When I was 19, I lived in Yosemite National Park for a summer and fell in love with a gay man. I can see now that I must have known, at least subconsciously, that he was gay. But at the time, I was so crazy about this guy I couldn’t see straight. The attention he showered on me was captivating, like the first sun of the season on bare shoulders. I closed my eyes, basked in the glow and never considered how an affair with him might end.
Edward was 25 and had blond hair that fell in big, loose curls around his tan and chiseled face. We worked together at the village store in Yosemite. It was dingy and dirty from the dust of Yosemite in the summer, and constantly filled with tourists who had driven from all over the country just so they could wait in line to buy Yosemite toaster tongs or laminated El Capitán place mats. The store sold sweatshirts with neon graphics, the worst of which was a bestseller: It had “Stokin at the Dome!” emblazoned across a hot pink outline of Yosemite’s famous Half Dome.
Edward had spent the last few winters in Colorado as a ski bum doing odd jobs, and his service industry skills left a little to be desired. He cut this bitchy quote by Hutton Wilkinson out of the newspaper and left it on my cash register one morning: “Every night, I pray that people with money get taste and people with taste get money.” I pasted it in my journal.
Right after I met Edward I wrote in my journal: “I am totally intrigued by a man that I work with named Edward. He’s a student at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. I love working with him. We just talk and talk all day long.”
Before I met Edward, my romantic past had consisted of a naive relationship in high school with Rob, my first boyfriend. Rob’s sole goal in life was to steal my closely guarded virginity. His merciless efforts night after night on the nubby brown couch in his family’s front room were the focus of the vast majority of the time we spent together. He was a sweet guy and he was hung up on me. But mostly he liked to drink beer, smoke pot and play basketball. He was a big fan of the ’80s rock band “Heart,” mainly because he thought the slutty female lead singers with their big hair and pouty mouths were hot.
Compared with Rob, Edward was fascinating. He told me stories about traveling in Europe, painting in the park at the foot of the Eiffel Tower and hanging out in cafes reading and sipping cappuccino. Everything Edward described sounded romantic and worldly to me. I grew up in a bedroom community east of San Francisco, a sterile if pleasant town with too many strip malls and a lot of tract housing. I went to Mexico to work in an orphanage with my church group in high school once, but other than that and family vacations in the Sierras, I’d pretty much been stuck, bored, in suburbia.
Edward listened to what I now know to be New Age jazz, but at the time, all I heard was “jazz,” which seemed mature and smooth. But he also listened to the Cure and the Smiths, bands I associated with a group of older, aloof but very cool goth kids in my hometown. Edward’s favorite movie was “Jules and Jim,” but he would explain it like this: “Do you like Truffaut?” I don’t remember how I responded, but I had no idea who Truffaut was and the fact that Edward did know seemed sexy and sophisticated. He was always telling me about books I should read or films I needed to see or museums I had to visit. I had the urge to take notes while he talked to me. I wanted to memorize the words coming out of his mouth.
When we worked together, Edward ignored everyone else, concentrating all of his energy on me. His eyes bore into mine while we talked. He’d nod his head and smile while he listened to me, as if everything that came out of my 19-year-old mouth was witty and wise.
Within a few weeks we were spending most of our free time together in addition to the time at work. We got up at 6 a.m. to watch the hang gliders take off in the silky sunrise from the top of Glacier Point, and then spent the next five hours hiking down the mountain, talking all the way. We drove out to the Wawona tunnel at night and crawled through a pitch-black opening in the wall to sit on a secret granite ledge and look at the stars. We stayed up until 3 a.m. talking in each other’s tent cabins. He showed me worn photos from his travels and I listened and watched. I couldn’t get enough.
By the middle of the summer, I felt like I was falling in love with Edward and I wondered if he was falling in love with me. Once, he joked that as soon as I finished college and he finished art school, he was going to come find me and marry me. Edward hung around with my best girlfriend, Claire, on his breaks and bombarded her with questions about me. Claire relayed everything he said about me later in the tent cabin I shared with her.
The whole summer was like being away at camp, except we were all young adults. You could sleep with the other campers and drink beer and get high, and it didn’t matter if you stayed out too late or partied too much because we were all doing these menial jobs that required minimal concentration and responsibility.
If I’d chosen to pay attention during all of this summer fun, I might have noticed the clues that Edward’s interest in me was, while sometimes intense, often also reticent. He stood me up, twice, when we had specific plans to meet and gave me only the vaguest of excuses when I confronted him. He talked obsessively about his friend Kurt, in the same way as one would talk about a lover. Apparently they had vicious fights, but they also had intimate inside jokes that Edward would describe to me with fondness. Plus, my relationship with Edward was for the most part platonic.
He’d kissed me at the beginning of August. I wrote in my journal: “So much has happened! Edward kissed me! FINALLY!!! It was awkward but sweet. I really, really like him a lot.” We’d walked home together from an employee party in a nearby campground. We were both a little drunk, and when we got to my cabin we stood around awkwardly in the dark, laughing. He took a step toward me and put his cool hands inside my tank top. He pulled me to him and we kissed tentatively. He tasted like beer and smelled clean and the kiss was over practically before it started.
The lack of sex in our relationship didn’t concern me much. Edward knew that I was inexperienced. I’d ended up sleeping with my high school boyfriend right before I left for college, but I hadn’t slept with anyone else since. I told myself that Edward was being respectful and chivalrous — a gentleman. And that seemed romantic. After Rob’s callous persistence, the sexual distance Edward kept between us was a relief. My infatuation helped me ignore the fact that Edward was, by all indications, uninterested in having sex with me.
Finally, late one night, Edward eked out his confession. It was something like 4 a.m. and we’d been lying side by side on his single bed talking for hours. Edward told me that he had “intense emotions for me that sometimes he wished were lesser.” He told me that our friendship was important to him, that he cared about me a lot and that sometimes he thought he loved me. I listened quietly, waiting for him to get to the point I knew he was tiptoeing toward.
Edward assured me that he was physically attracted to me but said that he hadn’t slept with a woman in four years. He told me that he wanted to sleep with me, but that Kurt was also his lover and that he was going to visit him in the Cayman Islands at the end of the summer. He talked quickly and erratically, describing himself as “gay,” and then “possibly bisexual,” finally stating loudly that he hated labels.
I was confused and hurt. My journal reads, “Edward told me last night that he is bisexual. I am not entirely surprised but it just makes everything so much more confusing and complex. He told me he’s not into the gay scene and that he hates labels. I think that’s screwed. I alternate between being angry and being sad and wanting to ignore it all. I don’t think it’s fair. I want him to choose one or the other and I want him to choose me.”
I called my mom from a pay phone and told her everything, crying. She’d been listening to my reports of how wonderful Edward was all summer long. Once she heard that Edward had a boyfriend she freaked out and gave me a long lecture about AIDS. She scared me and I began to think that breaking up with Edward might be the best thing to do. But that idea dissipated as quickly as it had formed once I got off the phone with my mom.
We had just over a week left together before Edward left for the Cayman Islands. I went ahead and wrapped up my summer romance with a B-movie ending, complete with I-love-yous and a teary goodbye under the redwoods. Edward promised he’d call from the islands. I assumed he’d break up with Kurt. I was insanely naive.
Edward never called. Kurt knew that Edward had been involved with me and was annoyed that Edward had been fooling around with a girl. It probably took Edward about two seconds and one hot kiss before he fell back into Kurt’s bed. Edward sent me an oversize postcard with tropical fish on the front. He mostly described the trivialities of island life but he ended the card with: “I miss you. Life is complex. — Love, E.” Once he got back from the islands we exchanged a few phone calls, but we were both in school by that time and our relationship fizzled in a way that only the promise of a campus full of new people to date allows.
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I ran into Edward a few years ago in a vintage clothing shop in San Francisco. I was killing time with my husband before a movie. Edward was looking through a rack of silk ties. I couldn’t believe he was standing right there in front of me. I studied his profile from a distance for a while, trying to figure out if it really was Edward. I tapped him on the shoulder and watched his face as he recognized me, while my heart tried to beat its way out of my chest. Our conversation was unremarkable, and marred by awkward pauses, but I was glad to see him. It felt surreal to be chatting with this man I’d once thought I was in love with but hadn’t thought about or seen in 12 years. Edward was right: Life is complex. If I have learned anything in the last decade it is that while my heart often seems fickle, it also doesn’t forget.
I taught fifth grade in a district where it was not uncommon for families to donate more than $1,000 to their child’s school throughout the course of the year. This windfall of cash transformed our small public school into an exceptionally flush campus, on a par with many of the private schools in the surrounding area.
Unlike other California public schools, where state funds have been repeatedly slashed, my students had weekly art lessons, a library program, a drama coach who directed a play for the fourth- and fifth-grade students and computer classes four days a week. Donations from my students’ parents even made it possible for me to have an aide in my classroom nine hours a week, which meant frequent opportunities for one-on-one tutoring. My classroom closets were crammed full of fancy art supplies, books and the newest educational software.
When I was first hired to teach in this affluent district, I thought I had scored a pretty honey gig. But after teaching there for several years, I felt frustrated and stifled. The parents who made extraordinary donations to the school assumed that their generosity would be rewarded with power. They expected to have a commanding voice in administrative and classroom decisions, to have control over curriculum.
As a teacher in the district, I was expected to coddle this belief, preferably with a grateful smile on my face. In the end, the extreme parental pressure and hyperinvolvement in the classroom became one of the main reasons I left teaching for a new career.
A typical example of the kind of clash that ultimately drove me from the classroom was an incident involving reading. Part of my students’ homework was to read silently for 30 minutes every night and to keep a log of what they had read. At the beginning of the school year, a parent in my classroom suggested I create a contest in which the student who read the most pages in a quarter would win a prize.
This type of competitive reading program was at odds with my teaching philosophy. I wanted my students to learn to love to read. I wanted them to think about the content they were reading rather than obsessively tally the number of pages they had turned. I explained this in a detailed note to the parent who had suggested the contest.
The next morning, a group of my students rushed up to me on the playground and excitedly explained that the fifth-grade class that read the most silent-reading pages was going to win a pizza party. A note from the parent who had suggested the contest explained that he understood that I didn’t want to set up a competitive climate in the classroom among individual students, so he went ahead and offered to buy a pizza party for the fifth-grade class (out of the three fifth-grade classes at our school) that read the most, shifting the focus from individual students to the class as a whole.
Clearly, this parent had good intentions. But he also expected to have things his way. He ignored my reservations and threw in some pizzas to convince me that I should take his suggestion. He sealed the deal by telling his daughter about the plan, knowing she would tell everyone else and leave me with the option of crushing the spirit of students prepared to speed-read for a pile of pizzas. So much for autonomy in the classroom, the teaching credential and professional expertise.
I am well aware that in the current educational climate there are worse problems than parents who donate a load of money to their school every year. And at a time when many affluent families are abandoning public schools for exclusive private schools and begging for vouchers to apply toward the cost of those private schools, it’s tough to criticize parents who are investing in America’s public classrooms.
But many of these generous parents are making dangerous assumptions about their investments. They too often believe that they are no different from the corporations and individuals who donate thousands of dollars to political candidates’ campaigns, expecting a specific return. They want to have an impact at school, regardless of whether their ideas are based on sound educational philosophy. And just as politicians should be making decisions based solely on what they believe is best for their constituents, teachers and administrators should be making decisions based solely on what they believe is best for their students.
Most important, if we allow parents to donate huge sums of money to public schools — with strings attached — we create an artificial solution to a very real problem. The urgency to increase funding to ailing public schools is hobbled by these well-meaning attempts to make everything OK — for a handful of already privileged schools. The parents who cannot afford to pad their school’s budget rely on that sense of urgency to provide some impetus for improving the public education system — now.
There was a different kind of urgency in my district: Parents urgently wanted me to believe that they had a right to interfere in my classroom. They even felt they had the right to dictate how my aide should spend her time. She happened to be a whiz at mathematics, so I frequently asked her to work one-on-one with students who needed extra help in math. About halfway through the school year, the group of parents who oversaw parent donations to the school announced that classroom aides would be used in reading instruction. It didn’t seem to matter that none of the aides had teaching credentials or any specific training to teach reading. The way these parents saw it, they paid the aides’ salaries and therefore should be able to dictate how the aides functioned in the classroom.
The meddling reached its apex last year during a labor dispute between the teachers and the school district. As a last resort before striking, teachers at my school “worked to contract hours” (which meant 7:30 a.m. to 3:15 p.m., as stated in the teaching contract, rather than the longer hours many teachers put in on a regular basis). The teachers also wore pins that read “Honor the Teachers, Honor the Agreement,” which referred to an agreement made in earlier contract negotiations with the district.
Some of the parents were horrified by these actions, worried that the teachers’ openness about the conflict would somehow traumatize their children. They forbade the teachers from discussing the dispute with their students, even in general terms, and scrambled to end the dispute themselves by paying the teachers the raises they had requested during contract negotiations.
When they were told that their generous offer wouldn’t solve the issues under debate, the parents were shocked — and confused. We had to explain that legally, since our school was public, the teachers’ salaries had to be paid out of specific funds allocated by the state. Moreover, since the dispute involved many issues, not just teachers’ salaries, a chunk of money wasn’t going to make all the unpleasantness go away.
The parents’ attempt to make our labor dispute disappear was a perfect example of how convinced they were that money could fix anything, even a problem with a time-honored and democratic means of resolution. While their offer to pay our raises was generous, it was also a strong-arm tactic designed to silence teachers and sweep uncomfortable issues under the proverbial rug, where their children would never see them.
As we consider solutions to the current crises in public education, it is essential to look at what happens when a community is allowed to bankroll its schools. When teachers are forced to act on the whims of the highest bidder, they can’t be free to follow their instincts, to draw on the fruits of their education and experience or the advice of their administrators. Suddenly, the idea of high-quality public education in every school — not just the lucky ones — is gone.
As tempting as it is to lavish praise and support on schools where parental participation is extraordinarily high, it is important to scrutinize the impact of the parents’ involvement. It is true that children deserve a rich educational setting, but the value must come from a teacher’s good sense, not from the influence of parents’ dollars.
Not too long ago, I taught fifth grade in an exclusive Northern California
suburb where even the second graders can tell you where they want to go to
college.
The school where I worked is just over the hill from the University of
California at Berkeley. By fifth grade, my students already knew not only
the words to the Berkeley fight song but also where Berkeley fit in on
their lists of preferred universities — below Harvard, below Brown, below
M.I.T., but definitely above any public state college. On Career Day, when
my students were asked to invite someone who worked in a field that
interested them, they brought in the president of Bechtel, a neurosurgeon
and an astrophysicist, among others.
The students in this community are aiming high and their parents are right
behind them, propelling them in any way they are able. For franchised
tutoring programs like Kumon, Sylvan Learning Center and Score! and
supplemental programs like Hooked on Phonics and Lindamood-Bell, this mix
of wealth and ambition represents a gold mine. The parents in communities
like this are ready — even anxious — to pay top dollar to make sure their
child has an edge in competition that is furtive, furious and
fueled by the purveyors of academic weapons designed especially for the
battle.
Hooked on Phonics is currently running flashing banner advertisements on
women.com that command: “Get your kid an unfair advantage. Teach him to read early.” A click-through takes you to the Hooked on Phonics site, which promises “simple systems” to help your child improve in both reading and math. “There is nothing more anxiety producing to parents than thinking their child is falling behind in school and not knowing what to do about
it,” intones the copy, which incites parental terror and then makes big
money off of it.
While programs like Hooked on Phonics and Kumon Math and Reading centers
claim improved skills for your child at school, they also slyly
suggest their programs will offer your child a chance at a better life. The
Kumon program helps students “master the skills necessary to succeed in an
increasingly competitive world.” Hooked on Phonics assures the reader that
“a whole lot of people in the new economy owe their success to superior
math skills” and offers, “Here are some rich and famous people who have a
math/engineering background: Bill Gates — Chairman of Microsoft
Corporation, John Glenn — Astronaut and Senator, and Andy Grove — Chairman
of Intel Corporation.”
Read between the lines, folks. Your child could someday make billions like
Bill Gates or travel into outer space like John Glenn, but he’s got to be quick
with his times tables in grammar school. What parent wouldn’t want to see
their child succeed on the level of these “rich and famous” men?
(Curiously, there were no rich and famous women mentioned.)
In order to survive, supplemental tutoring programs must undermine a
teacher’s authority and expertise. They must convince parents that their
children either aren’t being taught with the appropriate techniques or that
their children aren’t being challenged. Otherwise, the after-school desks
at these centers will be empty and the money will stop rolling in.
In upscale communities like the one in which I taught, the most convincing
sales pitch revolves around the idea that a gifted child’s needs aren’t
being met in the classroom. This is a hit with educated parents and their
kids, for whom the suggestion of mediocrity is unfathomable. For these
parents, the Score Web site explains, “Excellent students like your child
often suffer from our school systems’ inability to offer appropriately
challenging course work for those who need it.”
These kinds of statements are an insult to dedicated teachers. It was rare
that I felt that a student in my classroom wasn’t being challenged
academically. In fact, I made it a top priority to meet the needs of every
child in my classroom and instituted a computerized independent math
program out of Stanford University for a child in my class who was
phenomenally gifted. Still I heard in parent conferences, “My child is
bored!” Most often, these were parents of children enrolled in outside
tutorial programs.
When I was in the classroom, I put countless hours into making sure my
lessons were engaging, motivating and challenging for each of my students.
I made myself available for students who needed extra help. I treated each
child with respect and I truly believed that every child could learn. My
kids made me laugh. I thought they were clever and funny and mostly, very
hard-working.
I worked tirelessly in my classroom, pushing to the back of my mind the
fact that I had made more money waiting tables in college than as a full-time
teacher. I got to work early and stayed late. I served on
committees and took courses to stay current on the latest educational
research. I took pride in my classroom, and as sappy as it sounds, my
greatest reward was seeing a child’s eyes light up with understanding.
Unfortunately, for some parents, my combination of hard work and a teaching credential
specifically designed for elementary-aged students wasn’t enough. Parents who enrolled their children in after-school tutoring
programs often questioned my teaching practices and bombarded me with
questions about the methodology I employed in the classroom. They called me
at home at night for clarification on why an assignment had been structured
in a particular way. Instead of trusting me as a professional, they
questioned my expertise every step of the way, in part because of the hard-sell techniques the “learning specialists” at after-school programs were
feeding them.
Ironically, parents with students in after-school tutoring programs also
complained about the amount of homework assigned. For a child enrolled in
several hours of after-school tutoring, the one hour (sometimes an hour and
a half) I assigned (per my district’s guidelines) seemed burdensome.
Unfortunately, when kids were forced to choose between classroom
assignments and assignments from tutoring programs, it was often the
classroom assignments that were rushed through or not completed. After all,
their parents were spending a lot of money for those supplemental assignments.
Without exception, the programs are outrageously expensive. The Score
program advertises programs on its Web site for “as little as $30 a week.”
However, when I phoned the location nearest to the elementary school I
previously taught in, I was told that in addition to the $100 registration
fee, two unscheduled visits a week typically cost $129 a month with a
12-month minimum. That’s a total of $1,648 a year.
The Sylvan Learning Center quoted me $150 for the first battery of
diagnostic tests and $75 for each additional test by subject. The
representative explained to me that parents often prioritized their
student’s needs in terms of the subject area that needed the most immediate
attention and spread the rest of the tests out over a period of several
months. Additionally, she explained, there is a onetime $50 registration
fee and then tutoring costs of $44 an hour with a two hour per week
minimum. She also explained to me that many parents chose to enroll their
child for year-round tutoring and that most major credit cards are
accepted. A year’s worth of tutoring for a child in one subject area at
Sylvan Learning Center runs a whopping $4,424.
Obviously, programs like these are available only to a fraction of the
population because of the high costs. But the franchised tutoring programs
would like parents to believe that almost every child, and certainly your
child, needs these programs. The Score Web site, for instance, offers
programs for “excellent students who need an extra challenge,” for
“students who are doing fine in school but have room for improvement in one
or more subject areas” and for “students who need immediate assistance in
one or more subject areas.”
There is no question that some children benefit from after-school tutoring
programs. The Web sites for each of these programs are filled with
testimonials from satisfied parents, children with boosted confidence and
teachers filled with wonder at vast improvements in students’ skills in
short periods of time.
But in my experience in the classroom, I didn’t see any dramatic
improvement in the students enrolled in after-school tutoring programs. In
fact, one student’s progress halted once he enrolled in a tutoring program.
He was exhausted and quit working in the classroom as a means of survival.
There are ineffective teachers out there. But for the most part, it’s
safe to say that your child’s teacher has your child’s best interests at
heart. He or she wants your child to succeed. If your child’s teacher is
anything like me, he or she probably stays up at night and wakes up first
thing in the morning thinking about how to reach your child, how to help
your child and how to challenge your child. But your child’s teacher is
also a professional and wants to be treated like one. And of course, your
child’s teacher isn’t bringing in nearly $44 an hour.
