The Iowa Landscape in late, late afternoon… or possibly evening.
We made it to Iowa. But only after a long, hard, impossibly-icky travel day. More than 700 miles were covered in only fifteen-plus hours. With no real breaks for meals because restaurants will not look kindly on bringing the family dog into the dining room. Especially our dog, who will kill for people food, and even threaten small children if she thinks they might pull her ears and also look tasty enough. Traveling with an insane dog is never easy.
And the way was unusually challenging. We normally travel up Interstate 35 because it goes from the North Dallas suburbs where we live to within a few miles of the family farm where my parents still live. It is a good route because it is very travel-friendly with numerous places to stop and a 70-plus miles per hour speed limit to make the trip faster.
But first, we had to pass through Oklahoma. And unfortunately that means Okie drivers. Especially the super-speed Bubba trucks (Chevy pickups with a rebel flag in the back window and more often red than any other saner vehicle color), ultra-super-speed oil-money Wasp-rockets (BMW’s, Rolls Royces, Italian sports cars of high-dollar varieties), and the most dangerous, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol (because I have a Texas license plate, that is. They never seem to be a problem for the first two groups on this list. Do other people in the world do racial profiling against Texans in general? They probably should.)
And, apparently every bridge, over-pass, and under-pass on Interstate 35 has to be repaired, inducing a lowered speed limit that also apparently doesn’t apply to Okie drivers. And the powers that decide things for highways went with the northbound lanes first so they could save the southbound side for my eventual return trip. I got honked at, headlight flashed at, and endured several Okie drivers using one of their fingers to brag at me about their current I.Q. (I won’t mention which single finger they all use for that). They heaped this scorn on me for daring to go no faster than the posted speed limit. I mean, there are road signs in Oklahoma that tell you it is against the law not read and obey all road signs. And fines are doubled, if not quadrupled, in work zones. But the laws against not reading probably don’t apply to those who naturally can’t read.
And I ran into trouble with Kansas City rush hour. Which, of course, travels in the opposite of a rush. And while we were sitting and waiting in the middle of the rush, my little car’s engine overheated. So I had to turn the heater on high and aim the dashboard vents out the rolled-down windows to prevent the car’s engine control chip from shutting the engine off to cool down in the middle of the stationary rush. The heat made the dog even more insane.
And when we finally got to Iowa just before dark, we may have been kidnapped by aliens. Time, it seems, completely went missing in southern Iowa, making the trip last even longer. I may actually have captured the reason for that. I took a few pictures with my phone camera on top of the steering wheel, which probably isn’t a safe thing to do, but I wasn’t in Oklahoma at the time. So decide for yourself if this is significant, or just marsh gas.
You may not be able to rescue other people’s minds from being stupid. But what you can do and be artful about is… make them laugh.
Another Brick in the Wall
I sincerely hope I never appeared in any way to be like the teacher in the video of Pink Floyd’s rock opera The Wall. That teacher represents everything wrong about education and everything that looms over us as a coming darkness if the conservative privatization movement continues to move forward with their evil sausage-factory plans.
In the video you see the teacher making fun of a student for writing poetry instead of participating in the rote recitation about math that the class is engaged in. The school is portrayed as a factory that puts masks on the students, makes them march in a line, and eventually pitch forward, face first into the sausage grinder.
The song was written by Pink Floyd’s bassist, Roger Waters. It was written in the long ago 70’s as a protest against rigid education systems in general, and British boarding schools in particular. But old problems can come back to haunt us.
Here’s the evil being protested. Schools should never be used to suppress creative thinking and enforce conformity. While it is true corporate America is hot for education that treats educating students like baking bricks, with attention to precise shapes and uniform size and color, that is not how kids learn. They have to be treasured for what they are, unique individuals, no two alike, and all possessed of varied strengths, skills, and talents. The idea of education is to help them add to what they are born with, use what they are born with, and fit into the jigsaw puzzle of working with and getting along with others. We cannot teach them by pressing them into molds with standardized high-stakes tests, or taking their individual faces away by always trudging through the same low level thinking skills year after year just because a textbook written in conservative Texas says so. Learning in the classroom needs to be through guided discussions, activities, and interactions. Not through filling in all the blanks on a worksheet.
My own children, for the most part, have been cheated by the public education system in Texas. They are bright kids, but have humongous school troubles stalking them like monsters, boredom, disengagement, and feeling like the young poet betrayed by the teacher in the video. While I always, in my teaching, fought to creatively present learning opportunities, I found good teaching to be a rare thing in Texas. It was sometimes actively discouraged. And it is getting rarer. The people who think teaching English means diagramming sentences and circling the adverbs are winning the battle for young minds. I am left at a point of futility where the only thing I can do about the brick-making is write rants like this one about it.
Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos should be pleased with themselves. The sausage factories in our schools are turning out sausages. Sausages don’t think for themselves. Sausages are easy to control. And when the time comes, some corporate fat cat will eat them and become fatter (hopefully only in the metaphorical sense). And I am guessing here, but I’ll bet sausages make up most of the Republican voting public.
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