Book Review: The Half Has Never Been Told

The following is a book review that, like my last post, was originally created for a history class, which I'm taking as part of my elementary education course load.

Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York, New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism is a sweeping history of American slavery, detailing its effects on the social, political, economic, and military development of America. The book traces American slavery from modest origins through rapid expansion. It weaves personal narrative strands of slaves, enslavers, abolitionists, soldiers, and politicians into a cloth of economic, social, and political patterns to produce a brilliant tapestry, depicting slavery barreling across the American landscape, drunk on blood and torture and profit, nigh unstoppable in its fury.

Baptist borrows an image from Ralph Ellison to organize the book: slavery as a “trussed-up giant, stretched out on the rack of America’s torture zone,” (xxiv). Each chapter is identified by both a time period and a body part of the trussed-up giant (Chapter 5 is “Tongues,” Chapter 9, “Backs”), the latter signifying how slavery “seemed to reduce African Americans to body parts: feet walking like a chained machine, hands on the block and hands picking, minds and nervous systems yielding revenue, providing entertainment and pleasure” (415). The Half Has Never Been Told relies primarily on the vividness of personal narratives to capture and keep reader interest, only supplying the occasional chart, graph, or political cartoon when needed to drive a point home. For a book that focuses so heavily on migration and sectional strife, it is curiously short on maps—there are just a few, all clustered at the start.

These two map sets (pages 12 and 14) show the westward expansion of slavery and cotton production

Baptist’s thesis is that slavery was the dynamic engine that powered the United States’ rapid economic growth in the first 80 years of the country’s existence, and that it did so by extracting incredible efficiency through brutal torture. According to Baptist, slavery was not an anomaly or an accident, doomed from the start to die off naturally, but an integral part of the way America functioned, which had to be vigorously opposed before it could be destroyed (xvii-xix).

Baptist marshals a broad array of sources to make his case. Using primary sources like newspapers, legislative proceedings, collected family papers, and slave narratives, but also secondary literature, like academic journals and monographs, he shows how slavery was built into the nation from the first. Far from causing insurmountable problems in the early years, “the possibilities that enslaved people represented…would actually forge links that overrode internal divisions” (4). Citing debates at the Constitutional Congress, Baptist claims “interest was the governing principle of shaping the Constitution. In the interest of both profit and unity” most white Americans “proved willing to permit the movement of enslaved people” (11). Through both detailed statistical information (114) and captivating personal narratives (escaped slave Charles Ball’s story, for example), Baptist shows that slavery was expanded rapidly in the early 19th century by a class of speculators, slave traders, and planters in search of profit (1-39). This lust for gain also drove enslavers to create a “complex of labor control practices” called the “pushing system” (116), a system based on “innovation in violence” (117)—in other words, on new methods of torture (140-141). This system, in turn, produced cotton at an enormously efficient rate, and said cotton was the foundation on which the whole of the American industrial revolution was built. Baptist cites a report from Jackson’s secretary of the treasury, who wanted to show the “Tariff of Abominations” was protecting American manufacturing, but who also ended up showing that “by 1832, cotton made by enslaved people was driving US economic expansion” (319).

This is a reliable book. Sources are used in an honest and accurate way, to create profound arguments about the place of slavery in US history. In the whole 500 pages, I found only one error: Baptist calls W. H. Harrison the governor of Ohio, rather than the Indiana Territory (267); this misidentification is unimportant to the surrounding argument.

I have read little about slavery, but Baptist’s book compares well with the only other book on slavery I have read, Freedom National, by James Oakes. Both books undermine popular narratives about slavery (Oakes buries the notion that the Republicans were somehow not interested in destroying slavery as fast as they could) and both do so skillfully. The Half Has Never Been Told’s emotional hook is better—when the “evocative history” (428) in this book works, it works—but Freedom National is more consistently well written.

The author uses arresting images to express his ideas, as in his description of a slave society that “ensured that any future Nat Turner was like a bug waiting for the hammer” (347), or the amusing portrait of the Bank of the United States as “a maiden aunt chaperone who frowned at any sign of a creeping hand” (244). His evocative sketches of slave life are frequently captivating. Unfortunately, his prose sometimes gets bogged down by clunky or confusing language. At its best, though, the book is a joy to read, though that joy is darkened by the grim subject matter.

Baptist betrays no bias, beyond the obvious one for a modern writer on this subject: he hates slavery, especially the slavery that Americans crafted in the 19th century. This is not a problem—in fact, it is what makes the book effective: the book lives or dies by how well the emotional, personal impact of slavery reaches the reader. Baptist’s strong feelings on the subject bring that impact home. The Half Has Never Been Told is a work of breathtaking, detailed scholarship that, at its best, also manages to communicate at a deeply personal, emotional level. For these qualities, I highly recommend it.

Battle of Tippecanoe Game

Below is a game that I created as part of an assignment for a history class, which I am taking as part of my elementary teaching licensure program. It's untested and probably totally unbalanced right now; at some point in the future, I hope to actually give it a try.

The game is a history-based deck-building card game. The main thing that makes it distinct from most such games is that the deck is built in-game by each player, and the two players each have a different method of building a deck. Check it out, and if you happen to put together a game and actually play it, let me know how it goes!


GAME INFO: 
Players: 2
Game Time: 60 minutes
Type: Strategic Card Game

MATERIALS: 

• US Troop Cards: 50 
• 40 US Privates 
• 5 US Sharpshooters 
• 4 US Captains 
• WH Harrision 
• Native Warrior Cards: 50 
• 20 Aggressive Warriors 
• 18 Defensive Warriors 
• 10 Native Sharpshooters 
• Tecumseh
• Tenskwatawa 
• US Condition Cards: 20 
• 7 Fair Conditions 
• 3 Dysentery 
• 2 Swamp 
• 1 Lost Unit 
• 4 Tension in the Ranks 
• 3 Desertion
• Ammunition Cards: 30
• Weapon Cards: 100 
• 5 Swords 
• 60 Muskets 
• 15 Muskets w/Bayonets 
• 20 Bow & Arrow/Tomahawk
• Tactics Cards: 25 
• 5 Charge 
• 5 Dig In 
• 5 Flanking Maneuver 
• 2 Feigned Retreat 
• 8 Take Cover 
• Dice: 10 
• US Troop Advancement Board: 1 
• US Troop Advancement Marker: 1 

Printable game materials can be found here (Excel file)

BACKGROUND: 

Tecumseh. Source

The year is 1811. Tecumseh, a Shawnee leader from the Ohio country, and his brother, the prophet Tenskwatawa, have drawn together an intertribal coalition of Native Americans, with the village of Tippecanoe in the northwest Indiana Territory as its primary power center. This confederation of Shawnee, Lenape, Sauk, Miami, Pottawatomie, and other Native Americans, joined together for mutual aid and defense, is deemed a threat by the US Government, who decide it must be put down before it grows strong enough to resist white settlement of the Northwest Territory. Goals: The Native player must first gather and arm a coalition of warriors, and then lead a defense of the Tecumseh Confederacy’s capital at Tippecanoe. If the Native player succeeds, the US may be forced to come to peaceful terms with the Tecumseh Confederacy and treat it as a legitimate political entity to be reckoned with. The US player must march and deploy a force strong enough to overcome Native defenses at Tippecanoe. If the US player succeeds, the Confederacy will be scattered and the Northwest Territory will eventually be settled by whites.

Tenskwatawa. Source

GAMEPLAY: 
The game takes place in two stages: preparation and battle. The preparation stage is distinct for each player, but both preparation stages involve creating the deck that will be used to play the battle stage against the other player.

Preparation Stage – Native Player: 
The Native player’s preparation stage comes in two sections: the Civil Chief phase and the War Chief phase. These phases reflect the political arrangement in place in the villages of Tecumseh’s Confederacy: political affairs in ordinary life (such as treaties and relations with outsiders) were directed by the Civil Chief, but in wartime, a separate War Chief took power. Thus, the Civil Chief phase focuses on attracting warriors from various Native tribes to Tecumseh’s Confederacy, while the War Chief phase focuses on preparation for battle by acquiring supplies and training warriors.

Civil Chief: During this phase, the Native player may pull 7 cards from the warrior deck, and choose 5 to keep in the their hand, replacing the remaining cards at the bottom of the deck. The player may also choose to trade one warrior from their hand for one ammunition card or one weapon card. The player may choose to switch to the War Chief phase at any point (5 turns is recommended), but may not switch back.

War Chief: During this phase, the Native player may draw ammunition, weapon, and tactics cards. Each turn the player may draw 3 ammunition cards, 5 weapon cards, and 1 tactics card. The player may also exchange any ammunition, weapon, or tactics card for another warrior during this phase.

WH Harrison, US Commander. Source

Preparation Stage – US Player:
The US player starts out with a full complement of weapons (5 Swords, 30 Muskets, and 15 Muskets w/Bayonets) and troops (40 US Privates, 5 US Sharpshooters, 4 US Captains, and WH Harrison), as well as 15 ammunition cards. Each turn, the US player will draw 1 tactics card and 1 condition card. If the Conditions card allows for it, the US player will advance one day’s march closer to the Native player’s position, moving the US Troop Advancement Marker 1 space on the US Troop Advancement Board. The condition cards will gradually decrease the US player’s deck size; unlike the Native player, the US player “builds” a battle deck primarily by choosing what to discard.

Battle Stage: 
Start: At the beginning of the battle stage, each player lays out 5 unit cards, each paired with a weapon of the player’s choosing. The rest of the units remain in the hand.

First Battle Round: At the Battle of Tippecanoe, the Native forces attacked the US troops before they reached Tippecanoe proper, so the Native player attacks first. The attacking player first announces whether they will perform a ranged or hand-to-hand attack. If the attacking player is performing a ranged attack, both players must discard an ammunition card. (If the defending player does not have an ammunition card, they can still win the round, but the attacking player will not lose any units.) Both players may then play a tactics card if they choose to do so, with the attacking player choosing a card first.

Next, each player rolls one die for each regular unit on the battlefield (no officers or historical characters)—up to 5 dice. Each player adds up the sum of their dice roll; the attacking player adds this to their total battlefield attack number (composed of each unit’s attack score, each weapon’s power score, and any bonuses from unit cards or tactics cards), and the defending player adds their dice roll to their total battlefield defense number (composed of each unit’s defense score, each weapon’s power score, and any bonuses from unit cards or tactics cards). Note that the weapon power score is different for ranged and hand-to-hand attacks. The player with the higher score wins that round; the losing player that round must remove a number of units equal to the difference between the attacking and defending score from their field of play, along with the units’ weapons. If the difference is greater than 5, only 5 cards are removed from play—no cards are discarded from the hand.

Next Battle Round: The next round begins with the losing player placing on the field new units with new weapons from their hand, with a total of 5 cards on the field. The attacking player becomes the defending player, and vice versa, and the process repeats.

Example Battle Round:

The attacking player chooses a ranged attack, and each player discards an ammunition card in the discard pile. Attacking player chooses a tactic that adds 1 attack for each unit; the defending player choses a tactic that adds 2 defense for each unit. The attacking player rolls 5 dice, one for each regular unit, and scores as follows:

• Unit score: 7, adding up each unit’s baseline attack (1+1+1+2+2)
• Weapon score: 8, adding each weapon’s power (1+2+2+2+1) 
• Tactics score: 5, multiplying an attack bonus of 1 times each unit (1x5)
• Dice score: 20 
• Total score: 40 

The defending player rolls 4 dice, since they have 4 regular units, and scores as follows:

• Unit score: 5, adding up each unit’s defense (1+1+1+1+1) 
• Weapon score: 4, adding each weapon’s power (1+1+1+1+0) 
• Special unit score: 5, multiplying a defense bonus of 1 times each unit (1x5) 
• Tactics score: 10, multiplying a defense bonus of 2 times each unit (2x5) 
• Dice score: 14 
• Total score: 38 

The attacker wins this round by 2 points, so the defender loses 2 unit cards of their choice, along with their weapons. The defender must select 2 more units and 2 more weapons to play before becoming the attacking player and beginning the next round.

Game Conclusion: The game is over when one player has no more units on the battlefield, or when one player concedes defeat.

Sources:
Parkinson, S. (Instructor) (2015, February). Contested Republic. HIST 201 Class. Lecture conducted from Muncie, IN.
Oakes, J. (2012). Of the People: A History of the United States (Concise Edition, Second ed.) Oxford University Press, USA.
Sugden, J. (1998). Tecumseh: A Life. New York: Henry Holt and Co.

Why I Am Considering the Teaching Profession

Photo credit: Todd Petrie

Speak with words that you gathered from the ground,
Hold a light up to the sky,
Give the dove just one more chance to sing,
And replace the morning light.
"Built for This," Ben Sollee

The following is a short essay I wrote this week for my elementary education class; since it answers a basic question I get asked a lot—why do you want to teach?—I thought it'd be appropriate to share here. Enjoy!

~   ~   ~

“Okay, so, what are we playing tonight—Settlers of Catan? Cool. Have you played Settlers before? No? Great, well let’s get James over here to teach it to you—he’s good at that.” Settlers of Catan is a popular board game among young people,¹ and whenever my friends get together to play a new board game like Settlers, someone will say something like the quote above: James should teach it to you; he taught me to play, and I understood right away. I am the resident teacher of new board games in my friendship circle, because I am, and always have been, just that: a teacher.

I have always, always loved learning, and passing along what I learn has just come naturally as part of that love. As an elementary school student, I learned math with relative ease. My peers often struggled with math, though; once other kids realized that I knew my math pretty well, they would come to me for help. I learned to like helping them: it strengthened my grasp of the material and made me feel kind and intelligent all at once. Teaching, in other words, improved my sense of self-worth, enriched my own education, and gave me a chance to serve others. I held it close from then on, nurturing my skills as a teacher of one kind or another through camp counseling,² Sunday school teaching,³ and running tutoring and mentoring programs.⁴

My teaching method: wear hats; point at things.

Thus, teaching has always been something I have considered doing professionally. As an undergraduate, I studied linguistics in the hopes of someday becoming a college linguistics professor. Unfortunately, I graduated in 2009, in the middle of the Great Recession, when legions of other young adults were delaying entry into the decidedly unfriendly job market by applying to grad school. Prospects for secure, long-term employment as a professor looked grim, and have continued to do so ever since, as university budgets shrink and higher education in the U.S. leans more and more heavily on adjuncts to prop itself up. Fortunately, though, I learned through a variety of post-college experiences that I was adept at teaching children, and that I enjoyed it a great deal. I also knew that male elementary teachers were few and far between, and I relished the thought of bringing something unique to children’s lives with something as simple as my gender. So it is that I have turned my sights on elementary education.

I do this knowing that there are risks: education in this country is a fraught business everywhere, not just at the college level. While poverty and other external social factors are at the root of many problems with education in America, the education reform movement has placed most of the burden of solving these problems on teachers, most notably through tying school funding and even teacher pay to standardized testing. Charter schools and turnarounds place additional pressures on teachers, often minimizing their job security and compensation in the vain hope that this will somehow empower them to improve their students’ educational outcomes. I have seen these issues and others in person, in addition to reading about them extensively in the news.

To put it bluntly, the culture of education in this country is a mess. I fully expect to be frustrated and hampered in my attempts to work with my kids. But in a way I look forward to the challenge. After all, if not me, who will serve? If no one steps forward to improve kids’ lives, how will they improve? If people do not set out to change the world, why should it change? I hope to be the change that I want to see, in the lives of my students and, just maybe, in the system that serves them. That is why I am considering the teaching profession.

---

1. Well, some young people. My friends, anyway. Yes, we are nerds. Well, some young people. My friends, anyway. Yes, we are nerds.↩
2. I was a summer camp counselor for both younger kids and teenagers, starting at age 17 and continuing through college. I had the privilege of working at a camp that I attended throughout my childhood, so I felt very at home there, which was great for my ability to jump right in and lead each year.↩
3. Before moving to Muncie, I was a Sunday school teacher for 1st-4th graders for three years. I have also signed up to be a Sunday school teacher at my new church in town, the Lutheran Church of the Cross, though the Sunday school year has not begun yet.↩
4. I was a team leader for City Year teams in Chicago public schools on the south side of Chicago for two years. City Year is an AmeriCorps program that provides young adults with service opportunities in underserved schools. My teams did reading tutoring, after school programs, and mentorship for elementary and middle school students, and I oversaw their work, as well as participating in much of it myself.↩

Starting Over

Beneficence, the unofficial mascot of my new school, Ball State. Source

And you of the tender years
   can't know the fears
   that your elders grew by.
—"Teach Your Children" Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young


School starts on Monday. It'll be my first first day of school in five years.¹

I say school, but what I really mean is class, and when I say class I do mean class rather than classes, because I'm only taking one this fall.

~   ~   ~

Since moving to Muncie, I've been looking ahead to Monday, August 18, with mixed feelings. It represents the end of an excellent summer vacation, spent with my new wife in a new home—a real, actual house, no less—but also the beginning of a new chapter in my life: graduate school.

Grad school is something I've long wanted to do, but the original plan was much different. After a semester of undergrad, I set my heart on the study of linguistics. I wanted to get a PhD and become a linguistics professor somewhere.

Maybe that was always a fantasy. Acquiring a PhD has always been a tough gig, and getting a tenure track position at a university little easier. What really convinced me it that it would be a waste of my time to try, though, was the Great Recession. However challenging it might have been to pursue my dream in the pre-2008 world, graduating in 2009 made getting into a PhD program look fiendishly difficult, as young people delayed entry into the job market by going to grad school in record numbers.

Perhaps "waste of time" is too strong a term. At any rate, I realized I was unwilling and maybe even unable to undergo the loss of time and energy, the uncertainty, and the hardship required to achieve that particular goal. I didn't want to move all over the country hunting jobs for the next several decades. I didn't want to compete in the cut-throat academic world for low pay. I didn't want to publish or perish. I wanted peace. And in the world of the post-2008 "economic recovery,"² there seems to be very little peace to go around in academia.

So I looked for something else. I did two years in AmeriCorps, which would be a great program if it actually paid people a living wage for their service to the country (like, say, military service, or literally any other public-sector job). As it was, I lived on a small stipend and foodstamps and worked my butt off five or six days a week. Afterwards, I cobbled together a meager living from teaching test prep for a for-profit education company (shudder) and teaching some friends the basics of Biblical Hebrew, and then finally got a full-time job proofing resumes for fairly low pay (still better than my previous gigs, sigh).

Life in this economy hasn't been easy for most Americans. I don't think my story is particularly unique, but it is what it is.³

~   ~   ~

Meeting Anna, getting married, and moving to Muncie has given me a chance to hit the restart button, for which I'm grateful. I'm going back to school to get certified as an elementary school teacher. It will take at least two and a half years. Even though I'm a grad student, I'm basically just getting a BA in elementary education, so it will be entirely undergrad-level classes. I don't know how much fun it's going to be being almost a decade older than my classmates. Maybe no fun at all? 

I've always loved school, though. I love learning new things, and I love teaching other people things, so learning stuff with the express intent of using it to teach others seems like it's going to be fun. Or at least entertaining enough and worthwhile enough that I'll be able to bear the awkwardness that may come with being caught between grad and undergrad. 

And maybe it won't be fun; maybe I'll just do my time and move on to do the worthwhile work out in the field. I think education in America is in a seriously bad place, though I'm not of the opinion that it's ever been all that great. The way I see it, the root of our problems is this: America's poverty levels are too high, much too high for a rich country, and we have too many impoverished students in particular. Poor students need the most intervention (read: money) in order to succeed, but tend to get the worst resources because of how schools are funded and the ability of richer students to opt out of public education. Impoverished students are increasingly segregated into schools by themselves, to the detriment of their educational performance. (Also, speaking of segregation: racial segregation in schools is on its way back.) The result of all this is a system that adequately serves the needs of middle-class and wealthy kids, and throws poor ones under the bus. 

Source

America's school troubles, in other words, can be summed up with that old chestnut, It's the economy, stupid. 

Troublingly, the "education reform" movement ignores this, and has been implementing misguided solutions like using standardized tests to determine which schools should get government funds (Surprise, kids, your whole education is now oriented around the ISATs!), as well as opening charter schools (Kids, your education is now being used to profit large corporations! Ain't that swell? Also your teachers get paid less here. And there's no evidence this school will do better on average at educating you than a traditional public school. We're much more likely to expel you to keep our numbers high, though!).

I hope to be able to do my part in building something better than what we have now. Failing that, I'll serve the kids I meet to the best of my ability for as long as I can. But first, I gotta get through grad school...with undergrads. 

~   ~   ~

If I'm not careful, I may end up at Bracken Library for the whole semester, where I often go to read books for fun. Source

Which brings me back to my opening remarks. I'm only taking one class this fall because I can't get in-state tuition rates till next year, and the difference is steep enough that it makes sense to wait till then to get started in earnest. I can't tell whether this first semester is going to be a challenge or not. I've enjoyed lots of free time this summer, but I'll start to feel guilty if I don't find something worthwhile to do with my extra time this fall. But what exactly that will be remains to be seen. I'm considering finding a job (top of the list: substitute teaching) or starting some kind of big personal project, or maybe just finding a bunch of on-campus activities to get involved in. 

Whatever it is, I recognize that it's an enormous blessing to have extra time to myself this fall, and that I would have a much bigger, more intense set of worries if not for Anna. So I'll end this post with a word of thanks to her, my beloved partner, support, and friend, for this gift: the chance to start something new.

---

1. Unless you're counting my AmeriCorps years working in schools, which did include "first day(s) of school" in a distinct sense.↩
2. In scare quotes because the gains from said recovery have overwhelmingly gone to the richest Americans while the rest of us climb over each other for the few remaining jobs at low wages. Wealth inequality is probably the economic problem of our time; possible solutions range from raising the minimum wage to creating a no-strings-attached minimum income for all Americans, with a job guarantee program lying somewhere in the middle. Sadly, thanks to the Reagan Revolution in the 80s and the Democrats' reaction to it, both major parties are apparently too far to the right to seriously propose any but the first and least radical option.↩
3. I do remember sitting out on a hot day in the park one summer not long after the economic downturn. It was a gross, humid day, and I had stripped down to a grody white undershirt, my body sweaty, my hair mussed. As fate would have it, a Japanese TV crew walked through the park just as I sat down, spotted me, and came over to interview me about, what else, the economy. It was pretty surreal. I told them that yes, the economy did indeed suck right now. I can only assume I looked perfect for the part of down-on-his-luck schmo, though whether that's an accurate description of me, a highly educated white male with a great middle-class social support system, is open for debate.↩

Smoke and Mirrors: An AmeriCorps Tale

Note: I've gone ahead and changed names and altered the accompanying photo for the sake of story's characters, since I don't necessarily have permission to write about them like this. I'm hoping that if they see this story, they'll take it in the spirit of fun it's intended to have.  

It'll end too soon if it ends at all
I don't worry now, 
The friends of summer'll be the friends of fall. 
—"It'll End Too Soon," Crooked Still

In 2009, I signed up for an AmeriCorps program. I was fresh out of college, graduating into a stagnant economy with a degree in not-science, not-medicine, and not-any-other-field-where-you-might-actually-get-a-job. I wasn't bitter about this: college was awesome, and I was happy about having studied linguistics, with a minor in more linguistics. But I needed a job, and AmeriCorps had positions, so I took one.

When I showed up for training, one of the first lessons I learned was how to talk about AmeriCorps when people didn't know what it was. "Whatever you do, you shouldn't really say 'It's like a domestic Peace Corps.' AmeriCorps has a very different set of goals, structure, and kind of activity from the Peace Corps." Instead, I was supposed to mention that AmeriCorps is a government-sponsored program that provides a way for Americans to dedicate themselves to a period of service to their fellow citizens.

Typically, talking about my experience would go like this:

SOMEBODY: "What're you up to these days, man?"
ME: "Oh, I joined an AmeriCorps program this year. Do you know about AmeriCorps?"
SOMEBODY: "Nope."
ME: "...well, it's like a domestic Peace Corps."
SOMEBODY: "Cool!"

For real, anything else was a mouthful, and people's eyes tended to glaze over when I tried to deliver the approved spiel. But just so you know: AmeriCorps isn't really all that much like a domestic Peace Corps.

I was charged with co-leading a team of people in an elementary school. We were supposed to tutor kids in reading and to run an after school program, and occasionally we'd put together a school-wide event of some kind. That was pretty much it.

It sounds simple, but it was actually really tiring, frustrating, challenging work. Part of the trouble was the fact that we had long days (7:30 to 5:30, if I recall, with a half-hour lunch break) and that working with kids can be super draining. But most of the trouble came from the fact that we were a bunch of oddball misfits who didn't really get along.

How all these strange people—and I include myself in that description—ended up on the same team is a colossal mystery. There was Harriet, the dreadlock-sporting conspiracy theorist and probable stoner; she wore sunglasses inside a lot, and tried to teach children that milk was bad for them and would give them asthma. This upsetJosh, the Republican Jew law-school applicant, who regularly employed questionable tactics in engaging children, including using military history to teach his 4th graders reading and—my personal favorite—taking a child's chips and eating them in front of him to emphasize that the child should not bring food to tutoring sessions. He was also very fond of dodgeball, due to its being his sole opportunity to peg children with dodgeballs without repercussion. To his credit, though, we all ended up fond of dodgeball. For the same reason.

Next to Josh's spot in our room was the one belonging to Elena, our Hispanic lesbian with a fondness for making non-school-appropriate jokes when kids weren't around. In fairness: the whole team was fond of this; it became, over the course of the year, a game to try and make me blush at lunch hour. Leela was Elena's right-hand girl in inappropriateness, but also would get real stone-faced if things started to get out of hand. It helped us keep it together, sometimes.

There was Alice, our fairly straightforward, Christian gal, who was the "old lady" of our group, mannerisms, memory, speech patterns, and all. There was my co-leader, Carrie, who took things a little too seriously, seemed to have home issues she couldn't unburden herself with, and, um, lied. Like, more than I was prepared for. She lost the team's faith a lot sooner than she lost mine, perhaps because I'm a sucker and can't spot lies and half-truths very easily.

King of lies and obfuscation, though, was Ulysses. Ulysses was a gay black man with an extreme fondness for Beyonce Knowles and matching his shoes to his outfits. He was noteworthy for his tendency to take creativity too far, like, say, crafting elaborate board games for his tutoring students, but then not really using them to teach them to read, which is what he was supposed to be doing. If he was confronted about this sort of thing, he'd throw up a verbal cloud of smoke and retreat, sometimes to the cafeteria. He once drew fire from the school administration for teaching children the "Single Ladies" dance from the eponymous Beyonce music video, but by that point in the year I was too far gone to ask him to account for it. His explanation would have involved too little sense and too much leaving the room to hang out with the cafeteria staff, and I wasn't up for it.

We did have one normal, everyday-seeming guy there to balance us out and help us stay even-keeled. His name was Peter. He left the program after a week with us.

This team was often a frustrating group to work with. There were days I would show up and feel that the group had just stopped a conversation, not wanting me to hear what they were talking about. They would accuse each other of not working or being inappropriate when I wasn't around. They generally acted in ways I found confusing. There were months in my year with them where the general smoke-and-mirrors feel of it all left me unsure who to trust or what to do.

Late in the year, though, I had bigger troubles, when two terrible months-long developments came to a head on the same day.

It was April, and a couple months before I had invited a former professor from college, a Deaf woman, to come talk to my students about Deafness and Deaf culture. She agreed to do so, but to get her to come, I had to hire an interpreter. I got a woman named Rebekah to agree to come, on the condition that she be paid $50 an hour, a sum which staggered my mind at the time—my AmeriCorps stipend was $250 a week. Fortunately, the school agreed to pay her; she said she'd like to be paid in 30 days, the school admins said that'd be fine, and that was that. My professor came, the interpreter interpreted, the kids had a good time, and everything was grand. Rebekah worked for 2 hours and was owed $100.

A month passed, and one day I got a concerned text message from Rebekah, asking about being paid. I talked to the school admins, who said that she had some paperwork that needed to be processed, and it would be a little while longer before she could be paid. I texted this to Rebekah, who was not happy about it.

This situation repeated itself several times; each time, I'd get a text (and they grew angrier and more vehemently accusatory each time) from Rebekah, I'd track down an admin, and they'd tell me that her paperwork was still processing. Once, Rebekah asked for the school's number so she could call and complain; I gave her the number on the school's website. It turned out that this number was no longer in use, so Rebekah accused me of trying to keep her from talking to the school and getting her money. I started loathing my phone, fearing it: any vibration could be another threatening, spiteful text message from this woman, which added immeasurably to my stress level, usually high enough from corralling children and my team.

The other issue was my co-leader, Carrie. Carrie was a stalwart servant and passionate leader early in the year. Unfortunately, she got stressed easily and it started to show. By this point in the year, she had lost the team's faith for lying about where she was and what she was up to when she should have been working—pretending to have sick relatives or job interviews when she was really at home or out on the town, that sort of thing. She had also gotten in serious trouble with the organization for getting caught breaking a fraternization rule. And then one day in April, I got a call from my boss, saying Carrie had been demoted. Carrie had been caught in a pretty big lie—she'd decided not to tutor a student for months and lied about it to me and the school—and had been demoted from team leader to regular team member and suspended from service for a week. I was now on my own as the leader of this team. And not just the only team leader, but a leader of a team where everybody hated one person, Carrie. So it was a bad day.

The day as I climbed the stairs to our classroom in the school, I got that call from my boss, Rebekah texted me. She said that she was fed up; she accused me angrily of denying her what was rightfully hers, and said that if she didn't get her $100 very soon, she would sue me for it. Not the school: me. I about broke down in the stairwell with terror and anger.

That day, I sat with my team at lunch, and I gave them the news about Carrie. They were angered by it, but unsurprised: they'd had their suspicions that Carrie was neglecting that student. I also told them that I was super-stressed, and had been for a while, about Rebekah, and that she was threatening to sue me and that everything was terrible.

And then my team made it all seem okay. They told me I was the team leader that they actually trusted and liked, and it would be okay if I was their only team leader—better even. And they made sure I felt like Rebekah wasn't going to be able to mess with me anymore. In an inappropriate way, sure: they told me they'd be happy to give Rebekah a beat down; I just needed let them know where to find her, and they'd take care of it. But seriously, Josh chimed in, there was no way I could get sued for $100; for one thing, court costs would eliminate any benefit. Besides, Ulysses pointed out, she really should have worked those measly 2 hours for free. We all practically were.

And so, in my dark hour of need, my inappropriate, obfuscatory, strange team came through and lifted me up, and helped me realize that things weren't so bad. At the finish, Rebekah got her money, we got through our year, and everything ended up all right.

Mr. B: NRA Member, History Teacher

Half my life is in books' written pages,
Live and learn from fools and from sages;
You know it's true,
All the things come back to you. 
— "Dream On," Aerosmith
(Note: summer is over, so I'm going to try and return to my original one-post-per-week schedule.)

In 8th grade, I had the coolest history teacher; I'll call him Mr. B.

Here's the thing about Mr. B: he stands out in my memory as a great teacher, but many of the details I remember about him make him sound kind of terrifying, or just like a not-ideal teacher. Mr. B was a card-carrying NRA member, and he let us know about it. He often spoke about the possibility of revolution in the U.S. because of too much government control or corruption (he never claimed to be a Libertarian, but he strikes me as one in hindsight; maybe he just didn't think we'd know what a Libertarian was and didn't want to explain it). Not that he advocated revolution: he was just letting us know it might come one day, and we should be prepared. He was going to prepare by owning guns.

Mr. B was a loudmouth, and he often poked fun at his students, though never in a way that struck me as intentionally mean-spirited. If you gave him a silly or ignorant answer to a question, he'd ask what you'd been smoking (and, on his better days, request that you give him some). He was generally just not interested in any way in being politically correct: the man had us watch "The Patriot" in class, for Pete's sake.

But I will assert that Mr. B was the best teacher in the whole school, no contest. The man should be honored as a hero and, I think, remembered as a legend. Why, you ask?

Mr. B was the most energetic, enthusiastic, engaging teacher I've ever been taught by, known, or heard of. He was utterly unhinged, unafraid to be weird, goofy, or even abrasive if that's what it took to get kids' attention and focus it on learning. He was creative and imaginative, and he cared deeply about his students. I've never had another teacher give me a Myers-Briggs personality test, and even if I had, I doubt anyone else would have thought to group students together by complementing personality types or would have been able to address them in class by type ("James! You're an INFJ, what's your opinion on X? Our ENFP over here thinks otherwise, eh?" and so forth).

My favorite part of Mr. B's classes was the opening monologue, where Mr. B would riff on current events and try to teach us about how the world worked. It could have been the most self-indulgent nonsense ever, but it was usually awesome; in particular, I remember hearing about and discussing the implications of the U.S. spy plane collision in (debatably) Chinese territory, and I realize now that there was no one else in my life who bothered to talk about big, knotty political and international issues like that when I was 13. Heck, not many adults took me any kind of seriously at all at that age, so Mr. B was definitely special.

Mr. B was the greatest. It's thanks to teachers like him that I grew up into a person with any kind of ability to think independently or analytically (and perhaps that I survived such teachers as Coach V later on down the line). I hope my kids get a few teachers like that guy someday.

Coach V and the Native American Project

And I've been holding onto the gold,
When letting go would free my hands.
 —"The Rifle," Alela Diane

I went to two high schools as a kid. The first was a suburban public school: huge, full of bustle and energy, smart kids and middling kids and weird kids. It was fun, and I liked it, most of the time. The second was a Chicago Catholic high school.

Now, in retrospect, there probably wasn't an insane amount of difference between these institutions, but to adolescent me, the second school was a turd. I had no friends there, it was dingy and weird and unpleasant, and I felt alone in having any kind of intelligence (I wasn't, I discovered later: the smart kids just didn't act the way I expected them to, and I didn't recognize them for a while). Oh, and many of the teachers were hacks.

One such teacher was Coach V, who taught my English III class. Let me break that class down for you a little bit:

• First, this was a non-honors class, so I was surrounded by and expected to perform at the same level as (what I would have then thought of as) my "intellectual inferiors." (My experience in school inculcated a thoroughgoing elitism in me that I failed to recognize until I hit college. [Translation: I thought I was better than everyone else.]) This was misery. But, to be fair, I probably deserved it.
• Added to this was the fact that Coach V did not challenge his students very much. We read—in a high school English class in America in the 21st century!—a total of one novel in the course of the school year. A day's lesson would regularly consist of just reading out loud together from a textbook, with little discussion, analysis, or thought required of kids. We'd fill out worksheets. Sometimes, we would watch a movie.
• Lastly, Coach V was a neglectful teacher: he was laughably bad at returning our work. At the time, I was unexposed to adults who would straight up lie or make promises to children that they had no intention of keeping. So when Coach V would tell us it'd just be a day or two more before our homework was graded, or our grades were calculated, I totally bought it and forgot to notice when work never came back or grades came out months after they should have. Grades were apparently based on Coach V's general feeling about how we were doing, since he clearly hadn't graded most individual assignments. 

At the time of the incident in question, then, Coach V was either sort of a loser, not really cut out to teach English, or he was a lying, manipulative, lazy jerk. I'm about to make the case for the second option. 

Early in the year, Coach V mentioned that we would be doing what he called a "Native American Project." He just let us know that we'd be doing one, and that he liked to keep students' projects to show to next year's classes, even going so far as to show us one from a previous year. He said he was famous in the school for having a really effective way of convincing students to let him keep their projects. And then he went back to his lesson. 

So later in the year, when the Native American unit came around (represented by reading about two short stories about/by Native Americans) everyone was primed for the Native American Project, and we were all "No way am I doing work on this project and letting this guy keep it."

Coach V's Native American Project was assigned as follows: 

1. We were to go to an "angled street" (not one of the rectangular grid streets that characterize Chicago's layout, but one of the few streets set at diagonals to those streets, like Milwaukee or Elston) because—and I can neither confirm nor deny this—they were the city's "old Native American trails" paved over and made into streets. 
2. Once on such a street, we were to purchase something "related to Native American culture"—and here, Coach V held up, I kid you not, a Land O'Lakes butter container, which he claimed a student had brought in for his project the year before. We were not supposed to create something, just, you know, buy it. 
3. We would bring this item to class, along with the receipt which would demonstrate that we had bought it during the time in which the Native American Project had been assigned, rather than simply brought from home. And then we would explain to the class how our item related to Native American culture. 

So the Native American Project was obviously horse hockey, plain and simple. But it was going to be a little challenging, since the places you could buy things were limited geographically and the things you could buy were limited by the general stupidity of them having to be related to Native American culture, which, c'mon. I'm pretty sure the Land O'Lakes butter thing is related to Native American culture exclusively via cultural stereotypes.

But, Coach V, said—and this was, it turned out, the truly devious part—if we were worried about the difficulty of getting something related to Native American culture under the constraints of having to go to an angled street to do it, there was an easy workaround: just go to this store up on Milwaukee Avenue; he discovered it recently, and it's a store that just specialized in Native American cultural wares!

So, naturally, we all went there. It was the only way to accomplish this ridiculous project without dignifying it with actual effort. I bought a cheaply framed, soft-focus painting of some eagles and Native Americans in feather headdresses or something. It cost $15.

The day of the project presentations came around. I stood up and gave my talk, as did everyone else. (Mind you, I took the project quite seriously: I wrote a nice little essay and expected a good grade for my efforts. My cynicism toward all this came later, though I suspect it was already present for many classmates.) We all gave Coach V our purchased objects, all from the same store, and—and this is crucial—the receipts for said objects along with them. And we never saw them again.

Coach V's famously effective method for persuading his students to let him keep their projects? He never spoke about them. He never offered to return them. If we asked for them back, he politely changed the subject.

Sometime after the end of the school year, a true understanding of the nature of the Native American Project finally clicked into place for me. It changed from a story about an absentminded teacher who forgot to grade papers assigning a silly project and forgetting to return it to us, to a story about a teacher who scammed his students out of hundreds of dollars. My classmates never forgot or forgave: whenever we'd see Coach V in the hall or he would visit one of our classrooms to talk to a teacher, someone would utter an unconvincing cough laced with "Native American Project," or, even better, just straightforwardly shout from the back of a classroom, "Hey Coach, where's that Native American Project, huh?" And Coach V would smile, wave his hands, say hello, even occasionally address our concerns directly and promise the projects would be returned sometime. But they never were.

Coach V was a lying, manipulative, lazy jerk. Fortunately, the school administration forbid him from ever assigning the Native American Project again after my year. And then, a year or two later, they fired him.

---

Photo source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/horiavarlan/4290553216/

Pete. The Bookstore Guy.

Honey get your boppin' shoes 

Before the jukebox blows a fuse.
Well everbody's hoppin',

Everybody's boppin',

Boppin' at the High School Hop.

—"High School Confidential," Jerry Lee Lewis

This week, I met an old high school classmate; I hadn’t seen him since we graduated almost seven years ago. The guys in my class (it was an all-boys school for a long time, and my class was the last all-boys class) were a rowdy, strange, and not particularly mature group of dudes. It was a surprise, then, to meet my classmate: self-aware, sober, in the middle of helping someone he cared about, no longer his high school self. The pleasant thing was, it was as if this is who had always been all along, and it just took a few more years, some exposure to life outside of high school, to let it show. I wonder if that's how I seemed to him.

***

Meeting this classmate reminded me of an incident, late in my high school career, when my classmates demonstrated their character to the fullest—at least, their character at the time.

Our school was (and, to my understanding, still is) a shabby, somewhat desperate place, continually struggling to get the funds to pay for teachers, staff, and upkeep. It’s a private school, so they charge tuition, of course, but the school’s search for money doesn’t stop there. There’s activity fees, and annual fundraisers like raffles and a walkathon. But, most frustratingly, there’s the bookstore.

My high school did not provide you with anything you needed for class for free. If you wanted, say, a textbook, you bought it at the bookstore. And yes, that textbook lost 80% of its value immediately upon purchase; you could sell it back to the bookstore, but it was hardly worth it. The worst injustice teachers didn’t even give you scantron forms to take your multiple choice tests on; you had to buy them at the bookstore, or risk failing the test. Naturally, this situation created some resentment within the student body.

To make matters worse, when you visited the school bookstore, you had to deal with the man who ran the bookstore. This man was late middle age, kind of heavy-looking. He had a combover and big, coke bottle glasses. And he was a bitter, angry person who did not like you, or, apparently, anyone. Who can say why he was bitter and angry and did not like you? Perhaps it was because everyone he met was angry at having to come to the bookstore. Perhaps he was angry because he was middle aged and had a combover, and that's just no fun. But the main point is, this guy was a jerk.

Now, the hallways at my high school were divided by class—you had the freshman hallway, the sophomore hallway, and so forth. One day in the senior hallway between class, someone started to mouth off about the bookstore guy. It was unfair that we had to buy our own scantrons, sure, but it was extra frustrating that this guy was such a jerk to us. Who was he, anyway? No one knew his name. So we collectively decided to call him, “Pete.” I never found out if there was a reason for this choice; thereafter, the bookstore guy was Pete, and that was that. Not long after, someone wrote a short song in celebration of Pete. The lyrics went like this:

Pete, the bookstore guy,

Pete, the bookstore guy,

Pete, the bookstore guy,

Pete, the bookstore guy.

We were a creative bunch in the senior hallway.

As the year went on, the sound of Pete, the bookstore guy ringing through the senior hallway became more and more common. We would chant it between classes to each other, glorying in the weirdness of this bitter man whose identity was unknown and, in our way, releasing energy but also building and expressing our frustration about the bookstore and our experience at the school. Sometimes someone would rap over the background chorus of Pete, the bookstore guy, expounding on Pete’s made-up life and existence, or just editorializing on life at the school in general. It became the senior class theme song, even surpassing our already very creative “Oh-five-WHAT? Oh-five-WHAT?” chant, referring to our graduation year, 2005.

Time passed, and the end of the year loomed large. The seniors were on their way out, finishing classes with final exams and getting ready for graduation. We were restless.

One day, the song finally made its way out of the senior hallway. A senior, passing by the bookstore downstairs, casually chanted it to himself (pete the bookstore guy); a moment later, someone else picked it up and chanted it along with him (Pete, the bookstore guy); gradually, more and more seniors gathered and chanted and whooped and laughed and soon there was a howling, jumping, agitated mass of high school seniors outside the bookstore, all yelling at the top of their lungs PETE, THE BOOKSTORE GUY; PETE, THE BOOKSTORE GUY; PETE, THE BOOKSTORE GUY; PETE, THE BOOKSTORE GUY.

The bookstore guy was furious: his name was not Pete. Onlookers were amused: someone was finally doing something, however trivial, about the injustice that was the bookstore and its operator. And suddenly, a teacher appeared around the corner, and all the seniors dispersed, not wishing to endanger their graduation with a suspension.

That was the last time any of us sang the song, and it was the last time any of us needed to. We had made our point.

Camp Counselorhood, and What it Taught Me

Me at camp with a friend.

Wake up
It's a beautiful morning
Honey, while the sun is still shining
Wake up
Would you like to go with me?
Honey, take a run down to the beach
—"Let's Go Surfing," The Drums

When I was 17, I had my first job. It was not a job I took by choice; my mother made the unilateral decision that I should be employed, and even went so far as to do all of the work required to secure said employment for me, getting me the paperwork, arranging an interview, and so on. After a fair amount of cajoling, I went along with it all and did what little I needed to do to actually qualify for the job, and I got it. It was summer 2004, and I was a camp counselor.

An ideal first job should have a modest measure of responsibility and short-ish hours. It should involve interacting with other people in a friendly but relatively low-key way. Something like stocking shelves or food service: these come to mind as good first jobs. Being a camp counselor is on another level entirely. You have all the responsibility you can handle—the health, safety, and emotional well-being of over a dozen young people is in your hands—you have one hour in every 24 to yourself, and you have to navigate a complex and shifting social network of older teens and young adults, often quite volatile and gossip driven. If learning to be employed were learning to swim, being a camp counselor would be falling out of your canoe in the middle of the lake.

***

Camp counselorhood taught me a few big lessons. The first was that I couldn’t rely on my “book intelligence” to get me through a lot of real-life situations: I needed to understand how people worked, and I didn’t. I had trouble getting kids to do what I wanted them to do, and I couldn’t figure out why. I had trouble understanding the motivations and actions of the adults and young adults around me. My social skills were wanting.

My favorite example: I had a kid who was totally good all day, enjoyed himself thoroughly and loved being at camp. But every night at bedtime, he would cry because his mom wasn’t there. And I had nothing meaningful to say to this kid. I would basically say, “Look, your mom’s not here, obviously. Please stop crying. Like, soon. Now would be good,” and then he just wouldn’t, of course. My solution: I gave him a bunch of tissues and left him alone. Others were critical of this strategy, but at the time, it just seemed like the most practical thing to do.

***

I also learned how easy it is to get pressured into doing something when you don’t have a firm sense of what is and isn’t a good idea in a given situation. Large groups, even composed of children, have a strong voice, and sometimes I gave in to that voice against my better judgment, simply because I hadn’t worked out all of the boundaries and rules I wanted to stick to beforehand.

Example: I taught an Astronomy badge at a scout camp for some boys, and I ran out of things to do with them. The camp owned these inflatable plastic planets, and the kids wanted to use them to play dodgeball. I hadn’t given much thought to what we should and shouldn’t be doing in class, so the kids’ logic (“It’ll be fun!” “It’s technically related to astronomy!”) got the better of me, and I set up a dodgeball game in our classroom, flipping tables on their sides and laying out the rules. We played a game. And the Camp Director walked in on us. I knew from the look on his face that I had made a bad call on what our astronomy class should have been doing that day.

***

The best thing I learned was the joy of leading others, of being in charge and making things work. I had to think quickly and act fast a lot, and I learned that I was okay at it most of the time. It was a good feeling. The last day of my astronomy class, I took the boys out to the big hill at camp for a stargaze. I convinced everyone to turn off their flashlights, let their eyes adjust to the dark, and walk by the light of the stars on the through the woods. We got to the top of the hill, the highest place in the county, and we looked up and saw the stars as few of us had seen them before: a clear country sky, no city lights, and, what’s more, no moon to outshine any star. I pointed out the constellations we’d discussed in class. I pointed out Mars, red and low in the sky. And we stood on the hill, looking up so long and so hard our necks hurt, and I knew I had led my boys to something wondrous and good.