Remembering Eugene

This is an essay that I didn’t want to write.  And if I wrote it, I didn’t know whether I’d share it.  As I write these first sentences, I’m still not convinced that I’ll share what I write.  But I’ll write and then decide.  If you’re reading this, you know what I decided.

 

I write to honor Eugene Smith, a friend/mentor/guide/teacher who taught me the most important lesson I learned as a teacher.  My almost-40-year friendship with him seems too personal to share – especially since I just learned that he passed away last October.  He was 95 when he passed.  Though we met many years ago and lost touch for a while, we reconnected in 2011.  The last time I had lunch with him was in 2020, just after his birthday and just as the pandemic was starting to keep all of us apart.  Then we exchanged e-mail messages during the pandemic until he stopped responding.  We lost touch during 2021, and while I reached out a few times, I figured the non-reply was because he was getting more frail and unable to reply.  Until that point, he remained vibrant while looking for opportunities to engage in the world around him. 

 

His retirement years inspired me.  One of the joys of my life was being able to edit one of the books he self-published in his late 80s and early 90s.  He still had words he wanted to contribute to the world even as he transitioned into his ninth decade.  His last book, for which he asked me to write a review and which I read drafts of chapters as he wrote them, was especially meaningful since it was a lightly fictionalized version of his own journey to becoming an educator.  In my review, I wrote:

 

This book is worth reading because of the connection it makes between the humanity of a teacher and the work of a teacher – and how those two complement each other.  It is not a recipe for becoming a teacher, but it does offer an image of one teacher that is inspiring enough to encourage someone considering the profession.  That image allows the reader glimpses into how that teacher has been able to sustain himself while continuing to teach well into a stage of life when people are expected not to contribute to the world around them.

 

He gave copies of that book to people who attended his ninetieth birthday celebration.  In its pages I learned much about what shaped him.  That allowed me to discover his life well beyond our professional relationship.  You can read about some of his professional accomplishments in the obituary that’s online.  However, I now choose to write about the personal journey he helped me make from someone who understood the technical skills of teaching to someone who came to see the importance and value of seeing teaching as principally an act of building relationships.

 

I’d been teaching for five or six years when I met Eugene.  At times, I hear or read someone claim that teachers had a teacher in their life who inspired them.  That wasn’t true for me until I met Eugene – well into the start of my career.  I often comment that the teachers I encountered throughout my own education taught me how not to teach.  I became a teacher to ensure that learners wouldn’t have the same soul-denting experiences I had in elementary, secondary, and undergraduate education.  Within a few years of starting my career, people told me I was successful at the work.  By the time I met Eugene, I’d figured out how to write and deliver lessons, how to organize a curriculum, how to manage a classroom, and how to create engaging sessions.  So I didn’t need anyone to teach me the technical side of the work, though he did help me add to those skills.  What I learned from Eugene was something more significant than the skills he helped me hone, though. 

 

I majored in English literature as an undergraduate, and that degree left me wholly unprepared to teach secondary students how to write – which seemed more critical than teaching them about Chaucer or Wordsworth.  That’s why I applied to and was accepted in a master’s degree program where I could focus my coursework in composition and rhetoric at the University of Washington.  I took courses in composition theory and rhetoric, and I met Eugene as he taught one of those courses.  In my first year in the degree program, I also applied for the Puget Sound Writing Program’s summer fellowship program where teachers from the region spent six summer weeks focusing on learning about the teaching of writing.  In the year after I finished the PSWP summer fellowship, Eugene became the program’s director.  So we had many common points of contact. 

 

I learned about grammars from him – and, no, that’s not a typo.  He was the first to teach me that grammar is an organization system, and that there are many, formal organizational systems beyond the traditional, Latin-based system that’s typically (and badly) taught in schools.  He, for example, exposed me to Chomsky’s transformational grammar that remains critical to how I think about how people learn and apply language.  And he taught me about Vygotsky and the connections between thinking and language.  It all revolutionized how I thought about what my students did when I asked them to write – and what I needed to do to support them.  But those weren’t his biggest lesson for me.

 

Because I was completing the master’s degree in summers and evening, finishing the degree took me a few years.  I outlasted two advisors (one was hired away and the other retired), and the English department eventually assigned Eugene as my advisor.  I was happy about that since I’d gotten to know him a little through his courses and as he became the PSWP director.  I didn’t need career advising since I had a pretty good idea that I’d be a secondary English teacher for the rest of my career (a good lesson to me, now looking back, on the foibles of career planning).  But I did enjoy meeting with him and talking about the work of a teacher.  He always had great insights from his own experiences and passion about teaching.  I’d share what I was doing in my classes, and we’d discuss what that was working and what wasn’t. 

 

When I met Eugene, I taught in a semi-rural area that was about 50 miles south of the university, and there weren’t any peers with whom I could have those discussions.  For example, I told him about the plays my students were writing, and how I, as a personal exercise, wrote an introductory act for one student play in the students’ colloquial dialect employing iambic pentameter to show students meter while stretching my writing skills.  At one point, he made the trek to my school to see what I was doing and spend the day with me – not as part of a course or as an evaluation.  He wanted to see what the school and kids and classrooms where I taught were like.  For two summers, he hired me to teach PSWP’s summer writing institute for kids.  He and I had a connection unlike any other I’d had with any teacher to that point.  He was genuinely interested in more than papers I wrote and comments I made in a graduate seminar.  And more than the lessons of those seminars, our connection contained the most important lesson he taught me. 

 

Eugene taught me that teaching is always about those relationships.  It wasn’t that I could or should ignore a course’s content.  Learners came to my class to learn whatever content I taught, and having the skill to create a learning environment that engaged them around that content was important.  But helping students develop a relationship to that content requires a relationship with each student where they see my care for them and their success first.  If you’ve been a student of mine, and you felt that I wanted to know you well enough to understand your needs and to address those needs, thank Eugene.  He was the one who modeled that for me and taught me the primary truth that teaching is about relationships.  I’ve worked to recreate that for the students I was fortunate to have taught because of how much his care for me meant to me.  I may not have been successful at that with all of my students, but it always has been a goal for me, whether I was teaching secondary students, undergraduates or graduate students. 

 

So this is a note of thanks to an amazing friend who taught me the most important lesson in the profession where I spent most of my working life.  And I decided to publish it because I want that thanks to be public.  Every teacher should be as fortunate as I was to have known and benefitted from such an extraordinary friend. 

Defacto secession and what I’m doing about It…

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

 

U.S. Constitution, 14th Amendment, Article 1

 

I’ve been paying a lot of attention lately to the 14th Amendment.  The last time the nation stopped a group of states from seceding, Congress passed it.  It was one of three new amendments ratified as a consequence of the long and bloody armed conflict that began with an assault by rebels on a federal fort in South Carolina.  These days, in contrast, secession is more subtle than firing on Fort Sumpter.  Instead, states are enacting legislation or imposing regulations that limit or roll back the rights of their citizens.  It’s a step backward from progress that has ensured more rights to more people over time – a step backwards that’s contrary to the demands of the 14th Amendment.  Unlike the rebellion of 1861, they’re doing it in increments that intend the same impact:  to act separately from the nation and oppress some citizens while giving increased power to others.  That was the same outcome that the southern plantation class sought in 1861 when they led the nation into armed conflict.  This time, the rebellious states aren’t taking up arms.  But they are, in fact, openly rebelling against the protections provided in the 14th amendment. 

 

In their actions, these states are seeking to stop an evolution the nation has undertaken in the past 250 years as it sought to live into the inclusive ideals established at founding.  If you’re reading this essay because you’re a personal or professional connection of mine, you most likely don’t need an explanation of that 250-year evolution’s necessity as the laws increasingly gave rights to citizens who were disenfranchised and excluded at the nation’s start.  So I won’t go through that here (but please do contact me if you need a reading, viewing, or listening list, and I’ll put one together).  Citizens’ rights have incrementally become more inclusive of more people since the nation’s founding, yet there are those who would roll back that progress to the point of subverting or ignoring the hard-won rights of the past 250 years.  Some have identified that as a backlash to progress, and I agree with that.  However, I believe there’s more to it.

 

What’s happening in these states is an attempt to secede in ways every much as real as the southern rebellion of 1861.  More than one governor in these states that are attempting secession has publicly refused to carry out federal mandates or has acted unilaterally to usurp federal power.  At the same time, these states’ legislators are creating laws and regulations that take away more rights from more people.  Action by action, these changes are, therefore, a defacto[1] secession from the laws that we’ve evolved nationally to guarantee increased equity, justice, and inclusion.  It’s a devolving return toward states’ rights to oppress their citizens.  States’ rights to oppress selected groups were litigated and decided in 1865.  The result was codified in the 14th Amendment that the nation ratified three years later.  Yet these states attempting defacto secession want to relitigate that decision and demand that they be allowed to oppress some within their borders

 

My initial reaction was to be thankful that’s not happening in my state.  Our legislature isn’t trying to remove safeguards that protect women’s relationships with their physicians; the state isn’t telling parents what kinds of medical care their children can have; lawmakers aren’t creating voting laws and voting districts that lessen the voting power of specific groups.  Even though we still have work to do, my state continues its progression to ensure more rights to my neighbors and me.  So I thought myself fortunate.  And that was that – until I thought back to 1861 and the 14th Amendment.  What would have happened if the entire nation agreed to let the southern states’ plantation class secede from the union and continue to oppress my Black progenitors because of where they lived?  What would’ve happened if there weren’t federal protections demanded by the 14th Amendment?  I’m a citizen of this nation, and any attempt anywhere to reduce anyone’s rights is an attempt on my rights – on all our rights.  At its core, that’s what the 14th Amendment is about.  My next thought was that I should boycott those states that are participating in the defacto secession as a way of voicing my concerns.  That’s when clarity came.  Even if I convinced others to participate in a boycott, what does that do to support the oppressed citizens of those states who are losing basic and critical rights like bodily autonomy, parental rights, or voting? 

 

This all came into focus for me as I planned to attend a national conference that’s scheduled for Kentucky in the fall.  As I was making plans, the Kentucky state legislature overrode the governor’s veto of a bill that prohibits medical care for trans youth while additionally banning any mention of sexual orientation or gender identity in schools.  That override makes that law the official policy of Kentucky.  It’s part of a national push by Republicans to use the trans and LGBTQI+ populations as a wedge to divide voters and solidify their radical-right base through fear of differences.  Kentucky is the perfect example where the legislature is attempting defacto secession from the union.  My initial thoughts to ignore the law because I’m in a safe state, or to boycott Kentucky, would have no impact on Kentucky legislators’ actions.  So, instead, I decided on a plan of action that would provide support to those people affected by Kentucky’s acts toward secession. 

 

My plan is to offer my time and energy to organizations in Kentucky that are battling against their leaders’ oppressive secession.  I’ve started to contact colleagues I know in the state and ask them for names of organizations where I can volunteer while I’m in the state.  As I contact these organizations, I’ll offer whatever support they feel is worth having – anything from volunteering in my areas of expertise to folding flyers for mailing to folding chairs and sweeping floors after a meeting.  No matter the level of work I provide, acting in opposition, it seems to me, makes more sense than ignoring the attempted secession by these states, or staying away from them.  So that’s what I’m doing.  I want folks in these states to know that those of us in other states are watching their leaders and are joining the people in the state as they hold their leaders accountable to the 14th Amendment.  I want folks, who must feel despair in having actions taken to marginalize them, to know that there are others who work alongside them.  Whenever I visit one of these secessionist states, I plan to do the same.  That seems a better outcome than ignoring the seceding states or boycotting them.  I’m sharing this decision publicly because I know there are others who are trying to figure out what to do.  This is my solution. 

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[1] A definition:  The term defacto, is used to describe something that exists in fact, even if it isn’t a law.  When people live, for example, in separate communities that are divided by race, that is defacto segregation, even if that segregation isn’t mandated by law.  I use the term “defacto secession” because what we’re seeing in the nation is, in fact, a secession where certain states are seceding from the rules that the nation has evolved to provide justice and equity for all. 

Life, Work, and Maynard G. Krebs

When I turned 18 and people asked me what I planned for the future, I usually said something like, “Eat, sleep, maybe go for a walk.”  It was my deflection of that tiresome question older folks ask young folks who are entering adulthood.  But the deflection also reflected my beliefs.  At 18, I really had no plans and no intention of developing any.  My favorite TV character in childhood was Maynard G. Krebs, Dobie Gillis’ ersatz beatnik friend.  If you’ve never seen The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, watch almost any episode on YouTube, and you’ll meet Maynard.  He’s the only reason to watch the show which is, otherwise, another late-1950s, dopey, teen-angst sitcom.  Whenever Maynard heard the word, “work,” he always showed a viscerally negative reaction as he repeated the word while his voice jumped an octave and his face displayed a mixture of shock and consternation.  My pre-pubescent mind thought that was the perfect response.  I’m sure the show’s producers didn’t intend for the audience to see that caricature as positive.  They likely expected that the audience would see him as a shiftless ne’er do well; but I thought of him as a role model. 

 

By the time I was supposed to enter adulthood, I was content to follow Maynard’s example and play a little music with friends, hang out, organize a rally or music event now and then, eat, sleep, and maybe go for a walk.  I lived in a commune for a while, but that became too much work when we’d have hours-long meetings about the dishwashing schedule and whether drying them afterward would spread more germs than letting them air dry.  It’s when I realized that meetings could be more laborious than physical toil.  I left the commune and enrolled in a junior college and then found that I could hitchhike to the beach after classes.  With time, I realized that I could just bypass the college and thumb a ride directly to the beach.  I didn’t see any reason to stay enrolled in college to go to the beach, so I stopped attending classes midway through that first semester.  For a good part of that year after I left high school, I successfully sidestepped anything that resembled work. 

 

However, by the latter part of the year after I turned 18, I started to feel to the pull of adulthood.  As an adult, especially a male adult in that era, everything around me demanded that I needed to be productive and striving.  I needed a job to pay bills, and that required that I modify my aversion to work and take a job as a warehouseman.  That left less time for strolls and more time that my boss demanded that I be at work.  To keep the job, I had to be consistently there, and I needed to perform tasks as well as those around me.  If I didn’t go to work on any day, that meant others would have to do my share – something my co-workers, all middle-aged men with families and mortgages, made certain I understood wasn’t acceptable.  So I showed up and worked and learned how to be a good warehouseman.  And I experienced the unexpected.  With time, work became interesting and eventually enjoyable. 

 

I could challenge myself to master tasks and feel good about that mastery.  Driving a forklift quickly and efficiently required some artistry, as did stacking loads onto trucks for delivery or learning how to drive those delivery trucks.  To this day, I still use a flying dutchman knot to snugly secure any truck or trailer load.  It was interesting to learn new skills, and it felt artful as I constantly adapted new ideas to perform better.  By my 19th year, I began to evolve a different viewpoint that I kept throughout my adult years until I retired.  Instead of work being a pejorative, it became one of the defining purposes to my life as working gave me purpose and direction, especially later as I became a teacher and adapted my developed sense of work as artistry to teaching.  I reversed from my Maynard G. Krebs-inspired perspective.  These days, I’m in the phase of life when going to the beach instead of contributing productively is a societally acceptable approach to any day.  But now looking back, I wonder if I went wrong in completely abandoning my childhood views on work. 

 

I now review my employed life of 46 years, three months, and 27 days and question the value of the many weeks, months, and years when I worked 60 or 70 hours a week.  It’s a pace that I began when I finally attended college in my mid-20s, and I worked full time while taking classes full time.  Once I graduated, I always had reasons to work a side job, take on additional work, operate a side business, or maintain an active consulting practice.  I was that teacher who built an after-school drama program, or advised all the school’s publications, or served on multiple committees, or taught in-service classes to other teachers.  I was the one who went on to a master’s degree in summers and evenings, and eventually a doctorate to build more skills and knowledge.  I constantly found new challenges and new opportunities to engage me, and that meant long hours of working.

 

When people asked me whether I felt any stress, I always laughed and answered “no.”  I really believed that.  Retrospectively, I now realize that I’d gotten so habituated to stress in my daily life that it felt normal to experience the pressure of time and task.  It wasn’t until a year after I retired that I understood what living stress-free felt like again.  Like the frog in the pan of water, I never knew that the water reached well past the boiling point.  But it’s not just me.  I think this is the experience of many workers.  We just feel the drive to work and don’t see what work’s dominance means to our lives. 

 

Workers in the U.S. are among the most productive on the planet.  According to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development’s annual surveys, in 2021 we were sixth in number of hours worked per GDP;  we were third in GDP per person worked.  We were also first in total number of hours worked per worker.  The average amount of paid leave that a U.S. employee is given in a year is among the lowest among developed nations.  Workers in the U.S., regardless of their income levels or education, weekly work much harder and longer than their counterparts in other developed countries.  We seem to take a perverse pride in our overwork.  We’ve bought into what social scientist Max Weber coined as the “Protestant work ethic” in the early 20th Century.  That idea came from an extreme Calvinism that valued work above all else and claimed saintly rewards to all who arrange their lives accordingly.  It’s all led to a simplistic bifurcated calculation:  Not working is slothful and sinful, so working especially hard must be virtuous.  Actually, that polarization should’ve been my first clue that something was amiss because I know that binary choices are typically false choices. 

 

And what’s the real reward for a life spent working?  It can’t be the ways in which I’m remembered – what people call “legacy.”  Now almost six years after I left the job where I retired, I’m guessing most of the people who now work there wouldn’t recognize me if I walked into the building.  A good number of others would need a second to remember my name – even though I was there a decade prior to my retirement.  Not much of a “legacy.”  It’s critical to note that’s neither good nor bad.  It’s just the way things are.  To tell the truth, I’d have to think hard about those people’s names if I saw them.  I’ve maintained some relationships from my final job, but those are relationships that continued outside of the work we did.  In those relationships, we hardly ever talk about that work.  Life goes forward and the friendships that lasted are the real legacy – not the work. 

 

For American workers, the real rewards of their overworking habits are, as sociologist Juliet Schor suggests, a shorter lifespan, more stress-related illnesses, and a more unhappy workforce than many other developed nations.  We’ve sold ourselves on the importance of work and have forgotten the importance of life.  I understand that some folks don’t have an option.  If you need to work two jobs to make ends meet, you don’t have the choice but to overwork.  But for people who don’t have to have two or more jobs, and to the employers who implicitly or explicitly demand and reward the behavior, that compunction to work seems misplaced. 

 

I’m incredibly fortunate that I’ve now been retired long enough that I’ve been able to rediscover life outside of working.  I maintain some professional interests while conducting some research, consulting on a few projects, and writing professionally.  But those are now secondary to playing music or tinkering or just hanging out – living the life I admired Maynard G. Krebs for living.  Others may not have that chance.  There’s no guarantee that people will live as long as I have and still have the ability to enjoy retirement and live as I now do.  I know far too many people who reached my age without the capacity to do what they enjoy doing, and I know as many who didn’t live long enough to retire.  I also know some who’ve come to retirement and realized that they don’t know how to do anything besides work.  According to the CDC, In 2020, the median expected lifespan of a child born in the U.S. was 76.4 years, a reduction from 78.8 years the year before that.  It’s too early to tell if that decline is a trend.  But the truth is that if the median lifespan remains the same, increases, or decreases, life is finite. 

 

Given the finite, it seems to me that spending 40 or 50 years without nurturing your inner Maynard G. Krebs is a mistake.  Beginning in 2020, as people lived through the pandemic, I heard from multiple friends and colleagues who were still working and came to that realization.  As a result, they left jobs or changed positions or pursued new opportunities that allowed them the time to live outside of working.  That gives me some hope.  Maybe more people will discover their Maynard-ness while they still have time.  Maybe that’ll be you.  And maybe you’ll make more time to enjoy a good meal, sleep, or just go for a walk. 

Being Loud… and Wrong

The July 15, 1970, edition of the Oakland Tribune offered an example of who I was at the time in an article that began on page 1 and jumped to page 16.  As the reporter explained what happened:

 

“… the Hayward City Council was showered with balloons and protests by a group of 15 longhaired youths objecting to what they charged was police harassment and a city ban on pamphleteering in public parks.  The youths, led by Robert Hughes, said they were threatened with prosecution by city officials if they continued distributing political handbills during their free rock concerts at Hayward Memorial Park….  The youths started a carnival-like atmosphere in their protest by sailing balloons through the council chambers, wearing tiny clown caps, and staging in the council aisles a mock monopoly game they called ‘The Hayward Game,’ satirizing the city establishment.” 

 

I learned how to be in the world from folks who raised me.  As a result, my sense of right and wrong reaches back to the late 19th century through the stories that those elders told me.  That gave me a lot of history to ground me.  I suspect that those multiple generations of knowledge, mixed with my own experiences, have now given me some wisdom.  I wasn’t born wise, and I can still make foolish mistakes.  But I can apply the lessons of my years and the lessons of those who came before me to a lot of circumstances.  I don’t believe we should do something now because we did it before.  But it sure does save me a lot of headache to avoid circumstances that I’ve heard about or personally seen before.

 

That reliance on learning wisdom from the past and personal experience doesn’t seem to be universal.  For instance, consider the antics of some House members during the President’s State of the Union address.  Their reality-show theatrics got them the attention they apparently need, but it accomplished little beyond raising their profiles.  They are elected, as the Constitution defines their role, to govern as a critical part of the legislative third of the government.  In order for that part of the government to function, though, the framers seem to have hoped that we would elect people with wisdom to fulfill the role.  That didn’t happen with some congressional members who seemed to think that acting outrageously for the cameras is what they’re there to do. 

 

It’s as if UPS hired a deliver driver who came back at the end of the day with a full load and said that it was much more interesting to stop at Starbucks and make drinks for customers.  I doubt that UPS would tolerate that.  Pretty quickly, the manager at UPS is going to look for another driver who can get the job done.  The job as a member of the House of Representatives is to represent your constituents – not to become a spectacle during a Constitutionally mandated event as the nation looks on.  My Southern progenitors would call these people, “loud and wrong,” a phrase they reserved for people whose mouths outran their wisdom.

 

I understand that people can stray from what they’ve learned.  That’s certainly the case for me.  Even with the lessons that my forebearers gave me, I had to learn some on my own.  Early in my public life, I thought that being the loudest voice was important, while assuming that, of course, I was right.  I recall that event during the city council meeting in my late teens as I and my colleagues disrupted governance functions in an attempt to make a point.  I can also recall how little impact those actions had. 

 

The stunt in 1970 got us attention, but the point we were making got lost.  The speech I gave denounced the police who had recently shot and killed a Latinx young man.  We demanded accountability for that officer’s actions.  The reporter misses those important points in favor of describing our antics and the comparatively minor points about our right to distribute handbills.  Our protest was clever, innovative, and got attention enough to be in that day’s regional newspaper.  Did it resolve the issue of police harassment and brutality?  Now, over 50 years later, the nation is still having that discussion.  Nothing changed in the city as a result of what “15 longhaired youth” did in 1970.  Maybe clever, but not productive or wise.

 

The difference between the GOP loud-and-wrong crowd and me 50+ years ago is that I was a radical 18-year-old with little wisdom who eventually got some.  In contrast, the current crop of GOP rabble are elected, mid-life adults whom constituents should expect to have some measure of prudence as they focus on the job they’re there to do.  As I aged, I learned to find avenues that allowed me to create and sustain the changes I believed should happen.  I became wiser.  These folks are much older than I was when I was acting out, yet they seem incapable of learning to do more than shout and catcall their way into the national spotlight – with no agenda other than to decry the failures they claim others have had.  They offer no competing vision or direction – just anarchical complaints.  It took growing older and seeing the futility of my actions for me.  As I wanted change, I began to realize the need for more than shouting.  Unfortunately, these folks are being rewarded by accolades and additional funding.  As a result, there’s not much incentive for them to grow wiser.

 

In addition to choosing wiser actions, another lesson I learned from my elders and my own life is one that also seemed lacking at the State of the Union:  respect for others.  Not subservience to others, or belief in the superiority of others.  Respect.  I learned it from watching my aunt who was born in the late 1800s and by the 1950s owned her own grocery store.  I saw her show respect to community leaders and neighbors down on their luck with the same grace.  My learning came from watching family and friends with brilliant minds being relegated to menial tasks because of the color of their skin, yet rising to excel at those tasks until the larger world recognized them.  When they were ignored and when they later became well-known, they treated everyone they encountered with the same respect.    

 

From what others taught me and from my own life, I learned to respect both those with privilege and those without equally.  As a result, I listen respectfully when people speak.  If I disagree, I find the time and appropriate place to express my disagreement.  Although I now have status and privilege that exceeds where I started many years ago, I don’t abuse that privilege by disrespecting anyone.  Wisdom teaches me that waiting for that appropriate moment and venue respects the speaker with whom I disagree.  That, in turn, gives me the opportunity to share my disagreement so that was can, at the least, understand our differences.  I’m no longer interested in looking clever.  I want to see real changes, and that begins when I interact with others respectfully. 

 

This all leaves me wondering about the constituents who voted for these representatives.  In one case, it was by a small majority, but most of the others won their most recent elections by wide margins.  I’m guessing that their constituents would tell you that they raise their children to be respectful and that they themselves are respectful of others – as most adults I know try to be.  The majority of those voters might even tell you that they take some pride in doing whatever job they were hired to do.  We’re supposed to learn those behaviors from early childhood.  It’s part of the wisdom that gets passed down.  But instead of demanding that their member of Congress acts wisely and focuses on legislation effectiveness (the job they were elected to conduct), constituents cheer disrespectful and ineffective actions that are clearly antithetical to the common courtesy these voters presumably practice in their own lives.  To follow the metaphor I started above, it’s as if they tell their representative that it’s okay to make drinks at Starbucks – while being surly to the people who come to the counter – instead of making deliveries. 

 

When are these congresspeople’s bosses, their constituents who elected them, going to expect them to deliver on the job they were elected to do instead of acting like they’re auditioning to be the latest loudmouth on TV’s newest reality series?  Maybe these voters figure, “Well, at least my representative isn’t out stealing puppies from the Amish,” (as is allegedly the case for one NY Republican House member); but that makes as much sense as the errant delivery driver telling the boss, “Well, at least I wasn’t using the truck to rob banks.”  The issue isn’t about who’s worse than whom.  The voters in these congressional districts have to expect that the people they elect will act more wisely and respectfully than what we’ve seen so far from the people they elected.  They have to hold these people accountable to legislate – i.e., to do the job they were elected to do – and to do it wisely. 

Mystic or Greeting Card?

FB always asks me "What's on your mind, Bob" as I create a post.  Today, I’m thinking about two messages that I saw on the same day with the same quotation purporting to be from two different people.  It was possible that one person originally made the statement and then the second one was quoting the first – and somewhere the original attribution got lost.  After all, one of the possible sources lived hundreds of years after the other, so that seemed the most likely explanation.

 

But being an academic, I tend not to be satisfied with half of an explanation.  I wanted to know who said it.  So I went to Google as a first pass.  The first item on the list of responses gave me an answer, and other sources affirmed and corroborated that answer.  It turns out that neither of the two people who were quoted made the statement.  The statement was written by a greeting card writer who borrowed the ideas for it from a mid-20th century Irish philosopher.  The greeting card writer takes full credit for the statement and explains its origins on that writer’s web site.  She could be lying, but a number of reputable sources who extensively research the statements of the two purported originators affirmed the greeting card writer’s claim. 

 

Why do I care, and why should anyone care?  After all, if I believe something to be profound, does the source really matter?  Well, aside from a search for accuracy, there’s a problem:  Are truth and mendacity so fungible that we shouldn’t care what the source is?  If that’s the case, that sort of relative truth making suggests that whatever I believe is what makes something true.  That’s problematic.  After all, claims of “alternative truth” aside, truth isn’t relative.  We can make up our own reality, but that doesn’t make our reality true.  There’s a lot of that kind of enchanted thinking happening these days, and we don’t need to look too far into the daily news to see how false statements impact the world. 

 

Apart from the demands to know what’s true, there’s also the question of how we create false histories from our beliefs about famous people.  Our knowledge of famous people is often based on what they say.  Those images get distorted whenever their words are changed, taken out of context, or when words are created for them.  Whether it’s Martin Luther King, Jr. or Mohandas Gandhi, the false attributions generate blurry images of the person who gets attached to the words.  So people are shocked to learn that Dr. King kept a firearm for self-protection or that Gandhi’s views as a young man (which he later modified) were clearly racist.  It’s hard enough to tell the realistic view of the famous without also distributing misinformation into the mix. 

 

It does matter whether that great idea came from someone who founded one of the world’s major religions, or from a modern movement leader, or from a greeting-card writer.  The difference in authors means a difference in intent.  If the idea is intended as spiritual guidance, that’s very different than it being intended to advocate for justice and change.  Context matters so we can really understand the speaker’s intent. 

 

So maybe the next time you want to believe and pass along a wonderful quotation you saw someone post, copy the quotation and paste it into the Google search box.  You may find that the person really said it.  Or you may find that the origins are somewhere else.  And the difference matters.

 

You may wonder which quotation prompted this note.  My omission is intentional because I’d prefer that you wonder about the authenticity of every quotation you see posted somewhere.  Rather than saying, “Yeah, that one didn’t sound like something that person would say,” I’m hoping that you take time to question every quotation you see attributed online.  And you can even go check the last quotation you passed along to see if it’s the one I checked. 

Happy Days? A look past the myth

During the holiday season, it seems like we’re constantly being invited to reminisce on happier pasts. 

 

With apologies to Grease, The Fonz, American Graffiti, and other fantasies spawned in the ‘70s to look backward, there wasn’t a magical period in U.S. history when the nation experienced a widespread period of bliss and harmony.  And for many people, the Disney movies of the ‘50s and early ‘60s that solidified that myth weren’t a simulacrum of real life.  Ask the braceros who’d been invited to fill in the worker shortage at the beginning of WWII and by the early ‘60s lived in squalid camps and worked under conditions that eventually led to their organizing the United Farm Workers.  Ask the west coast Japanese who continued to feel the impacts of loss and exclusion for decades after they returned from the WWII internment camps.  Ask the LGTBQ+ folks who lived in daily fear of losing everything, including their lives, if they even peeped outside their closets during that era.  Ask Emmett Till’s family – or ask any Black family who lived through that time – how safe they felt when they left the communities where they’d been purposely segregated.  The list could go on, but you get the point.  The myth of a post-WWII period of “happy days” is just that:  a myth. 

 

The myth comes from the post-war economic boom that was fueled by vast governmental spending and a resulting private sector economic expansion.  Since the nation typically equates economic prosperity for dominant groups with happiness, there’s a belief that economic expansion of that era must’ve created happy times for all.  But to see how the myth breaks down, you only need to look at individuals in smaller groups instead of the macroeconomics.  My dad was in WWII, but he wasn’t in the armed services.  When he went for a physical at the recruiting station, they discovered that he had an enlarged heart.  Despite being a college football standout a few years before, his heart condition meant he couldn’t enlist.  So he went to the Red Cross and was hired to go to the South Pacific as a Red Cross director.  He wasn’t allowed to serve as a soldier, but he wanted to contribute and serve however he could.  

 

In and of itself, that’s not remarkable.  After all, millions of people volunteered in that era.  What I find remarkable is that Black folks like my dad were willing to be part of an effort to maintain a society that devalued and, in many ways, sought to harm them.  It wasn’t just my dad.  The 442nd Regimental Combat team in WWII was comprised of Japanese American men, many whose families were confined to internment camps.  The 92nd Infantry Division of segregated African American men fought in the nation’s earliest efforts to free Europe during the liberation of Italy.  Black Navy sailors in Port Chicago, California loaded munitions onto ships with no training or safety measures, even after a preventable explosion killed over 300 men.  People of color volunteered their lives in service to a nation that would go back to devaluing them at war’s end.  For my father, it meant coming back to the U.S. for a few years and then expatriating to Ethiopia where he could work for the Ethiopian government and be treated as an equal. 

 

It wasn’t just the people of color who were damaged by the war and faced the consequences of their experiences in the period that’s mistakenly called the “happy days.”  The people who returned from WWII to experience the economic boom all had experienced the horrors of events where millions lost their lives.  I remember in the 1990s when my in-laws were at a Catholic mass to honor their 50th wedding anniversary.  As they went forward and knelt to receive communion, my father-in-law Art began crying.  It was touching to see him emotionally affected in that moment, something I’d not seen him do in the years I’d known him.  I assumed that the emotions arose from remembering so much that had happened in those 50 years.  As we talked at the reception that followed, Art explained that his reaction was from remembering all the men who fought alongside him when they fought too many battles on too many Pacific islands.  At that moment, he was overcome thinking about people who never came home and never had the chance to live the life he’d lived. 

 

I knew that those images haunted Art.  In the years immediately after the war, as he was becoming a new husband and father, he was hospitalized periodically with what was then called “shell shock” and now is understood to be post-traumatic stress disorder.  He was expected, after each brief hospitalization, to return to his job, his family, and his community to pretend nothing had happened.  I know what it was like to be 18 and trying to decipher how to be an adult and find life direction.  I cannot begin to understand what it must have been like for a generation of 18-year-olds to find themselves daily in circumstances where they could lose their life at any moment while having to take other people’s lives to survive.  Then after a short boat trip, they were sent home to live.  The trauma of war stayed with that generation throughout all the years I’ve known them as they struggled with alcohol, being abusive, or became so narrowly focused and goal driven that they risked all parts of their life to reach their aims.

 

The people of that generation have been called heroes, or, as Tom Brokaw termed them, “The Greatest Generation.”  Those are convenient tropes, but as literary devices often do, giving a simple label (especially to a generation of people) misses the complexity of what’s really happening.  Both my dad and father-in-law were deeply impacted from the war and they both had to grapple with the effects of the war throughout their lives.  For my dad, that meant working full time, and being vigorously political with his time after work and on weekends.  He spent little time not driving himself, and he died at 54 of a heart attack.  For my father-in-law, it meant having very few close friends and being obsessive about his religion – so much so that when he was older and had dementia, he would wander to the church a mile away in the middle of the night looking for a priest to hear his confession.  I knew of few people of that generation who escaped unscarred.  And many passed those scars along to their children through overindulgence, demands for high achievement, physical and emotional abuse, or obsessions with material gains – pursuit of unhealthy behaviors to fill the damages in their lives.  The “greatest generation” struggled to find itself.  Read Alan Ginsburg’s poem Howl and you’ll glimpse some of their struggle.  Although some of the adults from that era lived with healthy relationships and healthy, balanced lives, in my experience, the well-balanced in that generation weren’t normative. 

 

The happy days mythology didn’t fit their children’s lives either.  I can look to my own experience during the era as an example.  I’ve written about this, and I’ve spoken about it in presentations, but it seems worth repeating here:  I’m proud that I graduated in the lowest third of my high school class.  When I graduated, my high school posted the list of their graduates publicly; and they listed graduates in order of GPA.  I was in the lowest third of that list.  When I say this during a presentation, I assume that people are imagining that my current pride comes in my accomplishments since that time.  After all, I went to earn advanced degrees from institutions where there’s some selectivity.  However, that’s not why I’m proud of my lack of achievement in high school.  Lots of people earn lots of degrees, and I’m just lucky enough to be one of them.

 

During my presentations, I explain that fortune.  I also explain that my pride comes in appreciating who I was as an adolescent.  I was in an educational system and a community that undervalued me as a human and didn’t understand what I could contribute.  The entire system was rigged to favor only certain people.  I’d have had to change who I was to be able to have even the limited success that the system would allow me to have.  I’m proud that I saw that in my youth and opted out.  My experiences in that community and its education system eventually fueled my drive to participate in making education something different than what I’d experienced.  But at the time, my intuitive reaction was to produce the minimum so that I could get away from both the schools and that community as soon as I was old enough.  That intuitive reaction allowed me to preserve who I am.  To do anything else would’ve forced me to become something less than that.  It was later, as I became an educator, that I gained the tools to fight oppression effectively.  So I remain pretty proud of that kid who reacted healthily to oppression by refusing to participate.  In my “happy days,” that was the right choice.  That’s a choice that I see young people still making as schools and schooling still haven’t lived to their promise of educating all equitably. 

 

The happy days myth keeps some of us from seeing the struggles that were very real then and that keep some of us looking longingly backward instead of seeing the flaws and looking to solutions.  It’s what fuels fables that the U.S. was once “great,” and that we should strive to return to that greatness.  It’s what has some states and communities reaching backward to regain a past that didn’t exist for many people.  The “don’t say gay” rules in Florida and the “anti-woke” legislation that states are considering and passing errantly build from these myths.  The backlash that has produced these laws comes from a wholehearted belief in the happy days myth and that anyone who doesn’t believe the myth is anti-American or someone who hates the country and is attempting to distort the past.

 

Mythology is good when it teaches us lessons:  Icarus flying too close to the sun; Oedipus’ hubris; the dangers of Narcissus’ self-absorption; and so on.  But when we substitute mythology for history, we lose the opportunity to examine what’s happened and learn the past’s lessons.  If the purveyors of our popular television, movies, and novels want to use the familiarity of the past as an easy entry to storytelling, let’s appreciate that as storytelling, not as history.  Let’s not confuse what we see, hear, or read in those accounts as being an accurate representation of life to which we should aspire to return. 

How Not to Evaluate a Grant

Someone sends an e-mail message.  They received a grant that needs an evaluator.  They wrote an evaluation plan, and the plan requires an annual report.  They need someone to write the report.  Sometimes, they’ll call just as the funded project is underway; other times, they call when the report is due in a few months.  Sometimes, it’s a private, foundation grant; however, more often, it’s a federal grant.  Regardless of the source and the timing, they’re calling me far too late in the process.  I explain as professionally as I can that what they’re most often seeking is a compliance report rather than evaluation.  If they’re willing, I’ll help them do more than write a compliance report.  If they’re not, I wish them well. 

 

Any funded organization should show compliance to the funder’s requirements and progress in meeting the outcomes they established in their funding request.  However, the summative analysis within an annual report is a small part of what an evaluation could and should provide to any project.  Because I, and every other person who provides external evaluations, have these discussions often, I decided to write some recommendations for organizations that are writing funding requests so that they can understand what they miss by having a cursory, summary report of their project as their only attempt at evaluation. 

 

Recommendation 1:  Bring in an evaluator as you are designing your project – and it usually should not be the grant writer, especially if you’re using an external grant writer.  There’s an industry of grant writers who develop ancillary businesses by writing themselves into a grant as an external evaluator once the project is funded.  Typically, grant writers understand how to write a successful proposal.  That typically makes them qualified to write evaluations that ensure compliance to the outcomes written into the grant.  In contrast, an evaluator needs to be someone with a strong set of analytical tools, who can write objectives that are clear, yet provide for ongoing analyses of a project as it unfolds; who understands both qualitative and quantitative measures and when to apply them; who understands organizational development and systems; and who can recommend methods and processes that will assist the project to understand a project’s ongoing progress. 

 

An evaluator shouldn’t drive the aims of the grant, but that person should work alongside you to help you refine those aims to the betterment of your project.  That’s much more involved than writing a compliance report of simplistic objectives that you’ll meet each year or at the end of funding.  Grant writers usually don’t have the skills required to do all that.  If you find one who does have the skills of an evaluator, it might make sense to include that person as the external evaluator.  However, in my experience, folks who are busy writing grants sometimes find that they have to back out of the evaluation work as it competes with their more lucrative grant writing (that’s sometimes the reason that I get that e-mail request so late in the process).  

 

Recommendation 2:  As you’re writing your grant proposal, work with your evaluator to write outcomes and performance measures that will have meaning to you, not just to the funder.  Unlike compliance outcomes, the ones that a trained evaluator will help you generate will be more consequential for you as an organization.  Those will help you develop a plan that measures how and why the project is succeeding or not succeeding while it’s underway.  A skilled evaluator will help you design outcomes that are measurable, but, more importantly, outcomes that are useful to your organization as measures of progress – and measures of causes of that progress.  When done well, those measures will evaluate both the project and the organization in which the project exists.  Knowing that you met or didn’t meet a goal at the end of a funding year, or the end of the project, is not helpful if you don’t understand how or why that happened – or what those outcomes mean to you organizationally.  An evaluator will ask key questions that will help you to measure formatively so that you’re not waiting to the end to see what impacts your project is having.  That typically won’t happen if the evaluator isn’t helping to design the evaluation. 

 

Recommendation 3:  Make certain that your evaluation includes those formative analyses to determine what’s happening in the project as the project is underway.  The grants I’ve seen without this have outcomes that are simple numeric indicators that are easy to report.  To restate and emphasize this point, that happens because grant writers generally don’t know more about assessment and evaluation beyond identifying summative measures that will fulfill the funder’s needs.  But that misses a critical opportunity to learn and evolve from the grant.  More than one project I evaluated over the years began with a premise that a specific intervention was the solution that would help meet a challenge.  For these projects, as my team and I conducted the initial, probing analyses that an experienced evaluator will build into all projects, we sometimes discovered that the funded intervention is a small component of the possible solution.  With all of those projects, the organizations adapted their project to think more holistically and, as a result, had a more significant impact than the project originally intended.  That would not have happened if projects had not built sophisticated, formative analyses into their evaluation plans. 

 

What organizations often don’t consider when they’re writing a funding proposal is this opportunity to learn and to grow from the project.  Yes, of course, you want to change something about your work.  That’s what grants help you to do.  But you miss a critical opportunity to help your organization learn from the experience if you don’t build a formative learning model into your project.  All the organizations I work with don’t have the time or resources to do the kind of exploration that I’m suggesting in their normal operations.  Having an evaluator look deeply at your project can also be a way to leverage the work on the grant into your larger organizational needs.  The interviews, observations, surveys, analyses of documents, etc. that an evaluator will use to analyze your project formatively will give you a picture of how the project operates within your larger systems.  During one project that I was evaluating, my team’s analysis discovered that the organization’s IT structure and systems were hindering the implementation of the project.  We conducted a separate analysis of the IT department and how people perceived and interacted with it.  We were able to provide an additional report of our findings about the IT department, and that report had implications well beyond the project.  If we hadn’t done that work, the project might have looked elsewhere for the answers to questions about the project’s efficacy. 

 

Recommendation 4:  See an evaluation as an integral component of the grant’s work.  You’re seeking funding that will allow you to do work that’s beyond your organization’s base funding.  Take advantage of that and allow the evaluation to inform your organization’s work generally.  Use the evaluator’s expertise to help you operate.  In grant-funded projects that I evaluate, I typically will either design or implement measures that allow us to review documents, interview, survey, or observe activities to examine what is happening during the project.  That provides information about the project; however, it also provides a picture of the overall organization.  A grant-funded evaluator cannot help but to give that larger picture, if that work is seen as more than compliance checking.  If you’re an executive who has a grant-funded project and you’re not taking advantage of this important byproduct of every externally funded project, you’re shortchanging your organization.

 

Recommendation 5:  View the evaluator as a critical member of the project management.  All the above recommendations are of no use if the evaluator doesn’t participate in the design and implementation of the model.   In my consulting practice, I learned this the hard way and stopped serving as an external evaluator unless I am considered part of the project management team.  I don’t see my role as driving the direction of a project; however, as decisions are made by the executive team, I want to be there to offer advice on how to measure the impacts of decisions.  I also want to be there as program decisions are made so that I understand what it means for the work I need to provide the client.  At times, I’ve even provided support with strategic planning so that the organization could refine its intent and where the grant should fit that intent. 

 

Early in my consulting career, I would find myself working on an evaluation measure and in casual discussions with the project manager, the person would offer something like, “But we’re not doing that part of the project anymore.  We’ve decided to try something else.”  I understand that projects evolve over time.  They should.  By being part of the project management team, I can be aware of those changes as they happen so I can adjust my work to fit what’s happening.  That becomes especially critical when an annual report is due.  I can reference changed plans to explain the rationale for those changes if I have my notes from a meeting where the changes occurred.  That’s even more critical if those changes involve an activity that’s tied to a key outcome for the project.

 

Closing Thoughts:

 

In almost 30 years of evaluation work that’s looked at everything from small, private foundation grants to federally funded projects that involve multiple organizations and locations, I’ve learned that organizations that take advantage of the opportunities that evaluation offers are often organizations that grow and thrive.  Rather than chasing funding, they tend to look at grants and projects strategically to help them in their evolution.  What I’m advocating for, here, is that organizations be more like that in the ways in which they select and work with a critical role that their funding provides for them. 

 

Does it cost more to do this?  Yes and no.  In the short-term, yes, and in the long-term, no.  You’ll have to budget more for an evaluator in a grant proposal than you would pay for an annual compliance review.  However, the institutional support you’ll get for this far outweighs what you’d spend to hire an internal employee to provide the kind or institutional analyses that an evaluator offers.  Besides, in my recent experiences, private funders especially are now looking for more thoughtful analyses than compliance reports. 

 

There are resources that can help you find the kind of person I describe above.  The American Evaluation Association maintains a site where you can find members to interview about your needs:  https://my.eval.org/find-an-evaluator.  Like contracting for any work, you should interview a few people and get references to make a selection.  There are local affiliates of AEA that can be useful in finding people, too.  Check out:  https://www.eval.org/Community/Local-Affiliates.  As you’re interviewing, give them this essay and ask how they’d provide the services that I describe.  But, as noted above, you should be seeking an evaluator as you’re writing your proposal.  Do yourself a favor and don’t do that after you’ve written the proposal.  Once you see what a trained evaluator can do for you in designing and implementing a project, you’ll never do anything else.

 

I’ve waited to write this until I am no longer accepting clients so that no one accuses me of making this statement to advocate for a model that benefits me.  Throughout my academic career, I accepted evaluation work to keep current in the field and to have ways to engage my graduate students.  These days, I have other priorities.  For the past five years, I’ve only accepted a few client projects; and, at this stage, I’m not taking any more.  So please see this as coming from a colleague who also managed funding from granting agencies – in addition to having been an external evaluator.  Please see this as an opportunity to ask yourself questions about the next grant, the next funding source, or the next project where you’ll seek to better your organization.

 

I wish you all the best.