The Class(Entre les Murs)

Teaching must be the most frustrating, stressful, undervalued, disrespected profession that one could enter (with the possible exception of nursing).

I don't mean teaching in good universities, and I don't mean teaching motivated kids in good suburban schools or selective prep schools. I mean teaching average public high school and middle school students who haven't the slightest interest in the subject matter, who are completely absorbed in the social world of their peer group, and who may find their energy totally exhausted simply in dealing with personal and family issues.

A year and a half ago, I commented on the "mockumentary" film Chalk, a study of the frustrations experienced by a first-year history teacher at a high school in Texas. With a shudder, I pictured myself as the newly-minted teacher, standing before a bored class, trying to engage a room of students who were apathetic, silent, nonresponsive -- students who looked as though they had come to school with no more than three hours of sleep.

The French movie The Class (released in Europe as "Entre les Murs"), now showing in theaters, triggers my same feelings of empathetic horror. The film is based on François Bégaudeau's semi-autobiographical novel, which in turn was based on his own personal experiences teaching French literature to students in the 14-15 age group living in one of Paris's immigrant banlieues. Bégaudeau not only wrote the screenplay, but also plays himself as the teacher. The students, all actual students from Bégaudeau's old school, play themselves. The movie was scripted, but much of the dialogue between teacher and students was improvised as it was filmed.

A few of the students appear to be ethnic French, but the majority are African (either North or sub-Saharan), or natives of France's Caribbean territories. There is one Chinese boy who is bright, self-disciplined, and well-behaved -- the pride and joy of the school. There is another boy, apparently North African, who is deeply interested in science and whose parents push for a more rigorous curriculum.

The remaining students pose a daily challenge to their teacher -- disputing his every statement, arguing the relevancy of the formal French that he is trying to teach, distracting the class with irrelevant questions, and accusing the teacher -- and by implication the society he represents -- of disrespecting their lives and cultures. The demands by students for respect and for an equal footing in class with their instructor are constant themes running through the film.

I walked out of the movie disabused of any preconception that European schools still impose strict discipline on their terrorized students -- kids sitting at attention with their hands folded, reciting their lessons by rote. Times have changed, obviously, at least in the state schools. But my reaction, after having seen Chalk earlier and comparing it now with this movie, is that I would far rather confront a class of disorderly students who challenge my every word and waste the class's time with irrelevant argumentation than face a mass of silent zombies.

With an engaged class, even one that keeps veering off topic, some learning is possible. And the French teacher, despite all obstacles, holds his class of immigrant youngsters to a higher academic standard than would be expected in most American middle school English classes. (The students argue, for example, that learning to differentiate between the imperfect indicative and the imperfect subjunctive is a waste of their time, because no one they know ever uses the subjunctive in daily speech. Learn the rules before you decide whether to ignore them, is Bégaudeau's response.)

Learning is happening, however painfully, in Bégaudeau's classroom. The most disruptive male student, an immigrant from Mali who is ultimately expelled, shows effort, initiative and creativity in mounting a photo essay, for which he is praised by his teacher. The most difficult, irritating and sarcastic young woman in the class admits sheepishly at the end of the year that she read her older sister's copy of Plato's Republic at home, simply out of curiosity. I doubt if any of the older Texas students in Chalk would have even heard of Plato.

Both the immigrants at the French school and the Americans in Texas present serious challenges to their teachers and to their school systems, for many of the same reasons. But Bégaudeau's students display an electricity, a sense of rebellion, a willingness to confront and challenge authority that could, with skill -- in some cases -- be channeled constructively. The American students in Chalk, on the other hand, seem beyond reach. As I suggested in my review, the history teacher's achievement during his first year of teaching seemed limited to having merely survived his first year. If his students ever learned anything at all, it must have occurred off-camera.

Both teachers end the school year with a sigh of relief. But M. Bégaudeau clearly intends to be back again in the fall, facing a new class. Chalk leaves us in doubt whether the teaching career of his demoralized American counterpart will extend beyond the one year.

Bitter Lemons

Israel is again accused of killing and otherwise abusing innocent civilians in its attempt to control the Gaza strip. Israeli commanders, according to today's New York Times, admit that people have been shot and houses destroyed unjustifiably, but claim that overall they have been judicious in their use of force.

Israel's posture in its conflict with the Palestinians calls to mind a book I just finished re-reading: Bitter Lemons, by Lawrence Durell. Durell is best known as the author of the Alexandria Quartet, a series of sensuous, dream-like books about life just before World War II in that coastal Egyptian city. But he also wrote a number of books that can be found in the "Travel" section of your favorite bookstore, as well as a body of poetry.

Bitter Lemons is an account of Durrell's life on Cyprus in the early 1950's, while the Mediterranean island was still a British crown colony. The first part of the book is a hymn to the beauty of the island, where he bought and remodeled a house in the remote village of Bellapaix, as well as a celebration -- both humorous and moving -- of the idiosyncratic villagers, both Greek and Turkish ethnically, whom he met and dealt with daily. The book thus starts off as a mid-twentieth century version of Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun, another British writer's account of adapting to life in a different and more laid-back culture.

But unlike Mayes, by the 1950's, Durell was a well-known writer, and a man with wartime experience working for the British government. And in 1953, when Durrell moves to Cyprus, the local demands for Enosis, or union with Greece, are becoming increasingly strident. Durrell is politically conservative, and a supporter of the British Empire -- an empire still largely intact in 1953, despite the recent loss of India. He ultimately becomes the colonial government's Press Adviser, as the demands for Enosis become more violent and the rest of the world watches with increased concern.

He views the increasingly violent campaign for Enosis from a different perspective, perhaps, than would most Americans today. His love for the Cypriot people is clear, but he firmly views them as a rural, somewhat childlike people who are far happier under British rule than they would be under union with an increasingly dynamic and urban Greek nation. Cypriot self-government apart from Greece does not even occur to him as an option. He perceives the Cypriot desire for Enosis as a vague goal the residents love to ponder and discuss, but one stirred into violent ferver only by agitation and arms from political zealots in Greece. He notes, in addition, the strong opposition to Enosis by the island's significant Turkish minority population -- a fault line between the ethnic Greeks and Turks that continues to this day.

And so, the second half of the book becomes increasingly political, as he observes the rise in influence of EOKA, a local terrorist organization whose tactics and goals were similar to those of the IRA in Northern Ireland. Step by step, the people become radicalized in their opposition to the colonial government of Cyprus -- first the students and urban residents, and then the general population, including, ultimately, the friends Durrell had formed in Bellapaix. Meanwhile, the colonial government dreams on, the dreamy inertia of bureaucracy, throwing away its opportunities to defuse the crisis politically by promising to hold an eventual plebiscite on the question ... at some vague future date. The government instead persists in treating the movement as merely the obsession of a few isolated hotheads -- first to be ignored and then, to be put down with force.

When I read today about the Israeli army's resort to killing and destruction in order to control the Palestinians, or our own efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, I recall Durrell's acute observation that the goal of terrorism is to incur these very reprisals:

The slender chain of trust upon which all human relations are based is broken -- and this the terrorist knows and sharpens his claws precisely here; for his primary objective is not battle. It is to bring down upon the community in general a reprisal for his wrongs, in the hope that the fury and resentment roused by punishment meted out to the innocent will gradually swell the ranks of those from whom he will draw further recruits.

Durrell found a great, almost incomprehensible love for the British among Greek Cypriots, who, as did mainland Greeks, viewed the English as the people who had supported the Greek struggle for independence against the Ottomans. Greek Cypriots repeatedly assured him of this love, assured him that their struggle for Enosis in no way represented a hatred of the British. But by the end of Durrell's stay in Cyprus, in 1956, these old bonds between the two peoples were being broken -- tragically and unnecessarily broken in Durrell's opinion.

In that year, the British began a "war on terrorism" -- and lost the traditional affection of the people they governed -- by hanging a quiet, seemingly well behaved young man who had worked in the colonial government's tax department. It was time for Durrell to leave this warm and beautiful land; his neighbors and close friends could no longer look him in the eye.

The eyes which avoided mine, flickering shyly away from my glance "like vernal butterflies" -- I cannot say that they were full of hate. No. It was simply that the sight of me pained them. The sight of an Englishman had become an obscenity on that clear honey-gold spring air.

Lawrence Durrell left his house and village behind -- and his book ends -- in 1956. In 1960, Britain surrendered sovereignty over Cyprus. Fighting between Greeks and Turks broke out in 1974, when a military junta tried to force union with Greece, and the island was effectively partitioned between the two groups. The government to this day has no control over the Turkish area. Enosis never occurred. Instead, Cyprus eventually joined Greece as another EC member, and adopted the Euro as its currency.

So were the events described in Bitter Lemons actually tragic? In the long run, things have more or less worked out. Cyprus, although still ethnically divided, is prosperous -- at least in the ethnically Greek southern portion. I suspect that Bellapaix is still a friendly, sleepy village, and that Lawrence Durrell's hillside home with the wonderful views still exists. The medieval ruins still dot the landscape, the flowers still flower, and the dazzling sun still shines over the cerulean sea.

But, for Durrell, of course, the idyll had ended. He left Cyprus and died in 1990 without returning to Bellapaix. In the "long run," we are all dead.

Trapped in our cave

In his Republic, Plato suggests that we live our lives like cave dwellers who never see the "real world" outside the cave entrance, and who are required (by the hypothesis) to spend their lives facing away from the entrance. All we know of reality is the shadows of outside events that we watch flickering on the walls of our cave. We live our lives trapped in the illusion that those vague, fuzzy shadows are not shadows, but are themselves the true universe in which we live.

Psychologists also remind us that we never experience the "real world" directly. Our eyes detect certain wave lengths of light reflected from "objects." Our ears detect vibrations in the air. Our skin responds to stimuli of its nerve endings. Etc., etc. Our brain receives all these signals, and puts them together to construct a hypothetical picture of some external reality that we believe exists.

Modern physics shows us that even the reality of solid "objects" is an illusion. A solid object, in classical atomic theory, is composed of a relatively few elementary particles flitting around in a huge amount of empty space. Quantum physics shows that even these elementary "particles" are nothing but energy -- whatever "energy" is -- distributed throughout space in probability waves.

Insofar as our senses -- even aided by the finest scientific instruments -- detect anything, they detect only various probabilities of distribution among various energy concentrations. We build our world from these data and our experiences.

I had a health problem develop this past week, one that is probably inconsequential but that reminded me of how thin the ice is on which we all skate through life. Nothing original in that thought -- folks have contemplated for thousands of years how, at times, only an instant of bad luck separates life from death. But I also realized, not for the first time, how silly it is -- from the point of view of scientific method -- to attempt any conclusions regarding the meaning of death, beyond its obvious observable effects on the physical body (or the changing energy distributions for which these effects are a shorthand).

Science deals with observable data, and the conclusions that can be drawn logically from those data. I certainly question any religious attempt to prove scientifically the existence of any form of afterlife -- including reliance on testimony regarding "near death" experiences. But I also distrust any scientist who argues -- again, based on scientific methodology, rather than his own personal intuition or set of personal preferences -- that religious belief in "life after death" has been or can be proven false, or even particularly improbable.

The finest scientists in Plato's cave might have concluded that the universe had come to an end when dusk arrived outside, or the campfire outside the cave burned low, and they observed the shadows inside their cave disappear. But three-dimensional life in the outside world would have continued quite robustly, thank you, even as the walls inside the cave faded to black.

R.I.P.

Some things are just wrong. One of those things is death, especially the death of an old friend.

The Hearst Corporation announced today that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will publish its final edition tomorrow. After tomorrow, the name will refer to nothing more than a trimmed-down, on-line news site. As a long-time subscriber, I will suddenly find my subscription transferred to the P-I's traditional rival, the Seattle Times.

J. R. Watson founded the Seattle Gazette on December 10, 1863. Four years later, a new owner re-named the newspaper the Weekly Intelligencer, becoming the Daily Intelligencer in 1876.. In 1881, the Seattle Post and the Intelligencer merged, forming the Post-Intelligencer. California newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst bought the P-I in 1921.¹

For years, the P-I was Seattle's "liberal" newspaper, and the family owned Times was its more conservative, business-oriented rival. In recent years, as Seattle became an increasingly liberal city relative to the rest of the nation, both papers have become too liberal for the sort of people who consider "too liberal" an intelligible concept.

I began subscribing to the P-I when I started graduate school in Seattle. At that time, the P-I was the only morning paper (with an early edition that appeared on newstands the night before), and the Times came out in the afternoon. The P-I at that time taunted its rival with the slogan: "Read the P-I. Stay ahead of the Times." The P-I's masthead in those days, like the masthead of all the Hearst papers, contained a stylized eagle with wings extended across all eight columns, carrying a banner in its talons reading "America First."

I never had any illusions that the P-I was a great newspaper. It wasn't the New York Times or the Washington Post. For years, the Hearst papers were forced to carry a weekly publisher's message from William Randolph Hearst, Jr., an irritatingly provincial diatribe carried by a newspaper that itself was much more progressive. But for all the P-I's oddities and quirkiness, it was our paper, Seattle's paper, at a time when Seattle itself was perhaps an odder and quirkier place.

I'll miss living in a two newspaper town. I'll miss the P-I. May its inky soul rest in peace, and may whoever ends up with its revolving globe treat it with loving care. It represents another vanished facet of our city's history.

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¹The Hearst family began its newspaper empire with the purchase of the San Francisco Examiner in 1880. In the 1990's, the Hearst Corporation sold its flagship, the Examiner, so it could it buy the more profitable San Francisco Chronicle, without risk of violating anti-trust laws. The jettisoned Examiner has ended up as a free tabloid, and Hearst now appears to be on the brink of shutting down the recently unprofitable Chronicle. San Francisco, where the Hearst Empire began, will become the largest American city without a daily newspaper. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Late blooming

According to Marmota monax, Seattle will next get some nice weather on, oh, about March 16.
--My Blog (2-2-09)

Hang a gold medal around that clever groundhog's neck, and treat him to extra helpings of berries and grubs. Yesterday and today showed the first true signs that Spring had arrived in Seattle -- blue skies and a bright sun whose rays warm the body, even through the cold air. Finally we draw to the end of a peculiar winter season, one whose outset was marked by an abnormally heavy and prolonged blanket of snow before Christmas, and that ended with nightly snowfalls still dusting the ground several days last week.

Local flora has been irritated and confused. Ornamental fruit trees that often show their first signs of flowering by late January are only now beginning to burst into clouds of pink and white. Crocuses and primroses are displaying their colors, many weeks past their accustomed season. Trees that have often emerged from bud by now stand stark and gray, seemingly unaware that the equinox is at hand. Only college kids (and their younger high school siblings) order their lives by the calendar, rather than by the temperature of the air. It's March, and the students have been out in shorts --even t-shirts -- pretending they'd been admitted to UCLA rather than the UW.

So, yes, the groundhog did us all in this year. But fortunately -- in the long run -- it makes no difference. No matter how long the wait, the trees will always bud, the flowers will always bloom, the grass will always begin growing and demand the services of a lawnmower. In another month, maybe two, no clue will remain that we had to wait an additional six weeks for Spring, all because of the heliophobia of an overgrown rodent.

I walked across a crowded campus today, where spring quarter finals are now creeping up on weary-eyed UW students. Some of these anxiety-ridden young people arrived as freshman knowing exactly what they wanted to do with their lives, and the courses they needed to get there. In four years, they'll be looking for jobs as engineers or foresters or architects, or polishing their applications to graduate or professional schools. Others, equally anxious, equally bright, arrived confused and bewildered, having no idea how they wanted to spend their lives, knowing only that they wanted a degree. Some of these latter will find themselves still undecided, even after they've complete their majors and obtained their degrees.

Sometimes the groundhog decrees an early Spring -- other times he squints at the sun and decides he needs to sleep on it for another six weeks. But, in either case, Spring finally arrives, and by May or June, no one remembers or cares whether the leaves came out early or late.

So the silent advice I offered in passing to those students whose stride across campus may have seemed a bit less confident and purposeful than that of some of their peers, was this: Don't worry, it's all going to work out. Now and then, the buds take a little longer to open, but sometimes the most spectacular floral displays are those that took the longest to bloom. Trust in yourselves. Trust in life.

All the news

So you refuse to read Fox News On-line? You consider the site nothing more than a hotbed of right wing extremism? Think again. Fox is a respectable news outlet, not a propaganda machine. Fox clearly collects commentary by such thinkers as Reilly, Hannity, "Greta," and Baier, under the heading of "Opinion." The rest of the site is devoted to the unfiltered news you need to keep abreast of the world, and to put the commentary in its proper context.

For example, today's issue contains the following vital stories:

Irrational Exuberance. Boris Isayev died on stage during Pancake Week celebrations after stuffing himself with 43 banana and cream filled pancakes.

Islamic Civilization. Saudi Arabia sentenced a 75 year old widow to 40 lashes of the whip and four months in jail for "mingling" with two men. The men, one of whom was her late husband's nephew, were bringing her bread.

Gay Activism. In Alabama, a former male stripper was charged with slashing four persons to death while they slept. "It was worse than any horror movie," claimed the police chief.

Defense Policies. Arkansas police killed a man who walked into the station with a hatchet. After being tasered twice, "He was raring back to throw (the hatchet) at the officers and that's when the guys shot him," according to the sheriff.

Corporate Taxation. The so-called Swiss Gigolo was sentenced to prison for defrauding a 46-year-old BMW heiress, reputed to be Germany's richest woman, of $9 million, and for attempted blackmail. He had threatened to release videotapes of their trysts.

Gambler's Folly. Two phony "massage therapists" removed a man's pants and then robbed him of $2,000 in casino winnings. They were apprehended in a near-by convenience store.

Big Dogfight at First and Main. Two girls have been reported missing from a Philadelphia playground.

These seven stories comprise one half of the 14 stories Fox News offers today under its two lead topics: "U.S." and "World." That's ok. If you're one of those readers who just has to learn what's happening in today's world, turn to O'Reilly, Hannity, "Greta," and Baier. That's what they're there for.

Taking the 6 train to Union Square

Walk along a street in downtown Seattle. You see them everywhere. Wild-eyed men and women. Dirty, dishevelled, mumbling to themselves or yelling at the universe. Crazy people, creatures we nervously evade as we see them approach. More like hostile forces of nature than human beings.

Except, of course, they aren't non-human. John Wray's novel Lowboy shows us how much humanity schizophrenics actually share with the rest of us. And a story is perhaps the only way we will ever get inside the head of a schizophrenic and experience that commonality, unless we manage the nerve to sit down and talk to one.

Will Heller, who calls himself "Lowboy," is a highly intelligent, unusually attractive 16-year-old who possesses a detailed knowledge of the New York subway system. He's a man on a mission, a mission to save the planet from global warming, and he has less than 24 hours to do it. To accomplish his mission, it is essential -- for reasons that make a vague sort of sense, given his assumptions -- that he lose his virginity. He is a paranoid schizophrenic, and he is on the loose from his psychiatric facility. He has stopped taking his medications.

It takes us some time to understand even this much about Lowboy, because the story is told primarily from Lowboy's own, confused point of view. Later chapters offer us other aspects of the story from the points of view of his immigrant mother "Violet," who has her own problems, and of police detective Ali Lateef who is working with her to locate the boy.

Lowboy is acutely observant of everything about him. (After finishing the book, I'll never forget that the dual-tone chime you hear on the subway, warning that the doors are about to close, is C-sharp to A.) His illness causes him to find significance in insignificant occurrences, much as Greeks and Romans did in the flights of birds or the appearance of animal entrails. He knows that he is ill. He understands that the voices he hears -- sometimes loud, sometimes as a murmur, sometimes sensed only as the indistinct roaring of a dynamo -- are part of his illness. He realizes that his symptoms increase and decrease over time. In fact, at the age of 12, when his symptoms first began but were still controllable, he read everything he could find in the library on the subject of schizophrenia. But he doesn't -- he can't -- understand enough.

The story reads partly as an adventure. We don't quite understand Lowboy's quest, but we want him to succeed. His quest takes place largely within the dark, subterranean realm of the subway system, itself a metaphor for a certain twisted, noisy, and confusing set of limitations on reality. The book also reads as a detective novel, as Lateef attempts to untangle confusing clues he obtains from Lowboy's mother, psychiatrist, and one-time girlfriend, and to locate and apprehend the boy before he injures either himself or another person. Again the story reads at times as a peculiar story of romance, the same detective finding himself falling in love with the boy's mother, for reasons he doesn't understand.

But mostly, the novel is an immersion in the mind of a young man who is precociously bright and likeable and in a sense idealistic, but whose perspective on the world is far different from our own -- a kid who thinks deeply and observes much that we would miss, but who overlooks simple meanings and conclusions that we would find obvious.

The ending is stunning and unexpected. This book is unquestionably one where you want to learn how it ends yourself -- not hear it from a friend or read it in a review.

Schizophrenia, some psychiatrists (notably, Thomas Szasz) have argued, should be considered not a disease but simply an atypical way of viewing reality. After reading Lowboy, none of us would voluntarily subject ourselves to that experience. But we understand better the peculiar logic -- and even, possibly, strange beauty -- of the thoughts circling within the confused minds of those crazy guys we see on the street.