Letters from Lisa

I’m sure this happens to everyone. You work in a field for a number of years, experience and read up on current happenings and trends, and start to forget that there are worlds of people out there who don’t have any idea what your work is really about. It’s true of teaching — the sheer number of misconceptions and downright silly things that people think about teaching are too overwhelming for the purposes of this post - and particularly true of special education. I find most people to be respectful and mildly curious about what I do — sometimes they assume I have infinite patience or that I’m an “angel” (both untrue) — but I find them much less respectful, and often downright prejudiced, against the kids I work with.

My first job out of college was in a specialized program for severely autistic children. It was part of a self-contained non-profit setting that also had integrated classrooms, heterogenous classes of kids with developmental delays, and two classes of medically fragile/multiply handicapped children. When the autism program was first introduced (just before my time there) there was unfortunately a lot of resentment on the part of the existing workers, who didn’t qualify to work for the autism program because it required a certain number of college credits and didn’t take union workers. But even more so, because they didn’t know anything (true) about autism, they were very disdainful and even frightened of the little children and their behavior. Some employees even called them “animals”. And these were folks who worked with disabled children.

Most of them quickly came around, of course. But it was an eye-opener for me to realize that we live in a very judgmental world. People are very quick to see what’s wrong with everyone else, especially when it comes to children and their behavior. Some parents encounter hostility, rudeness, and ignorance so frequently in public that they have cards printed up that explain the child’s disability. A book I read recently about a mother’s experiences with her autistic son included an anecdote about how she deliberately spoke to her autistic son in an exaggerated “mommy” tone, as you would for a much younger child, to discreetly tip off her fellow airline passengers that this was not a typical bratty kid in their midst. It made me sad, though I admired her for having the foresight to subtly smooth over a potential situation and therefore make life less difficult for herself and her son.

Kids with learning- or behavior-based special needs have the toughest time, because their issues are not physically apparent unless you know what to look for. Everyone knows it’s politically incorrect to make fun of someone in a wheelchair or with a guide dog or with Down’s Syndrome. And it’s easy to identify who has those characteristics, and who doesn’t. But woe to the child who looks like everyone else, but whose behavior doesn’t match. It doesn’t have to be that the child acts out, either. I’ve known kids who were perfectly well behaved and nice, but who couldn’t understand a coach’s directions in the crowded echoing gymnasium or who couldn’t remember what lane they were in for the next swim race. Then they’re likely to be yelled at for not paying attention, or have their general intelligence called into question.

When I took a class of kids to the Empire State Building a few years back, someone asked me in the elevator, in front of the whole class, if the kids were “special”. Not meaning “special” in the sense of charming, creative, gifted, unique or delightful - which they were - but in the sense of “special education”. I don’t know why that person asked, particularly with all the kids standing there waiting to hear my response. But in a way, I’m glad she asked, because at least she was trying to figure them out instead of just making some assumption. Hopefully the fact that they were so well behaved and polite made an impression on her. But if they hadn’t been? Quite possibly she would have felt justified in walking away thinking about what a terrible thing it is when people have “those” kinds of children. You’d be surprised at how often I get that kind of remark, especially when the commenter knows that I work with “those” children.

The fact is, we’ve become a very tense, judgmental society. There’s this general atmosphere of punitiveness, self-righteousness, and judgment that I find very disturbing. Our level of public discourse has descended into name calling and outright fighting. You’re either with us or against us. Well, that does something. Everyone has to start scrambling to figure out who “us” is. And for those folks not lucky enough to be considered “us”, life can be pretty tough.

To be continued…

The ski adventure continues! Here are my father and myself, smiling happily. Why? We have just walked up this little hill from one ski lift to another. Up the hill. In skis. We are thrilled to be at the top. Never, ever walk uphill in skis. Just… never. You’ll be exhausted for days.

All that exertion, of course, caused us to have to stop and refuel. Back to the cafeteria, which by now was actually populated.

(By the way, I think I should point out that I am combining pictures from the first and second days.)

My mom and me. My mom decided not to go skiing. She is the one responsible for all of these pictures!

After lunch we unlocked our skis and headed for the longer trail. The first day, I went on it later in the afternoon, which was not the best time because the sun had been out all day and the snow had begun to get slushy, which makes it slippery and difficult to maneuver in. The first time I went down, I picked up so much speed that I was too afraid to turn and stop (I know… stupid) so I went barreling down the trail way too fast. Luckily I managed not to panic, and got out of there without falling. My second run was the best, since I was able to control myself a bit better - still, I felt very uncomfortable on the steep section because I was sliding downhill while turning. The third time it was too slushy, and I was tired, so I fell twice on the steep part in rapid succession. The second time I fell, a ski came off, and I kept sliding down the hill while trying to get it back on. Eventually I made it, and realized that I should stop for the day because I was pretty tired.

The second day on that trail was much better. It was a bit earlier in the day, I was much more confident, and I went down three times without falling at all. Here I am coming out of the trail, looking fancy!

Looking quite satisfied with myself…

Going again!

Coming down the trail for a second time…

Victory!

Two satisfied skiiers.

We headed home yesterday afternoon. It isn’t that long of a drive - a few hours. I was happy to be back in my own bed and to be able to take a long hot bath. My muscles desperately needed it. I’m sore in odd places - not in my legs like I’d expect, but in my chest and arms. And my right thumb took the brunt of a fall on the first day, so it feels a little sore too. (Thank goodness it isn’t broken… that would have been a disaster!)

Eh, nothing a little stretching and Advil can’t fix.

All in all, a fun family trip.

You can (maybe) see the very easy trails in this shot. You can also tell that they stopped making snow at the beginning of March. Many of the trails were gone. I wasn’t too concerned since I didn’t even know how to stand up without toppling yet.

I met my instructor by the Learning Center, and we walked down to a flat area near the bottom of the easy trails so that we could practice without sliding down a hill. An excellent idea, that. I learned how to turn left and right, walk uphill, stop, and keep my balance. Eventually we went up on the ski lift and tried the very beginner trail.

Yup, I’m on skis!

After the initial hysterics I put my parents through, I found that I picked up things pretty quickly. By the end of the hour, the instructor said that I had mastered Level 1 and 2 skills, and could do the two trails we’d been practicing on plus one slightly longer trail, “when you get bored, which you will”. I still needed to practice, though, so I was not at all bored on the two trails near the Learning Center. I was a little bit nervous about plowing into the little children taking lessons on the same hill, though. The instructor talked about giving lessons to kids as young as 3. I guess some of my students probably learned when they were that young. It was cute to watch.

My dad joined me for a little while, and then went off for a lesson of his own. Turned out to be the same instructor! I stayed on the steeper of the two easy hills and started to get pretty confident.

Here we are, coming down the easy trail!

Posing…

Heading up for another run!

This is not the full trail map, just a closeup of the trails that I did (and some that I obviously didn’t do). Some of these were already melted, so ignore those. “Grand Concourse” and “Central Park North” were the two easy trails that I learned on. Then you’ll notice a horizontal “gateway” leading to “Mossy Brook” which was the hardest trail that I did while I was there. More about that, next!

I’m back! And I have photographs…

We drove up to Hunter Mountain on Sunday afternoon - my mom, my dad and myself. My parents used to be avid skiiers, particularly my father, who used to take every available free moment to ski. (He once gave my mother ski boots for her birthday.) But then between pregnancies, family illnesses, volunteer obligations, and other assorted life events, my parents stopped going. In fact, my father had not been skiing in 30 years.

I hadn’t been skiing in 30 years, either. Well, 28.

Here I am posing in front of trails that are way too steep for me. This was the view from our motel room at Forester Lodge. First of all, I cannot believe that this place is modern enough to even have a website. It felt like stepping into a time warp straight into 1957. (Not that I was alive in 1957… I’ve seen films.) The accommodations were clean and safe, and extremely basic. Literally, two beds, a small bathroom, a cable TV, and… oh, I think there was a phone book. The lodge I stayed at in Kakadu National Park had more amenities. (Then again, that lodge probably gets thousands of visitors each year.)

Well, there was an outdoor pool!

It was warm, but not THAT warm.

Here we are having breakfast at the cafeteria at Hunter Mountain. Many of the lodge’s businesses were already closed up for the season, so at first we wandered around feeling like we’d stumbled into a ghost town. It was also far too early in the morning, since I had never been skiing at all and needed to book a lesson. Eventually we figured out where breakfast was being served, and I chowed down on pancakes. Then we went to purchase our lessons and equipment, and stood there at the counter while the second hand ticked toward 8:00 and a very earnest elderly gentleman plowed over our feet with a vacuum cleaner.

Eventually the girls at the front desk decided to take our money, it being 8:01 or whatever, and I noticed that the first group lesson wasn’t being given until almost 10:00. Now my dad, though he hadn’t been skiing in a long time, still knew enough to putter around on the easier slopes, but I knew absolutely nothing and didn’t want to wait almost two hours. So I signed up for the 9:00 private lesson. Then we went down to the equipment rentals and got our ski boots and skis.

At first the boots I got were incredibly tight, to the point that I was starting to lose contact with some of my toes. It was a real struggle to get them on, so of course once they were actually on, I didn’t want to go through the trouble of getting them off. So we got our skis and went outside, and my father attempted to show me how to step into the skis and stand up without falling over and walk a bit (on a slope… real bright of us!) Eventually I realized that I was going to be in pain all day if I didn’t change the boots. So, with the clock ticking towards 9, I went back inside to exchange the boots.

As it turned out, the shoe size was correct, so they unscrewed the buckles around the ankle and rescrewed them in a wider position. The clock continued to tick towards 9. At about 8:58, I was given the boots back. Just enough time to squeeze my feet into them and grab my skis and head outside.

Time to learn how to ski!

Have never been on skis before…full report upon our return!

Our class recently visited The Cloisters, the branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to medieval art. The attractions include the building itself, or I should say buildings, because the museum site is a composite of different cloisters and chapels put together so that you feel that you are wandering through a 13th century monastery. It’s a bit like the Temple of Dendur at the main Met building, where the idea is to give you a holistic perception of what it was like. Nothing was under glass back then.

The tour guides at the Cloisters did a fantastic job. They guided the kids into examining the tapestries and stone tombs and chapel stones for evidence of medieval beliefs, social structures and building techniques. We even constructed a tiny Romanesque arch out of little building blocks, and noted how it tended to push the walls outwards, demonstrating why you wouldn’t want to weaken the walls by putting in large windows. “I like it dark, anyway,” one of the kids said to me later.

What’s been interesting for me, as a teacher, are the questions I’ve been getting about the medieval people and their beliefs, more specifically Christianity. When I first showed the group pictures of chapels and churches with stained glass windows, the kids wanted to know who the people were. I explained that they were illustrations of scenes from the Bible and portraits of saints and historical figures. Then the questions started to come fast and furious. I found myself explaining a lot of basic Christian beliefs, with occasional help from the little girl who goes to CCD class. (As a classic dyslexic speller, she calls it CDD or CDC!) I didn’t get into all of the complexities of Christian theology, but it’s pretty hard to understand religious life in the Middle Ages without knowing who Jesus was. (or who they thought he was, anyway)

During one discussion of the medieval sculptures at the Cloisters, I found myself having to explain to my 10 year olds what a virgin is. (The scultpure was entitled “Virgin and Child”.) That was one of the few times that I really had to stop and think about what I was going to say…

“Okay. Well. In this situation… okay, in this situation, this woman here, Mary? Well, she was pregnant. You know how people get pregnant, right? And people were very surprised, because she wasn’t married yet, so how could she be pregnant? Who was the father? So she said it was because she got pregnant with God’s baby, from an angel, not from a man.”

What I should have said was, “Ask your parents!”

The kids seemed to accept the explanation pretty well, and then somebody asked, “Could that really happen?”

And the little girl who takes CCD class piped in with, “Well, that’s what Christians believe.” Perfect answer.

Currently reading a fascinating book on why we categorize, pigeonhole, stereotype and wage war between groups: Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind

This type of analysis demonstrates the vast implications of how we group people, even if we recognize the arbitrariness of the groupings. It becomes easier to understand how Shi’ites and Sunnis who lived in the same neighborhoods for generations are suddenly no longer able to peacefully co-exist. (Also true of Hutus and Tutsis, and Serbs and Croats, and any other instance of civil/tribal warfare you can think of.)

And it has implications for us in milder forms than outright warfare. After the 2000 election, which hinged on the electoral vote in a way that most people never experienced in their lifetimes, we began to choose to see ourselves as Red Staters or Blue Staters, complete with ideological opinions and religious beliefs and preferred TV pundits and all the rest of it. Those labels literally did not exist in public discourse until the folks who made the Election Special TV graphics invented them, but they have real meaning now, to the point where some people joke about not ever going to a Red State because it’s “scary” or how perhaps the country should allow itself to peacefully split, with the Blue States somehow geographically rearranging themselves so that they are all next to one another instead of along the two coasts.

But if you look at a map of the actual vote, coding each Republican vote as red and each Democratic vote as blue, you don’t get red states or blue states at all. You get varying shades of purple. (Visit that site - it is really amazing.) And if you investigate further, you’ll even find evidence that red shows up with greater intensity on than blue does, making it likely that a television viewer will see the block of red states as even more imposing than it really is.

The material point is this: if you see yourself as a red state member, in order to feel OK with your identity, you may start to make decisions and lifestyle choices that reflect your group membership. Isn’t that what groups and organizations set out to do when they form themselves, to influence and organize the behaviors and belief systems of individual people? Yet the book has much to say about the situational nature of human behavior - how people’s beliefs and behaviors adapt to what life throws at them. So the overall category, “Christian” or “Red State” or “pro-lifer” or “creationist” turns out to have less predictive value about how someone will actually respond than we all think. Same is true for “liberal”, “pro-abortion”, “feminist” and so on.

The basic truth is that the human mind does not have the processing ability, or the time/energy, to painstakingly analyze each incoming piece of information. We need categories to speed and regulate our thinking. Otherwise we would become simply overwhelmed with the staggering complexity of trying to understand each other. We’ve all experienced this, even in people we know very well. We never lose the capacity to surprise one another, yet we can speak confidently about the behavior and beliefs of strangers we’ve never met and be correct (enough) at least some of the time. What we risk is that we never really know each other, and that we make decisions and form beliefs that become self-fulfilling prophecies, condemning ourselves to wars of words and wars of mass destruction.

I took my students to the high school’s dress rehearsal of West Side Story yesterday morning… brought back some very old memories for me. West Side Story consumed several anxiety-frought and exciting and very busy months of my time back in high school, when I was obsessively playing the soundtrack turned up very loudly in my bedroom so that I could sing along without anyone actually hearing me. There were constant rehearsals, which I happened to very much enjoy, partly because I wasn’t in many large group scenes and therefore didn’t feel like I was stumbling in front of others.

It was definitely the most difficult show I’ve ever done - musically and acting-wise. That high soprano range isn’t usually something I attempt, unless I am trying to kill someone. Lots of practicing, vocal coaching, and losing my voice for a few days. And writing the score in all flats? Were they trying to kill the pianist? I felt sorry for Mrs. Foster. Oh, that was the other thing. We had a ten-piece orchestra hidden (poorly) behind a brick wall playing right onstage, competing for the microphone. Even at the Oscars, those folks are buried underneath the stage, for good reason. They’re loud! You have to practically shout, which is OK, because when you’re waving a gun around and screaming about your lost love, you’re probably shouting anyway.

(And when you pick up the first available prop in rehearsal to wave around, and it’s a soda bottle, then you’re shouting at your fellow cast members to stop laughing… maybe I should have used a butter knife like they did in the fight yesterday)

My adventures in stage acting illustrate an interesting point. Several actually. My nature is to want to keep things under wraps, secreted away, until they’re polished enough to show others, and singing is no exception. My own parents had never heard me sing by myself (except for inconsequential little solos in chorus) until they went to opening night. I was actually really shy (and still am) about singing in public. Maybe because I’m so prone to losing my voice, I’m very conscious about the way I sound and what kind of volume I’m producing. My vocal teacher used to admonish me for not singing at full power, but let’s face it - how often do you want to belt something out in a crowded room?

Onstage is different. I’m totally comfortable once the show’s in progress. Now that I am directing my own production and find myself playing the piano and singing with the kids all the time, I have had to tell myself that I am actually “performing” during those rehearsals. My time to practice is at home, when it’s completely quiet and there aren’t likely to be many neighbors around (yes, seriously, I actually worry that people are hearing my mistakes through the walls!) and my time to perform is when I’ve got a session in progress. Weird, but it works. It actually takes the pressure off the performance day quite a bit - because by then I am VERY rehearsed, and at that point it doesn’t matter who’s in my audience or how big it gets.

I promised the kids I’d show them the video of my performance from high school. I love that performance, but it’s definitely hard for me to watch. By the time performances roll around, I’m always critical of the show and myself. Now, ten years later, maybe I can finally watch it and just enjoy.

I was joking with the kids at the lunch table when one of them tugged on my hair to get my attention. (My hair used to be much longer until I donated it to charity, but it’s still tuggable, I suppose.) Then he said, “That’s what teachers need. You should have a rope around you. Because let’s say someone needs help. They could just pull on the rope and go, ‘Get back here!’”

Eventually I recovered enough to continue the conversation, and proposed that I could use some sort of pull-mechanism myself, so that I wouldn’t always have to be telling CERTAIN PEOPLE (hint) to be getting down to their work. To which the kid replied, “Yeah, but there’s more of us.”

Should I be worried?

I should introduce him to those kids from my student teaching class. When they found out that my student teaching stint was ending and that I was leaving, they protested and told me they were going to lock me in the closet. Later on they softened it to giving me spare beds at various kids’ houses. Then one kid said I could have his bed, and he’d sleep on the floor. They didn’t seem fazed by my insistence that I was going to be coming back as a full time teacher in a few months.

(Some of those kids are going into HIGH SCHOOL next year. That makes me feel old!)

Last night one of my meetup groups was stationed inside a little theater surrounded by other spaces. An audition was going on next door, so we heard many enthusiastic actors repeating the same lines over and over again. Every time I heard “Shut up!” and “Go back to where you came from!” I thought to myself, “Man, I hope that’s just the play.”

As I was leaving, an argument erupted in the doorway of another theater down the hall between a man and a woman.

Woman: You just don’t care.
Man: Oh, I just don’t care?
Woman: You just don’t care!!
Man: Right. I just don’t care!
Woman: YOU JUST DON’T CARE!!!
Man: Yeah, I just don’t care.
Woman: You just don’t care. You’re an (unprintable)
Man: Oh, I’m an (unprintable)? You’re an (unprintable)!
Woman: I’m an (unprintable)?? You (unprintable)!
Man: You’re an (unprintable) (unprintable)!

Door slams.

That would make an awesome play. “You Just Don’t Care, (Unprintable): The Argument About Nothing” by Jerry Seinfeld.

More photos will be posted on the knitting blog as soon as… well, as soon as I’m not too tired to take some.

What genius decides to make the Oscars on Sunday night every year? Here on the East Coast, we’re all bleary eyed and drowsy on Monday morning (well, those of us who aren’t caffeine addicts, at least) cursing the people who thanked their lawyers and financiers and kept us up past our bedtimes.

Why don’t they make it on Friday night? Then we could spend the weekend at the movies watching the winners.

Big news to break to the kids on Monday: our class tortoise is actually a female. Or as my mom put it, “You mean he’s a girl?”

These photos of male and female Russian tortoises make it all quite clear.