Article about New Phoenix Assistance Center from South Shore Community News, circa November 2004

Linda Douglas expressed gratitude for numerous gifts during New Phoenix Assistance Center’s Thanksgiving dinner at the CYC-Rebecca K. Crown Center Friday night.

“I’m thankful for my sons, my health and for God for waking us every morning with a roof over our heads,” said Douglas, whose husband of more than 22 years died in a car accident in 1999.

Douglas and her twin sons were homeless for more than two years and living in a shelter before connecting with New Phoenix and finding stable housing.

“That was real hard for my boys,” said Douglas, who attended the event with her son Brandon Smith, 16, a sophomore at South Shore High School.  She added that the housing has provided positive structure for her sons.

Article about Gwen Mastin from South Shore Community News, circa February 2005

Gwendolyn Mastin has fought AIDS in South Shore for close to 15 years, and Tuesday her efforts were honored during Illinois State Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka’s 9^th Annual African American Heritage Month Celebration.

More than 100 people attended the ceremony for Mastin and the other five award winners, which was held at the concourse level of the James R. Thompson Center.

“The month of February offers us the opportunity to celebrate and honor the achievements and successes of African Americans in Chicago, in Illinois and throughout the country,” said Topinka, speaking during the 40^th year since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. met with then-President Lyndon Johnson to discuss the Voting Rights Act.  “The month-long celebration is held to honor those who have come before us and to teach those who will be tomorrow’s leaders.”

RIP, Gwen Mastin

I just received the sad news last night that Gwen Mastin, chief executive officer of New Phoenix Assistance Center, died on Friday.

It’s been a big month for deaths already-I’ve written about Carlos Hernandez Gomez, Howard Zinn and J.D. Salinger earlier in the month-and now we add Ms. Mastin to the list.

I got to know her while working under Martin Clayton for South Shore Community News in 2004 and 2005.   A Thanksgiving dinner for homeless families was the first event I covered; I later wrote about her receiving an award at the Thompson Center-an event at which the later nationally controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright also received recognition.

Kurt Warner’s Retirement, David Halberstam’s Education of a Coach

David Halberstam's book about Bill Belichick offers insight on the just retired Kurt Warner.

Revered quarterback, clutch postseason performer and devout Christian Kurt Warner retired yesterday, just weeks after submitting one of the greatest postseason performances in history against the Green Bay Packers.

Throughout his career, Warner rose to the occasion again and again.  As a number of people have noted, he had the three highest passing yards in Super Bowl history-his teams won one of those games, and lost the other two at the last minute-and took his generally excellent play up at least one notch during the playoffs.

His Hall of Fame credentials are debatable.  Some say he has not played long enough to earn admission to Canton, while others see him as a football version of Sandy Koufax or Pedro Martinez, a little lacking in overall statistics, but a dominant champion in his five- or six-year prime.

Warner’s odyssey from Northern Iowa to stocking shelves at a Hy-Vee grocery store to playing Arena League football to Super Bowl MVP has been well chronicled. David Halberstam’s The Education of a Coach, a biography of Bill Belichick, sheds interesting light on how the Patriots coach prepared for the championship game against “The Greatest Show on Turf.”

Warner’s gaudy numbers notwithstanding, Belichick decided that running back Marshall Faulk was the key to the Rams’ offense.  As a result, he instructed his players to key on Faulk and make sure that he did not beat them.  The coach also through a variety of schemes at Warner, who threw two costly interceptions, one of which Ty Law returned for a touchdown.

Warner rallied the Rams back from their two touchdown deficit before Tom Brady started to burnish his legend by driving the Patriots down the field and leaving it to Adam Vinatieri to nail a 48-yard field goal as time expired.

Regardless of the game’s outcome, Warner always carried himself with class and gratitude based in his knowledge that he could easily still be stocking groceries. The image of his kneeling to pray with opposing members of the Tennessee Titans during the heat of the Super Bowl when one of their players was injured has stayed with me. He and his wife Brenda’s charitable foundation does much good in the community.

So, while his defeat meant the greatest of joy for this formerly long-suffering Patriots fan, I join others who salute this valiant player and dignified man.

RIP, J.D. Salinger

J.D. Salinger died yesterday at age 91.

In a way, it’s fitting that Howard Zinn and J.D. Salinger died so close to each other.

Both were iconic figures who spent their adult lives in New England.

Both wrote highly controversial books that many considered classics in their field, even if those works were not my favorites by these authors.

Both had a distinct attitude toward human contact: the gregarious Zinn could not get enough of it, while the famously reclusive Salinger had as little of it as possible during the last four decades of his life.

And both died within a day of each other after living at least 87 years.

I never fully got my heart into The Catcher in the Rye. 

I know more than 65 million copies have been sold.

I remember that Hisao Kushi, one of my closest childhood friends, loved the work so much that he made it the basis for many of his college application essays.  

And I know that Dunreith has said that many of her former students at Wilbraham Monson Academy identified strongly with, and grooved to, Holden Caufield’s alienated, angst-ridden and profanity-laden  journey.

The book just didn’t move me the same way.

I preferred Nine Stories of the three Salinger works I read, with Franny and Zooey coming in second.

That said, it is important to acknowledge the passing of a man who created a work that was the most censored book in America’s libraries and schools for more than 20 years, starting in 1961, and from which millions of adolescents have drawn succor since its publication nearly six decades ago.

RIP, Howard Zinn

Historian and radical activist Howard Zinn died yesterday at 87.

UPDATE 2: Comment from Bill “Doc” Miller about Howard Zinn and Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot:

 Like you, I had just finished reading [Zinn's] comments in The Nation.  For so long he has been a solid, trusted, respected intellectual mentor for so many of us.  A man of true integrity and wisdom!  I go back 42 years with him to when I first heard him at a protest in Baltimore at the trial of the Cattonsville 9.  Towards the end of my classroom career in 2003, NPR did a piece on my class around the issue of teaching patriotism in a time of war.  Zinn listened to the clip from my class and that of a more traditional teacher in New Jersey.  As always, his comments were insightful and even inspiring.
How fortunate we were to have him as a teacher.  He will be truly missed.
The Lawrence- Lightfoot book also interests me, especially since I’m in the midst of “the third chapter.”  For me,with my 50% work schedule, it has been a real joy so far.

UPDATE 1: Cousin Josh Krancer comments on the deaths of Howard Zinn and J.D. Salinger:

In 2005 Rob Zombie made a film called The Devil’s Rejects. It was a violent and savage, yet brilliant picture. One of the plot devices surrounds the local sheriff consulting an expert the Marx Brothers. The expert laments that Groucho Marx didn’t achieve proper postmortem fame because he died three days after ”that damn” Elvis’ death. The sheriff happens to be an Elvis fan, and does not take kindly to that gentleman’s comment. I can picture that same scene sometime in the future, with Howard Zinn and J.D. Salinger being the substitutes.

 

Howard Zinn was not my kind of historian. Equally upsetting was the political programming that took place at Brookline High. Young minds should be encouraged to think and question, not to accept every idea as fact. Yet many of my teachers sought to impose their own “correct” opinions and values on their students. This is why I turned from a left-leaning kid into my current political leanings which are mostly centrist.

 

I would enjoy reading your thoughts on J.D. Salinger’s passing.

 

MY POST ON ZINN”S DEATH

Legendary historian, radical activist and playwright Howard Zinn died yesterday at 87.

I had just been thinking about him yesterday as I read the final piece he had written for publication-an assessment in The Nation of Barack Obama’s first year as president, a year about which Zinn wrote that he had been “searching hard for a highlight. The only thing that comes close is some of Obama’s rhetoric; I don’t see any kind of a highlight in his actions and policies.”

It was vintage Zinn: active and uncompromising about his views until the very end of his remarkably productive life.

Some of his many critics said his scholarship was shoddy, and it was true both that he did not seem to be a big fan of the footnote and that one could read the entire A People’s History of the United States without learning the names of a quarter, if not half, of our presidents.

That wasn’t really the point with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s former neighbor and friend, though.

The former World War II bombardier summed up his philosophy in the title of his memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.

Zinn was always for the underdog, the oppressed, the downtrodden, the voiceless.

The first chapter of A People’s History, about the decidedly ruinous encounter between Columbus and the Arawaks, is a classic.  In the early stages of the book, Zinn explains his purpose to tell history from the perspective of the vanquished, rather than the victor.

Zinn did a lot more than write.

He put his body on the line countless times in the struggle for justice, participating and speaking at literally thousands of demonstrations during the civil rights, Vietnam and Gulf War eras, among many causes.  It wasn’t for nothing that former student Alice Walker dedicated a section of one of her poetry collections to him. Love or loath him, you had to admit that the man acted on his beliefs for more than six decades.

One of the many stories that have circulated about him since his death involves his going straight from his final lecture at Boston University to a picket line.

I had the great fortune to hear Zinn teach during that final semester as dear friend Paul D’Angelo was a student in the class and invited me to attend.

Beyond the shock of grey hair and the tall, lean body, I was surprised at how genial Zinn was.  For him, teaching was both art and performance, and he clearly relished verbal sparring with students who disagreed with him far more than fawning affirmations of his views.

“Look at me,” he said, at one point. “A cowering wreck of a human being.”

In truth, he was anything but that.

Zinn kept going so long-after leaving BU, site of epic battles with former president John Silber, he kept right on lecturing, writing, traveling and agitating-that you almost started to wonder if he would last forever.

He didn’t, of course, and we are the poorer for his departure, even as we celebrate his long and worthy life lived.

A People’s History is by far the most well-known of Zinn’s books, and for those looking to learn more from him, I would also recommend SNCC: The New Abolitionists, his account of having worked with and advised many of the students during their emergence in the early 60s, Disobedience and Democracy, in which he argues for the strategic use of violence against property and against accepting the legal consequences of civil disobedience, and his memoir, a book where he recounts his journey.

He will be missed, of course, and, fortunately, he has left a rich legacy behind.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot shows how people navigate life after 50

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot explores life after 50 in this insightful book.

I’ve read and admired Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot’s work for more than 20 years.

Starting with The Good High School, which included a chapter about my alma mater, Brookline High School, continuing with Balm in Gilead, her moving tribute to her mother’s life and work, and then extending to I’ve Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation, her portraits of six professional African-American men and women, Lawrence-Lightfoot has demonstrated an unusual ability to listen, synthesize and place in context what she calls the architecture of people’s lives.

Her most recent book tackled life for people in the 25 years after they turn 50.

The Third Chapter is Lawrence-Lightfoot’s distillation of what she learned through interviewing 40 people in this age group over the course of two years.

Rather than decaying or playing out the proverbial string, discovering or returning to passions is a major theme of the work.

Lawrence-Lightfoot maintains that for these people to make these changes, they must disregard what society tells them they should do and trust a different type of knowing.   The risk involved in making these changes and charted these new directions is scary, and sometimes painful, but most often worthwhile for a number of reasons.  She explains that the new endeavor can be a source of meaning and joy in itself, and also can generate meaning because people are charting their own directions, rather than following the paths that society would assign.

The changes her characters describe differ in scale and type.  For one woman, the exploration of a social science discipline to add to her focus on science in the academy is a new direction, while for another it’s returning to fierce activism against genocide and other atrocities.  For a third, it’s developing her creativity through becoming a playwright, while a high-powered attorney Lawrence-Lightfoot takes up gardening.

While the journeys differ, the gradual movement toward what Dan McAdams calls generativity is the same.  Lawrence-Lightfoot draws heavily on the work of Mary Catherine Bateson, too.

Individual chapters focus on specific aspects of the process.  For many of these people, moving forward requires looking back to heal childhood wounds and navigating boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behavior.  The process of taking up something new can be both bewildering and exhilarating.

In the end, though, many of the people Lawrence-Lightfoot depicts feel satisfied with what they have done.

She closes the book with a poem by a 70-year-old black woman that aptly encapsulates the book’s message:

After a long seeking

I gave up on all mirrors.

Then feeling a way forward in the fog

Without a lamp or even a candle

And absent any guide at all

One starless night I stumbled

Upon ths place of water where

Gleaming in its darkest deeps,

My own two astonished eyes.

Light.

Lawrence-Lightfoot shines a useful light on this little-chronicled stage of life in this accessible and insightful work.

Classics on the El: Brothers K gives way to War and Peace.

I'm starting War and Peace during my El rides to and from work. I could be done by late March.

I love riding the El to and from work.

In addition to chatting about various and sundry issues with Dunreith, aka “wifey, wifey,” I get some time to meditate, or, as she calls it, “sleepitate.”  The warm fumes from the seats exert an inexorable downward pull on my eyelids-a trend that usually culminates in a head jerk, some drool, or both.

I also get to read.

Although I often look longingly at the RedEye covers and stories, I have resolved this year to use my El riding time in reading classics.

I’m talking the Big Boys and Girls here.

My first El Classics book was Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which I enjoyed immensely and wrote about recently.

Yesterday, I began Leo Tolstoy’s epic work, War and Peace.

So far, so good.  I’m definitely impressed by his ability to describe scenes and dialogue, but not yet loving loving the work.

To be fair, I’m just about 40 pages in, which means I’ve got a mere 1,320 pages or so to get hooked.

What do you read on public transportation?  Is the Classics on the El doomed to end in closed eyelids? Should I just give it up and renew the People magazine subscription I once had?

As always, comments are welcome.

Linda Nathan teaches us about school’s hardest questions

Linda Nathan shares her hard earned wisdom in The Hardest Questions Aren't On The Test.

Linda Nathan is an education warrior.

The unassuming educator and wife of friend and Tufts University lecturer Steve Cohen has dedicated her adult life to Boston’s youth, pushing them to realize their often untapped potential against considerable adversity.

Since 1998, the former director of Fenway Middle College has been the founder and head of Boston Arts Academy, a public high school in which students both learn a traditional curriculum and have an artistic focus, or major, that they pursue closely.

Since its inception, Boston Arts Academy has placed about 95 percent of its graduates in college-a figure that is markedly higher than the system wide figure of 50 percent.

As impressive as that statistic is, though, it may not be the most compelling aspect of the school, according to Nathan.

It’s the questioning.

Nathan and the dedicated staff she has assembled are deeply committed to a relentless interrogation of things small and large at the school, and to conveying that culture of inquiry to the students who attend the school.

Nathan distills and shares the wisdom she has accrued during the past quarter century in The Hardest Questions Aren’t On The Test, a passionate testimony to the community that she has played a pivotal role in creating at Boston Arts.

Nathan divides the book into three sections and six chapters, each of which has a framing question.  The sections are dedicated to school structure, supporting teachers and addressing inequality-roles that she asserts are critical for school leaders to do (She has an entertaining and thoughtful critique of how principals are portrayed in many Hollywood movies about teachers.).

The Hardest Questions has many positive features. 

Nathan devotes a chapter early in the book to describing interactions between two ace teachers and their students.  She makes it clear that the teachers are demanding and accepting, strong and flexible.  

Nathan also stresses that these two instructors are exceptional examples, but that she could have cited many others in the building.  Beyond that, the two teachers gain strength because they are not stars seeking their own individual praise and honors, rather they are part of a team (A gifted music teacher who is not sufficiently committed to the team concept is asked to leave.).

The team is characterized by its honesty.

Nathan offers numerous examples of hers, and others’, efforts to surmount the visible and invisible barriers her students confront on the way to academic success and artistic fulfillment.

One of the book’s most poignant moments comes when she describes an incredibly talented female student losing out on a full scholarship to a prestigious conservatory because she was too ashamed of her inability to pay the $500 deposit to share the need with anyone on staff.

Nathan also talks about her painfully awkward attempt to diversify the composition of the parent advisory group.  She describes how, after the nominations had been submitted, she noticed that only one parent of color was among the ranks of 15 or so people in the group.  Her suggestion that the committee reopen the process leads to understandably hard feelings, several parents walking out, and the threat of a lawsuit. 

In the end, she persisted, and the group’s composition did indeed become more diverse.

You sense that Nathan feels relatively comfortable with that stance, and, to her credit, she also talks about moments when she made choices of which she is far less proud. 

In a chapter about how the school in 2002 confronted hateful graffiti, for example, she writes about how she was far less morally outraged and active in confronting a similar homophobic incident.  Her willingness to share her less impressive choices enhances Nathan’s credibility and moral integrity.

Nathan also describes the at times seemingly interminable staff discussions about how best to deal with students’ home lives, cultures and communities in which they live.  She writes openly about the frustration many staff members felt at the number and length of the conversations, which for months did not lead to any concrete action.

She also explains that there are limits to the discourse, too.

White students who feel that they are being blamed for historic and current racism do not appear to receive much sympathy at Boston Arts.  Nathan writes that she is shocked when a student approaches her after the Gulf War began in 2003 to ask for information about why one might support President Bush’s decision-a request that surprised Nathan because she considered it self-evident that the war was a wrong one.   Even though she eventually convened a teach-in, it’s clear that the ground in Boston Arts is not neutral. 

Nathan also devotes a certain amount throughout the book and in the conclusion to explaining the central elements-a set of shared values; a collection of  talented and dedicated teachers; and a series of culminating projects-that lead to the school’s success, and that offer whatever lessons she feels the school has to offer.

The writing is straightforward, laced with anecdotes and peppered with personal reflections.

You don’t read The Hardest Questions for the writing, though.

Rather the strongest  impression that emerges from the work is of an experienced, innovative and intelligent school leader sharing her bone-deep pride in her staff that she has selected and the students they have helped usher through adolescence and toward their dreams.

Judith Warner explains that we’ve got issues

Judith Warner argues that the idea of overmedicating children is not accurate in We've Got Issues.

For many parents, myself included, parenting consists of heavy doses of love, a dash of drawing on one’s own memories when you were the same age your child now inhabits, and healthy amounts of anxiety.

How much involvement is too much?  Too little?  When do you cross the line and enter the helicopter zone?  How much unscheduled time is all right?  How much academic challenge should the kid have?  How do you deal with drugs?  How much space to give?  What time curfew?  Are there rules you don’t enforce because they entail too much conflict?  Is it all right to raise your voice?

And on and on and on.

Underneath all of these questions, of course, is a desire to do right by your child, the gradual understanding that the answers tend to be both murky and constantly changing and, eventually, the realization that some of the most important things to do for your child are to let them know they are loved, expose them to different opportunities and experiences, share and model working hard and with passion, treating them and others with respect and getting out of the way to let them grow, make their own mistakes and draw their own lessons.

Easier written than done, to be sure, and often much easier to take a long-term perspective with other people’s children than one’s own.

And, still, I can say with confidence that one of the most contentious and vexing subjects is that of medication.

Judith Warner takes on this thorny area in We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication.

This book, which is slated to be released next month, is essentially a counter-argument against the popularly held and commonly disseminated notion that we are in an era of rampant drug prescriptions by doctors in bed with the pharmaceutical industry and administered by parents desperate to find a solution to their children’s disruptive behavior.

Warner acknowledges that she accepted this narrative when she began researching We’ve Got Issues close to six years ago.

By the end of her reporting, she writes in the introduction that she came to the following ‘simple truths’:

“They are: That the suffering of children with mental health issues (and their parents) is very real.  That almost no parent takes the issue of psychiatric diagnosis lightly or rushes to ‘drug’ his or her child; and that responsible psychiatrists don’t, either.  And that many children’s lives are essentially saved by medication, particularly when it’s combined with evidence-based forms of therapy.”

Warner devotes much of the book to expounded on these assertions.   The book is particularly effective at discussing other books and articles that have been written on the subject that have contributed to current attitudes.

At base, Warners maintains, we as a society still consider mental health issues to be a stigma, and, while we have made fitful steps forward, much work remains to be done to more fully accept and integrate those children and their families.

The book itself has issues. The circles in which Warner travels appear quite narrow-We’ve Got Issues is heavy on middle- and upper-middle class families whose children are college bound-and live in the Northeast-and she repeatedly is setting up straw men to knock them down in a way that can keep the reader off balance.  After maintaining that we are not living through an epidemic of drug prescription, for example, she does make the points both that diagnoses were far less in previous generations and that many doctors do indeed have uncomfortably close ties with drug companies.

This disequilibrium can make for queasy reading, but does not detract from the quality of the book.  In the final 50 of 250 pages, Warner starts to articulate her vision of healthier doctor/drug company relations, parents’ successfully helping their children and a society that deals more openly with mental health issues.

Reading Warner’s book both gave me moments of gratitude that Aidan is a psychologically healthy and intact young man and a slightly uneasy feeling of losing one’s footing.  Other parents may see this as just another day of parenting, and I give Warner credit for challenging commonly held notions.