A Spy in the House of STEM

I was about to post a blog piece that was introspective, soul-searching, and serious, but thought better of it.

Who wants to read such boring prattle? I used to fill up volumes with that kind of crap back in the 1970s and 1980s.

Let me tell you about something I did recently that made me feel good.

As of recent, circumstances have driven me into the employ of a company that provides afterschool “enrichment” programs for grade school children in the area (and a number of places around the country, so I’ve been told recently). Originally, this company provided chess classes, but not they have branched into “robotics” and allegedly engineering-related classes. The kids spend an hour a week assembling remote-controlled vehicles built from plastic parts in kits – sort of off-brand Legos. Each kit has a few cheap motor, a battery pack, and the remote control. 

The purpose for this is, allegedly, to interest kids in STEM-related stuff. For parents and school officials, STEM is big. STEM is what’s going to save their kids from abject poverty, scrounging through dumpsters and sleeping in underpasses. While the rest of the world (or at least the neighborhood) collapses into naked savagery and cannibalism, STEM kids will be heading for air-conditioned offices in their auto-drive cars, ready to spend the day designing plastic robot dogs that catch ping pong balls, or managing the folks who do.

I could go into this in greater detail, but why bother? The folks who designed the courses and manage the program haven’t, so why should I? Teachers in this program are “trained” through a series of videos that, needless to say, provide them with very little that resembles the reality of what they’ll find at the ground level. It’s sort of like finding oneself in a full-scale firefight after having just completed Basic Training. One is promised some sort of calculated strategies, and instead receives – mayhem!

Mayhem!

In a few brief months I’ve gathered enough war stories to bore you and annoy you all through the coming cold winter months. Some kids actually want to put together stuff from the robot kits. Some are actually quite good at it. Some kids just want to exercise their right to refuse to do anything you ask them. Some want to throw things around.

Only a few – but a significant few – we’ll either raise their hands, or step up and ask you, “Do I really have to do this?”

All I can tell them is, no. You don’t have to do this. What do you want to do?

A few of them asked, “Can I color pictures?”

I said, sure. Would you like to color pictures of dinosaurs?”

They look up, their eyes suddenly bright at the prospect, and nod.

After the first week, I started to bring downloaded coloring pictures of dinosaurs I found online. “Be prepared.”

They’re not robots, but we can call it STEM, because ... science.

Is it what my supervisors want me to do? Of course not. Is it what the parents want me to do? I have no idea. Do they want me to indoctrinate them into a world of engineering that will allegedly guarantee them relevance and value in a changing world? Or do they want me to simply keep them busy for an hour a week so that they don’t get into some greater trouble.

What am I supposed to “teach” these kids?

I can teach them what my supervisors expect me to teach them – but no. The kids never listen to me the way they listen to other teachers. They sense the anarchy in my bones. They know I have no “authority.” I’m a stranger in these parts. They can do what they want, whether it’s playing with robots or not playing with robots.

All I can teach is what I am, and what I love. That’s all the authority I’ve got.

And what I am, and what I love, often includes dinosaurs.

Last Thursday, one of the students in a “circuits” (i.e. circuitry) class I’m subbing for gets up from her table, walks to the place on the floor where the jackets and backpacks are being stored. She can’t be older than a first-grader. She lies down on one of the jackets as if it were a cushion. She looks tired, bored, and sad. The other teacher I’m working with asks her, “What’s the matter?” Doesn’t she want to learn about circuits and play with the motors and propellers attached to them?

She shakes her head. No. She looks even sadder.

My co-teacher asks her, “Is there anything you want to do?”

Even sadder shake of her head.

So I ask her, “Would you like to color some pictures of dinosaurs?”

Her eyes light up. She rises from her improvised cushion like Lazarus rising from his tomb.

We walk over to the box where I keep my teaching stuff. She chooses one of the dinosaur coloring pictures from my folder. She races back to her table with the picture and finds crayons … somewhere. Soon, she runs back to me and shows me the result of her coloring.

“See my dinosaur!”

“It’s beautiful,” I tell her. “I especially like what you did with the green.” I point to the region along the dinosaur’s back.”

She runs back to her table. Somewhere, somehow, she’s found a pair of scissors. She carefully cuts the dinosaur away from its paper background, then runs back to me.

“See my dinosaur!”

“Beautiful!” I say. “You did an incredible job of coloring the dinosaur and cutting him out.”

“Can I take him home?”

“Of course.”

“I love my dinosaur!”

“Who wouldn’t?”

The class was the last one in a session, and it’s part of the regimen to hand out medals to the groups and teams that did the best with projects and a final competition. A lot of the kids get a kick out of the medals, and that’s understandable and great. I’m not on competitions, so I don’t stress those kinds of things, but if my supervisors want competitions, I’ll do what’s needed to comply. Everybody gets medals.

But what warmed my heart on that last day of class, so close to the Christmas holidays, was the girl with her crayon-colored dinosaur. She was more proud of her dinosaur than the “STEM” medal. And that’s fine with me. Some kids do robots. Some don’t. Some are big on engineering. Some want to color dinosaurs.  We need as many kids coloring dinosaurs as we do building robots. More power to all of them.

I’m a lousy employee.

But I may be a decent teacher.

Merry Christmas.

Books that stuck . . .

Recently, on Facebook, folks have been passing around a post about “books that have stuck with you,” or some such wording. I usually don’t respond to requests that require me to post my list then tag a bunch of friends. I don’t like to bother friends with stuff like that. Friends usually have enough to keep them busy. Most of my friends are writers, artists – people who have to keep busy to keep going. Also, a lot of these Facebook requests require to rate your “favorites,” or something you think is best, or better than something else. I don’t like ranking books or movies or songs – I keep things fluid in that regard.

But John Carl, I believe, tagged me in particular, and since part of the directions were that I don’t give the selections that much thought (“fifteen books in fifteen minutes”), I quickly came up with a list of books I remember and that have become part of my consciousness. The books are me and I am the books.

Even when you give something “little thought,” thoughts take a lot longer to play through. I listed the books, and the list generated discussion, and the discussion generated more discussion.

A book that has stayed – or “stuck” – with me. Did it mean a book I read in my youth, or just any book I’ve encountered over the years? Some of my earliest memories are of exploring books, going through the pages, whether I could read them or not. From age three on, I was poking around in books.

There were lots of books whose titles I don’t remember – just picture books. If I don’t remember the titles, did they stick with me? Well…

My dad made a bookcase. A long one, with two shelves. Plenty of books on there, but with the exception of some Reader’s Digest omnibus collections of condensed books, some cookbooks and a ten- or eleven-volume thing that was a sort of children’s encyclopedia, I think it was called the “Childcraft Library,” the books were all in Polish. It didn’t matter much at the time, since I could read neither Polish nor English. I didn’t read so much as sense the presence of words. And I also sensed that there was something important about these things, these “books.” If they weren’t important, why would someone build a case to hold them?

There was book of illustrated bible stories. I think it came out from Golden Books. I remember in particular an illustration for the David and Goliath tale – a marvel to me for depicting a decapitated giant without resorting to blood and gore. The artist posed the body of Goliath in such a way that his body reclined over a downward turn in the terrain. Further back, David walked away, holding high Goliath’s head. His posture and expression seemed quite triumphant. I wondered over that picture for a long time and on many occasions. I think I wondered why he so triumphant, walking away with a head that was of no earthly good to him. I mean, why not just leave it there next to the body? Was he going to get some sort of prize for bringing the head back? Was he going to have it stuffed and hang it on his wall? I couldn’t guess. Bible stories were like that. They made no sense to me, and yet they were apparently very important to grownups and older kids. I think I was less interested in the stories themselves than in the fact that people found those stories so important. Adam and Eve, Noah, Moses – Moses had to be important; they had made a whole movie about him, and about the ten commandments. God split the sea in half, made pillars of fire, sent lightning down to smash golden idols. They didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but visually they were fascinating.

The most I could make out about God, though, was that “He” had a really bad temper.

Of the Polish books, I found out later that one impressive set of volumes – in uniform size and binding – were the works of Henryk Sienkiewicz and the epic poem Pan Tadeusz. My parents revered these works, but they never read them, not where I could see them. Of course, they read them when they were children, remembered them vividly, and both my parents could quote passages from Pan Tadeusz.

You might think I’d have learned more Polish from my parents, but I didn’t. I think my parents were sorely divided on the subject of teaching my brother and I Polish. On the one they, they wanted us to learn the language of our heritage. On the other, when they spoke in Polish they knew we wouldn’t understand them. They had their own language – the secret language of adults. In the end, I think, the most I learned of Polish were the basic Catholic prayers, the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. My mother typed them out, in Polish, and taped them on the wall of our bedroom, just above the nightstand and below the crucifix that hung above it.

I do remember my dad reading to my brother and me a children’s edition of Robinson Crusoe. I vividly remember his reading of the scene where Crusoe comes upon the footprint in the sand, his placing his foot within it and discovering that it did not fit his own foot, that there must be someone else occupying the island. At this time, I won’t place too much significance on my remembering that scene, although I can. It is fraught with significance. But I will say that it impressed me because of its vividness – words making a picture in my imagination – and because the scene illustrated a basic sort of deduction – reality could be tested and examined. I needed to test reality because my home life did not resemble the “normal” world I encountered by watching television, or observing the behavior of the other kids in the neighborhood. The world of home and the “normal” world did not match up. I just couldn’t figure it out.

Another bunch of books that have stayed with me: no, not comic books; that’s a whole other story. It was a stack of paperbound books that sat in the lower right corner of the bookcase. Not “shelved” – stacked. They weren’t like American paperbacks. They were what we call now “trade”-sized paperbacks. No illustrations on the cover; no blurbs. The paper was cheap and thin and smelled with a distinct “non-American” scent. The covers weren’t even made of paperboard, just a slightly heavier grade of paper. The covers, titles, texts – all in Polish.

They did, however, have pictures.

There were pictures of soldiers in uniforms. They were pictures of soldiers holding guns. There were pictures of big cannons, of bombers flying overhead, of demolished cities.

Pictures of war.

I understood war in terms of action and activity – shooting, fighting, bombing. Kinesis. Motion. It was fascinating.  Have to admit it was fascinating. I’d seen some war movies on TV and I think my folks took me to see Pork Chop Hill, Ski Troop Attack – a few other war movies. War was in the movies, and I don’t think it could really be avoided. War was reality, or so it seemed. My parents both lived through the Second War War. My father lived in Lublin during the occupation. Nearly all his friends had died by 1945. My grandfather served in the Polish Army and nearly ended up as one of the officers executed by the Soviets in the Katyn Forest – though I didn’t learn that last fact for years. My mother went to school in Scotland after she, her mother and her sister nearly circumnavigated Europe to escape the Nazis.

Which is to say, there was some talk about “the war” in the household. Not a lot of talk. But talk of the war could not be avoided.

So these pictures of the war fascinated me. Unlike what I saw in the movies, they were “real.” It wasn’t the sort of sharp, well-lighted, “pretty" photography that an American cinematographer could perform. They were black and white – and gray. Gray upon gray. Everything gray. The images were often grainy and muddy, the sun too bright, the shadows too deep. I was a kid, but I could sense the authenticity of these images.

Then I reached the last pages of the book.

These were photos taken in the concentration camps.

Remember, I wasn’t much older than four, and I was looking at photographs of bodies – human bodies, naked bodies, bodies so starved you could make out the ribs, the knobby joints of every limb, the skin tightened against every cheekbone, the eyes fallen into the hollow recesses of their skulls. Dead eyes, hollow mouths, twisted teeth, wide open nostrils.

Bodies stacked in brick niches next to what I later discovered were oven doors. Bodies piled on little carts, stacked high – higher than you could imagine a cart so rickety and primitive could bear.

I stared at those photographs as much as I stared at the ones of all the military hardware and the uniformed combatants “doing their jobs.”

I stared at them more. And when I stopped staring I could still see them.

To a four-year-old, war makes a sort of sense. Not a “good” sense. An insane, twisted sense – it’s still a sense. A bunch of guys on one side shoot a bunch of guys on the other side. The other guys shoot back. Somebody “wins,” the way you win a ball game, or a game of checkers. That’s what it seemed like. And World War Two “made sense” in that “we” were fighting some very, very bad guys. Even for a kid, there was no way to mistake Hitler for George Washington – no way to mistake David for Goliath.

But those photos from the camps –

I will not pretend to understand them. I will not pretend to have derived lessons from them. I can’t say that I felt that what happened, what the pictures documented, was evil, because the placing of meaning to words and images is a complicated thing, and I was just too young to comprehend anything so big.

All I knew was that it was awful, it was terrifying, and I was frightened.

It was out there. The war was over, clearly enough. We were living in Chicago, in America, and everything was “all right” now, wasn’t it?

At least that’s what my parents tried to tell me, when I asked them about the pictures.

Nevertheless, it was out there. Whatever made what I saw in those photos a reality could still be out there.

Could.

I knew nothing about history as history. The difference between what was, what is, and what will be was too much for a four-year-old imagination.

It’s probably too much for a fifty-eight-year-old imagination, still remembering the afternoon I came upon that stack of books, in my dad’s den, in the bottom right corner of the bookcase.

So that book, whose name I don’t remember, whose words I couldn’t read, but whose pictures I could see, and did see – that’s the book that has probably stayed with me the longest and has had the most profound effect on whoever it is I have turned out to be.

+                          +                          +

For the record, though, this is the first list I came up with:

1. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
2. The Man With the Purple Eyes by Charlotte Zolotow
3. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
4. Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
5. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
6. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
7. Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov
8. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
9. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
10. Who? by Algis Budrys
11. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
12. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
13. A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren
14. Native Son by Richard Wright
15. Less Than Angels by Barbara Pym

After some discussion, I added these (I was on a roll): What Is Cinema? by Andre Bazin: The Parade's Gone By by Kevin Brownlow; The Instrumentality of Mankind by Cordwainer Smith; The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy by Ernst Cassirer; The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer; Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges; The Professor's House by Willa Cather; A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor; The Confidence Man by Herman Melville.

And after some more discussion, I added three more books from my misspent youth that have stayed with me: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut; Revenge of the Lawn by Richard Brautigan; Journey Beyond Tomorrow (aka The Journey of Joenes) by Robert Sheckley.

And yet three more: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Farina, which I read in one sitting and drove me nuts because I could not accept what the fictional character of Gnossos does at the end of the story; a book that wasn’t very good (by my standards, whatever they are) but that I also finished in one sitting: The Butterfly Revolution by William Butler; and I would be remiss not to mention Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller, who had the courage almost forty years ago to say what some folks still find difficult to acknowledge today.

Poetry? Like comics, that’s a whole ’nother story that would fill another entry at least as long as this.

And you will notice not one inclusion of a book about (or by) dinosaurs. Again, dinosaurs deserve their own sweet, generous chapter. Ask me no more questions and I will tell you no lies.

Introduction to "Auteur Theory," Part One

Yes, yes, I know I should be working on new stories. I'm getting there, honest. But I'm still being lured into the whole world of e-books (or should that be "ebooks"? Shows you how little I know about this world). Hey, I used to have some of my old stories with Alexandria Digital Literature. Remember how well that worked out? Okay, let's not remember that ...

I've been working out ways of packaging the stories, of putting out the equivalent of little chapbooks, pairing the stories one way or another. The weekend of Father's Day it occurred to me that three of my stories featured dads. So I said, "Okay, how about we put "Auteur Theory," "Where We Go" and "The Cthulhu Orthodontist" together. That will be one book. And maybe I'll write an introduction for it, explain where the character of Andrew came about."

So I started working on the introduction and got this far. I wouldn't ordinarily bother you with it, but I'm still playing around with committing acts of bloggery. I'm sort of intrigued as to how far I might go. If I ever manage to make a point I might even learn a thing or two about my creative process or lack thereof.

"About the time I was in fourth grade, maybe earlier but certainly no later, I invented a father.

"Not that I didn’t have a father already. It’s just that I needed another one. One who wasn’t so – not to get too deep into it at this time – so … 'real.'

"Kids invent imaginary friends. Often, they invent other kids – kids who exhibit the qualities they desire in themselves, or who represent some part of themselves they cannot or will not express. I don’t know too many people who talk about their imaginary friends, but I’m sure many more had them than will ’fess up to it now, even among the people of my tribe – writers.

"My imaginary friends were all adults. I was no fool (an idiot, yes, but not a complete fool). I knew who had all the power and where all the fun was to be had. Adults will disagree with that assessment. I disagree with it myself, now.

"I claim to be no better or worse than the next stunted, insecure, psychically-injured-down-to-the-root-of-the-soul-type kid who grew up in a cultural desert of bungalows and raised ranch houses of the mid-twentieth century. All I know is that my fantasies had a slightly odd curve to them.

"You see, if I went to a movie like, let’s say, The Time Machine, I didn’t come back wanting to be the character Rod Taylor played, the time traveler rescuing the helpless Eloi and fighting off the scary Morlocks (or, as we used to call them, Morons). I wanted to be the guy who made the movie about the time traveler rescuing Eloi and battling Morlocks.

When I read a book, I didn’t want to be the hero of the story; I wanted to be the guy who wrote the story, or a story very like it.

"And so with the comic books at the Rexall. And so with music. And so with paintings in the Art Institute. I didn’t know much about art – Hell, I didn’t know about anything. You couldn’t get dumber than me without being scraped up, placed into a clay pot and watered twice a week. I didn’t know a thing about art – except that it was made.

"Made. It didn’t fall out of the sky. It wasn’t the product of air masses or sunspots. Even if you wanted to attribute art to a godlike entity, an intermediary did all the grunt work. Art is made.

"And I wanted to make it.

"Not that I knew how. I didn’t even know how to make my bed. I didn’t know how to carry numbers in arithmetic. I didn’t know how to bring home the correct change if my mother sent me to the store for milk (she did that once and once only – in my household, you had but one chance to do anything; if you screwed up you were forever labeled a screw-up and never, ever, trusted again to do anything of importance).

"But I knew I wanted to make some kind of art. Movies. Books. Paintings. Music. Whatever. I wanted to tell stories. Nothing could have been more important. In second grade, I had to fill out a questionnaire and one of the questions had been about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I ran out of space somewhere between doctor and paratrooper. But if I had filled out that form two years later, I most likely would have limited myself to movie maker, writer and, running a close third, paleontologist (look at it this way: if I wrote books about dinosaurs I would be telling their stories. Scientists can be storytellers, too).

"How to get there? I couldn’t see how, though I was very willing to try. But … to make it as plain as I possibly can, kids from the Southwest Side of Chicago did not grow up to be movie makers, or writers, or visual artists. Kids from the Southwest Side grew up to work in factories. Or drive trucks. Or pump gas (when such jobs could be had). That’s what I was given to believe. If you had high aspirations, you could apply yourself so that maybe one day you would wear a white shirt and a tie to work every day and not carry your lunch in a metal container. You’d be working for a company that manufactured screws, or cables, or plastic shims that would fit under your Formica-topped kitchen table. Or you’d be selling insurance, or keeping books for the company that made those ever-so-essential shims. But not much more than that. Nothing wrong with such a life. One does what one needs to do. Shims are valuable objects, easily worth their weight in … shims. That just wasn’t where I wanted to go.

"From where I stood, at my age, weight and height, the future looked like a still sea of death, smooth as glass.

"Of course I fantasized. Of course I invented a person who could do the things I couldn’t do. Of course I often imagined I was him and he was me.

"And even when I grew older, old enough to leave behind much of the world I created inside my head, every now and then my thoughts returned to that guy.

"He became the basis for Andrew Ulaszek, the retired movie maker of “Auteur Theory.” He showed up again in “The Cthulhu Orthodontist,” and once more in “Where We Go.” He’s the father of one of my most frequent narrators (see “Surfaces” and “The Ambiguities”). The old dude and his family get around.

"I’m not through with him yet.

"Or he’s not through with me.

"What's the deal with that?"