huddle and decide what they will play before they hit the stage.  Two songs in I’m texting with Joey and we’re making our escape, along with several hundred other fans, to the parking lot and whatever wait in line lays beyond.  We spend our wait reviewing the show and our experiences of this legendary metal band and come to this:  check this one off the arts and culture bucket list—so worth the driving hassle and what an amazing rock concert -- put on by guys almost old enough to be our Dads!

"Angry English teacher looking to front local rock band."

Angry English teacher looking to front local rock band.  I’m 38, past my prime, and pissed about the state of the world--time to rock!  Let’s see if you can keep up with me.  No instruments or gear but I can write lyrics and front a band (drama, dance, athletics, hardcore/mosh pit background).  To boot I can hack a few chords out on a git, play bass with instruction from a guitarist, keep a beat on a drumset, play percussion, some sax, and have a solid sense of rhythm and an ear for music.  More than anything:  give me a mic so I can connect us to and rile up the crowd.  Warning—I’m political and I will climb on shit if it’s possible.

I come at making music mostly from an improvisation/jam perspective—with a lot of punk attitude (Not Green Day kids—more like Black Flag. . . look ‘em up and take a wisten.).  I want to make original music (To see my influences and current faves, respond to this ad and I’ll get you hooked up with me on Facebook—there are too many to list.) with people who feel the same.  Let’s live in the moment and not worry about being “serious musicians:”   pleasure before practice and profit I say!

That said I want to play out and blow some peoples’ minds . . . that’s what it’s about right?  Let’s put on a show—something that respects our audience and their time, exists in the moment, is dangerous, honest, and exciting.  I’m hearing at least a couple guitars, a big rhythm section sound, me going off over it all, and maybe even some keys, extra percussion, and a horn or two.  Make it so some freak can dance to it already.  I love punk, metal, hard rock, alt-country/ rock, funk, soul, R&B, and good ‘ol classic American and Brit rock ‘n roll man—LOVE IT!

If you’re down hit me up soon—I have about a month before my life starts getting progressively complicated, and then insane, as school starts.  Let’s do this.