Riemblog

On a recent business trip to our nation’s capital by way of Los Angeles International Airport, a few things got me thinking.

First, no one seems to know what a line is. I say this because getting in line in order to get your tickets, in order to check your bags, in order to get to your gate, in order to get to your plane…getting into each and all of these lines is nearly impossible because no one knows what a line is. And at LAX where the line is, or where it goes. This leads to chaos. As I was taught in first grade, “If you don’t see the back of the head of the person in front of you, you are not in line.” Why can one of the great airports in the world not manage to clearly delineate where lines begin, which way they wend, and where they end? It is bad enough being crammed into narrow tubes like molecules of crushed humanity, but must getting onto the planes be such a gruesome ordeal?

Second, I don’t think the screening process is serious. We all have our anecdotal evidence for this. And don’t get me wrong, I am not a whiner. I understand the need for vigilance. I am for it, but I do not think the process as it stands enhances vigilance. Item 1: As I madly dashed away from the x-ray area, laptop flapping, sandals ready to slap on, hoping not to be nabbed for “additional screening,” I caught a glimpse of someone’s grandma being additionally screened. You know the picture, a frail, elderly woman with her hands over her head, legs spread, a wand being put where it doesn’t need to be. Bad enough. Then I saw it, a teenage boy like the ones I teach, posing with his three foot long skateboard leaning on his hip. He may well have been grandma’s grandson. And I flashed back to a kid with blood gushing from the gash in his skull in the hallway at school, having been bashed with a skateboard wielded as a weapon. You can kill someone with a skateboard. Easily. But here’s this kid, ready to get on a flight with his board, and apparently no one has thought twice about it. But no nail file. And poor grandma. Again, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against skateboarders. Anyone who wants to spend more time practicing falling off something that is moving fast and landing on concrete than they spend reading or thinking is just fine by me. Okey dokey. And terrorist skateboarders are a stretch. But how serious is the TSA and the government about security and passenger safety, really?

Item #2: While eating my hideous fish and chips at the Samuel Adams location at Reagan International, past the screening, able to stroll freely onto my plane it occurs to me that people are ordering and being served beer. Nothing strange there, it is Sam Adams’. But the beer is in bottles. Glass bottles. Now I am not paranoid. And I am not a terrorist, but I don’t trust the Sam Adams beer guy to keep track of the beer bottles. And it is very easy to go into a restroom and bust off a bottle-neck and voila, cutting weapon.Stick in carry-on. Carry on. They don’t even serve beer in bottles at baseball games. With good reason. You can hurt people with them. I know this sounds a little odd, but so is limiting the amount of hand lotion or baby food we can take on a plane. If we’re going to be thorough, let’s be thorough. Or admit it’s a show.

On a different, lighter note, I was reading grants for the department of education in Washington, D.C., and I teach in the Los Angeles Unified School District, so I am awash in acronyms and I have grown to hate them. In reading the grants, it seemed that every applicant felt that they needed to create an acronym for their project. Oddly enough, though, this was not among the criteria for funding. But you would think it was. I cannot reveal the actual grant applicants’ acronyms–believe me, you don’t want to know them, but here are two examples of bad acronymism from my district: SDAIE and LEARN. SDAIE violates one of the criteria for a proper acronym: the initials, when put together, should form a pronouceable verbal entity. But SDAIE has been going strong since I started teaching twenty years ago. SDAIE is pronounced su-die. It stands for (I know you’re dying to know) Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English. SDAIE must die. LEARN stands for Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Reform Now. I know, it skips essential initials. But it’s cute. And that’s why I hate it. Burn LEARN. Join me in my movement to get rid of acronyms. Ban Acronyms Now! BAN. Oh, no.

By David W. Riemer

“The generation gap.” The phrase still resonates in my generation with a soundtrack provided by the Who (an old rock band): “…t-t-t-talkin’ about my generation…”; “won’t get fooled again!” Along with Roger Daltrey’s wailing vocals and Pete Townshend’s power chord bravado, I hear the echoes of other ghosts: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty!” “Fight the power!” “**** the man!” Just a few problems, though. The Who, whose landmark album, “Who’s Next”, featured cover art of the band zipping up their tight jeans after having apparently relieved themselves on some concrete bunker/monolith in the midst of a barren wasteland (Take that, monolith!), those rebels the Who, as I was saying, now supply the theme music to the CSI suite of crime investigation shows. That’s showing the man. Thirty, forty years ago, these guys were feared by my elders as cultural barbarians, Dionysian dysfunctionals, threats to the established order. Now they serve as an opening act for Led Zeppelin’s (another old rock band) ode to the Cadillac, “Black Dog”—a rowdy, rockin’, guitar-riff-on-testosterone-masquerading-as-a-song now dedicated to selling cars in an ad campaign presumably targeted at people over thirty. Sic transit gloria.

What do these musings have to do with anything? Well, at a high school they have a lot to do with the whole institution. This is a place that forcibly brings the generations together into a close and potentially meaningful relationship. And with a little understanding on both sides, the dynamics of the generation gap can help us understand each other a little better and help deepen us in the business of this place: learning. (This piece originally appeared in La Yuca, the student newspaper of Verdugo Hills High School, where I teach.)

I never thought when I was in high school (you really should see my high school yearbook photos) that I would end up being the guy (grouchy old man) who locked the gates on young people trying to get into a school after a bell had rung. Man, what a sell-out to my radical, hippie, commie-loving roots. But through a meandering path of decisions and circumstances, that’s what I do most days at 8:00 a.m., or thenabouts. I’m not grouchy, of course, not that old, either, but I do lock the gates on latecomers. And I do think that those who are late, and especially those who are habitually and chronically late, have some important lessons to learn. In first grade, you learned how to tell time; by tenth grade, you should know what time means. As a teenager, I also thought all this was stupid. There is the essence of the generation gap: both sides of the divide stand firmly on their respective ground, convinced that they are right. And both sides generally fail utterly in recognizing the standoff in all of its manifestations. But there is case after case of this issue in any given school day.

It occurs to me that the oldsters will always think the youngsters look silly—or wrong. Their hair, or lack of it; their clothes, or lack of them; their decorations—tattoos, piercings. The hair thing is pretty much over—heck, I even cut mine recently—and there are plenty of slick, razored scalps shining on both sides of the generational chasm. Clothes have probably always been a divisive issue. I know some of my generation’s (and my own) fashion choices were, er, questionable, shall we say? I remember cultivating a rotation of variously faded 501’s, looking for just the right wear patterns, washing them excessively. Coupled with the de riguer white cotton tee shirt, topped by the unbuttoned Pendleton, my friends and I must have looked like a band of potential recruits for a street-based crime organization (gang). All we had to do was button that top button and exchange the Levi’s for some Dickies. But we knew where our waistlines were, and our choices in underwear style and provider were not a matter of public record. As to decorations, those belonged on cakes, not your arms and legs. Earrings went in your ears (one if you were a male)—not your nose or belly button, much less anywhere near your organs of procreation. Art was done on canvas, not human skin. Tattoos were the province of drunken sailors and convicts. So maybe we have come a long way. Then again, maybe we made a wrong turn. A sensitive person can understand both possibilities.

Let’s not even talk about music. That’s a subject for another post.

Which brings me to the larger point. Teachers hate to admit it, but we are the conservators of culture. Many if not most teachers have a liberal tilt, but we work in an institution that has as its underlying purpose the, dare I say it, PRESERVATION OF CIVILIZATION. Yes, friends, in many ways we are like those Irish monks in the monastery, feverishly scribing away, trying to preserve the past in the midst of a barbarian storm swirling around outside our locked gates. We tried unlocking those gates when I was in high school and the jury is still out on the open-campus, all-the-world’s-a-school experiment I was part of. I mean somebody’s got to read the books and someone has got to get the young people to sit still long enough to do that. And that somebody is us. So I will continue to lock the gates and to recite Blake’s lyrics to teenagers: “Tyger, tyger, burning bright…” And in the background I know the soundtrack well by now (cue up Who’s Next): “Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss…Won’t get fooled again!” Must be time for CSI.

By David W. Riemer

Last year—or was it the year before?—I opined in these very pages (vented is more like it) on the downside of cell phones. I still loathe them. But it has occurred to me that cell phones, for all of their faults and obnoxiousness, are merely one component in a technological plague of biblical proportions. Who needs locusts when you have BlackBerries (used to be food), PDA’s, iPods, MP3 players, TiVo, web-access on those pernicious cell phones (not to mention video on cell phones, iPods, etc.), satellite dish TV, HDTV, satellite radio, you-name-it tech gizmos? As the coordinator of the school’s Multimedia Communications Magnet, this may sound heretical, but I think we are drowning in a sea of irrelevant, unconnected, mostly trivial information, and drowning is not a good thing. (This piece originally ran in La Yuca, the student newspaper at Verdugo Hills High School, where I teach.)

Instant information is not necessarily a good thing. All of these devices extend the reach and speed of information. But there is such a thing as too much information, and there exists a fundamental and crucial need to be able to distinguish good information from bad information or disinformation. And being able to get information quickly is not as important as getting information correctly. The dangers of instantaneous information are well-illustrated in the case of the recent West Virginia coal mine disaster, where a misunderstood radio communication was quickly spread by cell phone, raising the hopes of family and friends that the miners had been found alive. As we now know, those calls were based on incorrect information and the hopes raised were cruelly dashed by the truth, which took time and careful inquiry to establish.

Also, these devices are classic swords of Damocles: they cut two ways. On one hand, they connect people to information and other people. On the other hand, they isolate individuals from those around them and intrude on common courtesy and consideration for others, coarsening our already crass social mores. Curmudgeon that I am, I believe the negatives far outweigh the positives in this case. The iPod is the perfect example of the isolating quality of technology. Having taught high school for 18 years, I am painfully aware of the fact that many teenagers are isolated and alienated. (And I am sympathetic. Heck, seeing all these people walking around having a party in their own head, listening to gosh-knows-what on their iPods makes me feel isolated and alienated.) But do we really need an entertainment device that cuts the user off from any meaningful interaction with the rest of the world?

In this technological brave new world, our sense of public and private are consistently being undermined and denied. People privatize what used to be a public experience, listening to music, and in the process they completely isolate themselves from others. Similarly, the cell phone—sorry, I can’t help myself—makes public a previously private activity. Remember phone booths, those quaint devices that kept your private drivel neatly separated from my sensitive sensibilities? If you don’t remember phone booths…oh, forget it. This fogey gives up.

And honestly, when people tell me, “TiVo has changed my life!” or just as bad, “I couldn’t live without TiVo!” I worry. Not for them. They are lost causes. Oh, no, my scope is grander than that. I worry for society itself. Which is to say I worry for myself, because I have to live with these nuts. Really, television is not important enough for me to have to be able to watch everything I possibly could watch at my convenience. In fact, I believe that every television program I miss is a good thing. No doubt I was doing something more important and useful.

Do you know the origins of the word, “saboteur”? A saboteur is one who engages in sabotage, the intentional destruction of property—most typically machinery. The word comes from the wooden shoes worn by Dutch peasants—“sabots.” The act of sabotage was coined when the Dutch peasants destroyed mill machinery by throwing their wooden shoes into the gears, stopping the machinery. Have you heard of the Luddites? Here is a description of their origins and practices from Wikipedia. I know, I know. An online encyclopedia? You’ve given up, Riemer! But I know the information to be correct from my considerable, book-based research, and I believe in citing sources:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (For more about the Luddites, click on this link): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddites

Thomas Pynchon’s excellent 1984 musings: “Is It OK to be a Luddite?”
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html