Monthly Archives: May 2009

More on Brandie

30 Saturday May 2009

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Brandie Weston, Santa Monica, California, circa 2006, March 19, 2009. (Robert Cotnoir).

It’s all too unfortunate how much we can learn about someone once they’ve passed away. All secrets can come to light after we’ve died. If our death is through an unfortunate accident, a coroner can perform an autopsy and find out what we’ve been eating, snorting, ingesting, imbibing, what Rxs we’ve been taking, what diseases we may or may not have. They could do a genetic profile, and if we’ve giving consent, use our organs as a gift of life or to teach medicine to others. Beyond that, our words, our deeds, our dreams and our shortcomings are all there for others to look at. All anyone has to do is be curious.

That’s been the case so far as I’ve looked into the life of the late Brandie Weston off and on over the past twenty-one months. In that time, I haven’t learned much more than what I already knew about her last years before her death in August ’07. Through public records, I discovered that Brandie had left New York sometime in ’02, lived for a while in Montana, spent a bit of time in the Bay Area, and made her way to L.A. and Santa Monica by ’05 or ’06. She had been homeless pretty much that whole time. There’s also evidence of vagrancy arrests and her own paranoia regarding the police and being medicated through the bits and pieces I and one of her best friends from our high school days pulled off of the Internet.

I’d like to know more about Brandie’s last years and days, but that’s going to take a lot more work, like an investigative story piece. I need to reach out to her mother again, who didn’t want to talk about what happened when I called her a year ago. I might have to contact her sister, but that may mean opening up some bad memories for both of us. It may even mean me going to Santa Monica or L.A. to talk to folks at local homeless shelters. That, of course, takes money, and I’m pretty tapped out right now from doing Boy At The Window in terms of tracking down people and memories.

But I’ve learned a bit more about how Brandie lived in her years after high school. I’ve received at least a dozen emails from her SUNY Purchase classmates and friends, and some anonymous communications as well. All of them seemed shocked about Brandie’s end. All of them seemed like they knew Brandie — or at least a side of her — better than anyone she grew up around. All of them seemed like they would’ve wanted as much information about her mental illness and homeless state as they could’ve gotten in real time during all of those years before her death. It was nice to know that Brandie’s calling as a music artist took her to places that she did want to go, and that her SUNY Purchase and other friends wanted to go there with her.

This is as important a lesson as anyone can learn from life. However we leave this world, it’s important to have touched as many lives as possible with your calling, your dreams, your successes, even your shortcomings. It’s always important to have friends in your life who know the real you, not the one you have to show at work to get a promotion or at home to please family or at school to satisfy your teachers and your alleged friends. From the looks of things, Brandie had more than a few of those.

But not in total. Obviously Brandie didn’t exactly go around sharing the news of her mental illness and her homelessness with most folks. From what I’ve uncovered so far, she also didn’t share too much about her family or her Mount Vernon, New York past either. That’s unfortunate, and for several reasons. These college and music artist friends were the people most likely to have understood what she was going through and how much hell she had to go through in her final years. They would’ve been there for her in ways that even her family couldn’t (and likely wouldn’t) have been. Keeping her past, her struggles, her emotional aches and pains, the things that vexed her all bottled up couldn’t have helped her state of mind or decision-making in the years after ’02. It would’ve tormented Brandie, as it would anyone with aspirations and the talent to reach them under less trying circumstances.

As a writer and an educator, I understand the grand irony of a calling. That without the pain and trauma of the past, I wouldn’t be the writer or the teacher that I am today. For Brandie, those things should’ve driven her, maybe even made her a better singer and artist. There’s a danger to embracing one’s past and one’s pain, though, because both can become an addiction, driving people out of one’s life in the process. In the case of a couple of our former high school classmates, I think that’s exactly what happened. I just wish that Brandie had at least given her SUNY Purchase friends a chance to know that part of her before she died, and certainly before she left on a multi-year, homeless, cross-country journey to nowhere.

It makes me think of the still relatively new Nickelback song, “If Today Was Your Last Day.” What would really matter? Who would I choose to spend my last twenty-four hours with? As much as I want to publish Boy At The Window, I’d likely spend the day with everyone I’ve ever loved, make amends to whomever I felt I needed to, and go to a park to spend time enjoying nature. I’d leave my book manuscript with someone whom I could trust to publish it. I’d make them promise, but then I wouldn’t think about it again. I hope that Brandie didn’t spend so much of her precious few moments of clarity thinking about what could’ve been. I hope that those of us still here do make the most of Brandie’s warning to us to get our acts together while we still can.

The Gameplan

27 Wednesday May 2009

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It was right after Memorial Day ’92 that I first set out to write a doctoral thesis on multiculturalism. Who knew that my first plans for finishing my doctorate would lead me straight to a memoir about navigating different worlds, different spheres in my life during the Reagan years? I realized some six weeks after finishing my master’s that it was going to take a monumental effort to do my coursework, fulfill my quantitative methods requirement, take my PhD comprehensive exams (written and oral), research my topic, put together an acceptable dissertation proposal, and then go out into the world to conduct my research and write up a several-hundred-page-study. Oh yeah, I’d also have to teach, should at least think about publishing a few academic pieces and presenting papers at a few conferences. I knew by the time Memorial Day ’92 rolled around that the plans I made to finish my masters in two semesters wouldn’t work for getting my dissertation done.

Of course it wouldn’t work! That plan was designed for me to work at warp speed, to take advantage of my previous four years as a Pitt student, to exploit every loophole in the University of Pittsburgh’s rulebook for their undergrad and grad students in Arts & Sciences. If I worked at the same exact pace for another year, well, there wouldn’t be any more years. I knew that burnout was inevitable. I saw it nearly every day during my Pitt grad school days. Students who’d been “All But Dissertation” — ABD to the uninformed — since the OPEC oil crisis and folks whose kids were now as old as I was and no longer had the energy to finish their thesis. People who under a different set of circumstances might’ve shot up our department or killed their dissertation chair or committee. I knew I didn’t want to become any of those people.

But I also knew that working at a leisurely pace would keep me in grad school at least for another eight or even ten years. The average graduation rate for a PhD in the History Department at Pitt was at least a decade (I’d learn later it was fourteen years). I needed to strike a balance between working with a sense of urgency, but not at a killer pace. I also needed to figure out if I really wanted to stay at Pitt to finish this degree — I already had two degrees from the same department.

So I did what I’ve always done, or at least, had been doing since the summer of ’82, the summer of my abuse. I came up with a plan. I wrote down all of the different requirements I needed to fulfill to become ABD and came up with a rough outline of how I would want to approach the topic of multiculturalism as a historical construct among African Americans. Off and on throughout the summer of ’92, starting with the last days of May, I worked on my two-year gameplan to get to the dissertation stage. I even included a contingency plan for the real prospect of me transferring to another school to finish my advanced terminal degree.

As for the dissertation topic itself, that took a bit longer to define. I spent the twelve months that followed thinking through the topic of multiculturalism and what bothered me about the idiotic, so-called Culture Wars commentary and insufficient research on the subject. One thing that influenced my thinking on the topic that I was only semi-conscious of was my time in Humanities, around all of those students from different racial, ethnic, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds. Even though Humanities was a poor experiment at multiculturalism — because it was seldom acknowledged, and because our “creme de la creme” nerdiness was our common currency — it gave me some idea of how to think about multiculturalism and its relationship to African Americans.

I knew to approach the topic with the assumption that most African Americans wouldn’t know that they were practicing multiculturalism when they discarded certain notions of inferiority, but adopted and adapted notions of the American Dream and made White notions of equality and freedom their own. That socioeconomic distinctions between elite and ordinary Blacks, that interactions and even intermarriage with other groups of color, and even the issue of passing for White or not made some Black communities practitioners of multiculturalism. Or cultural pluralism as it was called until the ’80s. Yet I also knew that I needed some additional backup. I needed to confirm that African American intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke and Carter G. Woodson and Anna Julia Cooper were all thinking along these lines. I needed to find a place where such ideas and interactions did take place in the public and private sphere.

And at that point, I realized that Pittsburgh wasn’t going to be the locale I would study. I suspected as much as I walked home the day after Memorial Day in ’92 from the nearby Sears on North Highland Avenue in East Liberty. Pittsburgh’s Black elite, even in its heyday during the ’30s and ’40, wasn’t as big as Mount Vernon, New York’s Black elite. In the early ’90s, to be Black with a degree and an income over $30,000 was about as middle class as most folks got in the ‘Burgh. Forget about teachers, doctors, lawyers, postal workers, barbers and other members typical of an African American elite. There really hadn’t been much of an intellectual culture in Black Pittsburgh before the ’50 and ’60s. The schools weren’t legally segregated, and with so few African Americans teaching in them prior to the ’60s, there wasn’t a whole lot to look at in terms of multicultural influences on Black education. Forget about the racial demographics. Pittsburgh was White — with some differences as indicated by the area’s Southern and Eastern European immigrants and their progeny — and Black throughout the twentieth century.

Based on my first visit to DC in March ’92, I kind of figured that this would be the place to do my research. Its Black community was much more vibrant, with an HBCU in Howard, a segregated school system with African American administrators and teachers, a rich intellectual heritage, and a more ethnically and socioeconomically diverse city overall. It took a summer and a Spring Break ’93 trip to DC to confirm my sense about the city. By then, I realized that my Humanities years and my struggles to leave Mount Vernon and 616 behind did have some benefits. It was those experiences — and the need to make plans to overcome and accept them — that enabled me to come up with a dissertation topic based on “the power of another E” (see April postings) and a four-block walk home from buying a $15 fan from Sears.

Seventeen years and numerous writings later, I still am working my dreams into gameplans and picking out lessons learned from the worst years of my past. If there’s anything I hope comes out of Boy At The Window for others who read it, it’s that sense of converting imagination into plans and plans into action that provides motivation to those whom most need it.

Top Cook

25 Monday May 2009

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I’m sure that many of you are familiar with the Bravo show Top Chef, hosted by Padma Lakshmi and with head Italiano judge Tom Colicchio. It’s been a reality-series-mainstay for five years, with chefs in constant competition over the quality of their dishes and the ambiance with which they present them. When I do watch — it’s one of my wife’s shows, not so much mine — I find myself thinking, “I can out-cook most of these people, no problem!”

But as the mafioso-like Colicchio has said numerous times, “the show’s called Top Chef, not Top Cook.” Given the fact that most of the contestants don’t even bother to taste what they cook, I don’t think that they should be in competition for either title. I should know. I have twenty-five years of experience to prove it.
One of the consequences of my youngest brother Eri’s birth in the spring of ’84 was that I learned how to cook, at least enough to make sure that seven people actually gained weight and enjoyed eating my food for the next two months. It was a time of irony and hypocrisy (as if any other time during my Boy At The Window years wasn’t), putting another nail in the Hebrew-Israelite coffin in which my stepfather was prepared to bury himself. It also gave me the opportunity to see myself as an adult beyond my academic abilities. It provided a level of confidence that would be helpful in my Pitt years.
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My conversion to Christianity and my developing interests in sports, music and girls in the spring of ’84 couldn’t have come at a better time. The week before Memorial Day ’84 was when my mother gave birth to my baby brother Eri. The little porker came in at just under seven pounds. Two weeks before that, my stupid stepfather invited his Hebrew-Israelite matriarch “Balkis Makeda” (she believed that she was the reincarnation of the Queen of Sheba, the one who would marry King Solomon of ancient Israel) to stay with us. She was moved in before my mother could seriously object. What a situation! Six kids, including me, plus Mom, Maurice, and an old woman living together in a 1,200-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment. We now needed to behave like good little Hebrew-Israelites with this woman in our house, so as to not embarrass my stepfather.
One of the wonderful rules of our absurdly orthodox practice was that my mother couldn’t cook or do any familial tasks for the next three months. She was “unclean” because she’d just given birth to Eri. This might’ve made sense in the deserts of ancient Canaan, with no antibiotics and drugs to deal with unclean “issues of blood” and other bodily fluids. It didn’t now. Plus I didn’t remember my mother not cooking for three months after Yiscoc and Sarai were born. This was suck-up time, plain and simple.Maurice made what was an abyss-of-bad even worse by cooking dinner for three days. Three straight nights of overboiled and under-ripened cabbage drenched in its own juices and seasoned to high heaven with red and black pepper. My stepfather could’ve been the founder of the cabbage soup diet if he’d actually eaten his own cooking. Man, a week of cabbage like his would’ve left skinny me in an emergency room in need of an IV. As it was, my younger siblings couldn’t even eat a mouthful of the gruel. We needed someone else to cook, and soon. My mother knew just who to ask.So from the end of May until mid-July, I cooked dinner night after night for my family of eight. Makeda refused to eat my food on principle — the man of the house or a female servant was supposed to cook, not me. Before this crisis, I’d only cooked a few things, like baked chicken leg quarters, fried and boiled eggs, sticky-bad grits, and toast with butter. I immediately learned to control temperatures on our gas stove to fry chicken Southern-style, started making spaghetti and meat sauce, and figured out how to season meats and the difference between that and seasoning veggies. All while still doing my other chores, helping out with my siblings and getting ready for Regents and final exams.

I learned how to make the five-dollar-spaghetti meal for eight. For that amount of money, I’d shop at C-Town, buy a pound of ground beef (two dollars), a box of Ronzoni spaghetti (eighty-nine cents, often on sale for fifty cents), a can of Hunt’s spaghetti sauce (ninety-nine cents), and a box of frozen chopped broccoli (fifty-nine cents). With the fifty-four cents left over, I could buy two packs of grape and lemon Kool-Aid or a pack of Wise Crunchy Cheese Doodles as payment for my shopping expertise and culinary services. Sometimes I’d even squeeze a Twix candy bar out of the remaining change.

It was a sharp learning curve, but I wanted to learn. I’d been asking my mother to teach me how to cook since I was nine or ten. Now I was learning under a bit of pressure. Our health and my continued psychological wellness depended on me making food we not only could eat but enjoy as well. By the middle of my second week as 616’s master chef, even Maurice was complimenting me on my skills at the stove and oven. My mother was the only holdout, constantly saying that my food was only “okay,” or “It needs more seasoning,” or that my gravy was “oily and lumpy.”

I did the best I could under these difficult circumstances. My grades remained consistent all year and remained that way even through Regents and finals the third week in June. I managed an 86 on the Geometry Regents despite seeing too many proofs, a 91 on the Biology Regents, and scores in the high-80s and 90s on my Literature and History exams. I got a 73 on my Italian final, a sure sign of things to come with me and Romance languages. My fourth semester GPA was a 4.48, and for the year it was a 4.26. If I could keep this pace up, Humanities in high school would be “as smooth as a milkshake,” as a former classmate would’ve said.

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I’ve added quite a few dishes to my repertoire since ’84. I can make everything from broiled salmon to  veal stew, from wine-drenched pork tenderloin to wok-cooked vegetable fried rice. The most important thing I’ve learned as a cook is the ability to walk in a kitchen, look at a bunch of raw ingredients, and come up with something to cook, without a recipe or without it being something I normally make. I figured out how to make good gravy from scratch one time in ’93 when the only thing I had to work with was water, oil, flour and seasoning. I combined ketchup, soy sauce and chili sauce to make barbeque sauce one day in ’99 when we had only $10 to work with while living in Pittsburgh. Learning this, and that my palate is pretty good in discerning seasonings and tastes, is what makes me as good a cook as I am.
None of this would’ve likely happened, though, without going through those years of malnourishment and wanting for food. None of my ability to cook would’ve been converted to actual cooking without those weeks of cooking in volume for hungry mouths at the end of my freshman year of high school. I likely wouldn’t have finished college or grad school without the ability to cook my own food — it would’ve been too expensive to go to school otherwise. Like reading, critical thinking and creativity, cooking to the point of chef-like ability is a skill that always comes in handy, that makes the most boring of meals worth eating. It also revealed a lot about my character and my sense of initiative than I knew before, especially outside of the classroom.

The Meaning of Eri’s 25th

23 Saturday May 2009

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Eri Washington (with my left arm) at 616 for Thanksgiving, Mount Vernon, New York, November 23, 2006. (Angelia N. Levy).

Yesterday, my brother Eri Washington turned twenty-five years old. He’s my youngest brother (technically, half-brother, but I don’t bother with such labels), and he’s as old now as I was when I was in the middle of my dissertation process. Wow! To think that it’s been a quarter-century since his birth makes me think about how much has happened and how much my youngest brother didn’t have or get to experience in the twenty-five years since his birth.

For starters, Eri’s birth ended a cycle of bad experiences and bad decision-making on the part of his father and my mother. I love my brother and know that the world would be a different place for me and others without him here. Yet his birth was in the middle of our fall into welfare poverty. Eri was the fourth of my younger siblings born in less than five years, between July ’79 and May ’84. He was also the third kid born during our dreaded Hebrew-Israelite years. Although his would be and remains a Hebrew name, it was also one of my family’s final acts as Hebrew-Israelites. My mother didn’t believe in abortion, nor in any form of birth control. My idiot stepfather didn’t believe in condoms. But he loved hanging out with other idiot guys bragging about how many kids he sired — I caught him once sharing cigars with these imbeciles soon after Eri’s birth.

Once again, I digress. The worst of things were over. My mother wasn’t physically abused in the final years of her so-called marriage, and I only had to face down any form of physically abuse once after Eri’s birth. Our financial status was so far below the poverty line that the only place to fall was in homelessness. Between AFDC, WIC, and FS (as my wife calls Food Stamps), we had about $16,000 coming in to feed, clothe and pay rent and other bills for a family of eight. Of course, my obese stepfather shouldn’t have been there, but oh well! There weren’t any more kids on the way, and it seemed as if my mother and I were both waking up from the illusion cast by the cult that we lived under for the previous three years. Having too many mouths to feed can do that, I guess.

There were also things that Eri would never see as he grew up, especially as he reached his tweener years. Me, my older brother Darren, and my younger brother Maurice all have memories of my mother working as a supervisor in Mount Vernon Hospital’s Dietary Department. We all knew that she worked very hard at her job and fought to keep it even though it was a losing battle. (You can’t cross your own picket line and expect to keep your job in the long run.) So Yiscoc, Sarai and especially Eri never saw my mother as a worker growing up. My mother didn’t start working again until the fall of ’97, and would work off and on as a temp for six years before getting a job with Westchester County Medical Center. Eri was nineteen years old by the time that happened.

He also never saw me slogging my way through Humanities and Mount Vernon High School to get into the University of Pittsburgh. Heck, Eri was a just a bit more than three years old when I went off to college. He took it harder than any of my siblings when I left for Pittsburgh in August ’87. When I did my family intervention in January ’02, Eri was still angry with me about it, accusing me of “abandoning the family.” In a way, I guess he was right. This despite the fact that I visited every summer through ’94 and every Christmas through ’97. My need to go away to school meant that there was little reason for Eri — or any of my other siblings for that matter — to follow my example. Of course, by ’93, none of them could have even if they had wanted to. The Humanities Program graduated its last cohort of brainiacs that year.

For better and for worse, Eri was born into an era of limited possibilities and little imagination. His first nine years of life were spent in welfare poverty during the Reagan and Bush 41 years. Not exactly a time of optimism about American innovation, social mobility, and racial harmony. Not in Mount Vernon, not in the New York City area, not for the poor and for people of color of this more conservative era. With no Humanities and living in a bedroom suburb not exactly “on the move,” Eri spent his formative years without the constant academic and familial encouragement necessary for early successes — small and big — that could provide fuel for optimism later on as a tweener or teenager.

Then the fire of April ’95 at 616 happened. It left my mother and younger siblings in a semi-homeless, semi-halfway-house state for nearly three years. They lived most of that time in Yonkers, just five blocks from the Bronx and within a half-mile or so of Van Cortlandt Park. It changed all of us. But I think it changed Eri most of all. He was always angry. Even when I visited, I could see how angry he was with me and with the rest of the world. By the Yonkers years of ’95 to ’98, he was in middle school. But instead of sending him to middle school in Yonkers, my mother made the decision to keep all of my younger siblings in Mount Vernon public schools. Only Maurice did well. Of course he did — he was a junior at MVHS when they all lived in Yonkers. Not so for Yiscoc, Sarai and especially Eri. My youngest brother spent three years and one summer in middle school, including two years at Davis in seventh grade and a summer making sure he didn’t have to repeat eighth grade.

Eri continued to behave as if his actions had little meaning after moving back into the new, insane-asylum-looking 616 in ’98. From the fall of ’99 until he dropped out in ’02, Eri was a ninth-grader at MVHS. He was a drop-in, cutting classes, hanging out with his buddies, bringing girls home apparently to hump. It wasn’t until he managed to knock up one girlfriend in the middle of ’01 that Eri realized that his life couldn’t get better without him making an effort to make it better.

By the time of my family intervention in ’02, Eri was enrolling in JobCorp in upstate New York. Still, I wanted to make sure that I gave him as strong a push as I could so that he would take the program and its possibilities seriously. Within eighteen months, Eri had completed his GED, gotten his driver’s license and earned an auto mechanic’s license. Even after not being able to find steady work, Eri made the decision to join the Army Reserve, earning him a tour of duty in Iraq in ’07-’08, not to mention a broken toe.

Not everything in Eri’s life, especially of late, has been bad. Yet when living with so much anger because the world seems like it’s against you aspiring to anything, it’s easy to just throw up your hands and say, “No mas!” The meaning that I can take from the past twenty-five years is to never give up, especially on yourself, and never let the world take your dreams from you. I hope that Eri can continue to do the same.

Testing 1-2-3

20 Wednesday May 2009

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I had planned to write something about President Barack Obama or about some other pressing issue. Like, is President Obama really operating as a Vulcan when it comes to his policy decisions, all logical with repressed emotions? Or can a computer virus ever become a real world one, and start a pandemic that will destroy our civilizations? Or if we ever created the Star Trek equivalent of a holodeck program, will our birthrate drop to the point where humanity would be in danger of extinction because we engaged in sex with virtual people? Or is it possible to impregnate a nine-dimensional hologram? Sadly, I decided against all of these topics because of an article in today’s Wall Street Journal about the efficacy of test preparation programs for the SAT and other national standardized ETS and College Board exams.

The article goes on to say that there isn’t much bang for the buck from the Kaplan’s and Princeton Review’s of our world. For the $1,000 or $1,500 folks plop down to make their scores a couple of hundred of points higher, they really only raise their scores by a handful, maybe even 50 or 70 points. True that. Yet is this really news to anyone who has ever taken the SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, Praxis I and II, GMAT, PSAT, AP and other exams? Books like Nick Lemann’s The Big Test and Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen have shown over the years that family income as it relates to race, gender, neighborhood and public schools is the single biggest factor in the scores that students earn on these exams. In other words, if you didn’t grow up with parents who read to you as a toddler and young child, have immediate access to information through physical or online encyclopedia, dictionaries and thesauruses, or traveled to various parts of the world, oh well! That’s a disadvantage that can’t be made up by taking a six or ten-week class in test strategies and cramming words like “acerbic” and “esoteric” and “etymological” into your brain.

I should know. Even with years of accelerated classes, of being around kids who traveled and lived the boring lives of the upper middle class and the affluent, I wasn’t as well prepared for standardized tests as them. Of course, some of them took test prep classes even with their built-in socioeconomic advantages. October ’85 was the first time I took the SAT, when it still stood for the “Scholastic Aptitude Test.” I scored a 1050: 480 Verbal, 570 Math. That’s well above the national average even now, and was about 200 points above it back then. For African Americans, whose average scores in the mid-80s was a 736, it made me seem genius-like by comparison. I knew those kind of statistics even then. But I also knew if I wanted a scholarship or to get into a school like Columbia or Yale, I would need a score closer to 1200.

The following October was when I faced the SAT again. I prepared dutifully at the end of the summer of ’86 and into September. I went through the entire Barron’s SAT prep book. With all of that, my score went up, but only by another 70 points. I scored an 1120 this time: 540 Verbal, 580 Math. My classmates scored 1360, 1350, a couple of them 1280s, one a 1220 and a bunch of them 1200s. One of them had the nerve to say, “only an idiot would score under 1200.” I assumed that the comment was directed at me, since the asshole looked directly at me when he said it. I know for a fact that some of them took a Kaplan or some other course to help them prepare. The reality was, though, that most of them would’ve scored at least my score without any test prep at all.

A new standardized test cycle began for me during my junior and senior years at Pitt. Luckily, I did learn a thing or two about taking these kinds of tests during my undergraduate years. I hadn’t learned nearly enough, though, and I still didn’t have the funds to pay for a test-prep course. I took the GRE for the first time in February ’90, with next to no preparation. My total score was a 1680 out of a possible 2400: 530 Verbal, 580 Math and 570 Analytical. The Analytical section was new, having just been added to the exam that year or the year before. Based on my SAT experience, I knew I’d have to take this exam again.

But there were a couple of interesting wrinkles in my standardized test plans. One was that I was learning how to drive that spring and summer, and for me, that was tougher than the GRE. Especially since no one in my family owned a car, and I split my time between Mount Vernon and the ‘Burgh between May and September. I also wasn’t certain whether I should go to grad school for a master’s in history, or to law school for something a bit more sensible. So I bought two Barron’s books, one for the LSAT and one for the GRE in August, and hoped for the best.

I ended up taking the LSAT the week before I took the GRE for a second time. I’m not sure what the LSAT is like now, but back in ’90, it was virtually two-thirds Analytical and one-third Verbal Reasoning and Reading Comprehension. I spend about two weeks off and on preparing for it. I scored a 31 (out of a possible 47) on the exam, which put me at the 50th percentile. Pretty average, obviously! But it also helped me prep for the GREs. The one area my score improved was the Analytical section. My total score was a 1720: 530 Verbal, 570 Math and 620 Analytical.

In a twist of irony, because the section was so new, not one of the admissions people I talked with even knew what to do with my Analytical section score. I was rejected by UC-Berkeley and the University of Virginia because my verbal and math scores didn’t put me in the 70th or 80th percentile (I was only in the 64th and 51st percentiles for those scores). Mind you, my Analytical score — the one that involves critical reasoning, a key component for being a brilliant historian — put me in the 74th percentile. Even Pitt, NYU and the University of Maryland — all schools that accepted me into their programs — didn’t account for that particular score.

I say all of this because standardized testing, test-prep and other related work is really a crock when it comes to evaluating students for college or advanced degree/professional programs. At best, they can be used to show how students with a certain level of life knowledge can perform under the pressures of a timed bubble exam (of course, now they use essay writing too). These tests, regardless of what the psychometricians at ETS and The College Board say, don’t correlate well to how students actually perform while in postsecondary, graduate or professional education. They tend to weed out folks who otherwise would do all right, but not great, in college or graduate school more than they help others who would likely get into an undergrad or grad program even without taking these exams. Two friends of mine from Pitt both took the LSAT at least three times. Between the two of them, their highest score was a 17 (back in the day when the point-scale for the LSAT was between a 12 and a 47).

Anthony Carnevale, a former vice president at ETS (and someone the folks I used to work for full-time should’ve hired for our education reform work back in ’02), let it be known a decade ago that ETS had been doing some promising research into understanding the correlation being SAT scores and family income as it related to race, gender and neighborhood. It snowballed into a controversy over what many in the press called the “Strivers Report,” where it was suggested that someone with my upbringing could have my SAT score of a 1120 weighted to reflect my relatively high score. In other words, an affluent White male from Scarsdale with a 1280 SAT score and my 1120 score would be seen as the same under the circumstances. The mere suggestion led to many a conniption fit among policy makers, educators, and affluent parents.

I respectfully submit that any education system or policy that doesn’t account for relative circumstance is an inequitable one, and that not all standardized test scores are created equal. If the elite schools like UC-Berkeley, Harvard and Princeton can recognize this, why can’t the rest of us?

The Curse of “Dr. Collins”

18 Monday May 2009

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Those of you reading this may think that this is my “woe-is-me” posting about how horrible my life is as an underemployed professor. Well, not exactly. On this date twelve short years ago, I officially walked across a broiler of a stage inside a tent on Carnegie Mellon’s small quad to receive my doctorate from then dean Peter Stearns. It was a bittersweet day, for I already knew that my relationship with my mother would never be the same. The reality is, though, that my relationships with folks who knew me while I earned my doctorate have changed, and the way folks attempt to relate to me has changed too, and not necessarily for the better. There are days that a part of me wishes that I never set my sights on anything higher than a master’s degree, or had just taken my chances as a broke-butt writer eighteen years ago.

With my mother, despite what almost every person who’s never met her has said, I know that she isn’t proud of me. She’s completely puzzled by me, because I don’t act like my other siblings, sound like my other siblings, or complain about life like my other siblings (or like her, for that matter). Mind you, the way I sound hasn’t changed much since my tweener years — I just speak much faster than I did when I was twelve. But somehow, it was me earning my PhD that made me this way, not the fact that I aspired to one in the first place. So if I give my opinion on something and my mother doesn’t like it — which is almost all of the time — it becomes an issue of my “secular education” or having exposed myself to this wicked world of diversity, evolution, gay rights and social justice. It can’t be because I am who I am and have made myself to be over the years.

My mother-in-law’s the same way, picking arguments with me over the silliest of things. She assumes that I assume that she’s “stupid” because I have a doctorate. I don’t think my mother-in-law’s stupid. Like me, (but by a factor of ten or fifteen times more) she has a tendency to say really dumb things. That I sometimes point out the illogical nature of what she has said is usually what gets me in trouble. It would just be nice to have a conversation in which we not only disagree but agree to disagree without my so-called advanced education getting in the way.

Among my co-workers, some of my colleagues, and a fair number of undergraduate friends from my Pitt days, my degree sometimes confuses, even intimidates. I’ve seen it in numerous conversations. People whom I know may be yakking away about the NBA playoffs or the news of the day. I join in the conversation, and my colleagues give themselves a code-switching upgrade, using words I know they don’t use in everyday conversation. What do they think, I’m going to assign them a grade for vocabulary usage or something?

Some of my Pitt friends started falling by the wayside as I pursued my grad degrees, which is normal, but there were some pretty weird conversations I had with them as they did. One insisted on calling me “Dr. Don” about a dozen times during a bus ride one day in ’92, laughing to the point of hilarity while doing it. I thought that he was going to choke on his own spit all the while, he was laughing so hard. Another guy — who eventually committed suicide in ’98 — told me straight up that people like me were “sellouts,” that “The Man” wasn’t going to accept people like me or him “no matta how many degrees we get” or don’t get. Luckily, I learned not to bring up my education to folks unless it was for professional purposes or unless someone asked.

There are other issues that come with an advanced terminal degree. Especially when you’ve been teaching college and grad level courses off and on for eighteen years and have ten years of nonprofit management experience. I can’t apply for just any job, full-time or part-time. Most human resources people probably laugh when they see my c.v. come across their desk. Other writers and editors assume that the only experience I have as a writer is through peer-reviewed academic journals and long-winded monographs about how to use statistical analysis and dry-as-dust-writing to wring the life out of history. If I decided to go back to school, what for? Unless I want to become a lawyer, medical doctor, or astrophysicist, there’s really little reason for me to earn another degree. I could go do some executive or professional program in journalism or writing, get certified as a K-12 teacher or administrator, but given my limited experience with these programs, I wouldn’t want to be my teacher — it’s scary, it’s just too scary!

I could act as if the past twelve or eighteen years haven’t happened. That is, merely list my bachelor’s and master’s, create a true resume instead of a c.v., and only list my job experiences. Even with this, though, there would be problems, as some of my work has required someone with a minimum of a doctorate to do it. Plus, it would surface at some point anyway. In a conversation, in hanging out with co-workers, in occasionally bumping into my former students, in the two-dozen or so articles, book reviews, op-eds and other pieces I’ve published. I am who I am and have made myself to be, and part of who I am is because of those five and a half years of graduate school.

Now what I have done is de-emphasized the degree as the end-all and be-all of my existence. For many, including those whom I know in academia, the degree and tenure are pretty much all that matter. Not so for me. I’ve always been ambivalent about my doctorate and what it means, to me and to others. So I’ve rearranged my priorities, seeing myself as a writer first and an academic historian second (and more often than not, third or fourth, behind teacher and consultant). Now I’m “showing off” again! I’ve just shown how much of a glutton for punishment I am. Is being a writer any easier that being an academic historian?

A Star Trek Education

16 Saturday May 2009

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I plan to see the new Star Trek movie in the next couple of weeks, even if I have to go to a matinee showing of it minus my wife and son. I’ve heard so many good things about the film. So many that I’ve been catching the other Star Trek movies on cable over the past couple of weeks. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek: Generations, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Nemesis, as well as the TV series Star Trek: TNG, Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and Star Trek: Enterprise. The day that the new movie opened, AMC, Cinemax and SciFi were all showing different Star Trek movies at the same time! With all of the talk of warp drive and the use of antimatter as fuel, using electroplasma energy as electricity, and protein resequencing machines to turn normal human waste into kobe beef, we’ll still apparently have an education problem in the 22nd, 23rd and 24th centuries as a world.

The one thing all Star Trek movies have in common is this common context of all Starfleet officers having a common public school experience prior to attending Starfleet Academy. They attended elementary school, had tough and demanding teachers (notice that I didn’t say good teachers), and went to high school. You get some sense, at least from the Star Trek movies done with the cast from Star Trek: TNG, that the high schools are a bit different, that those 24th century folks were required to excel in differential equations before graduation. Beyond that, their education sounds very much like an early twenty-first century American K-12 one.
And that’s the interesting part. I don’t think that our 15,000 school districts as they stand right now could ever hope to produce someone like a Zephyr Cochran, the series’ fictional inventor of a warp drive engine. One of our universities could, but that’s only assuming that his or her sense of creativity, critical thinking, and innovation hadn’t been numbed out of them by the time they reached college. It’s the sad truth that our nation has a four-track, K-College education system — one for the poor and not-so-well off, one for the affluent, one for the obviously analytical and scientific, and one for those of us willing enough to pick up any certificate or degree from anywhere.
None of these systems are compatible, and only the high-potential affluent have the best chance of earning advanced degrees and making the most of their education. We in education often talk about the low high school and college graduation rates for students of color from low-income backgrounds. What about for the White and the affluent? Even for them, roughly 22 or 23 percent don’t graduate college within six years. So even if we improve education for the less well-off to the standards of upper middle class Americans, we’ll still lose nearly one in four students at the college level.
Ours is a system that was designed for the early twentieth century, when not-quite White immigrants from Italy, Poland, Russia, Greece, Serbia and Croatia and Romania were streaming in by the millions to fill factory jobs. It was designed to take in folks who had little hope of social or career mobility, of doing something other than work with their hands. Our K-12 system as we know it today is the result of actions taken as early as the 1890s, when schools began to sort students based on their abilities through testing. Obviously, if one was a non-English-speaking Italian Catholic from agrarian Sicily living in New York City, one’s chances of performing well in a school district run by Protestants with very American and English ways of thinking were about the same as a snowball’s chance in a fiery pit.
Over the years, educators and policy makers have tried to make this system more user-friendly, but have not taken apart its fundamental premise. Many, if not most, students don’t have the mental stones to graduate from a dummied-down high school curriculum, much less go on to college. Even with community colleges, online and distance learning experiences, and so many other programs for the educationally down and out, the likelihood for success would be better if we had the academic equivalent of American Idol for thirty weeks, with handfuls making it to the next level. Because of the complexities of race and socioeconomic status, ability grouping or tracking, and our own idiotic perceptions of intelligence, American education remains a system that grinds up many more students than it actually graduates. That includes the ones they graduate, as most are without the leadership, critical thinking, creativity, and innovation skills necessary to go to college or take a good-paying job in the here and now.
The folks of the Star Trek world don’t need good-paying jobs, for money is no longer necessary in a world without poverty. Somehow, those people have figured out how to train good teachers who can teach, run good schools, foster the holistic growth of kids intellectually and psychologically, and managed to raise high school standards to the equivalent of one’s sophomore year in college. Not a community college, but more like an Oberlin, Grinnell, Pitt or even a University of Pennsylvania. That’s more amazing than the ability to warp space to exceed the speed of light.
But we all know that this Star Trek world is a bit of fiction. Many things we have seen created in our real world since the days of a fit William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, though, were inspired by the first Star Trek series, from cell phones and hand-held computers to breakthroughs in particle physics, quantum mechanics and nuclear fusion. Maybe enough folks can be inspired to help create the big leap we need in American education, to make our education system one that leads the drive toward creativity, critical thinking and innovation, rather than driving it away.