Fw: [Futurework] ) Hue and Cry on 'Whiteness Studies'

[Ray Evans Harrell]

Harry my comments are in red ----- Original Message ----- From: "Harry Pollard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Ray Evans Harrell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Harry Pollard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Keith Hudson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "Selma Singer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, June 27, 2003 10:13 PM Subject: Re: [Futurework] ) Hue and Cry on 'Whiteness Studies' > > Ray, > > You say: > > "I agree with your comments about race and discrimination but you have not > convinced me that you have the knowledge to make such judgments about > education and the antecedents that build it in children." > > HARRY: I have been teaching for more than 50 years. I have been writing > courses for kids from 7th grade to post-doctorate for more than 30 years. I > have known high school teachers for more than 30 years and I've visited > hundreds of schools across the country, as well as Alberta. By visiting, I > don't mean popping in for an afternoon, but staying for as long as a week > giving teacher Seminars, teaching individual teachers, working within > departments.   Harry, in the music business we call that coaching and workshops.   Not teaching.   Teaching is taking responsibility for the development of the student in a given discipline for the development of a given order of competency.    The more complicated the competency the more difficult it is to teach it.   The more difficult it is to teach the more time and repetitive discipline it takes to incorporate it into the life of the student.     I too have written educational books.   But we tested our works by working for five years with over 300 piano students with constant, never ending lesson reports on every single piece, lesson and work tried.    It was done at the University of Tulsa and no private business that I have ever seen would have put in the money.   Certainly our competitors didn't but they sure fed on our discoveries and rewrote their books.   They were lazy and self-satisfied.     I too have worked and developed voice and piano programs from age four through to the Metropolitan Opera and have students who have worked in all of the major opera houses and orchestras of the nation and internationally.   They also work on Broadway and have hits on the commercial music chart.   My religious students are  Ministers, Cantors and Music Directors in some of the most prestigious institutions in the country.   I also work on lists with Ministers of Music and others that are nationwide just to keep up with what's happening in all of these.     I've taught and directed full time and long term at the largest music conservatory in the world and given summer festival and workshops at others.   I've also lectured at Ivy League Schools,  Seminaries,  major private companies (I've posted all of this on this list and happy to send my vitae) and worked for the government for six years in the Pentagon Complex as well as giving lectures at the UN on Native Americans and cultural stereotyping.      If you truly teach someone something then they can do it in almost any circumstance correctly every time.   That is teaching.    From my family, my father taught and tested in the public schools of Oklahoma for forty years and my mother taught business arts in the public schools for forty years.    Both were about performance and not theory.   They did and took responsibility for what they did.   They also tested their theories in action successfully and their students showed it over the years.    My father wrote two books on testing theories that he had an interest in solving and were about psychometric issues in specific situations in two schools in Oklahoma.   I tell you this simply to say that I know pubic school teaching and government run schools from the reservation as well as local schools, from the cradle.         I've also made wonderful speeches to a variety of educational > conferences. (Well, I thought they were wonderful.)   I've lectured on Donald Schoen and the MIT theories of education and pedagogy at Columbia U and it looks good on the resume.   I'm also referenced in several books by their PHD graduates but that and a buck will get you a cup of coffee.   > > What do you want to know? > > "Today we underpay teachers & cut off serious programs that build > competencies while hyping educational junk food like Edison and the Wall > Street Retail Journal Gang." > > HARRY: I'm sure there are places - particularly in country locations where > teachers are not paid well. Mostly they are paid very well. > > In Southern California, they build up over $50,000 pretty quickly. Many of > them use their somewhat limited hours at school to do other profitable > things. One friend of mine owned and operated a "Creamery" - an ice cream > shop that did excellent evening business in Old Pasadena.   First of all you should read People, Performance and Pay by Flannery, Hofrichter and Platten (Free Press) to discuss the issues of relativity of compensation.   You fall into the same old tired trap of pay relativity that comes from every complaining citizen who says that Congressmen and Doctors are overpaid.   Payment should be based upon the expertise and complexity of work.     Anyone who has spent long term time in the classroom will not make the judgments that you make because the work is relentless for eight months and in our areas 12 months out of the year and I have never met a businessman on the local level who would spend anywhere near the amount of their own time, resources and access to their families as public school teachers do.   The health issues are relentless the environment is unhealthy and the stress is horrendous.     Perhaps you think $50,000 is adequate pay for such abuse but I decided early on that I would never work for such low pay.   $50,000 for 32 weeks if that was all you did and then took a four month vacation would be one thing.   But there is usually unpaid work during that time as well.   So lets just say that the average day for a teacher in California, the fifth largest economy in the world, is ten hours.     Most teachers spend more than three hours with class preparation and grading papers, etc. so, as in the case of my two parents it was almost a 24 hour a day job since they did their job as do all of the teachers that I know here.     But lets just say ten hours a day.   Only five days a week with no weekends.   Another big IF.   So $50,000 over 32 weeks, five days, ten hours and how much an hour?   $31.25 about the same as an executive secretary makes for an eight hour day or is the starting salary for a college graduate on Wall Street where they are not at the top of their ceiling but the bottom rung of the ladder.   Specious Harry.    Specious.      This workforce is as highly trained and is stepped on by the likes of people like yourself simply because they are poorly organized nationally.    If there were national Unions that organized National strikes and stopped the Nation cold then they would have the potential of comparable salaries with other professionals but you could hear the disgusting, pitiful cries from the likes of you two and the rest if they ever did that.      I worked for years in private schools and grew up in a public school teacher home.   The private schools are shallow and don't pay their teachers well enough to develop a teaching team.   They come and go like flowers.   The public schools are the equivalent of "economies of scale" and you have people constantly meddling and illogical text development that screws around with education like the poor aesthetic curriculum .   You are the guy who told me that the purpose of music was entertainment and should be relegated to the demands of the ignorant.   That's not logical.     > > Then, of course, there is summer school which adds to their  income.   Still $31.50 an hour.   My fee is $200 like the other professionals of my caliber.   > > I'm not suggesting that teaching is easy - particularly with the student > material they must contend with - but they are not ill-paid.   That deserves another American expletive but I will save it from sensitive eyes.   Also, when > they start, they are often paid too little. However, they can pick up (in > California) another $5,000 a year for teaching "English as a Second > Language" - a program that has been a monumental failure.   Almost as bad as the prejudice against learning Spanish by English speakers.   America is the most mono-lingual country in the world with the most possibilities for linguistic sophistication squandered in prejudicial provinciality.   > > (One English speaking high school student enrolled in an ESL class so he > could learn Spanish from this dual speaking program. Problem was no English > was spoken. Only Spanish was used in this class to teach English to > Hispanic students. He gave up on it.)   My daughter's Spanish class was taught the same way.   But it was cultural.   The teacher tried but he couldn't even get the Anglo kids to order in Spanish when they bought their food in the local bodega for lunch.    It was a class thing.   You should have heard their music program.  It was disaster but they did math and language great.    The Hispanic kids were the performers and they are also doing well but in more high paying jobs.  But they refused to speak to each other or speak each other's language.   They were being "Merican."    Don't blame the teachers for not being able to overcome their student's family's provincial idiocy.    They would have to spend all of their time in the kids homes like my father did before it broke him. > > With present school financing, about $235,000 finances each classroom of 35 > students for a year (based on national average). Let's give the teachers > (say) $75,000. Do books, materials, furniture really cost $160,000 a year > for 35 students over about 9 months? Particularly as books and furniture > are amortized over  many years? Do the arithmetic Harry.    $235,000 divided by 35 pupils divided by 1250 hours of in class time.      You are paying less for education than you would pay for a babysitter.     Students in classes in New York city for dance classes that require a room and a bar pay a minimum of $9 for a set of fifteen classes or $15 for a single class.   Those are group classes with up to sixty students in the class Harry.   I ran a school for five years here and paid my teachers $35 an hour.   $15 less than they make normally on a per hour basis but we were all investing in a company idea.   I took a $35,000 salary as well.    And it still cost the 15 students for the whole program, $18,000 per student.    Rooms, stages, technology required for theater is expensive.   But your books, your plant with its gym, its open space,  its teachers and its administration still teaches your kids for less that you would pay for your babysitter.   Who's the crybaby here Harry?    I hate arithmetic with my reservation math but I'm doing a hell of a lot better than you guys.   It pisses me off to have to take the time.   Do the homework Harry and stop just blowing off!   > You said: > > "conventional English is rife with nouns and prejudicial statements" > > No it isn't. It contains words which might be used prejudicially. But that > is the invention of the user, not a fault of the language.   Like  Christianity, the proof is in the pudding Harry.   I'm not responsible for the possibilities.    My students make great art out of the possibilities but they aren't making statements like your making either and we don't make statements about cultural convention and individual judgment like you and Keith were indulging in because we work in many different languages and understand the contexts and geniuses of them.   We put our own bodies and instruments into doing more than just wandering through and making judgments.   Old Cherokee saying.   "Don't open your mouth to make a judgment unless you have walked in the other persons moccasins for at least a moon."    The Hindus say the same except the time is longer.   Too bad the Hindus learned bureaucracy from the Brits to everyone's chagrin but the Brits didn't pick up much from the Hindus except a few trinkets.   Of course it is > laced with nouns, but there are a lot of things to name.   Naming does not indicate competency unless you have done the process that is embodied by the name and therein lies the problem.     Learning process.    Preparation (process)  - Presentation (naming)  -  Application.    If it isn't perfect every time then it wasn't learned and the naming is (expletive).    Think of "walking".     Knowing the name is useless, you have to do the work and be able to do it or you can't "walk."   Also, the almost > same things may attract several nouns each of which is used precisely to > label something.   An obvious statement that means little. > > As you say, you may be a smart ass, but you are my favorite smart ass.   You have such potential and the years of experience, you should try harder.    Move into town. > > Blame an Englishman for being an Englishman? We should thank God that he > got it right for once.   Dame Eva Turner, my first voice teacher was English and earned her title unlike the 32 bar song frauds who bought theirs.   She was singing Tosca at age twenty and Turandot for Toscanini at La Scala while others were playing at business in their clubs.   (Sir Basil Langton, the Shaw expert,  was another British teacher of mine.)   She knew that voice was a 24 hour a day job and did it until the body wouldn't sustain the power.   She stopped at her peak at age 55.    The war destroyed her hard earned fortune in the blitz and she came to Oklahoma because she was broke.   But she could still knock your pants off and ran to the top floor of the building where her studio was each day.     She wouldn't tolerate the kind of nonsense both you and Keith have spoken on race or the arts.    It was about discipline, power, the psychological forces and great culture.    She was the one who taught me not to take nonsense and she gracefully told people they were full of shit up until she died at 94.    She never used the word but a simple withering "Yes dear, it must have been very hard for you" is all it would take to let you know that you were not coming up to the mark and making a mess of things.   In America we are more blunt and use the vulgar as often as the polite.   That is our way.   But the point is the same.   You have to have done the work to deserve being a judge and even then you should do it with trepidation and skill.    Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director The American Masters Arts Festival Biennial 200 West 70th Street, Suite 6-C New York City, 10023 [EMAIL PROTECTED]   > > Harry > > --------------------------------------------------------------------------