Scattershot

Merit pay—a tale of two teachers.

With all the talk of merit pay for teachers lately, I keep wondering about merit pay for other professions—senators and representatives, for example. If it’s such a good idea, should we maybe pay them according to their worth?

            But of course, how would we measure their worth? Would Republicans get to judge? Or Democrats? Or Independents? What standard would we use? Number of bills passed? Number of bills vetoed? Perceived morality? Popularity? Ability to toe the party line? Truthfulness? Spin ability? What?

            It’s nice to say that merit pay is a good idea, and in theory maybe it is. But it’s hard to imagine how it would work fairly in real life. For teachers, signs point to assessment tests as the primary standard of judgment. There’s a big problem with that. Assessment tests have to be set up to measure something measurable. But how do you measure, say, inspiring a thirst for knowledge? A joy of learning? Creative thinking? Judgment? Problem solving?

            I think back to two social studies teachers I had in high school. I’ll call them Mr. A and Miss B. Mr. A was methodical, plodding, a by-the-textbook kind of guy. He was a bit boring but not terribly so. We progressed unimaginatively through the book with many lectures and many tests. I learned some facts about Revolutionary War America, and some of the information stuck. Mr. A was a competent though completely uninspiring teacher.

            Miss B was definitely not a by-the-book teacher. She had us read books—un-textbooky books like Black Like Me. She set up the classic experiment in discrimination where some students were designated as “inferior” for a week, and then we studied what happened. We had lively, fiery discussions. She showed us a movie full of outrageous propaganda, and when we all sat there swallowing it all, she taught us to question and think about what we were hearing and seeing.

            I learned from both teachers, but I learned far more from Miss B. Her classes had a lifelong effect on me. I suspect, though, that Mr. A’s students would have done better on the kinds of assessment tests given today. What he taught was easily measurable. What Miss B taught was not. She inspired us and taught us to open our minds, to question, to think. How do you measure that? I don’t think you do.

            Sadly, Miss B lasted only a year. I have no proof of this, but I strongly suspect our small town school board sent her packing. She ruffled feathers. She stirred controversy. She made us question the status quo.

            So who would have likely received merit pay if it had existed? Mr. A. Who was really the teacher in every sense of the word?

            Miss B, of course.

Hunks of the mind—gone

I got an e-mail from my friend Don the other day. He wanted me to settle a disagreement. He remembers that he and his wife Nancy visited me in Montana many (many!) years ago when I lived there briefly. Nancy remembers that she visited without Don and that he is conjuring up memories from what she told him about the trip. Who is right?

    I have no idea. I remember that it was quite a big deal for someone to drive 13 hours from Colorado to visit, and I remember that they (or she) did visit and that I was excited about it. I remember that they (or she) did actually arrive. And that's all I remember.

    Where has this hunk of my mind gone? Why can't I remember anything about their (her) visit? I can remember the name of the three-year-old daughter of a college student I had in class a bazillion years ago: Shaniqua. (I can't remember the student's name, though.) I can remember exactly how much I paid when I was 22 years old for a brown dress with a white lace collar. I can remember what my high school English teacher Mrs. Tate told us about a teacher she once had who owned a brown dress and a black dress and brown shoes and black shoes—and she always wore the black shoes with the brown dress and the brown shoes with the black dress. Why is stuff like this occupying space in my brain, for heavens' sake?

    For several days I've been trying to pull up one, even one, tidbit of a memory from Don and Nancy's (or Nancy's) visit to Montana. So far...nothing.

    Sigh.

Teacher, writer, inspiration

Several years ago, I was waiting for my luggage in New York City when I turned around and saw a woman holding a sign that said "Frank McCourt." I knew he was going to be speaking at the conference I was attending, but still I gave a little gasp. Maybe I'd actually see him up close—a writer whose work I loved.

    I grabbed my bag, called my office on my cell phone to check in, and looked up to see a small man smiling sweetly at the woman with the sign. It was Frank McCourt.

    "Say something to him!" my colleague on the phone said.

    I couldn't. I just looked at him. Weirdly, if I hadn't loved his writing, I could have spoken. But because he was someone I so admired, I was struck dumb.

    I loved his first book, Angela's Ashes, the moving and funny and poignant story of his childhood growing up in poverty in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. I also loved 'Tis and Teacher Man—especially Teacher Man. I loved the way he talked so openly of his struggles and self doubt as a teacher. Yet anyone could tell, reading the book, that he must have become a great teacher.

    Two years ago, I happened to encounter McCourt again, this time in a crowded New York City elevator. He was inches away from me. It took me a couple of floors to screw up my courage, but I finally did it. I said simply, "Mr. McCourt, I really love your work."

    He smiled, gave a dignified nod, and said, "Thank you." Then the elevator doors opened, and he got off.

    It may not seem a big deal, but I was glad to have that tiny exchange. I have always been so touched by the humanity, the humor, the wisdom in his work. And whenever I find myself thinking, "Oh, I'm too old to try that," I think of McCourt and how his first book was published when he was 65. One of his best lines: "F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. I think I've proven him wrong."

    Frank McCourt died yesterday at age 78. I am saddened at his passing, but happy to know he will live on, through his words, for many years to come.

    

Good Verizon, Bad Verizon

Imagine the kind of salesperson many of us hate to encounter in a store selling anything technical. Young. Techno-dweebish. Unwilling to listen to what it is we want. Too cool to want to deal with an older person.  No people skills.  Answers questions like “Where is the ‘on’ button?” with,“If you are interfacing with a Gizmat 23 with four whamobots, then you need to align your PQR with the slartsweller socket.” Or rolls his eyes and doesn’t answer at all.

    Got him in mind? Well, that’s pretty much what I encountered in the Verizon store yesterday. Only worse.

    If you read my blog regularly, you know that a couple of weeks ago I praised a Verizon salesman named Matt. He was terrific—the best salesperson I’ve encountered in eight or nine years. My experience at the Verizon store that day could not have been better unless he had given us everything we bought for free.

    Today? It couldn’t have been worse.

    Unless I had strangled the salesman.

    Which was tempting.

    I went to the store to exchange the phone I had bought earlier because I discovered it doesn’t have a missed call alert tone. The salesman, Mr. X., immediately assumed that I am an idiot and asked for my phone. Then he spent what seemed like forever searching the phone features for the missed call alert.

    Finally he said (SURPRISE!), “It doesn’t have that feature.”

    I said, “I know. That’s why I want to trade it in for one that does.”    

    After a few words implying that he couldn’t imagine why any idiot would even want that feature, he said, “Well, none of our new phones have it.”

    “None of them?”

    “No. They’re not putting that feature on anymore.”    

    “Well, I guess you can’t help me then,” I said. He shrugged, and I headed for the door. At the last minute, on impulse, I turned around, walked to the wall full of model phones for sale, grabbed one, and in twenty seconds found the missed call alert tone feature. I called to Mr. X.

    “This one has it!”

    He gave me a long-suffering look, stood there a minute, and then said, “Those are the old phones.”

    “Old? But they’re there on the wall for sale.”

    He turned and disappeared. Not a word to me. After six or seven minutes, I was steaming, and the manager could tell. She finally got away from a customer and said, “What happened to the person helping you?”

    “That’s a good question,” I answered. Mr. X suddenly appeared. (I am convinced he was in the back looking at the cell phone pictures his colleague had been trying to show him earlier.) Things went downhill from there, with the manager finally apologizing for the way I had been treated, promising that she was going to be talking to Mr. X, and making an appointment for me with Matt, the good salesman.

    So Friday I have to go back again. Maybe, maybe, Matt will still be as helpful as he was last time.

    Unless Mr. X will have poisoned his mind about me by then.

Hair, hair, hair

My earlier blog about "hot hair" has triggered what might be called the "Herbal Essence" center of my brain. I started thinking about hair. Or, rather, the lack thereof.

    I was a bald baby. I was a bald child. My mother often told me in later years how frustrated she was when she took me out in public—not because I was bald but because people were so dim-witted. My grandmother, an amazing seamstress, always kept me provided with stacks of ruffled, embroidered, lacy clothes, clothes so girly that anyone with the slightest powers of observation should have gotten the message: female child.

    Yet they didn't. They'd say, "How old is your son?" Or "What a sweet little guy." Mom wanted to tape a bow to my head, but she figured that wouldn't be any more effective than the ruffles.

    As I grew older, some hair came in, but it was so fine that it would often rub off on my pillow at night. When I was five or so, Mom and her friend Betty decided to take action: hot oil treatments. Where they got this idea, I don't know, but I hated it. It involved rubbing my head with Pompeian Olive Oil (I still shudder when I see those bottles in the store) and wrapping my head in hot towels—repeatedly, allowing my head to steam between wrappings.

    Eventually, my hair did start growing in and showing more staying power. Mom and Betty were convinced it was because of the hot oil treatments. At any rate, when my hair finally decided to take hold in earnest, it went from one extreme to the other. When I finally got hair, I got a lot of it. It grew in thick, extremely thick. It is so thick now that people who cut my hair have to spend a lot of time thinning it to make it look decent. I carefully read shampoo labels to find bottles that do not brag about being "volumizing" or providing "extra body." On particularly poufy days, I'll put on a stocking cap for awhile in the mornings, just to tone down the volume.

    I'm not complaining. I'm glad to have lots of thick hair. But sometimes I wonder if Mom and Betty maybe should have given me two or three fewer hot oil treatments.

Below: me as a bald baby and me when I started getting a bit of hair.

 

 

 

 

Hot hair

Who among us doesn't remember a childhood haircut story or two? I remember my mother painstakingly cutting the bubblegum out of my little sister's hair. (She had gone to sleep with gum in her mouth.) I remember the terrifyingly hideous poodle cut and perm my aunt once gave me. (Just the smell of a home perm can make me break out in a cold sweat today.) A friend remembers learning as a small child that she was not to cut anything that didn't belong to her. Finding herself unexpectedly with access to a real pair of scissors, she quickly saw that the one thing around that did belong to her was her hair. She hacked it off almost to the scalp, as far back as she could reach.

    A couple of days ago my friend's daughter Emma—soon to be a first grader—decided that she was just "too hot" and would do much better if she didn't have bangs. I'm not sure how Emma felt about it, but her mother was not thrilled to come home to these results:

The lady who didn't belong

I had a hard time paying attention to what my husband was saying last night. We were seated at our favorite Mexican restaurant, and three feet away from us, seated by herself, sat a woman who was worrying me.

    She was probably in her sixties, with old-fashioned hair cut in a prim and proper style, elastic-waist pants, and a flowered top in pastel colors. She sat with her Coke and chips and looked, well, absolutely terrified.

    She was clearly so uncomfortable that I couldn't help keeping a surreptitious eye on her. Generally, when we are seated so close to someone in this restaurant, I'll smile and acknowledge the people next to us. Sometimes we'll exchange a few friendly words or even have a lengthy conversation. It's that kind of place.

    But when I tried to smile at this woman, she quickly looked away, with a scared bunny kind of look.

    Was she waiting for someone? She didn't wear a ring. Could she have been on a blind date? If so, he never showed up. She was not the kind of woman you generally see eating alone--she was from an era when ladies didn't do that, or if they did, certainly not without a book or a magazine to read.

    But not her. She sat, simply sat, and looked so frightened, as if she had never in her life done this sort of thing before. I even wondered if she could have been taking part in some kind of test--perhaps a counselor had talked her into a commitment to step out of her comfort level and do something, for her, that was daring.

    I just wanted to put my arm around her, give her a hug, and ask her to pull up a chair. And if you're thinking, "No wonder she looked uncomfortable; she had a nosy woman sitting next to her speculating about her life," I have to tell you that she looked terrified before we sat down, and I really was careful to be unobtrusive in my watchfulness.

    So she ate alone. And left alone. And I still worry about her and hope that, somewhere, she has a place where she isn't terrified, a place where people welcome her and love her and she can eat her chips and salsa with a comfortable smile.

The blonde and the Mini Cooper

Some people just have a natural born sense of style. My cat Cassie is one of those, though she is not—strictly speaking—a person. She will sit at the top of our stairs in the sunlight, a leafy plant as background, her tail artfully wrapped around her, and I will marvel at her beauty. My sister calls it "posing," and the description fits. Cassie does pose, and she poses beautifully. I'm convinced she chooses her posing places carefully, so as to show herself in the best light.

    And so does the cute blonde I see most mornings, always dressed stylishly. She parks her dark green Mini Cooper on our street every day. She does not use the nearby employee parking lot. She does not choose a parking spot in front of the beige house, the gray house, the brick house, the house with the overgrown yard. No, she parks her dark green Mini Cooper in front of the beautiful white Victorian house with the dark green and maroon trim, where it looks simply fabulous. The car and the house coordinate, making it look as though the Mini Cooper is part of the design. It's amazing. I look out my front window and can't help but admire her sense of style. Like Cassie, she knows what's going to look good.

    I can't help but admire that in a person. Or, well, in a cat.

Bravery, schmavery

For some reason--maybe because I was walking alone in an area where I had once seen a badger--I was thinking about bravery yesterday. It's a quality I've always worried that I lack entirely.

    And yet I can't count the number of times various individuals have called me "brave" for quitting my job many years ago and starting a publishing company--with no money and no experience in business. "Naive" and "crazy" might be more appropriate terms, though I've never regretted doing it.

    Many of the same people who call me brave think nothing of para-sailing, bungee jumping, sky diving, or hurtling themselves down steep mountain slopes on skis at a gazillion miles an hour. I think of all of those activities as taking truckloads of bravery. They think of them as "fun."

    So what is bravery? People facing a serious illness are often described as brave, as in "her brave battle with cancer." But since the person has no choice in the matter, is facing the disease really brave? Or does it have to do with attitude? Is battling the disease cheerfully or optimistically what we mean by bravery?

    I don't know. Maybe bravery is just doing what you have to do in the moment. When I quit my job and started Cottonwood Press, I was doing what I felt I had to do. The desire to do something different and be my own boss was so strong that I didn't really feel I had a choice. If you are battling cancer, you're doing what you have to do. If you're marching into battle during war, you're doing what you have to do. If you are getting ready to leap out of a plane....well, okay, no one generally has to do that. So maybe that isn't brave. Maybe it's just exciting.

    I would not jump out of a plane, even if someone offered me ten million dollars to do it. But what if the only way I could save a loved one's life would be to jump out of that plane? I'd have to do it. Would that be brave? I don't think so. I would not suddenly be infused with courage. I would be suddenly infused with terror. I would be just doing what I had to do.

    Maybe bravery isn't something we feel ourselves. Maybe it's a word we use to express a kind of admiration for what someone else does, something we can't imagine doing ourselves--unless, of course, we have to.

A wonder of a salesman

Since I often complain about bad customer service, it's only fair that I praise great customer service. A couple of days ago my husband and I encountered it in a Verizon store. We're still marveling.

    We had gone in to replace our current cell phones and to look into buying a device that would allow us to have broadband access anywhere. I was dreading the experience, frankly. Salespeople who deal with anything technological can quickly drive me nuts.

    But not a young man named Matt. For over an hour and a half, he answered our questions completely and accurately, using no techno-speak. We understood him every step of the way. He made recommendations that showed that he was--wonder of wonders--actually listening to us and paying attention to some rather complicated needs we have. No matter how many questions we asked, he showed not the teensiest bit of impatience. His attention didn't wander. He was ours, all ours, until the deal was done.

    We actually left the store thrilled. We got everything we wanted and more, at a price that was a wonderful surprise, and all pieces and parts are working great. We especially love our portable wireless device called "Mi-Fi."

    Whoever hired Matt made a very good decision. It is so nice to deal with someone who is so good at his job.