Boring old college lecturer responds to "The Chair"

Watched the last episode of "The Chair" this week. I laughed, I cried. Various faculty and administrators and students pissed me off.  All in all, a good investment of six Netflix hours. 

I have never served time on a college faculty and I've been an adjunct at community colleges. I was an undergrad English major at one community college and a land-grant university in the Palm Tree South and a grad student at a land-grant university in the Rocky Mountain West. I never got within spitting distance of a small liberal arts college such as Pembroke. 

But Pembroke's people seemed familiar. As a grad student T.A., I experienced some of the same frustrations of Pembroke faculty, those f*cking f*cks referenced in The Chair's (F*cker In Charge) desk sign. Some faculty members were old and stuck in their ways. The Literature, Composition and ESL faculty didn't like creative writing faculty and vice versa. The administration was always targeting the English Department for cuts due to the fact that we all speak English so why in the f*cking f*ck do we need an English Department? Shouldn't it be the  'Merican Department since we all speak 'Merican here? 

All an MFA grad student could do was teach our two sections of comp, keep our heads down and write a lot. We had regular classes to attend on top of writing workshops. And, in my case and some others, I had a family to support. 

One of my favorite aspects of "The Chair" are insights into faculty's families. Dr. Ji-Joon Kim has a daughter who is as argumentative as faculty ("You're not my real mom"). Dobson's wife died and his only daughter went off to college. No matter he gets stoned before and after class, and sometimes doesn't show up at all. Dr. Joan Hambling gave up her personal life and career advancement to prop of the fragile egos of male colleagues. She is working on a relationship with a college IT guy who is as much as a wise-ass as she is. Dr. Rentz (Bob Balaban) chats with his wife before a college event and we find out that she gave up her academic career to raise three kids. "Someone had to cook dinner," she says as she urges her aging husband to wear his Depends.

My daughter, an English major, is watching "The Chair" but I don't think she's finished. After a couple episodes she was angry at the students, which I thought was interesting since she is a student and a Millennial. I was angry at the students too but possibly for a different reason. They didn't want to learn Chaucer and Melville? I fondly recall my red-haired prof at UF who taught us Chaucer in Middle English. She spoke it like a native and there were times I imagined her as The Wyf of Bathe. 

The Pembroke students just didn't want to learn it the old-fashioned boring Boomer lecture way. They liked the way Moby Dick was taught by Dr. Yaz, a Millennial who approached it in a new way. By the end of the final episode, I was depressed about the state of academia. No surprise -- I was a boring old lecturer and probably still am. Back in my day, etc., etc., and so on. 

Life on campus, 1969 to the present

When I left the dog-eat-dog arena of corporate America in 1988 for the ivy-covered halls of academe, I imagined a long life of teaching and writing and pondering. Plenty of pondering. Never mind that my corporate pals sent me off with a cake and a real bullwhip as a farewell gift. "You’ll need the whip for the little darlings you’re going to teach," they joked. I could have said LOL but it was 1988 and that expression had yet to be invented. I just laughed and replied: “At least I won’t have to deal with you SOBs anymore,” using an expression that was sort-of acceptable in the guy-oriented workplace of the late-20^th century.

I learned several lessons during three years in grad school at CSU in FoCo, CO. If I landed a job as an academic, I would get paid peanuts for teaching five sections of freshman composition at a community college in East Jesus, Nowhere. I interviewed for jobs at universities, but my impending MFA didn’t stack up against all the young PhDs running loose all over the place. So I switched gears and got into the lucrative field of arts administration, a career I will be retiring from in 2016.

I have taught on a part-time basis over the last couple decades. Composition, yes, but also creative writing, business writing, memoir writing and so on. I’ve taught in classrooms and online, for community colleges and universities. My students have ranged in age from 18 to 85. I’ve enjoyed most of those experiences.

But deep inside of me resides a dapper gentleman who wears a tan blazer with patches on the elbows. He walks campus like Mr. Chips, saying good morning and hale well met to all the students who greet him as he passes. These young people are all above average and bound for careers where they will praise the lessons they learned under the tutelage of Mr. Chips, I mean, Mr. Shay. Maybe that’s why I can’t resist a walk around any campus I happen across. I wax nostalgic on campus, which is odd because I never really experienced an idyllic campus life. I’ve blogged about some of my college experiences and will blog more about them later. Let’s just say I seem to learn everything the hard way. Add to that the fact that neither of my children have let me live through their idyllic campus experiences because, well, they haven’t had those either. Still, my nostalgia remains about college life.

Here we are in the 20-teens. Life on campus seems more complicated than ever. And strange. I only know what I read in the papers and online and see on the TV news. Students, apparently, want campus to be a “safe place.” Free from racism and violence and sexism and all kinds of –isms. Damn. Campus is where learned about all of those because I ran headlong into them. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? The college experience is supposed to be about experimentation and freedom of expression and encounters with new and possibly dangerous ideas. You try on new ideas and experiences like a new outfit, and you can shed it willy-nilly and go on to the next thing. If you are too afraid of giving offense, you will probably be less willing to give it the old college try.

As a liberal, I gleefully criticize those on the right. They often bring up political correctness. In their eyes, political correctness prohibits their freedom of expression. They no longer can use the N-word in public or discriminate against LGBTQ people or call immigrants wetbacks or worse. I am politically correct by writing the previous sentence. Problem is, I am 64 years old and grew up in an era where we casually used all of those terms and practiced casual (and formal) racism. I’ve been in a steep learning curve ever since. The Civil Rights struggle caused thinking people to reassess their priorities and behaviors. The battle over the Vietnam War caused us to reassess the blind obedience to country we learned in the church and in Boy Scouts and ROTC. The women’s movement forced us men to look differently at relationships with the other 50 percent of the human race. In the West, we had Latino/a Power and the American Indian Movement. The sixties and seventies were hard on us white males, even those of us who weren’t Ivy League or Wall Street privileged. You could attempt to get out of changing by pleading that your forebears were poor white trash from Ireland and that your great-granddaddy didn’t own any slaves or kill any Indians. That never got me very far. White privilege is a real thing, like it or not.

I was impressed by the recent stand taken by the Mizzou football team. Nothing will cause white folks to stand up and take notice than threatening tailgate Saturdays at the old alma mater. Think about it. When I entered the University of South Carolina in 1969, the Gamecocks had not one black football player. Their first black athlete was future NBA star Alex English, the poetry-writing power forward from Columbia. He joined the basketball team in 1970. B-ball and football squads in the South are now comprised mainly of black athletes. Think of how much power they possess to determine the course of their universities. Is it PC when they flex that power? Isn’t power-flexing more of a conservative value? More reminiscent of corporate takeovers and police actions in third world countries than progressive politics? You’d think that The Donald and Bill O’Reilly would be singing the praises of the Mizzou football team. Flex those collegiate muscles, you middle linebacker! What better prepares you for a corporate job once those knees give out?

My collegiate dreams faded over time. A good thing too. I’m not sure how welcomed I would be if my Baby Boomer patriarchal self showed up in class smoking a pipe, wearing a corduroy blazer, carrying a bullwhip and barking out orders to my young charges. Not PC, Mr. Chips. Not PC at all. 

Aaron Abeyta will be keynoter at 2015 Wyoming Writers conference

Aaron Abeyta

This news comes from Wyoming Writers, Inc., WYO's statewide writing org:

The Board of Wyoming Writers is excited to have the poet, Aaron Abeyta, from Adams State University in Alamosa, Colorado, as our presenter in poetry workshops, and as our keynote speaker. When the word got out that Aaron was coming, we got messages from people praising the choice. Poets, writers, and teachers who have had the privilege of working with Aaron in a variety of workshop and classroom settings were enthusiastic about both his writing and his thoughtful approach to teaching and motivating poetry from the roots up.

Aaron says: “The poet must be both ‘piper’ and ‘bard,’ tender and turbulent, dangerous and comforting; the poet must be able to understand, as Czeslaw Milosz put it: ‘In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: a thing brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us, so we blink our eyes….’ ( Ars Poetica)” In our correspondence he excerpted another poet from workshop material, the American, Mary Oliver: “‘…just/ pay attention, then patch/ a few words together and don’t try/ to make them elaborate, this isn’t/ a contest but the doorway…’ (from Praying). In short, we must be observant and ‘prayerful’ in our watchfulness of the world around us.”

Aaron has a B. A. in English, and an M. F. A. in Poetry from Colorado State University. His most recent collection: Letters from the Headwaters (Western Press Books) in out this year. An earlier collection, Colcha won the American Book Award for Poetry, and the Colorado Book Award. His list of publications and appearances is lengthy.

Aaron will be at the WWInc. conference June 5-7, 2015, in Cheyenne, just a short six months from now. Get more info here. 

Aaron is a fellow grad of the excellent CSU creative writing program. One of his mentors was poet Bill Tremblay, who also mentored me although I am not a poet. A slew of CSU writers have visited Wyoming during the 23 years I've been in the state. Both Bill and Aaron taught at the Words Worth Writing Symposium for high school students, a very fine workshop spearheaded by poet Diane Panozzo when she taught at Cheyenne East High School. 

See you in June.

New generation of book censors play the same old tune

Fiction must be very dangerous.

Why else would parents and school officials be trying to censor Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet Letter, and A Farewell to Arms?

Parents of students at Highland Park High School in Texas must sign permission slips for their little darlings to read the above classics. I read all of them in Catholic school. Nobody ever asked my parents if it was OK to read such horrible stuff. Nuns and priests assigned them so they must have been just fine, right?

I could see Sister Miriam Catherine laughing with glee if my mother would have said, “Huckleberry Finn is a dangerous book.” And the good sister didn’t laugh easily. My mother would never had said that. She was too busy raising a passel of kids and working as a nurse. My father? When I was in the fourth grade, he invited me to read any book in his expansive library, courtesy of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Keep in mind that he was a conservative Catholic parent, an accountant by trade who read voraciously. Not read Huckleberry Finn? Don’t be absurd. He would have never said “don’t be absurd.” It’s something a character in a novel might say, an English classic such as “Wuthering Heights” (read it in grade school) or maybe one of the fake royalty riding the raft down the Mississippi with Huck Finn and Jim.

My parents and my four grandparents all were readers. Until my father went to college on the G.I. Bill, none had advanced farther than high school. They all would have considered it strange and un-American to tell us what not to read.

Soon at Highland Park, more books will be added to the list:

They are The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Dracula by Bram Stoker, The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, and The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler.

I regret that I have only read two of the books on this list. Now I have added them to my reading list.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, rapidly trying to outpace Texas on the batshit-crazy list, teacher Dave Peterson is under fire for teaching “pornographic” literature to their children. The pornography includes classics, such as “Hills like White Elephants” by Hemingway and “Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor, as well as gems of contemporary fiction by Junot Diaz, Amy Hempel, Tobias Wolff, Ron Carlson and Alice Walker. I’ve read the entire reading list which has been thoughtfully posted on Facebook. It tickles me that Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” is on the list, a tale about political correctness gone bonkers (did any of the critics actually read these pieces?). It’s a fine reading list, one that I printed out for my own edification. Peterson also included an introduction to his list which serves as both encouragement and a warning. This is obviously a responsible mentor to our children, which is more than I can say about his right-wing critics.

There is a petition on Facebook supporting Peterson. Go sign it, read his list and then go out and read all of the selections. My fellow fiction writers are counting on you.

Remember what Kurt Vonnegut wrote in a letter to the chairman of the Drake (N.C.) school board who had burned some of the author's books:

“If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in any favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible that they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hard-working men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. If was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.” 

Who's your favorite music teacher?

My two children had excellent music teachers in the Cheyenne schools. My daughter Annie was so smitten with music that she's now a vocal music major at Laramie County Community College. Justin Timberlake joined Grammy Foundation member Ryan Seacrest and of President/CEO Neil Portnow in announcing a new award for music teachers sponsored by the foundation. Earlier in the night. Here's the info:

GRAMMY Music Educator Award: In recognition of the significant role of teachers in shaping their students' musical experiences, the GRAMMY Foundation and The Recording Academy are partnering to present the first Music Educator Award. Open to current U.S. music teachers in grade kindergarten through college, the Music Educator Award will be given out during GRAMMY Week 2014. The nomination process opened Feb. 10 at www.grammymusicteacher.com. The deadline for submissions is April 15. See the awards announcement from last night's Grammies at http://www.grammy.com/news/neil-portnows-55th-grammy-awards-telecast-remarks. 

Teachers are the real job creators

Democrats will have no problem with this one...

Vote for these good people for the LCSD No. 1 Board of Trustees

The Wyoming Public Employees Association (WPEA), the union that represents Wyoming's public servants, has endorsed a slate of candidates in Laramie County. In my previous post, I forgot the mention the endorsements for the Laramie County School District No. 1 Board of Trustees. They are:

Nate Breen
Mark Klaasen
Tim Lockwood

There is another great candidate in the running. That is Lynn A. Storey-Huylar. Not sure why she didn't get the endorsement. It's possible she didn't come into the WPEA for an interview. Anyway, all of these people are worthy of the post. They decide school district policy and make sure that we have the best teachers and administrators. They believe in public education. Pick the best three.

There are a few knuckle-draggers among the other candidates. Avoid them.

Let us now praise famous songs, and those creative types who begat them

Chris and I attended the "American Tapestry" concert this afternoon at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Cheyenne. Our daughter was singing, as she's in the Laramie County Community College Collegiate and Cantorei choirs. She does both well. You're probably not surprised to hear a proud father say that.

Several of the selections were taken from the page -- poetry, to be specific. First came three selections from A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad. My accountant father gave me a copy of that book when I was still in high school. He thought it might be an encouragement to my budding poetic soul. It wasn't (I was more attuned to Jim Morrison back then), but it was still a nice gesture. Housman is still not my favorite, but his verse sounds great when set to music and sung by collegiate voices.

Robert Burns made an appearance as the Men's Ensemble sang "My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose." The men, all dressed in black suits, held a rose as they gathered around the piano and intoned Burns. Very nice.

The recessional song was "The Promise of the Living" from the opera The Tender Land. Music was composed by Aaron Copland with libretto by Horace Everett, a pseudonym for dancer and choreographer Erik Johns. Copland was inspired to write the opera after viewing the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with text by James Agee and photos by Walker Evans. The book arose from a 1936 magazine assignment Agee and Evans accepted in 1936. The goal was to document the lives of white sharecroppers in the South. The magazine article didn't pan out, but the book did, and is now one of those volumes studied for its trail-blazing blend of straight reportage, creative nonfiction, poetry and photos.  Another one of those interesting works of art to emerge from the Great Depression.

Fine concert today, and I'm looking forward to the next one. Thanks to talented  singers, and the wonderful teachers who trained them.

Tired of Republican attacks on teachers?

Please join us for a Democratic Party education candidate house party for Misty Heil (LCCC Board), Nate Breen (LCSD#1) and Gary Datus (HD-42).  

Brand House 

629 Oakhurst Drive, Cheyenne.

Sunday, October 14, 3-6 pm. 

Come meet the candidates!  Supporters can learn how they can help these great campaigns.  Education at all levels is a priority for Laramie County and attacks on teachers, other educators/faculty and academic freedom are rampant. Our candidates value good  teachers and strong policies to support them and their students. 

For more information, contact Lori Brand at 307-634-6977.

Pat Conroy's response to the "censors, book-banners and teacher-haters" of Charleston, W.V.

Author Pat Conroy has witnessed his books being challenged and banned 

all over the country. Read a letter he wrote to the editor of the 

Charleston Gazette in response to one such incident in 2007, shared in

honor of Banned Books Week (from the Open Road Media blog):

October 24, 2007
 
I received an urgent e-mail from a high school student named Makenzie
Hatfield of Charleston, West Virginia. She informed me of a group of
parents who were attempting to suppress the teaching of two of my
novels, The Prince of Tides and Beach Music. I heard rumors of this
controversy as I was completing my latest filthy, vomit-inducing work.
These controversies are so commonplace in my life that I no longer get
involved. But my knowledge of mountain lore is strong enough to know
the dangers of refusing to help a Hatfield of West Virginia. I also do
not mess with McCoys.
 
I've enjoyed a lifetime love affair with English teachers, just like
the ones who are being abused in Charleston, West Virginia, today. My
English teachers pushed me to be smart and inquisitive, and they
taught me the great books of the world with passion and cunning and
love. Like your English teachers, they didn't have any money either,
but they lived in the bright fires of their imaginations, and they
taught because they were born to teach the prettiest language in the
world. I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to
damage a kid. They take an unutterable joy in opening up the known
world to their students, but they are dishonored and unpraised because
of the scandalous paychecks they receive. In my travels around this
country, I have discovered that America hates its teachers, and I
could not tell you why. Charleston, West Virginia, is showing clear
signs of really hurting theirs, and I would be cautious about the word
getting out.
 
In 1961, I entered the classroom of the great Eugene Norris, who set
about in a thousand ways to change my life. It was the year I read The
This letter first appeared on the Open Road Media blog during Banned
Books Week 2011.Catcher in the Rye, under Gene's careful tutelage, and

I adore that book to this very day. Later, a parent complained to the

school board, and Gene Norris was called before the board to defend his

teaching of this book. He asked me to write an essay describing the book's
galvanic effect on me, which I did. But Gene's defense of The Catcher
in the Rye was so brilliant and convincing in its sheer power that it
carried the day. I stayed close to Gene Norris till the day he died. I
delivered a eulogy at his memorial service and was one of the
executors of his will. Few in the world have ever loved English
teachers as I have, and I loathe it when they are bullied by
know-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.
 
About the novels your county just censored: The Prince of Tides and
Beach Music are two of my darlings which I would place before the
altar of God and say, "Lord, this is how I found the world you made."
They contain scenes of violence, but I was the son of a Marine Corps
fighter pilot who killed hundreds of men in Korea, beat my mother and
his seven kids whenever he felt like it, and fought in three wars. My
youngest brother, Tom, committed suicide by jumping off a
fourteen-story building; my French teacher ended her life with a
pistol; my aunt was brutally raped in Atlanta; eight of my classmates
at The Citadel were killed in Vietnam; and my best friend was killed
in a car wreck in Mississippi last summer. Violence has always been a
part of my world. I write about it in my books and make no apology to
anyone. In Beach Music, I wrote about the Holocaust and lack the
literary powers to make that historical event anything other than
grotesque. People cuss in my books.
 
People cuss in my real life. I cuss, especially at Citadel basketball
games. I'm perfectly sure that Steve Shamblin and other teachers
prepared their students well for any encounters with violence or
profanity in my books just as Gene Norris prepared me for the profane
language in The Catcher in the Rye forty-eight years ago.
 
The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave
anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the
genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty ofprogre
language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna
Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome
Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the
streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The
Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for
Owen Meany. I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced
myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career,
all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up
every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I
cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy
and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.
 
The school board of Charleston, West Virginia, has sullied that gift
and shamed themselves and their community. You've now entered the
ranks of censors, book-banners, and teacher-haters, and the word will
spread. Good teachers will avoid you as though you had cholera. But
here is my favorite thing: Because you banned my books, every kid in
that county will read them, every single one of them. Because
bookbanners are invariably idiots, they don't know how the world
works— but writers and English teachers do.
 
I salute the English teachers of Charleston, West Virginia, and send
my affection to their students. West Virginians, you've just done what
history warned you against—you've riled a Hatfield.
 
Sincerely,
 
Pat Conroy
 
This letter first appeared on the Open Road Media blog during Banned
Books Week 2011.

DNC delegates will hear social justice speech from Sister Simone Campbell on Sept. 5

The Democratic Party has the wisdom to realize that activist nuns have a lot to teach its convention delegates. This news comes from NETWORK, a national Catholic social justice lobby.

NETWORK is pleased to confirm that Sister Simone Campbell has accepted an invitation to speak at the Democratic National Convention on the evening of Wednesday, September 5. This will provide an important opportunity to talk about what she has learned after decades of work for social and economic justice.

We also regret that no similar invitation was extended by the Republican National Convention and that, despite our efforts, NETWORK was unable to find a venue there for sharing information about economic justice rooted in Catholic Social Teaching. Sister Campbell would have been delighted to speak at the convention.

We are pleased that Cardinal Dolan will be present at both the Republican and Democratic conventions.

Note: In addition to her speech, Sister Simone Campbell (and NETWORK staff) will be facilitating two social justice workshops during the Democratic convention: “Mind the Gap” on Wednesday, Sept. 5 from 10 AM to noon (http://charlottein2012.com/events/mind_the_gap_) and “Nuns on the Bus” on Thursday, Sept. 6 from 10 AM to noon (http://charlottein2012.com/events/nuns_on_the_bus). She will also provide the keynote address at the Faith Caucus meeting of the College Democrats of America annual convention prior to the Democratic National Convention.

Civility & poetry & Wyoming

Civility Matters!

So does poetry.

Naomi Shihab Nye is "surprised by how kind people are when reciting and listening to poetry." She specifically is referring to secondary students, such as the ones she taught today at Casper's Star Lane Academy. "During nearly 40 years of working with kids, sometimes in very rough situations, I've never seen kids bully each other over their words."

Naomi Nye was in Casper Thursday night during the last stop on her "Civility Matters: Potlucks and Poetry" tour sponsored by the Wyoming Humanities Council. "Civility Matters" is a program funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Its goal is to "creatively engages the public in considering the meaning of civility, both in the context of our national democratic commitment to freedom of expression and in the context of an increasingly global world."


The award-winning Palestinian-American poet started her tour in Jackson and then moved on to Riverton for a potluck at the Native American Center at CWC. At each stop, people are invited to bring picnic dinners and enjoy an evening with Nye, who describes herself as a "wandering poet." Nye, the daughter of a Palestinian father and American mother, has appeared on NPR's A Prairie Home Companion and several times with Bill Moyers on his PBS poetry specials. 

Writing of all types is just one of the creative disciplines used to nurture public dialogue. "Writing is a grass-roots effort -- it belongs to everyone," Nye said.

Throw some food into the mix -- that adds to the community atmosphere.

Nye liked how her Wyoming hosts made her feel so much at home by putting food and poetry together. That's what you'd see in the Middle East," she said. Inhibitions are eased and pretty soon people are talking to each other.

"Civility is a matter of interest in another person and another person's perspective," she said.

Thursday night's event with Nye marked the beginning of the Casper College Literary Conference, which continues through Saturday. FMI: http://www.caspercollege.edu/events/lit

Wyoming Advisory Panel for Students with Disabilities plans "public meeting by phone" Friday

My two children were both served by Individualized Education Plans (I.E.P.) during their time in Laramie County School System No. 1. My son was diagnosed with ADHD when he was 5 and my daughter struggled with mental health issues and learning disabilities.

I bring this up because the Wyoming Advisory Panel for Students with Disabilities, the group that advises the Wyoming Department of Education on services for youth with disabilities, is conducting a "public meeting by phone" Friday. One of the hard lessons learned by parents of special needs' students is that eternal vigilance is the price of a public school education. There are a whole set of federal regulations that assist students with disabilities. School administrators aren't always up to date on those rules and regs. Sometimes they know the rules but choose to ignore them. This would be a great time to point out that there are superb administrators and counselors in our school system -- I'm looking at you, Cheyenne Central High School. But many of our schools can do better.

My kids have left the K-12 system and are on their own (and doing very well, thank you). If you have a child whose needs are not getting met, get on the phone Friday and see what's happening:

The Wyoming Advisory Panel for Students with Disabilities will hold a public meeting by phone Friday to discuss proposed rules for student seclusion and restraint, among other issues.

The panel, which advises the Wyoming Department of Education about ways to promote services for children and youth with disabilities, will also talk about an upcoming federal report that examines the unmet needs of such students, said Barb Yates, the panel's administrative assistant.

As required under a new state law, the panel is asking for public comment on proposed rules for when and how students can be secluded or restrained while in school.

Yates said the panel may decide to offer its recommendations on the policy as well.

The meeting will be held from 8 a.m. until noon at the Wyoming Advisory Panel for Students with Disabilities' Riverton office. Members of the public may offer their opinions to the panel from 11:30 a.m. until noon by calling 877-278-8686; the passcode is 095102.

Read more: http://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/article_f12ec331-1f66-5eea-9777-9b3df0c04996.html#ixzz1XvjqWUg7

The Progressive: ALEC, Republicans Beat Up On Kids in Special Ed

To see what's coming Wyoming's way in the form of ALEC-sponsored "education" bills, read this story in The Progressive: ALEC, Republicans Beat Up On Kids in Special Ed

Wyoming Republican legislators will be traveling to the ALEC wingnut conference in August to get their marching orders for the next session. Beating up on special ed kids will be in the mix.

I am the father of two children who benefited from the very comprehensive special education programs offered in public schools in Colorado, Maryland and Wyoming. While not all teachers and administrators were easy to work with, they all had to comply with federal regulations as spelled out in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and other legislation.

It's a different story in private schools. Those schools do not have to comply with IDEA. And some of those schools according to The Progressive, are fly-by-night academies who prey on parents desperate for solutions to their children with learning disabilities and/or behavior problems.

Happy birthday to a writing mentor

Happy birthday to Harry Crews. He was one of my writing mentors during my time in Hogtown. He helped me look at fiction in new ways, and introduced me to many of the Southern writers I had overlooked in my youth (or those that the nuns in high school overlooked for me). Harry said that he learned to write by copying those stories and novel passages that he especially liked. Not sure how many of those he did. I tried it and it helped me get to the bottom of phraseology and rhythms. Also a great way to grok a story's dialogue. He wrote, as he tells it, a "roomful of stories," but most weren't published at the time. He did publish a slew of books.

Harry's novels (Feast of Snakes, Car, Karate is a Thing of the Spirit) explore the wild side of life in the South. He also wrote fine pieces for big mags such as Playboy and Esquire. His Esquire column, Grits, was a must-read for me every month. He wrote about encountering some rough customers while hiking the Appalachian Trail, a part of the trail that passes through the place where they hanged the circus elephant. I guess you can "see the elephant" down South, too. His most chilling piece (for Playboy, if I remember correctly) was "The Button-Down Terror of David Duke." It was a chilling piece because KKK Grand Wizard David Duke had learned what his forebears had not, that late-20th-century marketing required a smile, a suit and speaking in complete sentences. The message was the same but the messenger had grown slicker and more menacing.

Crews could talk to people like Duke because he grew up in southern Georgia swamp country. He knew these people. They were family. He imagined people like them and put them in his books. They were sometimes large and startling figures. No surprise that Harry has this quote from another Georgia native on his web site:

"When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures." — Flannery O'Connor, "The Fiction Writer & His Country" 

Happy birthday, Harry. Thanks for everything.

Hanging out in Cheyenne with the Wyoming Poetry Out Loud crowd

Marking the wrap-up of Wyoming Poetry Out Loud outside The Albany Tuesday. Pictured are (left to right) L.A. musician Peter Lewis, one of the founding members of Moby Grape; Mike Shay, no credentials to speak of; Detroit poet and musician M.L. Liebler, editor of new anthology "Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams;" Linda Coatney, poet and WAC coordinator or Poetry Ouit Loud; and daughter Annie Shay, poet and musician. Lunch was fab. So was POL.

Photos from Wyoming rally supporting Wisconsin public workers

Trio of WI supporters at WY State Capitol

At the WY State Capitol with 100 of my closest friends

On Wisconsin!

Democratic Rep. Ken Esquibel of Cheyenne

Visiting WI Dems tell about experiences at Madison protests

From WI People's House to WY People's House

Great photo of gathering of workers in the Wisconsin People's House. Wyoming workers will be outside the Wyoming People's House today showing solidarity with their WI colleagues. Rally is 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. See you there.

Teachers, get out your yardsticks to see if classroom flags measure up

Culled from this week's legislative report from the Wyoming Democrats:

Patriotism in the classroom (HB 204):  Rep. Gerald Gay (R-Casper) introduced legislation that would require all classrooms to have a standard sized American flag and that at the first period of each day students must recite the Pledge of Allegiance.  It also requires school boards to "ensure that no other flag or banner containing a political message or connotation is displayed higher" than the flag and that they have a policy for students who do not wish to recite the pledge.  The proposal passed the House on Monday and the Senate Minerals Committee on Friday on a vote of 4-1.  It now goes to the full Senate.

Wyoming teachers survived a legislative assault on their status as tenured educators. However, they now will have to carry a yardstick at all times, not to whack student knuckles (I went to Catholic school) but to ensure the proper size of the U.S. flag in their classrooms. No more of those disruptive "My American flag is bigger than yours" battles among teachers. When asked by their parents if their school room has a standard-sized American flag made in China, students can now answer loudly and proudly "yes!" or add emphasis with the German "yavohl!"

What are the consequences should a first-grader refuse to recite the pledge to the standard-size U.S. flag? That's when teachers will be allowed to use their yardsticks in a punitive manner. The details have yet to be worked out, but I'm sure Rep. Gay is working this weekend on the guidelines.

See how simple legislation can be? 

Wyoming's UPLIFT displays the better side of human nature

It was a week marked by savagery and bravery.

A disturbed young man shoots 18 people in front of a Tucson grocery store. Six of them die, the rest wounded, one -- Rep. Giffords -- critically.

Amidst the slaughter, people rushed to save the wounded and subdue the attacker. You're heard the stories, if not from Cable news than from Pres. Obama's eloquent speech at Wednesday's memorial.

What causes some people to run away from chaos and others to run toward it? I've been asking myself that question all week. Daniel Hernandez ran toward the gunfire and tended to his boss's wounds. He didn't leave her side until the ambulance got her to the hospital. When he spoke Wednesday, we saw a self-confident and self-effacing 20-year-old college student. He's devoted himself to a life of public service. We saw that commitment to both the "public" and "service" parts of the equation this week.

When challenged, we will sacrifice our own lives to help our fellow humans. This is the good side of our nature, the empathetic and charitable side. Researchers announced recently that there is a part of us -- the "altruism gene" -- that promotes charitable instincts. We also know that there are parts of us that respond to the venal and violent.

In the end, which wins out? Physiology is only part of it. Family upbringing makes a difference, as do other role models. Intelligence and education do to too, although we know that many sins have been committed by "the best and brightest." Religion can play a part. Again, many slaughters have been committed by the righteous.

I was thinking of this yesterday during the quarterly board meeting of UPLIFT in Cheyenne. We are a volunteer board of 14 members. We just welcomed a new one, LaWahna Stickney, from Thayne. We now are a truly statewide board, with members from Cheyenne, Laramie, Casper and Thayne. Most of us became involved in children's mental health and behavioral issues because our own children were struggling. Teachers complained that our kids were unruly and defiant. Other parents complained when our children got aggressive on the playground. We were at wit's end at home because we could not understand why our little darlings were such monsters. Weren't we kind and generous and educated human beings?

We were stymied when we attempted to find help in the community. We were either told outright -- or it was implied -- that we were bad parents with bad kids. We knew that wasn't true. By the time our son, Kevin, was five, we'd seen practically every specialist along Colorado's Front Range. We finally found a psychiatrist in Fort Collins, Dr. James Kagan, who diagnosed Kevin with ADHD and helped put us on the right road. That involved medication in the form of Ritalin. Therapy, too. But we still had this weird sense that we were all alone in this, that it was our struggle to bear and understand.

Finding UPLIFT when we moved to Cheyenne gave us some handy tools, especially when it came to dealing with schools. We also found similar struggles among its staff and board. We discovered helpful ways to deal with schools. It was cathartic to share our stories and hear those of others.

Here's UPLIFT's mission statement:

Encouraging success and stability for children and youth with or at risk of emotional, behavioral, learning, developmental, or physical disorders at home, school, and in the community.

UPLIFT just marked its 20th anniversary of service to Wyoming. At yesterday's board meeting, we heard details of our recent financial setbacks. UPLIFT is an organization that gets 97 percent of its funding from governmental (mostly federal) sources. Sometimes you get turned down for grants, and sometimes funding streams dry up. Strings are attached to most government funding. So, while your organization has a significant budget, you may not have enough money to pay for the basics, such as salaries, electricity and a office space. It's a truism in the world of non-profits -- keeping the lights on is the biggest challenge.

UPLIFT had to cut the administration budget. That includes salaries and benefits, including health insurance. Two employees left because that health insurance was crucial to them -- many employees have kids with special needs. One employee moved out of state. The ones that remained not only stayed and worked with their clients around this very rural state, but they even stopped claiming travel reimbursements. Some employees even made cash contributions. That's something, isn't it? Salaries and benefits get cut, yet you still find the means to put some cash in the kitty.

They know that this is a short-term problem. They also know that the cuts bring pain to their boss, Peggy Nikkel. They are certain of the good work they do and don't want it to stop or interrupted. Most of their time is spent working with families. They accompany parents to school meetings, helping them make sense of the requirements with the Americans with Disabilities Act and Individualized Education Programs. At these meetings, the principal and school psychologist and half the teachers are arrayed against you. We have had several of UPLIFT's family support specialists (Judy Bredthauer, for one) at these meetings and it made a huge difference. They are cool and calm and knowledgeable. They can get tough when presented with intransigence. But the main thing is that schools now know that UPLIFT can be trusted. Oftentimes, they welcome the participation of UPLIFT staffers.

As I've recounted often on these pages, Wyoming is a huge, rural state with many challenges when it comes to children's mental health.

UPLIFT, an affiliate of the Federation of Families for Children's Mental Health, fills a huge gap. Its staffers don't provide clinical services, but they are the great connectors between families and those services. They can translate government regulations. For cash-strapped families, they find funding. They make sense of the great big world of mental health.

They are on a mission. Maybe, as were the Blues Brothers, they are on a mission from God. Whatever their motivations, they come from the better side of human nature.

By the way, if you want to stimulate your own better natures, you can donate to UPLIFT by going here.

Looking for help, call toll free 888-875-4383.