I accidentally hit the send button and posted a mysterious W

Think of it as a question: Why?

Last week, I invited the advisory committee of the Network for Public Education to hold its first face-to-face meeting at my home in New York City. After an all-day discussion, I invited everyone to do a walk-through of the house, which is a wonderful old brownstone in a landmark neighborhood.

In my fourth-floor office, I pointed out old family and professional photos. Julian Vasquez Heilig asked if he could take a picture of my second grade class at Montrose Elementary School in Houston. “Go ahead,” I said. Little did I know that Julian would turn the photo into a contest on his blog, asking readers if they could pick me out. So far, no one has.

As it happens, today is a big birthday for me. I am 75. I have never felt embarrassed about my age, whether I was too old or too young. I still have huge reserves of energy. I am passionate about the work in which we are all engaged, the task of protecting public education for future generations of children and preventing its privatization.

The great thing about reaching 75 is that I have no ambitions. I don’t want a job. I don’t want to be appointed to anything. I don’t care about prizes. I want to do the right thing. What I want is to live in harmony with my conscience. I want to know that I have done my best every day to advance the cause of better education for all children. I want to tell the truth as best I know how, without holding back. I want to be honest about my mistakes. I want to be quick to admit when I am wrong and quick to apologize.

I could be a better mother, a better grandmother, a better partner to my partner. I could be neater. I should exercise more. I can think of lots of ways I could be better as a person. But it seems to me that at this point, the die is cast. I am who I am. I am 75. I have a great life. I love what I do. I still have plenty of work ahead of me. And I plan to be around long enough to see the terrible scourge–high-stakes testing, teacher-bashing, top-down authoritarianism, profiteering, privatization– that is now afflicting American education come to an end. It will end, and I want to be with you to pop the cork and sip champagne when it does. Bad things don’t last forever. Stay around for the time when we will all celebrate together. It is starting to happen now. The public is getting wise. Everything the corporate reformers try or impose is failing. Soon even they will see what we see.

Every day, every month, every year brings us closer to the day when the status quo collapses, and we can focus on what matters most: children–each of whom is unique–and genuine education–which means far more than test scores.

My greatest birthday present is knowing that there are students, parents, teachers, principals, administrators, school board members, and tireless citizens across the nation who are taking a stand and making a difference.

If you want to do something for me to help celebrate my birthday, today and in the future, take action: join with others to insist on doing what you know is right; speak up; write a letter to the editor or the President; live in fidelity to your professional ethics or your commitment to the well-being of  your child; think of other people’s children as if they were your own, then act. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Do not do to others what you would not want for your own child.

As Vaclav Havel wrote long ago about another country, “live in truth.” Make our democracy work for all of us.

This poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of my all-time favorites.

I first read it in college and decided to memorize it. When I was feeling down, I would take walks around Lake Waban and recite it out loud. I don’t know if it made me feel better, but it was my ritual.

This poem is about death and life, fear and hope. Is this “informational text”?

Spring & Fall: to a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

A few days ago, I was baby sitting with my youngest grandson. He is not yet a month old. As I held him in my arms, I watched his sleeping face intently. It is, of course, beautiful. He was swaddled, as is the fashion nowadays (not in my day). As he slept, I saw his expressions change, from a frown to a knitted brow to a tiny smile, and then utterly placid, and repeat, in random order. I took his little hand out of the swaddling blanket, held it in my large hand, and marveled at his long, perfect fingers.

And I thought of these lines, “Not in entire forgetfulness,/and not in utter nakedness,/But trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home.”

That is a tiny excerpt from a lovely poem by William Wordsworth called “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” I read the poem in college many decades ago and have always loved it,

I know it may seem strange but I could see and feel those clouds of glory surrounding and trailing little Asher Saul.

I don’t know if anyone in the world cares about this except me and a few gray heads in and around Houston.

Our high school was just named to the National Register of Historic Buildings.

I graduated in 1956. San Jacinto at that time was a racially segregated school, as were all the public schools of Houston. In 1954, after the Brown decision, I asked to meet with the principal, Mr. Brandenburger. I asked him why we didn’t desegregate. After all, the Supreme Court said we should. He told me, in his most professorial manner, that desegregation would hurt the black schools. Their principals and teachers would lose their jobs. What did I know? I didn’t understand why this would be so. The all-white Houston school board was certainly not going to desegregate voluntarily.

The school graduated its last class in 1970, by which time it was an integrated school. Now it is Houston Community College.

It was a grand building with beautiful athletic fields and a fine gymnasium. I had a few wonderful teachers, and quite a few mediocre teachers. I had a few that were really awful teachers. I remember someone telling me that if you had one great teacher in your lifetime, you should count yourself lucky.

I used to believe that. Now only in our day do we believe that every school will have a great teacher in every classroom. Knowing how far we were from that ideal state of being, it is a wonder that any productive citizen ever graduated from my ordinary high school.

One thing I am sure of. I always thought that I was responsible for my grades. If I did well, it was because I read the assignments and was well prepared. I didn’t realize that whether I did well or poorly was a function of my teachers’ effectiveness. That is another new-fangled idea that would have been laughable in the 1950s when we took personal responsibility seriously.

And one more thing. We never took standardized tests. Our teachers made up their own tests and gave the grades they thought we deserved. Actually, I have to qualify that. We took silly standardized tests. We took tests that were supposed to predict what line of work we were suited for. We took personality tests (I don’t recall why). Whatever those tests were, none of them counted towards our grades. The only one I ever took that actually mattered was the SAT, and at that time, there were no coaching courses. You just showed up and took it. And we were not allowed to know our SAT scores. That was a secret between the guidance counselor and whatever colleges we applied to. (Most of the students in my graduating class did not apply to college and did not take the SAT; most of the girls got married and most of the boys went to work or joined the military.)

I didn’t learn my SAT scores until many years later, when I was at a luncheon, sitting next to someone who headed the testing program at the College Board. When I told him that I wondered what my scores were, he sent me a faded transcript. I was afraid to look but I had to. I knew I had done well on the verbal part but was surprised to see that I had a better-than-expected score in math. I never took a math course in college. Maybe if I had seen my SAT score, I would have tried math in college.

Here is the story of San Jacinto High School, in case you have read this far:

Hi San Jac Alumni,

Below is a press release from the Houston Community College regarding our high school building and being placed on the National Register of Historic Buildings

“It is a fitting recognition of a facility that has spawned so many productive citizens for the city
of Houston,” says Dr. William W. Harmon, President, HCC Central College. “We look forward to returning to the building and educating future generations of students.”

The building’s strong architectural design and its educational significance to Houston were the chief considerations for its listing on the National Register, says Carlyn Hammons, historian with the Texas Historical Commission.

The San Jacinto building joins 250 other Houston-area properties and more than 3,000 in
Texas also on the National Register, which was created in 1966 and serves as the nation’s official list of cultural resources deemed worthy of preservation.

Lord, Aeck & Sargent Architecture, the prime consultant for the San Jacinto historic structure report to the Texas Historical Commission, hired SWCA Environmental Consultants and historian Anna Mod to research the historical significance of the building. The San Jacinto building proposal was reviewed and approved this past September, then sent to the National Park Service for final approval and listing, Hammons says.

“The building is associated with some of the best architects of their time, and it is educationally significant,” says Hammons. “The National Register designation will bring a certain amount of good recognition to the building.”

Kim A. Williams, AIA, principal with the firm Lord, Aeck & Sargent Architecture, says the San Jacinto renovation continues the building’s innovative legacy. “In 1914, Houston was on the cutting edge of education reform and new school design,” says Williams, “and today that commitment to state of-the-art programs and facilities continues through the HCC rehabilitation of the San Jacinto Memorial Building.”

Originally constructed as South End Junior High School in 1914, the massive concrete structure – featuring monumental Doric columns and Art Deco-style towers – was considered a state of-the-art facility with innovative teaching strategies. Local educators hoped its design and the addition of a wider selection of academic, elective and vocational courses would encourage Houston students to stay in school and graduate.

To alleviate overcrowding, the Houston Independent School District converted the junior high
school into a high school in 1926, and built six other high schools around Houston. Master architects –Hedrick & Gottlieb and Joseph Finger – designed two wings in the same design style as the original building in 1928 and 1936, respectively, which strengthened the building’s architectural impact. The building is the birthplace of several well-known Houston institutions of higher education. In 1927, the San Jacinto building served as the home of the newly created Houston Junior College, which became a four-year college (later known as the University of Houston) in 1934.

In 1970, the final class graduated from San Jacinto Senior High School. Houston Independent School District’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts took over the building in 1970, and a year later – in 1971 – Houston Community College began holding classes in what became known as the San Jacinto Memorial Building.

The list of famous individuals who graduated from San Jacinto H.S. is also significant. It includes legendary television newsman Walter Cronkite, billionaire businessman Howard Hughes, race-car driver Joseph “A. J.” Foyt Jr., renowned Houston heart surgeon Dr. Denton Cooley and former Houston mayor Kathy Whitmire.

The building is beloved by its alumni; the San Jacinto H.S. Alumni Association is an active organization with hundreds of graduates as members, many of whom are now in their 70s and 80s. As the centerpiece of HCC Central’s campus, the San Jacinto building is part of a larger, college-wide renovation of the campus and surrounding streets. Classes are expected to resume in the facility in November 2013.

(Photos not include in this email message, but captions noted below:

Beautifying a new national treasure: The San Jacinto Memorial Building, located on the campus of Houston Community College – Central College, is a new member of the National Register of Historic Places. The building was constructed in 1914 and is undergoing a major renovation.

Down to the studs: The $60 million dollar renovation to the nearly 100-year-old San Jacinto Memorial Building on the campus of HCC Central College includes clearing its interior to its core. The building is expected to reopen for HCC Central College students in November 2013.

I love this poem, and I want to share it with you. It was written by W. H. Auden. It is like a song to me.

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree 
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

     You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
     The parish of rich women, physical decay,
     Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
     Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
     For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
     In the valley of its making where executives
     Would never want to tamper, flows on south
     From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
     Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
     A way of happening, a mouth.

          Earth, receive an honoured guest:
          William Yeats is laid to rest.
          Let the Irish vessel lie
          Emptied of its poetry.

          In the nightmare of the dark
          All the dogs of Europe bark,
          And the living nations wait,
          Each sequestered in its hate;

          Intellectual disgrace
          Stares from every human face,
          And the seas of pity lie
          Locked and frozen in each eye.

          Follow, poet, follow right
          To the bottom of the night,
          With your unconstraining voice
          Still persuade us to rejoice;

          With the farming of a verse
          Make a vineyard of the curse,
          Sing of human unsuccess
          In a rapture of distress;

          In the deserts of the heart
          Let the healing fountain start,
          In the prison of his days
          Teach the free man how to praise.

Last Sunday, I published a beautiful poem by Cavafy. In reply, Will Fitzhugh (founder of “The Concord Review,” which publishes history papers by high school students) sent this one to me. He probably did not know that this is one of my favorite poems, and it has special meaning for me. When I graduated from San Jacinto High School in Houston in 1956, my home room teacher Mrs. Ratliff gave me two snippets of poetry as a graduation gift. Each line had a message for the recipient. One of her gifts was the last line of this poem.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson [1833]

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.