by nflanagan

The Twelve Best Books I Read in 2023

Last week, Emma Sarappo, in The Atlantic, cautioned against setting reading goals for 2024:
Quantifying my reading, whether by titles finished, pages read, or another metric, doesn’t capture the quality of my attention to each book. In 2024, that’s what I’m most concerned with, and logging, rating, and sharing on the social web might pull my focus away from the moment and back to my phone. 

Well. La-di-dah.

I’d be hard-pressed to describe the quality of my attention to the 112 (Oops! Quantifying!) books I read in 2023. I logged them all, wrote a paragraph or a sentence about each and rated them, one to five stars.  Is that enough quality attention?

I log the books I read mostly so that I don’t accidentally bring home previously read books with interchangeable names—thrillers and series, especially—and so I can remember the best stuff. Barack Obama names his favorite books, each year. Why shouldn’t I?

In my top dozen this year, five non-fiction and seven fiction titles.

I liked two of the non-fiction titles so much that I wrote separate blogs (click on book titles) outlining their excellence:

The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (Tim Alberta)

The Teachers: A Year inside America’s Most Vulnerable Profession (Alexandra Robbins)

The other three:
Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America (Dahlia Lithwick). This book was a gift from a man who plays in my local flute ensemble, a retired lawyer who bought me a copy as a gift. The book is a fascinating review of amazing women who took the law into their own hands, often facing subtle and not-so-subtle discrimination. What makes the book outstanding, however, is Dahlia Lithwick’s semi-snarky, to-the-point prose.

The 1619 Project (Nikole Hannah-Jones) Actually, the NY Times Magazine collection of essays and commentary that frame the eventual book give the reader the rich essence of the multi-author big book. It took me a month to get through the whole volume, reading a chapter or two at a time. But the book deserves such contemplation. History is complicated, and always debatable, but what happened to Hannah-Jones after publishing the book is reprehensible.

Gender Queer: A Memoir (Maia Kobabe)I decided to read it because it was the book most often on lists of books—so MANY lists!—targeted for banning in schools and public libraries in 2023. What surprised me was how gentle, even tender, the book was, how sweet the drawings. Yeah—there is one drawing of sexual contact (which occurs between two consenting grad students) but my overwhelming impression was how incredibly helpful such a book, which reflects kindness and caring in interpersonal relationships, might be to a confused teenager. Also: props to this Massachusetts teacher.

Seven Fictional titles:

Tom Lake (Ann Patchett) Best book I read this year. I have recommended it to many friends, and lots of them have had lukewarm reactions, but the novel hit my sweet spot. Not only is it set, mostly, in the Grand Traverse region of Michigan, where I live, much of the action takes place during the pandemic. Nobody writes with the humor and humanity Ann Patchett infuses into her novels. I loved this book.

All the Sinners Bleed (S.A. Cosby) I’m with Barack Obama on this one. It’s a great read, as a crime thriller, but the uneasy racism and ‘Merica values that infuse the writing make it special.

The River We Remember (William Kent Krueger) I’m a fan of Krueger’s Cork O’Connor series, but I especially love his standalones, beginning with Ordinary Grace. “River” traces a crime through the eyes of a law enforcement officer still suffering from what we’d now call PTSD, after World War II, and the elderly female lawyer who helps him prosecute the guilty. Krueger is a master at creating memorable, complex characters and turning ordinary stories into reflections on human nature.

My best friend gave me a copy of The World Played Chess (Robert Dugoni), a beautifully layered book that looks at the long-term damage done to men who served in the Vietnam war. The novel’s structure, following a narrator from his teenage years, when comments on the war were vastly different from the way we perceive the conflict now is beautifully structured. This was the first Dugoni novel I’d read, and it sent me off to read more of his work.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow ,and Tomorrow (Gabrielle Zevin) I am totally not the audience for this book about the development of video games. I’ve written a lot about how I think technology is oversold. I have zero interest in the gaming culture. But I loved it. I can’t really say why.

The Displacements (Bruce Holsinger) I read Holsinger’s The Gifted School and liked it, but this novel is the ultimate dystopian fiction around a Category Six hurricane hitting Florida’s wealthiest coastal residents. Utterly believable, occasionally funny and scary as hell, the book somehow ends up being heart-warming.

Small Mercies (Dennis Lehane) Lehane, whose work is always good and always dark, says this may be his last novel. If so, it’s a barn-burner, centered around tough-broad Mary Pat Fennessey, and set in 1974, during the Boston school busing protests. Lehane spares nobody in this book—the dialogue is brutally authentic, and it’s hard to find a character to root for, at first. In the end, the book will break your heart.

by nflanagan

Where Were You in the Blizzard of ’78?

From The Gander Newsroom: The story of the Great Blizzard begins in late January 1978, during a winter that had already been fiercely frigid. The closing days of January saw snow falling in the Great Lakes Region on Tuesday, Jan. 24. Just as soon as that snow system was wrapping up Tuesday evening, the National Weather Service issued a Special Weather Statement: “Another Winter Storm Threatens Lower Michigan.”

As the Detroit Free Press reports, what would turn out to become the massive winter storm the Great Lakes Region would see in the coming days resulted from two different weather fronts in the US: single-digit temperatures coming from the north and moisture climbing from the south.

On Thursday morning of Jan. 26, the NWS’ Ann Arbor office issued the following special weather statement: “A Great Storm is Upon Michigan.” As the heavy snow fell, strong winds created whiteout conditions across the state. Michigan became paralyzed as air and land travel came to a standstill.
NWS Ann Arbor Meteorologist in Charge C.R. Snider wrote the following in a summary of the event:

“The most extensive and very nearly the most severe blizzard in Michigan history raged throughout Thursday January 26, 1978 and into part of Friday January 27.

About 20 people died as a direct or indirect result of the storm, most due to heart attacks or traffic accidents. At least one person died of exposure in a stranded automobile. Many were hospitalized for exposure, mostly from homes that lost power and heat. About 100,000 cars were abandoned on Michigan highways, most of them in the southeast part of the state.”

Over the course of the storm, snowfalls across the state included 30 inches in Muskegon, 19.3 in Lansing, and 19.2 in Holland.

I was a young teacher, living in Ann Arbor, in January of 1978. The weather had been crummy all week, making my 30-mile commute to work (in a lightweight Toyota Corolla) dicey. On Wednesday afternoon, I white-knuckled my little car to my boyfriend’s farmhouse–a guy named Flanagan– on the north side of Ann Arbor, sliding into a snowbank in his driveway and killing the engine. The weather was bad and supposed to get worse. And boy, did it.

It was the only time in my life where I was truly snowbound, unable to get out or go anywhere, and unclear about when the dirt road might be plowed or whether my car would start again. On TV, it was The Blizzard of 78, all the time, with terrible pictures of wrecks on the freeway and stories of people freezing in their homes.

I remember it, however, as a gloriously fun, responsibility-free five or six days. We never lost power, so we were warm enough and safe and able to talk to people on the phone and pull random stuff out of cupboards and the freezer to eat. We watched movies on TV and listened to lots of great music and shlumped around wrapped in quilts and two pairs of socks. At night, however, as the winds howled around the old drafty house, it was possible to imagine living on the prairie a century ago, wondering if daybreak would bring an end to the storm. Or our lives.

It’s stormy here tonight, events cancelled, social media full of “grow up people, this is Michigan” scolding and warnings about charging your devices and keeping a flashlight handy. We’re going to get a foot of snow or more, all told. I have a sturdier house, a better car (with better tires), more food and the miracle of technology, should things go south.

Still– I’m nostalgic for those two in the farmhouse, under that quilt.

by nflanagan

Star Tech: The Next Generation of Record-Keeping

In her last year of a degree program in Justice Studies, my daughter took a course called “Surveillance in Society.” The readings and discussion were around intrusions into personal privacy and data made possible by technology. Dear Daughter and I had many amusing conversations about some of her assignments—“Are Bar Codes the Mark of the Beast? Discuss.”—which struck me as paranoid in the extreme. Her professor was obsessed with our imminent loss of civil liberty, always urging his undergrads to be suspicious of anyone asking for personal information, and, presumably, scanning the sky for black helicopters.

However—I have been thinking a lot about the use of technology to gather data and “streamline” normal school processes, like testing, attendance and grading, to present an image of a “21st century school.”  Here is a simple story about data collection and our belief that All Technology is Good.

In 1998, my district opened a new middle school, full of state-of-the-art technological systems. We were the envy of the other buildings, with fully networked software to handle all our data needs. We got some training and the big pitch—our new procedures would save time, paper and man-hours, give us more accurate data, impress parents with e-communications, yada yada,

Under Old Attendance procedures, every teacher took attendance once, at the same time every morning, recorded it in their grade/attendance book, and sent a student to the office, with an attendance form, printed on scrap paper from recycle bins. Secretaries recorded these on a master list, and handled absence data for students who came/left during the day. Teachers got a copy of the master list, to help confirm absences when students needed to make up work.

Under New, Improved Attendance procedures, every teacher had a computer, with separate attendance book and gradebook functions. Teachers were now required to take attendance every hour and enter absences and tardies on the computer within a five-minute window. We were not allowed to keep the attendance program open on our computer desktops (because our gradebooks, protected by the same password, might be accessed by devious students)—so we had to log in every hour.

Because this was 1998, the server’s horsepower was severely strained by 40 teachers logging in simultaneously, and it would take 30-60 seconds for the program to load. Teachers who forgot to take attendance within 5 minutes would be called by the office (where a secretary now sat, monitoring the data coming in every hour), disrupting teachers’ lessons. If someone had a missing assignment, you had to toggle between attendance and grade programs to discover whether the child had actually been absent.

A process that had taken two minutes of teacher-time daily suddenly began to take two minutes every hour. Best-case scenario, teachers would lose ten extra minutes of instructional time each day: 50 minutes/week, four class periods per month, 36 class periods per school year, or six full days of instructional time. Taking attendance.

Lest you think I’m being overdramatic (or are dying to tell me that faster computing and better software have eliminated problems and made attendance-taking an absolute joy)—I tell this story not to whine about record-keeping, but to question our automatic goal of “efficiency” and the uses and purposes of all K-12 tech-enhanced data collection.

The state requires daily absent/present data, and that to ferret out kids who aren’t actually attending school but were counted for funding purposes. A student who went AWOL would not necessarily be picked up any quicker under the new system, and most of our mid-day leavers were signed out to go to the orthodontist with their mom, anyway.

The new system made data-entry mistakes six times more likely and kept a secretary busy checking on students who were marked present one hour, but absent the other five due to teacher error. I had great sympathy for “careless” teachers who rushed through the attendance procedure to get started on, you know, teaching—only to be monitored and chastised later. I was one of them.

Nobody in the office could explain why or how, precisely, the new system was helping us do a better job of serving kids. The on-line gradebooks also came with unanticipated problems—teachers who didn’t post enough grades (remember when formative data included things that weren’t numbers?), the amount of time now required to deal with anxious parents, and so on.

The most obvious reason to question always-available online gradebooks is that responsibility for turning in work and monitoring a running performance record should belong to students, especially in secondary settings. We have always had periodic reporting to parents—four or six times a year, or in some cases, weekly progress reports. Any more than that elevates grades over actual learning and encourages students to let mom be in charge of their education.

Tech-based surveillance of students is now on steroids. In a thoughtful post entitled How Much Should I Track My Kid? Ann Helen Peterson says this:

My parents trusted me because I had earned their trust. Sometimes I stretched that trust, but I was constantly figuring out what felt too risky, what felt right or wrong, who I didn’t want to get in a car with. Maybe that sounds like a lot of discernment for a teen. But how else do we figure out who we are? My parents could’ve lectured me about “making good decisions” all they wanted; I only knew how to make them by finding myself in situations far from them where I had to.

The same principle applied to my grades, to my online use, to how I talked to boys and figured out friendships. In high school, I would see my exact grade around twice during the quarter, when a teacher would distribute printouts that included all graded assignments and your current percentage.

Schools pay attention to what they value. We collect data first, and decide how to manage it later, a pattern repeatedly endlessly in thousands of schools. We assume that everything can be done faster, cheaper and better through technology. Sometimes, the rationale runs backwards—we adopt the technology, and then invent reasons for why we need it.

by nflanagan

I’m Not That Kind of Christian

I was eager to read Tim Alberta’s new book: The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. I follow Alberta’s magazine pieces, in the Atlantic and Politico, his appearances on cable and mainstream news and podcasts. I read his previous book, American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, and found it well-written but disappointing, an overly detailed defense of country-club Republicanism that missed the ugly underpinnings of how we ended up with President Donald Trump.

But—cutting to the chase—The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory is a fantastic book. Highly recommended, even though the burgeoning Christians-are-what’s-wrong-with-this-country crowd may be irritated by Alberta’s persistent, conservative choir-boy insistence that the church is a force for good.

I should mention here that I had a front row seat for the rise of the Cornerstone Evangelical Presbyterian juggernaut in Brighton, Michigan (nothing like your mainstream Presbyterian, btw). We moved to Livingston County around the same time as Richard Alberta, long-time pastor at Cornerstone and Tim Alberta’s father. When we were looking for a church, we heard repeatedly about the great things going on at Cornerstone, which was just a few miles down the road—the rapid growth of the congregation, the inspiring sermons, the youth group with 100 members. Pretty soon there would be a school, too—ultimately, there would be six major building expansions in 30 years.

One Christmas Eve, we decided to give Cornerstone a try. My son was three or four at the time and had zero capacity for quiet behavior in a strange place. When heads began turning, my husband took him out into the narthex. After the service, he was holding our coats and standing by the door. We’re not coming back here, he said.

Out in the car, he pulled a fistful of brochures and monographs out of his pocket, collected as he chased our son around the lobby area. Take a look, he said. There were predictable anti-abortion pieces—but also literature supporting capital punishment, and the usual Old Testament scourges against divorce, dark (Harry Potter) magic and homosexuality. We’re not exposing our kids to this, we agreed. We found another church.

But Cornerstone, which eventually grew to 2000 families, held a lot of power and influence in Brighton. Richard Alberta enjoyed stirring up local controversy—when a downtown coffee shop put a tiny rainbow sticker on its door, he wrote a letter to the newspaper, suggesting customers who were willing to order coffee in such a sinful place consider going to “Sodom and Gomorrah” (his too-clever name for Ann Arbor, 25 miles south), instead. The shop closed a few months later.

At Christmas time, when many churches collected gifts for needy families, he declared that there really was no excuse for being needy in well-off Livingston County. Instead, his church filled up a semi-truck with evangelical goods and household items and shipped them to Russia, to support struggling Christians there.

Alberta broke up the Brighton Ministerial Association because he refused to meet with a local gay minister. He brought in “security” specialists when my church, St. Paul’s Episcopal, called a Black rector, claiming that criminals “from Detroit” (code language) would now be getting off I-96 and endangering congregants in Brighton churches’ parking lots.

He went after my church, probably the most liberal mainstream congregation in town, repeatedly and viciously —in the newspaper and any other media outlets he could find, pre-social media. When a reporter at the local newspaper asked for an in-depth interview, he had a putting green set up in his office, and spent the interview nonchalantly practicing his short game, as she sat and took notes.

Many of my students attended Cornerstone and went on mission trips to save the unchurched of West Virginia or wherever. One of my band students’ father was an associate pastor at Cornerstone; at Parent-Teacher conferences, this pastor asked me to call the fees for his son’s upcoming band field trip a “donation” for tax purposes. He came with a typed-up statement for me to sign (I didn’t).

There’s much more, but you get the picture.

Tim Alberta’s book begins with the death of his father, in 2019, and his surprise at learning formerly dedicated congregants were leaving Cornerstone for more MAGA churches. Funeral attendees criticized Tim for his openly non-MAGA thinking (a well-deserved potshot at Rush Limbaugh). Followed up, of course, with the righteous assurance that they were praying for him to see the real truth.

My thought: The Buddhists were right about karma. You reap what you sow.

Which is, bottom line, where Tim Alberta is going in this book. He takes the reader through right-wing congregations, colleges and organizations around the country, a wide-ranging array of appalling examples of religious malfeasance. Mercedes Schneider posted some hot quotes from the book in her blog, if you want to get a sense of the flavor of his writing, and the practices he explores and condemns.

Alberta is careful to note that Trump was merely an accelerant, a permission-giver for bad behavior in the name of the Lord, not the root cause of what has happened to the Evangelicals. But he pulls back the curtain on some distinctly repellant, un-Christian conduct and people, both the globally famous and the local yahoos in Brighton.

He resists passing judgement on more inclusive, mainstream churches, although his conservative perspective is never hidden. He also has the scholarly and personal background to dissect theological and biblical questions raised by the commercialization and politicization of the spiritual. He writes with great confidence and clarity, relishing the opportunity to counter every lazy iteration of “Well, the Bible says…” He spends a half-dozen pages on abortion that are well worth reading.

I learned a great deal from the book. For starters, I began to understand where MAGA and its tribal beliefs and actions come from, how conservative Christians moved rightward—the triggers, the entitlements, the power-hoarding. This was personal for me, too, a look at how all the nice white kids from nice white families in my school district shifted their world-framing and let casual racism, sexism and xenophobia emerge.

It was also clear how the pandemic was a huge political trigger, dividing congregations that wished to protect their more vulnerable members from those who saw vaccines and restrictions as the state trying to control the church, and COVID deaths as God’s will.

Alberta ends the book with some signs of hope—the most convincing of which, ironically, come from women who have been sexually abused and actually fought back—Jennifer Lyell and Rachel Denhollander. Aside from Paula White, Trump’s hottie “spiritual advisor,” the main characters in this book’s framework are men. White men. When Alberta travels, as research, he visits men—genuine pastors, scoundrels posing as clergy, insufferable jerks, the egomaniacal, the greedy and the scheming. Women take a subordinate role in all of the churches and organizations. This is so obvious, in all 500 pages, that it feels like a blind spot. He thanks his wife for essentially raising their three boys in his absence, in the acknowledgements, but it feels like an afterthought, the cookies and coffee after the meat of an intelligent sermon.

Nonetheless, Alberta seems to have had a religious epiphany, taken a well-researched and critical look at what evangelical Christians have become, and bravely wrote about what he’s observed. When I read about mega-churches, pastors living in mansions and castigating their fellow citizens who believe differently, as the donations roll in, I always think “Not all Christians are like that.”

And, lo and behold, there’s a FB page for that: Not That Kind of Christian. There are think pieces—“We Were Wrong”– and bricks and mortar churches where the focus is on doing good and building community, not accruing political power. The traditional church may be fading, as it definitively has in Europe, but it isn’t dead yet.

I am certain that Tim Alberta holds out hope that we’re on the crest of a religious revival. In the meantime, he was harrowingly honest about what he saw. Everyone—believers and non-believers should read the book. Five stars.


by nflanagan

My Twelve Best Blogs of 2023

Every December, sites and services that spend the year hoovering up personal information spit out a summary of users’ activity. Call it the year-end quantification-industrial complex. The trend isn’t new. But especially since Spotify hit word-of-mouth marketing gold with its shareable Spotify Wrapped feature, companies of all kinds have been delivering year-end nuggets of data to their users, whether personalized or in aggregate.                                                             Atlantic, December 23, 2023

The year-end quantification-industrial complex. I like that phrase. I really do like Ten Best columns and Biggest Stories and even the Time Person of the Year. There’s something gratifying about a year’s worth of anything, be it books, movies or (my personal favorite), Most Important Trends in Education.

It’s nice to think: Well, that was then, but now we have a clean slate, a fresh start. Even when we know, deep in our brains, that next year will be largely composed of the same old sh*t, plus some disconcerting new sh*t and perhaps the occasional good news. Which means that columns about education policy and practice are, if not evergreen, enduring.

Here are what I think are the best dozen education-related blogs I wrote in 2023. Not necessarily the most popular or most-read—but the ones deserving another look:

I Had a Dream about the First Day of School    actually was one of my most-read blogs. I was wading around in teachers’ August complaints about bad professional development, endless and pointless staff meetings and all the unpaid work involved in classroom re-organization and wrote the blog in about 20 minutes. It struck a nerve.

Sometimes, you know, going in, that a blog will sink like a stone. But you write it anyway. In the case of Girls. Period., the trigger was being asked by a friend, a school social worker, to donate pads and tampons for the middle school girls she served. Bad policy in Florida makes an appearance in this blog, as well. I’m sure some readers found it distasteful. But it applies to girls, half our population. Just saying.

Almost every edu-blogger wrote about book-banning this year, some with photos of empty shelves. My personal take explores the use of the word ‘pornography’ to describe books that have changed students’ lives, and my own first encounter with actual porn.  I Know It when I See It.

The Absolute Folly of Standardization:  ‘The trouble arises when we use the tools of school—instruction, curriculum, assessment—to compare the students in our care, to label them, to sort them into standardized categories when they are very young. To essentially assign their potential. To show contempt for the wide range of human talents.’

Here’s one about the school where I used to teach, after a student filed a lawsuit against school leaders for not protecting her from overtly racist speech and acts. Are Schools Responsible for the Racist Behaviors of Students? What do you think?

Speaking of racism, and charges of “CRT”—Who is Indoctrinating Whom? A reflection on the impact of teachers on our lives and beliefs, for better and worse.

How many times have we heard teachers grumble about education policy that should have been run by teachers—who could have disabused legislators of the notion that they knew something about the way schools work? This ‘teacher at the table’ idea isn’t new: Thinking about Teachers at the Table.

Where the Boys Aren’t: Why is Teaching Still a Female-Dominated Profession? A question that is endlessly fascinating to me, as a woman who embarked on a largely male sub-profession: band director. Blogs about women in education don’t usually draw lots of readers, but this one has statistics and receipts.

Most of the blogging I’ve seen on the (faux) Science of Reading feels like it was created by SOR bots, claiming that they never learned anything about phonics in their teacher training. (Seriously?) Some thoughts about media baloney re: reading instruction. Learning to Read in Middle School.  

I spent most of my career teaching middle school. And I have some thoughts about the rather amazing capabilities of middle school students: Middle Schoolers—the Myth and the Reality.

In a year when unions appear to be making a comeback, teacher unions are still straw-men bad-guys in the war on public ed: Teachers or Teacher Unions? Or Maybe Neither?  Some clear-eyed observations on why we still need teacher unions.

Here’s another heartfelt reflection that went nowhere, but that I think summarizes the heart of successful teaching: being committed to your students, and even fond of them. Almost All You Need is Love.

It’s my sincere hope that you’ll take a look at one or two of these. And if you really want to make my day, subscribe—it’s totally free and easy—to Teacher in a Strange Land.

Happy New Year!

by nflanagan

Atticus

There’s a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it’s true but you haven’t told anyone yet. Of all things, that is what I remember most. It was so quiet.  

Barbara Kingsolver, from the Poisonwood Bible.

So—we are a dog family. Always have been. Before we had kids, my husband and I had a dog. A secondhand dog, like most of our subsequent dogs. In 44 years of marriage, we’ve had six great dogs, with divergent personalities and backstories. Two of our dogs were named Blue (neither was named by us). One dog thought she was a cat—you know, aloof and entirely self-interested. Another flunked out of leader dog school, and one was a beautiful golden retriever named after a Supreme Court Justice. One died, of a snakebite, about 15 minutes before my son’s 6th birthday party.

And the last dog we had was named Atticus. Putting that in the past tense is still hard, although we had to put Atticus down—over the Rainbow Bridge, as they say—in July.

Atticus was found in a Walmart parking lot, a stray, and—good fortune!—taken to a Humane Society in southwestern Michigan which partners with Lakeland Correctional Facility in a program called Refurbished Pets, in which selected dogs are placed in the prison, and inmates care for and train them. Before residing in the prison, foster families care for the dogs, which are often in rough shape.

Atticus was cleaned up and civilized by a wonderful woman named Jean, then entered the RP training program. As it happens, my husband, a criminal defense lawyer, had a client at Lakeland. At a visit, his client, a leader in the dog training program, asked if we might be interested in a great dog. We were in that sweet spot of not owning a dog, where you can travel and go out for the day without worrying about your pet, having lost Annie (the cat-dog) a few months earlier. We hadn’t yet discussed getting another dog.

What’s the dog’s name? my husband asked. Atticus.

And that was that.

We picked Atticus up from Jean’s house. She showed us how good he was at chasing balls, and gave us a thundershirt because Atticus was terrified of storms. She told us he had some “trust issues” but was, at heart, a very good boy. The vet that donated time to Refurbished Pets thought he was about three years old. Thinking about Atticus on his own, riding out storms and scrounging for food, broke our hearts. He was instantly, and irretrievably, our boy.

For the next eleven years, Atticus slept on a cozy bed in the corner of our bedroom and traveled with us—seven times—from Michigan to Arizona, an excellent backseat traveler. Whatever trust issues he had melted away, although he still whined from his bed when there was thunder and lightning.

Of all the dogs we ever had, Atticus was the most food-driven. We got in the habit of storing things in cupboards and the microwave, because anything left on the counter, or the kitchen island was bait. Once, my son and some of his friends bought some gourmet, $$$ cookies while touring northern Michigan, and left them in bags and boxes within striking range. When they returned home, Atticus had eaten most of them and hidden the rest. For the next year, we found cookies under couch cushions, in a bookshelf, and in a laundry basket.

About a year ago, Atticus (probably 14 by now) was showing signs of age: He panted constantly. He paced, all night long. It obviously hurt to lower his back end to the ground, and steps were problematic. The vet said his heart was enlarged, and gave him a medication that caused indoor accidents, something he’d never had before, and made him feel terrible. Plus—he had a collection of symptoms that might be called “acting weird.”

It was time. We were both there, petting him, feeding him treats, holding his paw, as his tail slowly thumped, then stopped. Afterward, I didn’t feel like sharing the news, or posting a photo. It was, as Barbara Kingsolver says, so very quiet.

He was our dog from the wrong side of the tracks, 100% dog, prone to drifting off during walks in the woods (but always returning) and always—until the last year or so—down to pursue a ball or chew up a stuffed toy, especially one that belonged to another dog.

After we made the appointment with the vet, I took a dozen photos of Atticus panting and pacing around the living room, his last afternoon on earth. Here’s one. 

by nflanagan

 A Crowded Table

I have been celebrating the coming of the light in eight different decades now—in ways considered sacred, secular, and even pagan—and don’t remember any end-of-year condition worse than the place where we find ourselves on this Winter Solstice, 2023.

We have the endless grinding, bloody conflict in Ukraine, and the ghastly war in Gaza which has divided our country as well. Politically, the nation is flirting with the destruction of democracy—with frail old Uncle Joe leading the good guys. And then there’s the rapidly warming planet…

Where, oh where, is the “thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices”—because boy howdy, we need it about now.

I live in a small, but exquisitely beautiful, rural county surrounded by water, a place not especially marked by diversity of thought, or faces. In fact, we struggle here with feeding and housing our poor, educating our kids, getting along peacefully. When it comes to problem-solving, we rely on local government, non-profit organizations and a handful of (Christian) churches.

Recently, Atlantic writer Tim Alberta shared his—very painful, very personal—story about being the son of a conservative, Trump-supporting minister, senior pastor in a church of over 2000 families, in southeastern Michigan. It’s a thoughtful but disturbing story, one very familiar to me, as my own family lived just down the road from this church, before we moved north. Many of my students were in the youth group there, absorbing conservative ideas about abortion, capital punishment and how the lazy don’t deserve handouts.

For the religiously skeptical, it’s churches like Cornerstone that illustrate how Christianity has crossed a line between serving our neighbors with compassion, because Jesus asked us to–and accruing power and riches because being a “Christian” means we’re entitled to them. For all my friends who are non-believers, or adherents to different traditions, or fed up with Christians whose lives are on centered on dominion rather than devotion —yup, I see you.

But I want to share one tiny spark of warmth—of hope, joy, peace and love—that still flickers here in the Little Finger of Michigan’s mitten. For five years, beginning in 2017 (and pausing for COVID in ’20 and’21), my church, Trinity UCC of Northport celebrates an Advent Afternoon, on a Sunday in December.

We invite the whole community to share their music, a kind of local holiday talent show. There’s a pick-up choir, comprised of singers from local churches and community choral groups. There are vocal solos and instrumental ensembles. Ministers from local churches do invocations and benedictions. All followed by cookies and wassail punch and talking over the local news, at crowded tables.

This year, last Sunday, our theme came from the Highwaywomen’s Crowded Table:

I want a house with a crowded table
And a place by the fire for everyone
Let us take on the world while we’re young and able
And bring us back together when the day is done.

If we want a garden
We’re gonna have to sow the seed.
Plant a little happiness, let the roots run deep
If it’s love that we give, then it’s love that we reap.

There were handbells, a clarinet playing Faure’, an old-time gospel quartet, a recorder ensemble and heartfelt solos. A trombonist accompanied himself in a pre-recorded trombone quartet, and a fiddle, bass, drum and superb accompanist played along with the singing, in this creaky, 150-year old sanctuary, as the day faded into twilight. There was jazz (Chick Corea) and 92-year-old Hugh Willey played a rip-snorting version of Jingle Bells.

The choir sang Gesu Bambino and Bethlehem Hallelu and Advent Alleluia. We dedicated our version of Eliza Gilkyson’s Requiem to the troubles—have mercy on us all—in the world.

In the end, there is still hope. There is still joy. On the darkest day of the year, there is still light.

by nflanagan

The Problem with Jingle Bells

If you follow various chat groups and Facebook pages of music educators, this time of year is rife with the Great Christmas Literature Discussion, centered around whether to schedule a concert in December and, if so, what songs to play, while avoiding stepping on anyone’s cultural traditions.

I have written, often, about this conundrum—honoring the festive spirit of seasonal holidays (which is evident absolutely everywhere, in December, from the grocery store to TV ads) vs. avoiding any mention of Christmas at school, because it’s inappropriate to preference one religious celebration over others, in a public institution filled with diverse children.

From a professional education perspective, it’s thorny. You can play a Christmas-heavy concert, sending parents home in a rosy glow—some parents, anyway. You can try to recognize every winter/light holiday with a tune—or rely on “classical” pieces like Messiah transcriptions. You can try to take Jesus out of the equation, and end up with a lot of junk literature. Or you can avoid the whole thing and schedule your concert in January.

Increasingly, I’ve seen elementary music teachers bowing out of anything directly related to Christmas. They can articulate good reasons for this, distinguishing between music students are fortunate enough to experience at home and with their families, and what belongs in a solid music education curriculum. For teachers who are under pressure from administrators or parents to put on a holiday show, there are winter weather songs. Enter Jingle Bells.

A couple of weeks ago, Peter Greene reprinted his blog entitled The Jingle Bells Effect and the Canon. It’s a bit of brilliance comparing 30 different versions of Jingle Bells, 30 ways of taking a small collection of notes and rhythms and turning them into something unique and different.

It’s like literature, Greene says—there are multiple ways to teach a concept, theme or historical era through the same medium: the printed word. He makes the point that teachers should always be able to offer a cogent answer to the question: Why are we learning this? I agree.

And for many years, I found Jingle Bells a handy instructional tool. The chorus uses only five notes, so the tune appears in virtually every beginning band method book, just about the time kids are eager to play real songs. The lyrics are thoroughly secular—no mention of Christmas—so when kids are singing about a one-horse open sleigh, it’s kind of like the Little Deuce Coupe of its day.

It’s also one of those three-chord songs, simple to harmonize. Add some sleighbells and voila! First concert magic. For years, my middle school band (some 200 7th and 8th graders) played Jingle Bells in a local Fantasy of Lights parade. Because when you’re trying to get 200 young musicians to march and play at the same time, you need something easy.

As awareness of the racist roots and language in some of our most beloved folk and composed songs began to grow, in recent decades, elementary and secondary music teachers rightfully started pulling certain songs out of their teaching repertoire. Scarcely a week goes by without an argument about this trend, on music-ed social media sites. Do songs that sprang from minstrelsy, performed in a different era, for example, have a racially negative impact today? Or are they just tunes? A valid and important question.

I find these skirmishes encouraging, an example of teachers discussing–with some conviction–the beliefs that shape their own professional work. And sometimes, seeing things in a new light. As Maya Angelou said: ‘Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.’

I’ve read dozens of these “is this racist?” discussions on-line. And music teachers, given the chance to re-think the cultural value–or lack therof—in certain pieces of music, often are willing to choose something else, or share the origins of the work, the outmoded and biased thinking reflected in the lyrics, as an opportunity to teach cultural history associated with music. People will adapt.

Except when it comes to Jingle Bells.

Back in 2017, a professor at Boston University , Kyna Hamill, published a research paper, suggesting that Jingle Bells was first sung in minstrel shows. Research papers are not generally the subject of teachers’ lounge chat, but this one caught fire, and pretty soon, there were teachers arguing that the composer of the piece, James Lord Pierpont, was a fervent Confederate, and therefore a supporter of slavery. Out with Jingle Bells!

Pierpont was not a household name, in his own time. He was a struggling composer, organist and teacher. His father was an ardent abolitionist and Unitarian minister, as were his two brothers, all in Massachusetts. But Pierpont took a position as organist in a Unitarian church in Georgia and was there when the Civil War broke out. He wrote music and sold it to support his family—including songs that supported the Southern war effort.

He also enlisted in the Confederate Army and served as a clerk. His father, the Reverend John Pierpont, was a Chaplain in the Union Army—one of those families split by a tragic war. There are plenty of families in the same situation right now, in this country—split by politics, influenced by cultural context. Something to think about, as we evaluate and banish Pierpont, 150 years after he wrote his most famous sleighing ditty.

Even Kyna Hamill, arguably the genesis of the anti-Jingle Bells movement now says this:
My article tried to tell the story of the first performance of the song. I do not connect this to the popular Christmas tradition of singing the song now. “The very fact of (“Jingle Bells’”) popularity has to do with the very catchy melody of the song, and not to be only understood in terms of its origins in the minstrel tradition. … I would say it should very much be sung and enjoyed, and perhaps discussed.”

There are teachers and schools that have taken Jingle Bells out of the curricular mix—and good on them for having that thoughtful discussion in the first place. And there are teachers who have decided they have bigger curricular fish to fry than banishing the bells on bobtails—they’ll save their firepower for songs with overtly racist lyrics and intentions.

Again– these are valid and important questions. The trick is to keep the conversation going, and refrain from condemnation of well-meaning peers.

Are those sleighbells I hear?

by nflanagan

What Happens When “Choice” Schemes Mature

Story from 1993:

I am finishing my year as Michigan Teacher of the Year, a whirlwind of heart-warming honors, random opportunities to speak, and learning just how ed-related organizations will try to co-opt The Teacher Voice. I am attending a 3-day music education conference in the summer, a gift from the Michigan School Vocal Music Assn, staying in a college dorm and actually having a blast, learning useful things and singing great literature, when I get a call from my husband. Yikes.

No cell phones or email at the time, so this is one of those scary moments—the central office crew at Alma College sends an emissary to the rehearsal hall, with the message: call your husband immediately. I take a handful of change and find a pay phone, heart pounding.

Nothing’s wrong at home—but my husband took an urgent call from the MI Chamber of Commerce. They need to speak to me. Today.

Turns out the MI Business Roundtable wants to shoot a TV commercial promoting a campaign to fix public education.They want me, the Teacher of the Year, to star in this commercial. The language, of course, is aspirational—our kids are our most precious resource, yada yada—but one of the aspects of the multi-prong campaign is offering families more choice.

They have set up a classroom, in an elementary school about 30 minutes away, where the filming is to take place. Someone will pick me up— this afternoon—and return me to Alma by dinnertime. They have already cleared this with the Department of Ed; one of my (unpaid) jobs as Teacher of the Year is serving as spokesperson for the Department and the Governor.

So I don the most teacher-like outfit I have on hand—your classic denim jumper—and get into the car with the Chamber of Commerce guy. He has to move his Bible and some Christian study materials to the backseat; he’s been listening to their inspirational cassettes on his long drive up. He’s unfailingly polite and appropriately grateful that I interrupted a summer workshop to film a commercial. He’s also really geeked about this campaign.

It’s not about funding, he says. It’s about freedom. Freedom for families to choose the schools that best fit their kids. But, I say–we turned down a ballot initiative to establish vouchers in Michigan back in 1978, two to one. The people have spoken on this issue. Haven’t they?

No, wait, he says. This is about sending your child to the PUBLIC school you want him to attend. Public schools will be open to all Michigan residents. Doesn’t matter which district you live in—your child can attend the public school of your choice.

Whoa. A half-dozen reasons why this is messy pop into my head. What about Detroit families who want their kids to go to Grosse Pointe—how will that work? What about transportation—if you don’t have a car and driver available every morning, how will your kids get to school? What about families only interested in scouting for the best sports teams? How will administrators plan for enough classrooms and teachers? And what about the value of neighborhood schools, serving as a community center?

Destabilizing those communities and significantly impacting their revenue streams doesn’t even occur to me at that point.

Chamber of Commerce Guy has already figured out that I’m probably a Democrat and union member and believer in public education for all, for better and worse. He’s grinning.

Wouldn’t you like to send YOUR kids to the school of your choice, he says. I note that we already have, by moving to the community where I teach. But what if you couldn’t afford to live there, he replies—if this campaign is successful, every child could attend the school where the Teacher of the Year works her magic. He raises his fist, chuckling—“Free the people!”

I was gobsmacked. I don’t remember much about shooting the commercial, except that it was in a first-grade classroom like those in the ‘50s, with a Palmer method letter border and a framed portrait of George Washington. We adjusted the camera angle to get the American flag in the background. I was holding an apple (which I got to keep, since I missed dinner). The script didn’t mention letting kids in poor schools choose wealthy schools, if they can get there, of course. It was more happy talk, children are our future, blahdy blah.

Mercifully, I have searched repeatedly and have been unable to find a copy of the commercial online, although I have a copy on videocassette buried in a box in my garage.

That was thirty years ago, when school choice was a sexy market-driven idea, whose ultimate ramifications were not well understood by parents or, frankly, by advocacy organizations like the Chamber, or by legislators or bureaucrats. People wanted the “freedom” to choose schools—who doesn’t value freedom?

Today, one in four Michigan children attends a school outside his/her district boundaries.

 The spread of choice statewide has accelerated as Michigan’s public-school enrollment has declined 11 percent to 1.38 million in the past decade, prompting competition among some districts.

Michigan law allows districts to open their doors to students from surrounding districts. Most of the state’s 540 public districts participate in some form, though several do not, including Birmingham, Grosse Pointe and Dearborn schools in metro Detroit. Districts can participate with all schools in their intermediate school district, typically their county, or more broadly with any district.

This article illustrates the consequences, especially for small and struggling districts, threatened by the law. It includes a district-by-district comparison of students lost, gained, and attending school outside their district zone. The winners and losers, in other words. Many of the examples are heartbreaking. Schools must compete—or die, literally. And a lot of the factors that draw in parents are unrelated to academic excellence, outstanding programs or a strong staff.

In fact, when asked, lots of adults defend choice for the sake of… choice. The individual trumps the commons. Caveat emptor. And we’re not even talking about vouchers or religious schools siphoning off money intended for public education.

Has any of this resulted in improvement, to any metric of school success—from parent satisfaction to unreliable-to-meaningless standardized test scores? No.

So why are we so stuck on the freedom to choose?

by nflanagan

How Old is Too Old?

I remember distinctly when Joe Biden, running for President in 2019, suggested that he might be a ‘transitional’ president, serving for one term to calm the nation down after the abuse it suffered at the hands of The Former Guy. He was 77 at the time, and while he was hale and fit, it seemed like a reasonable idea, four years and out. In fact, although Biden came in way down on the list of my preferred candidates at the time, that suggestion—that we just needed somebody with deep experience to get us out of the Trumpian quicksand—carried weight with me.

I took a lot of grief over a blog in which I said, essentially, that I was OK with Joe Biden.

What is striking to me, four years later, is how good a job Biden has done. And—yeah—maybe credit goes to the qualified people he selected to handle the business of the presidency, but the man himself has gone here, there and everywhere to move the country forward and make the nations of the world see us, once again, as a reliable ally.

I give Biden high marks, far higher than I would have expected, back in 2021, when he was inaugurated, two weeks after an insurrection. His job—patching the nation up after a global pandemic and economic collapse, and undoing the damage wrought by Trump—has been beyond challenging.

He’s made some missteps, but not many. Obama was vigorous and articulate, but no friend to public education, and too cautious in rebuilding the economy that Bush II crashed. America is great at seeing leaders through a haze of partisan nostalgia, however, and really bad at discerning what is fact and what is something you just read on Facebook so it must be true.

I know better than to wring my hands over polls. Those focus groups that the NY Times assembles—He’s too old and I feel poor!-– are a reminder that people seldom vote on policy questions, hot-topic issues or an accurate record of the incumbent. They pick the person they like the best, the guy they’d like to have a beer with, the one who looks most like their neighbor or friend. The one whose promises they’d like to believe.

Boots—or flipflops? Or old-man bedroom slippers?

Ronald Reagan, our oldest president before Biden, was formally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s five years after leaving office. I remember thinking he was too old to be president—but I was a lot younger then.  

So how old is too old? And what are the disqualifying parameters that come with old age? Heart attack? Concussion and subsequent, obvious cognitive failure? Being 95 when you leave office?  Traveling around the country spewing crazy talk? Tom Nichols put it like this:

Biden is a competent politician who sometimes stumbles or goes off the rails in his public statements. Trump is a disturbed, emotionally disordered person who, in Liz Cheney’s words, is “the most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office.”

That sums it up for me. I wish Biden were younger. Or—I wish he’d followed through on his suggested agenda, and announced that he would, in fact, bow out after one rather amazing term. But wishes aren’t horses, and the best we can do is hope that Biden maintains his health and his marbles for another five years.

I thought I would ask my friend Julia how she feels about Biden’s age. Julia is coming up on her 97th birthday (for which, she’s asking for a donation for a local group dedicated to equity and the environment). She’s already a decade beyond the age Biden would be, at the end of his second term, and she’s one of the wisest and most grounded people I know.

In response, Julia sent this poem. Enjoy.

These Old Men, each played one,

Both are now too old to run!

Knick Knack Paddy Whack Give the dogs a bone

and send the Old Guys limping home.

Find a woman, maybe two,

Someone who’ll know what to do!

Knick knack paddy whack, find somebody soon…

Before we all head for the Moon!