Observations of my walk in the park - Part 2

This is the second part of a two-part observation/reflection resulting from my walk the other day in a park near my house.  The first part was posted on Facebook (most who are reading this, I suspect, arrived here via the link in that post) and was about a super interesting podcast I listened to while I walked.  This second part is a little less light and a whole lot more concerning (at least to me).

 

The place I walk most often is informally referred to as HAC.  It’s in Hockessin, DE, just a couple of miles from our house.  HAC refers to the Hockessin Athletic Club, a private health club facility.  HAC’s facility is located in and is surrounded by Tweed Park, a public park in Hockessin.  The park has a series of walking trails the longest of which encircles HAC’s building.  It’s a pleasant place to walk.  I tend to call the entire property HAC even though the walking trails in the park have nothing to do with HAC and are open to the members of the public, like me.

 

It becomes very apparent in the summer that children’s summer camp programming occurs in the park.  I often see groups of children engaging with those who appear to be college-aged counselors in a variety of outdoor activities.  They were out doing activities in the park.  Fun, right?

 

A couple of times last week I saw them playing laser tag.  Everyone (college-aged counselors included) was wearing and using laser tag equipment – headband sensors connected to child-sized toy versions of semi-automatic weapons.  It appears to me that the large group has been divided into two teams.  I imagine the team with the last shooter “standing” is the winner.  The players could be seen running all over the park, hiding behind trees, finding their quarry, taking aim, and shooting.  Pretty harmless, right?  Sure, good clean fun.

 

Admittedly, when I was a kid, I played plenty of games like this, absent the fancy laser equipment of course.  No harm, no foul.  I’m a well-adjusted grown-up in spite of the sorts of games my friends and I played when we were that age.

 

But here’s the thing.  We now live in society that is very different than the one I lived in the late 60’s when I was the same age as the laser-tag playing kids.

 

I’ll provide some data in a moment, but first a pair of anecdotes to demonstrate the differences between 1963 and 2023 – these specific to the notion of school children doing drills in their schools to prepare for various potentially injurious realities of the day.

 

In 1963, I was in 1^st grade in Pennington, NJ.  We had the typical fire drills, probably each month.  But we also had air raid or civil defense drills – just one or two a year.  In those drills, we were taken to the lunchroom in the basement of the school (Pennington Primary School) where we were to crouch down under the tables for a brief period of time.  I didn’t necessarily understand the rationale at the time, and the drills ended just a year or so later, it seems, but it wasn’t long before I learned they were designed to prepare us for a nuclear attack. 

 

Was I frightened?  I don’t recall being afraid, but keep in mind, the rationale for these drills was not made entirely clear to the 1^st grade me nor to my 1^st grade friends – we tended to do what our teachers told us to do.  Even later, when I learned the real purpose, the whole thing seemed to be so abstract so as not to be worrisome.  I mean, it’s not like schools in the next town or across the country were being attacked with nuclear weapons and we needed to be ready for when those weapons found our school.  First-graders in other parts of the country were not dying from ICBM missiles and scaring the crap out of all the other 1^st graders. 

 

Fast forward a few years.

 

I was in a 2^nd grade classroom at a nearby elementary school 15-20 years ago when the school went into a lockdown drill.  The teacher and my student teacher shepherded the students into the narrow and barely lit cloak room between the main part of the classroom and the wall adjacent to the hallway.  We all hunched down in the shadows in a space designed for a group about half our size for the better part of 30 minutes while members of local law enforcement made their way around the outside of the building yelling, banging on windows, and trying to gain entry through the exterior doors in each classroom. 

 

It was as unnerving an experience as I’ve ever had in a school building, and I’ve been in hundreds of them over the years.  The 20 or so 2^nd graders were absolutely freaked out – some crying, some trembling, some asking their teacher if they would be okay.

 

I didn’t stay for the rest of the day because I had other student teachers to see, but as I left, I wondered how the rest of the day would go for these children.  Would their teachers find that these students were available for learning just like any other day?  Would they be able to just pick up where they left off before the drill?  Or would they need to spend time assuaging their students’ emotions based on the trauma caused by the drill?  If a district or building administrator happened to be in this room to witness what I saw, would they continue to support drills of this sort?  What do the data tell us about the effects of drills such as these?

 

The difference between 1963 and the present is that the reality providing the rationale for lockdown drills in present day is not abstract.  Schools today are being attacked by active shooters and children are dying.  This reality is one that 2^nd graders can grasp to the extent that it has the potential to cause fear and panic, and do real psychological damage.

 

Here are some data, some may be arguable, but most not so much:

 

First, death by firearms in the US is on the rise over the past few decades (source – CDC.  This chart and other interesting slices of CDC data are from USAFacts.org):

Second, there has been a steady increase in the number of mass shootings in our nation over the past few decades (source – The Violence Project).  So far this year, there have been 43 deaths from mass shootings in the US:

 

Third, there has been an increase in the number of school shootings since 1970 and an increase in the number of victims (source of these charts and more– CHDS School Shooting Safety Compendium):

 

Fourth, according to research from Everytown.org,

 

95% of American public schools drill students on lockdown procedures. Yet, there is almost no research affirming the value of these drills for preventing school shootings or protecting the school community when shootings do occur.

 

Fifth, the same paper examines the effects of active shooter drills and gun violence on the mental health of children:

 

•     Active shooter drills in schools are associated with increases in depression (39%), stress and anxiety (42%), and physiological health problems (23%) overall, including children from as young as five years old up to high schoolers, their parents, and teachers.
  

•     Concerns over death increased by 22 percent, with words like blood, pain, clinics, and pills becoming a consistent feature of social media posts in school communities in the 90 days after a school drill.

 

Finally, Surviving a school shooting: Impacts on the mental health, education, and earnings of American youth, a study from the Stanford University Institute for Economic Policy Research, had these key findings:

•     More than 100,000 American children attended a school at which a shooting took place in 2018 and 2019;
•     A higher rate of antidepressant use among those exposed to a school shooting in the years following the gun violence;
•     School shootings lead to drops in student enrollment and a decline in average test scores;
•     School shootings also lead to an increase in student absenteeism and the likelihood of needing to repeat a grade in the two following years; and 
•     Students exposed to shootings at their schools are less likely to graduate high school, go to college, and graduate college, and they are less likely to be employed and have lower earnings in their mid-20s.

 

Given the proliferation of guns in the US (I didn’t provide data on that fact, it seems to be commonly agreed to by those on both sides of the debate on guns in America – one side calls it a fetish and the other the only way to protect against tyrannical governments…); given the increase in gun deaths, mass shootings, school shootings, and school lockdown drills; and given what research tells us about the psychological effects of gun violence and lockdown drills on children; does it continue to make sense that the activity I saw in the park several days last week is still okay?  Is it a good look for whoever was running the camp program (not sure if it is a HAC program or county parks program)?

 

In my view, it’s unfortunate that an organized educational program in 2023, even if it’s in the form of a children’s summer day camp, would choose to include in their curricular planning an activity that mimics a violent reality in this country that results in so many deaths and so much heartache, and one or which these same children are undoubtedly subjected to drills designed to teach them how to react against in the tragic event of an actual school shooter in their schools.

I think we can do better than this.  Maybe we can begin to change the gun culture in our society by thinking more carefully about the activities in which we engage children in the name of summer camp fun, even if those activities were ones that were mostly harmless when my age peers and I were kids.

 

If you want to comment on this post, if you want to agree or respectfully disagree, I welcome the conversation.  But please do so here in the blog and not Facebook. I will likely remove reactions to this post that appear on Facebook.

 

Until next time…

 

 

 

Lynyrd Skynyrd - One More for the Road

I started college in the mid-70’s by packing a few t-shirts and my vinyl collection and heading off to West Virginia University in Morgantown, WV.  That was in the fall of 1975.  Even though it is farther north than (arguably) the southern ¼ of my home state of NJ, most consider it be a southern school (I’ll return to this point in a moment).  If I had the chance to do it all over, I wouldn’t change a thing – I had a great time in Morgantown and at WVU.  

 

 

For one, and from an academic perspective, I got a darn good preparation for classroom teaching in elementary education and special education, the latter being the one I acted upon during my career.  There were clinical aspects of my program’s curriculum in the 1970’s that were adopted by the Pennsylvania Department of Education in the late 2000’s and others that higher education colleagues at my last institution talked about adopting as innovative ideas in educator preparation in the late 2010’s…

Plus, I had a lot of laughs and a lot of great times.  I’ll leave it to you to imagine in what ways those “recreational” times unfolded…

 

But this post is about a specific genre of music from that era.  And now that I think about it, I suppose it doesn’t matter whether some thought of WVU as a southern school because back then Southern Rock was pretty ubiquitous, in the south and the north.  In the 70’s, groups like Allman Brothers, Outlaws, Molly Hatchet, Marshall Tucker Band, Poco, Pure Prairie League, and Charlie Daniels (among others) got a lot of airtime on the radio, as well as turntable time in my apartment and those of my friends.  To this day, when I hear songs from these bands, I am transported back in time to familiar locations and to comfortable and comforting memories.

 

Lynyrd Skynyrd was another band my friends and I listened to a lot.  Their 1977 album Street Survivors had only been out for three days when the band’s plane crashed in South Carolina killing several members of the band including the lead singer, Ronnie Van Zant.  That was in the fall of my Jr. year at WVU and I remember hearing the news of the crash while grabbing a bite to eat at the High Street Canteen.  That event cemented the band’s cult status in a most unfortunate way.  Today, when I am carried back by their music, the crash and what that meant to those of us who loved listening to that music invades those memories with a sense of sadness that is different from other moments of musical nostalgia.

 

 

So, although this is not a new release, this 2015 live recording from Lynyrd Skynyrd, One More for the Fans, has really hit the mark for me over the past few weeks.  It features a raft of guest artists covering the Lynyrd Skynyrd songbook.  It also features the current iteration of Lynyrd Skynyrd doing some of their biggest hits (like Free Bird).  Despite the fact that Free Bird is their magnum opus, the Lynyrd Skynyrd song I always liked best was That Smell.  On this release it is covered by Warren Haynes.  To near perfection.

 

Oh, and the most surprising thing?  Don’t Ask Me No Questions being covered by O.A.R. I doubt any of those lads were even alive on that fateful day in October 1977 and the O.A.R. songbook is hardly what one would call Southern Rock.  I guess they just know good music when they hear it.  Good on you, lads.

On Religious Sites in the Holy Land

Linda and I just returned home from nearly two weeks in Israel and Jordan.  We had originally booked Jordan with the kids back in April 2020, but the pandemic told us it didn’t want us to go back then.  So, just Linda and I went this time, we added Israel and didn’t take the kids (sorry kids…).

 

Both trips had been planned around seeing Petra, the Nabataean city the origins of which date back several millennia before the birth of Christ.  And seeing Petra did not disappoint – walking through the Siq and coming around that last bend to see the looming, majestic Treasury is breathtaking.  There is a lot to see and take in.  It added another UNESCO World Heritage site to our collection as well as another of the 7 Wonders of the World.

 

But want to know something?  Adding Israel really changed the nature of our trip.  We agreed that the original trip booked back in 2020 would have been quite different and perhaps not as engaging without Israel.

 

For example, an interesting place we visited was a former Israeli bunker on Har Benta just a few kilometers from the Syrian border.  (Everything to the left of the white road going toward the horizon in the second photo is Syria.)

 

 

There are many great places to visit and things to see in Israel.  What caught me off guard (given my lack of practical interest in Christianity as religion) was how much I enjoyed seeing the numerous sites of importance to Judaism and Christianity as more than just historical locations.  And most of these sites were in Israel.  My mother would have loved that we are able to see so many of these places.  And despite my agnostic tendencies, it would have given me pleasure to describe them to her.

 

Here are the religious sites we saw, in the chronological order of our trip: 

1.   Capernaum – this site on the northern shores of the Sea of Galilee is, according to tradition and archeological record, where St. Peter's house was located.  It is said that his house (located under a present day church - first photo) is where Christianity became more organized as a religion following the crucifixion of Christ.  It is also the site of many of the miracles performed by Jesus, some in the oldest of the two synagogues once located there (vestiges of which may be seen under the ruins of the 4^th century synagogue built on top of it - 2nd photo).

 

2.   Mount of Beatitudes – this site is not far from Capernaum and is, by tradition, the site of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.  Today, the site has a Catholic chapel built in the late 1930’s and is where a mass was celebrated by John Paul II in 2000.

 

 

3.   Safed – This city is one of Israel’s four Holy Cities.  It is located north of the Sea of Galilee and we visited it on the way up to the Golan Heights.  By tradition it became the center of Kabbalah (the traditional and most commonly used term for the esoteric teachings of Judaism and for Jewish mysticism) in the 16^th century. 

 

4.   Bethlehem – We traveled through a security checkpoint and into the West Bank to visit the town of Bethlehem and the Greek Orthodox Church of the Nativity.  Christian tradition tells us that Jesus was born in the grotto beneath the altar of the church (before the church was built, of course) and placed in a manger just a few feet away.  The grotto is connected by caves to the adjacent Roman Catholic Church of St. Catherine.

 

5.   Masada – an ancient fortification in the Judaean Desert and site of the Siege of Masada in 72-73 AD, admittedly not exactly a religious site nor event.  King Herod the Great (father of Herod Antipas who asked Jesus to perform a miracle before sending him to Pontius Pilate) built two palaces with fortifications on this mountain near the Dead Sea between 37 and 31 BC.  According to Jewish Roman historian Josephus, the months long siege resulted in the Romans breaching the walls only to find that its Jewish defenders had set all the buildings except the food storerooms ablaze and, so as not to be taken prisoner by the Romans, committed mass suicide or killed each other, 960 men, women, and children in total.  Only two women and five children were found alive.

 

6.   Church of the Holy Sepulchre – this church is in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.  Several locations within this church are Christian holy sites.  First, Calvary, the location of the crucifixion of Christ, a site that was a quarry at the time, is now encompassed within the church.  Second, the stone of anointing, where tradition tells us Jesus’ body was prepared for burial.  And last, the tomb of Jesus.  We were able to see the first two, but not the tomb as a mass was underway in the chapel in which it is located. The church also contains the sites of the final 4 or 5 Stations of the Cross.

 

 

 

 

7.   Via Dolorosa – the processional route through Jerusalem the cross-bearing Jesus took from the Antonia Fortress to Calvary along which the events of the Stations of the Cross took place.  We walked in reverse order from the Church of the Sepulchre to see 5 of the 14 stations.  The first two at which Jesus encounters and is convicted by Pontius Pilate are located within what is now a school and are largely inaccessible.  We walked past #7 – Jesus falls for the 2^nd time, #6 – Veronica wipes the face of Jesus, #5 – Simon of Cyrene is made to bear the cross, #4 – Jesus meets his mother, and #3 – Jesus falls for the first time.

 

 

 

 

 

8.   The Western Wall – Located at the base of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.  According to this site, the Western Wall is considered to be the holiest place and spiritual epicenter to the Jewish people (also where the Holy of Holies was located) given access restrictions to the Temple Mount.

 

9.   Mt. Zion – the location of the Cenacle, or Upper Rooms, site of the Last Supper with Jesus and his disciples.  Located below it is the supposed Tomb of King David (there is not consensus of this as fact). 

 

10. Bethany – After crossing the border into Jordan (which due to border tension took the better part of a day...), we visited Bethany.  Known as Al-Maghtas in Arabic, it is the site on the Jordan river where Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist. 

 

11.  Mount Nebo – this ridge in Northern Jordan is where tradition tells us Moses ascended and from where he saw the Land of Canaan (the promised land).  He later died there. A Christian church from the Byzantine era sites at the summit.   

 

Until next time..

 

 

 

 

A Tale of Two Music Teachers

Despite the title, this post is really about the importance of teachers being fully immersed in their craft – in the art and science of teaching – and remaining connected to their content.  In educator preparation, we talk about teachers’ need to become reflective life-long learners.  To me this has always meant, among other things, teachers reflecting constantly on their instructional efforts with students – how effective a particular lesson was, whether it connected with all students, what available assessment data tell them about next steps, etc.  But to a strong teacher, being a life-long learner also means maintaining a healthy curiosity about the world and the content they teach, and understanding that, for example, throughout a four-decade career, there will be advances in their field with which they will want to keep abreast.  When teachers have chosen to teach subject matters that are intrinsically interesting to them and/or that they are particularly good at, they will more naturally remain deeply immersed in those disciplines, even outside the classroom.  Especially outside the classroom. 

 

I’ll attempt to punctuate this point by telling the stories of two elementary music educators. One was a band instructor in the elementary school I attended as a child. The other taught violin in the elementary school my children attended. I have first-hand knowledge of the approaches each took as they strived to teach music to the children in their care.  Those approaches were very different and only one should be emulated.  You'll know which is which.

 

Ms. Saxophone (not her real name)

 

First up is the story of the band instructor in my school. I won't use her real name because this isn’t a very flattering story.  (The truth is I don't remember her name anyway.  If you are reading this, went to the same elementary school I did, and remember her name, please keep it to yourself.  I doubt she’s still alive, but her family members likely are.)  I’ll call her Ms. Saxophone.  😏

 

Ms. Saxophone’s story begins when I was in 3rd grade, the earliest opportunity I had to take up an instrument. I wanted to learn the saxophone. When I told my parents this, they agreed, and they rented a saxophone for me to use, at probably no small expense. I dutifully took the saxophone to school on days I was scheduled for lessons, but as I recall, throughout the fall of my 3rd grade year, the lessons were few and far between. In mid-November or so, Ms. Saxophone began to prepare us for the Christmas concert. She did this by assigning us to seats in the band. She looked at me, pointed to a chair, and told me that's where I would sit for the concert. At this point in my saxophone career, I could barely play scales much less make my way through whatever songs were on the program for the show. I remember telling her as much. She looked at me and said something to the effect, “don't worry, just pretend to play and no one will know the difference.”

 

If you know me at all, you know how musical I am, and you can therefore imagine how this broke my heart. I told my parents I would never take the saxophone back to school, and it was a long time before I even approached another musical instrument. In fact, it wasn't until college when I had to learn enough piano and recorder to pass a performance test on each for my elementary education degree.

 

Mr. Beech

 

Fast forward several decades to the story of the other music educator, one I'm happy to name. His name is Martin Beech and he taught strings at New Garden Elementary School in the Kennett Consolidated School District, the school my children attended. None of my kids chose to become violin players, so they didn't have Mr. Beech in this context, but they did take up instruments and so my family attended all the concerts. My vivid recollection of Mr. Beech, at the first concert we attended, was of him bringing the string ensemble onto the stage. The ensemble was comprised of perhaps a dozen elementary students each with a violin that was, ostensibly, in tune. Of course, they weren't in tune, not really. And so, I and the rest of the audience listened as Mr. Beech helped each and every student tune their instruments. This took four to five minutes as the audience waited. Then Mr. Beech conducted the young ensemble as they squeaked their way through 45 seconds of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. 

 

Every year, at every concert, it was always the same.  Mr. Beech would take whatever time prior to his ensemble’s performance was needed to ensure that every instrument was in tune.  I was always struck by the patience and perseverance he demonstrated in this regard.  Sure, his students improved during the elementary school portion of their violin careers with (likely) smaller and smaller subsets going on to play in middle school, high school, and perhaps beyond.  I suspect Mr. Beech took much satisfaction from this demonstration of progress; of germination and growth of the seed he had planted, even if only one or two continued to play after high school.  But each year, a new cohort of novice violin players took the stage with him and each year he went through the same patience exercise with these newbies.

 

Fast forward another decade or so.  My wife and I had become Delaware Symphony subscribers.  She could not attend one of the performances, so I took one of my boys.  I told Dylan to look carefully at the various members of the orchestra as they took their positions, particularly near the front of the violin section (because I knew who he would see).  Dylan realized he was looking at Mr. Beech take his position just a chair or two away from the DSO concertmaster.  Dylan was floored.  I suggested that this was another part of Mr. Beech’s reward for standing on the New Garden Elementary stage year in and year out and tuning violins for a period of time that was often 2-3 times longer than the actual performance itself. 

 

Mr. Beech is a magnificent example of an educator who remains immersed in his content area, his area of expertise.  Sure, his work with the DSO was his reward for his patient work with 9-year-old violin players at New Garden but imagine how much better was the pedagogical attention his students received from him because the art and science of his superb teaching was informed by his role as a member of a professional orchestra and his life-long immersion in the performing arts.  Music was not just his day job, at least not as I saw it, it was clearly the fiber of his being.  It still is, I suspect, although he has retired as a public-school teacher.

 

I don’t know anything about Ms. Saxophone’s life outside of school or the nature of her passion for music, so I can’t really hold her up as an example of the antithesis of Mr. Beech and his work as an elementary school music teacher.  Maybe she also played professionally, I just don't know.  I do know she had a horrible effect on me though, that I can tell you.  One that, again, if you know me you know I have been most fortunate to overcome.

 

Until next time…