Aaron Spain CATE President

THE MYTHOPOESIS OF THE EVERYDAY- or Looking out to sea from a stony promontory

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith
. . . . (Apostle Paul, 2 Timothy 4:7)

I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazette with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one.
(Lord Byron, Don Juan)

For my part I had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon, than go to Heaven with Paley and Malthus.
(Percy Shelley, "Preface" to Prometheus Unbound)

And when he occupies a college,
Truth is replaced by Useful Knowledge;
He pays particular
Attention to Commercial Thought,
Public Relations, Hygiene, Sport,
In his curricula.
(W. H. Auden, "Under Which Lyre: a reactionary tract for the times")

This is my last "President's Perspective". The end of my monarchical reign coincides mercifully with the end of June and this periodical's end of volume issue. You will forgive, I hope, my ambiguous, ambivalent, confused, and mixed feelings and their expression in the next few paragraphs. My friend, colleague, sometime confidante, and CE Editor is the personification of professional patience and sympathetic restraint. Naturally, the last column is late. Stuff happens; real life obscures the ideal, however momentarily.

As you read this the two years of my presidency will have flown past. Astonishingly fast, too. It is probably traditional for presidents to share their acquired wisdom in a farewell address. I'll forego the apologia cum admonition bit, but to say that CATE is strong financially and remains viable politically, despite the the state's economic downturn. I will not get into a backward glance at things in a rearview mirror. They are, after all, closer than they appear.

Looking forward (was it Carly Simon who sang "Anticipation"?), we may see some gloominess on the horizon. Those of us in the trenches never really had time to get used to the heady flush of prosperity that seemed to infect the air we breathed barely a year ago. That confident, exuberant profligacy that the laity apparently enjoyed never became endemic among the squalid, penny-pinching, Dickensian schools of California. Despite increased funding over the last few years, California is still among the bottom third in per student spending. The statistics are worse if you measure funding in terms of Gross State Product. Let's hope that the cooling California economy won't discourage bond and tax initiatives.

Certainly the state's new budget has cast a pall over the gains our schools have made in the last four years or so.

Shades of Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar". We do look through a glass darkly. Our grim future is detectable in the relatively recent contretemps over whether class size actually improves student performance. In an era rife with rumor and mistrust, when government agencies plan to plant false stories in the media in the name of security, the table is set for meatloaf stuffed with oatmeal -- a cost savings for carnivores, no doubt. Why does it seem that those farthest from the tasks of teaching and learning have the most to say about teaching and learning? Test-obsessed legislators, schoolboards, and their bureaucratic minions have so roiled the clear waters that leading education reformers can openly suggest ways to get around federal and state mandates in order to keep the money coming. Educational malaria seems to be in the water.

But I would not sing a an ode to dejection. To paraphrase the Wizard of Walden, I would sing like Chanticleer even in the darkness. Perhaps an imbalanced rooster (too cocky for his own good?) is a cheerful, romantic reminder of why we teach, why we trudge back each Monday for the widow's mite of respect we receive.

A fiscal, intellectual, ethical twilight approaches just as nearly half of the teachers in California are approaching retirement. The largest cohort of teachers in California's history exits stage left, many with strongly ambivalent feelings regarding the wispy, salutary hail and farewell of permanent days off. Many of these 'Boomers began their careers as hopeful idealists. They tended to be dreamers who saw real hope for the reclamation of American ideals and American society through educational change. By almost any definition, many of these young idealists were romantics who now find themselves leaving the profession they love just as so-called reform thrust major changes on curriculum, instructional practice, teacher preparation, and all the rest. It's enough to make J. J. Rousseau want to tomahawk his noble savage.

I realize I may be treading on the proverbial lubricious and and attenuated frozen water here, but when did how you teach become more important than what you tech? When did buzzwords associated with or substituted for grading (assessment- select from formative, summative, authentic, holistic, outcome-based, or-, evaluation, testing. . .) become more important than the stuff English teachers profess to be the center of their profession? How many English teachers really wanted to become English teachers so they could discuss the most efficient ways to assess, evaluate, test, grade? Or were they wooed by the prospect of debating lesson plan formats, paper return strategies, or time-on-task ratios with other true believers?

Where is the Promethean anger that reacts to the god's petulance and the bureaucracies' decrees? Mumbled, incoherent phrases muttered in the direction of a sibilant sea or an obscene gesture in no particular direction only elaborate the sense of isolation, frustration, and Tartarean resignation that English teaching has become -- a kind of twilight world bordered by chaotic incoherencies and Lethean legislation.

Can we, like Camus, admire Sisyphus's resolve to turn back down the hill only to press his face against the rock again and again, existentially reinventing himself with the task? Walking into that classroom every Monday is a declaration of existential resolve, perhaps not mythically Camusian, but certainly optimistic, romantic, and idealistic. Let others be legends in their time.

T. E. Hulme reminds us that romantic idealism in Great Britain and France is always associated with political action. Lockean idealism still wars with Hobbesian pragmatism when we confront what California's public schools are expected to do. What's more basically political and democratic than school board politics. Lockeans have always been terribly hopeful about making something meaningful, something worth writing about on the blank slate from our nasty, brutish, and brief existence. English teachers (especially classics teachers) probably know in their heart of hearts that what they do is terribly impractical and inefficient, probably deluded, certainly not immediately gratifying, to say nothing of underappreciated or even reviled.

School reform is a kind of political reform. It is the product of this-or-that give-and-take among political parvenus, mugwumps, know-nothings, and interest-vested lobbyists whose Hobbesian understanding of education is conditioned by ersatz efficiencies and pragmatic moralities.

As Elinor Burkett puts it in a discussion of her book about American high schools,"The new programs [to raise test scores and improve grades] have nothing to do with the reality of teaching. They just reveal the ignorance of the politicians who created them" (Atlantic Unbound, November 28,2001).

Sisyphus must have gotten tired. Perhaps he took a brief break at the top of his hill and took a deep breath. He must have remembered that his rebellion was his reason for pushing that rock. Camus reminds us that we must trust that Sisyphus is happy. Ignorant legislation must give us rock-like pause to reflect.

As I somewhat tiredly shuffle off stage left, to the few attendees who have remained in the audience, may I say I feel the ambivalent temptation to re-up in the fight against the ignorant legislative armies that clash by night. I can only hope that the oppressive and repressive gray-green twilight on our western horizon may rekindle some rebellious spirit of Shelley's Prometheus to fire the imagination of the youthful, idealistic, fore-thinking, fire-bringers of the future. Epimetheus had time to reflect on Pandora's choices.

The struggle for light may yet be titanic.