BLITHE SPIRIT 5/1/96: Murals at the pueblo . . . A poem about poems . . . Telling it to the Journal . . . Mrs. V. and her two-cents worth . . . She's entitled . . .

Like this sheet, two cents and worth it.

(Posted 5/1/1996): Friend Chuck returned from New Mexico with this to say:

We got back to find a holy (?) trinity of Blithe Spirits waiting. Too much food for thought for one sitting, but I soldiered on. It brought me back to Oak Park if not down to earth. Preferring (for the moment) felines to ruminants, I go back to March 27 and Lionel Tiger but only because we encountered tribalism of a more benign sort among the pueblos. Live and let live. Novel notion!

We were at an Elderhostel, so got past doors we would not have [got past] as mere tourists. At Zuni Pueblo we heard a talk from an artist who is painting murals in the old church there. A newer church serves on Sundays, this being reserved for special use. Above the Stations of the Cross (drab old lithographs of the kind that used to appear in poorer parishes), he is painting life-size kachinas and other traditional Zuni ceremonial and dance figures in brilliant colors. The parish priest encouraged it, even sprang for the paint. Talk about bending the rules! Il Papa would not approve, but then, as in so many things, he wasn't asked.

Maybe ecumenism (ecumenicity? whatever!) lies less in resolving differences than in ignoring them. At Zuni, it would seem, nobody bothers their head over theological inconsistencies. Way to go! A visit to the 1,000-year-old ruins at Chaco Canyon hinted at where that gets you anyway.

And so we return to a world where it is thought if we're not at each others' throats we're somehow indifferent to the problem. If so, then vive l'indifference!

Some poetry besides . . .

Chuck sent along several stanzas from “Hibernaculum,” by A.R. Ammons, of which here a snippet:

why does he write poems: it's the only way he can mean

what he says: you mean, say what he means: yes.

but it's harder for him to mean something than say

something: his sayings are facile, light-headed, and

discontinuous: he keeps saying in order to hope he will

say something he means: poems help him mean what he says.

. . . .

What I told Wednesday Journal. . .

Interrogated (in gracious manner) by our local paper the other day, I said some interesting things. Interesting to me at least; you may find them boring as sin.

Discussing ability grouping in Oak Park elementary schools and at Oak Park & River Forest High School, I said that's probably the most obvious difference: OPRF has it, OP elementary schools don't.

Thereby hangs the tale of resentment by our local lip-servers of the black (aka African American) cause: they hate that "sorting" of students at the HS into honors and other programs. It's un-American in their view, largely because relatively few black kids are "sorted" into honors courses.

What I told WJ was that there ought to be both kinds of courses, as there are at the HS and were in OP schools when they had ability-grouping (achievement-grouping) in the '80s. You can do that: your "core" courses -- the three R's, for want of a better term -- can be ability-grouped, other courses not.

The grouping can be under regular review, by the way, lest a kid get stuck where he can't compete or is not challenged. That happens now too: kids get out of HS honors courses if they find it too hard. They get into them too, if they want to push themselves harder.

Either way, once the three R's -- the do-or-die skill-providers that mean the difference between college acceptance or rejection, employment or unemployment, etc. -- are delivered, there's room for mixing kids up in optional or satellite courses, for want of a better term.

For instance, English is a clear-cut candidate for grouping, but not chorus or gym. Or philosophy -- a mind-bender but optional at the high school level -- can be for kids from all levels, and has been at the H.S.

I speak of do-or-die courses. Reading and writing and figuring with numbers are not optional skills. If we want our black and white offspring to rub shoulders with each other but not at the expense of efficient delivery of those skills, then we should find other ways for them to rub shoulders with each other.

It comes down to how important we think those skills are. Are the schools as serious about them as about, say, multicultural education? Then give them equal priority, which still won't be enough, but will be a start.

Picky, picky . . .

Some people are never satisfied. Take Mrs. V., who has given the high school board of education a fridge-doorfull list of things to do before, during, and after it spends a projected $250,000 on an "enhanced academic support system," which most people take to be a tutorial program for underachievers.

Speaking more like a consultant than a concerned parent (she may be both), as reported in the 5/1 Wednesday Journal, she said the board ought to (a) define academic support, (b) decide who's to be supported, (c) analyze the problem using hard data, (d) devise a component program that tries to fix bad attitudes and habits, (e) decide where this system fits into whatever else is going on at the school, (f) make sure the school's new computers are part of it all, and (h) decide how you will know when you have succeeded.

Picky, picky, as I said. She means this program is not to proceed as the high school's new-this-year "Four for 100" program for freshmen, which explicitly delayed Mrs. V's (h) and otherwise got no such attention (indeed, naught but praise) from her or anyone else? Or as Oak Park elementary schools' multifarious initiatives over the years which have produced no accounting whereby the masses can decide if they are working or not?

Mrs. V. is on to something. If she can only Pile it Higher and Deeper (dig the initials) or at least spread it around a little more, we will all be the better for it.

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As the famous Porky Pig would say, th-th-that’s all, folks. For now.