Wishing Women Well

                                  Wishing Women Well

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 9/30/18

            I’m thinking a great deal about women teachers these days, their school year still lying before them.  In fact, I’m going to sing their praises since I know from close experience how important and how unheralded they are.

            Why women teachers?  Frankly, because their influence on me and the debt I owe them is beyond measure.  I’m not referring to the teachers who taught me, though I also owe them a great debt of gratitude, but to female colleagues past and present.  I’m grateful for the men with whom I’ve taught over the years.  Coaches, particularly, are my heroes.  But in the two states, six schools and three colleges I’ve taught in, the women teachers have outnumbered the men more than two to one.  Individually and as a group, these women bear several distinctives.

            Some readers will view the following observations as condescending.  Sorry.  I still open and close the car door for my wife and intend to do so until I’m bent double.  Others might think these observations are out of step with modern times.  I certainly hope so.  There are many things about our exciting present world which I hope I never adapt to such as declining manners, vulgar language, our nation’s passionate love affair with alcohol, and all of the outlandish talk about choosing our gender.  In many ways the present age is better; in many ways it isn’t.

            But regarding women, it’s a long way from the ‘70s cry, “I am woman; hear me roar” to the contemporary “Me Too” movement.  Gloria Steinem, in her first issue of “Ms Magazine” declared, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”  Turns out, quite a few women now need the help of men and other women alike to bolster their claims of past male misbehavior.

            I’ve been surrounded by women my entire life.  Here’s how: one mother, ten sisters, fifteen nieces, one wife, two daughters, two daughters-in-law, six granddaughters, and over 400 stellar women in the teaching profession.  Except for the ten sisters, such a scenario is not uncommon for most other men in teaching.

            For what they are worth, here are four conclusions I’ve drawn from working among females.

            One, they are as protective of men as men supposedly are of women.  OK, risky language for these overly sensitive times, but most female teachers, married or not, parents or not, possess a Mama Bear complex.  To me this is joyous.  The first year I taught school, every woman in the building encouraged and “looked after” me and two other male neophytes.  My second year, at age 23 at an all black school, dear female teachers who knew my unstated and un-discussed mission for being there would say, “Mr. Hines, we gonna look out for you and you gonna be alright.”  Lord, I loved those women and still do.

            Women teachers tend to “look out” for their male students as well as for the coaches and all other male teachers.  Such an attitude makes for a productive and enviable workplace.

            Two, their sense of self and self-confidence is neither fragile nor undeveloped.  Women teachers are tough.  You will probably never hear a female teacher demand “safe space” or “sanctuary.”  You might hear a big 6-foot boy beg for safe space from his female teacher.  One of the pleasures of life is seeing a petite female teacher dress down a big, tall, smarty pants boy, reducing him to fear.

            Three, their families perch at the front of their minds.  Please get this.  Female teachers with families deal with children or teens all day, go home and serve their families, and then at 9:30 or 10:00 PM sit down to prepare or review for their next day of teaching.  Standing before people to teach requires ongoing thought and preparation.  Am I trying to evoke sympathy for female teachers?  Yes.  They manage two operations, a family and a full teaching load.  So, of course, do non-teaching working women, but right now I’m celebrating teachers.

            Four, like my wife Nancy, most women teachers could run the world.  Organization and execution are two of their greatest strengths.

            Oh, Nancy, I see you denying yourself, pouring your life into the lives of a husband and four children.  Betty Gray, Sue Gandy, Stella Ross, Jeanette McCloud, and Carla Northcutt, you my five female supervisors, I see you lending your inestimable intelligence and energy to Cobb County Schools, making a mark that still is apparent today.

            God, please bless all of our women teachers and please give them a good school year.

Roger Hines

9/26/18

           

The Augusts of My Life

                                 The Augusts of My Life

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 9/9/18

            With the exception of three years, I have entered a public school or college classroom every August of my life since 1950.

            Pardon the excursion into numerology, but that’s sixty-nine Augusts minus three which equals sixty-six.  Of those sixty-six Augusts, sixteen were spent as a student; fifty were spent on the other side of the desk.

            Today in London, England I am pondering those fifty Augusts that began in 1966. This, my fiftieth August year, is being interrupted by a brief vacation.

            Yes, I ponder.  Why have I given fifty Augusts to teaching youths and young adults about language, literature, English history, and writing?  Why have I pointed students to merry England, English poets, and the grandeur of London, that beacon of western civilization?  Of what good is teaching English literature?  Who actually thinks youths can be dragged from their technology long enough to learn, much less appreciate what things were like before technology enveloped us all?  What do English studies have to do with gainful employment?

            More personally, how did I go from southern country boy to lover of England and a teacher of poetry and all things British?  Good grief!  My youth was spent hoeing, castrating calves, cleaning barns and chicken houses, picking cotton, digging potatoes, and wringing chickens’ necks in time to have chicken for supper.  Since I enjoyed every day of it, how did Shakespeare, Tennyson, Charles Dickens, and Churchill wiggle their proper selves through my mundane existence into my brain and soul?

            They had some help, and not just from my parents and teachers.  Up and down a country road, farmers and their wives lived, practiced, and exemplified the contemplative life.  They may have never heard of England’s William Wordsworth but they believed that “the world is too much with us / getting and spending we lay waste our powers / little we see in nature that is ours.”

            Those farmers also cared about what was going on in the truly “outside” world.  They had endured the Great Depression and sent sons to the second Great War.  They had plenty to contemplate.  Contemplate and speak of it all, they did.

            It was a Greek non-writer, Socrates, who said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” but it was the many British writers who, like Tennyson, urged contemplation and challenged readers to “to seek a newer world / to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”  Hobson Harvey may have been the only farmer on Old Highway 80 ever to quote Tennyson, but all of them would drop poetic lines from time to time, indicating that somewhere along the way the poets of yesteryear had reached them.

            For the questions raised in the fourth paragraph above, I found answers many Augusts ago.  I saw the answers writ large on the faces of high schoolers as far back as the late sixties.  It was obvious, and still is in this fiftieth August year, that youths need the contemplation that the study of literature provides.  I’ve learned that college students as well need and can find answers for life’s deepest questions (meaning and purpose) in literature and in the thoughtful discussion of it.  Sports, malls, and pleasures of all sorts can provide needed respite and relieve stress, but they don’t deal with life’s deepest questions.  Literature does.  In a fashion, so can history. 

            I’m glad I stayed in teaching.  Twice I almost quit.  Yes, what most drives teachers from teaching is students and what most keeps teachers in teaching is students as well.  Learning that former student Harold Melton was installed this week as Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court was an emotional delight.  Melton was a prince if I ever saw one.  Running into former students who have successfully maintained a small business is just as satisfying.  Both the Harold Meltons and the Average Joes can keep a teacher going.

            Tomorrow we go to Downing Street.  No doubt a guide or a brochure will resurrect Disraeli, Gladstone, Churchill, and Thatcher, and let them say a few words.  But for all the contributions that Prime Ministers have made, the poets and the natural world they pointed us to have prodded the soul more.  As Wordsworth put it, “One impulse from a vernal wood / May teach you more of man / Of moral evil and of good / Than all the sages can.”

            Next week it’s back to the books and resumption of the fiftieth August since, as the American poet Frost reminded us, “the woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.”

Roger Hines

9/5/18

           

                   

           

Long Live the Nations

                                                Long Live the Nations

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 9/2/18                   

Is denialism a word?  If not, let’s make it one, defining it as the mental state of those who absolutely cannot (will not?) accept a verifiable reality.

 Denialism is a condition marked by an irrational refusal to accept the reality of a historical event such as, say, a presidential election. Those afflicted with this condition, the deniers, are off the rails, seemingly beyond help. Their condition leads to blindness, obstinacy, and incurable anger.    

One example of this affliction is former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.  Bill Clinton’s former cabinet member declared this week that the Trump presidency should be annulled.  Asserting that Robert Mueller’s findings could prove Trump colluded with the Russians to win the election, Reich went on to argue that such findings would further prove that Trump’s presidency “was therefore not authorized under the U.S. Constitution.”   

Such a leap of logic and such hazy words are the reason God made lawyers.  Lawyers, since they traffic in hazy English, could probably understand Reich’s logic and explain how annulment would be effectuated, but for us simple lay people it’s clear that Mr. Reich and many other deniers cannot accept the fact that Donald Trump was elected President.  Twenty-two months after that election, Reich and other Trump-haters are still shaking their heads, protesting, crying, hurling epithets toward Pennsylvania Avenue, and plotting.

            My question is what do Reich and others who are similarly afflicted think of those who put Trump in office?  We know the answer.  Those who put Trump in office are the unwashed, the non-college graduates, working folks, people of faith, neo-Confederates, Southerners and mid-landers, non-readers, NASCAR fans, and closet segregationists.  You might call them deplorables.

            Oh yeah, they’re also America First types and “nativists,” or nationalists.

            This last designation – nationalists – to whom the media is unwilling to grant personhood, is the reason Trump won and deniers lost.  As in Europe, so is there in America a nationalist/populist insurgency, a sentiment that rejects globalism and argues for sovereign nations.  On the rise across the globe, nationalism is actually a simple cry for localism, for a place in the sun where people of like values, traditions, and customs can live, work, and raise their families.

            When John Kerry was running for president, his wife Theresa Heinz declared she was a globalist.  When George W. Bush and Barack Obama were serving as president, they governed as globalists.  “We’re a global economy,” they both preached.  “Those jobs are not coming back.”

            Well, jobs do come back when different leaders with different policies prevail.  Nationalism is the reason Britain broke from the European Union.  It is the political force that has been felt in Italy, France, Austria, India, and Japan.  Under-represented and unnoticed for too long, the world’s deplorables are speaking out.

            What was communism other than the forceful gathering up of small European nations and placing them into a “union” of Soviets?  Communism ran roughshod over small nation states with their own languages, borders, and culture.

 If there was ever a fake nation, it was Yugoslavia, a post-World War I concoction of six republics with five languages, three religions and two alphabets.  Wish my Italian sister-in-law could tell you about it.  As the joke goes, there was never but one Yugoslav and that was Tito, the Yugoslavian dictator.  When Tito died in 1980, Yugoslavia died with him as at least six nations began to re-assert their cultural identity.

Donald Trump’s rise to power, like Britain’s exit from the EU, was brought about by a renewed spirit of nationalism.  Like it or not, the cry, “Build the Wall,” is no different from the cry of the Balkan states who wished to establish anew just who they were.

Democrat, Republican, and media elites are nervous.  Deplorables actually scare them.  Poor students of history, the elites seem not to know that nationalism freed the Soviet Union satellites from Russian domination thirty years ago.  Deplorables believe nationalism will free them from lost jobs, open borders, lawless illegal aliens, and bad trade deals. 

There’s hope.  The U.S. and Mexico have reached a deal on trade.  What happened to the trade war?

Those deplorables (the normals) are smart.  Unlike the deniers, they understand the meaning of nation, community, and culture.  They know that nationalism is not at odds with free markets and that it has often nourished resistance to tyranny.

How interesting. If the near future belongs to nationalists, it automatically belongs to the deplorables who understand manual labor and geo-politics as well.

Who would have thunk it?

Roger Hines

8/29/18