The One-Room School

The other evening I met a woman who taught elementary school in the early 1950’s. After four years she got married and so had to resign her position. After all, we can’t have married women influence children. The children might get the idea that she does something unthinkable with her husband. Oh I know…we know for sure that mothers don’t do such things! June Cleaver never had her hair mussed or makeup disturbed and Rickie and Lucy certainly did not share a bed!

But, that’s not what I wanted to write about. The school where the woman I met taught was a one-room rural school house, heated with a wood stove in winter. (It was the older boys’ job to keep firewood split and light the stove in the morning, feeding it all day.) One row per grade level; she had one girl in grade eight. That immediately brought back memories. When I was eight years old my parents divorced and for the first month afterwards my brother and I boarded at a farm where there were several other children. Each morning the teacher would pick us up, loading kids into his Volkswagen on his route to school. In the evening we were expected to walk home. (I don’t recall exactly, but it was two or three miles; it probably took us about an hour to make the trip.)

The school he took us to was a one-room school house, heated with a wood stove maintained by the older boys. One row per grade. Only one or two in grade eight. He had a large bell that he rang to announce the end of recess and we all ate our sandwiches for lunch at our desks. I was in grade four. On the first day the teacher asked me if I was “smart” or “dumb” at school work. They didn’t mince words in those days. Kids classified as “dumb” usually cheerfully accepted that ruling and got on with their lives. I answered that I was “smart” and so I was given a seat at the front of the grade four row.

I don’t remember much if anything of the classes, but the long walks home I do remember. We’d start off as a group of about a dozen kids and, along the route, kids would peel off as they reached the laneways to their farms. Sometimes we’d stop off to play in someone’s barn. We’d climb up and cross a beam to its central point, someone would throw us a rope; we’d grip it and kick off, sailing through the air across the barn. The idea was to let go at just the right moment so that one would perform an arc, landing in a pile of hay.

Farm life was quite a different experience for me.  I remember watching the farmer cleaning the guts out of a freshly-killed chicken that was going to be our dinner. He pointed out the partially formed egg in the chicken’s innards. I was curious about such things. Milk was straight from the cows each morning. One of the older boys took care of that chore. All the kids slept on cots in the attic of the house. It formed one large room with one end divided from the rest by a blanket. That was the “girls’ room.”  I have no idea how many of there were, but, there were a lot of kids.

I don’t recall church, but, Sundays were set aside for rest and worship. The problem, from a kid’s point of view, is that we were not allowed to play on Sundays. We could read or rest quietly. Period. No one was allowed to talk. There were not many books in the house, but I must have read all of them during those periods of enforced silence. There were a few old Farmers’ Almanacs and some ancient copies of National Geographic . One book that I went back to time and time again had pictures of members of the shark family. What a bizarre group they were—hammer heads, especially, struck me as alien life forms. There were also some pictures of deep-sea creatures with their odd angular bodies and a glowing light dangling in front of their mouths.

After about a month my father found another family to board us and so we left the farm. The teacher, I recall, seemed very sad to see me go. He asked if he could keep one of my many drawings of ships. I liked drawing ships. They always sailed from left to right.

Such schools are long gone, replaced by large regional ones with kids shipped in by bus from a thirty- or forty-mile radius. There’s not much chance that they would visit and play with one another, or that a teacher would follow their progress from their first day of school till their last. Instead of sandwiches made with home-made bread (there was no other kind when I was young), and milk straight from the cow with all that cream still in it, they consume pop-tarts and soft-drinks. One thing for sure, there are no more “smart” kids and “dumb” kids anymore. Just one grey homogenous mass and a few troublemakers. Because if you don’t blend in and disappear into your classmates, you are a “problem” that needs to be “addressed.”

Depression: coping with it.

When periods of depression hit, I was usually among the last to realize it. You go along doing whatever it is that you do and then one day it just seems too damned difficult to keep doing it. The change is slow and sneaks up on you. Now, just because some regular tasks might now appear to you to be more difficult than they used to be doesn’t mean that you give up. Most people, myself included, just keep plugging away as things continue to slowly fall apart.

Sleep usually becomes an issue. You are either unable to sleep and tired all the time or just plain tired. You just want to get things, like brushing teeth, out of the way—either doing a cursory job or not doing it all. And, the dreams and thoughts can start to frighten you. People around you seem to be nagging at you all the time. “It’s time to get up for work.” Leave me alone. “When are you going to empty the dishwasher?” When I get to it. “When is the last time you had a shower?” You’re not my mother. And so on. At work the boss takes you aside and asks you if everything is alright, he’s gotten some complaints about you.

There is no start point and end point in depression. Unlike a case of stomach flu where you can say, “I was not sick yesterday, but I am today,” when depressed you cannot say, “I was not depressed yesterday, but I am today.” It is just the state that you are in now. The changes are incremental whether the depression is developing or it is starting to fade through treatment.

Some people seem to regard depression as some sort of weakness. But, it can come from many different sources and usually has more than one cause. Stress, whether through dealing with an injury or with a divorce or with moving to a new home, is usually the main trigger. Problems can build up at work, at home, in health until you are carrying a load that just seems too heavy to bear. And, one of the earmarks of depression is that you find it very difficult to confide in anyone or seek help. It’s usually a quiet personal battle. What’s wrong with me? you might ask yourself and come up with very simple answers (I didn’t get enough sleep last night) or very complicated ones (I was always picked on in school and that caused me to have problems maintaining relationships which is why I am now living alone and feeling blue.)

One thing I learned in group therapy was that though the causes vary from person to person the symptoms are remarkably similar. Maybe someone in the group has just been diagnosed with type two diabetes so you can understand why they are feeling down, whereas someone else might be brooding about the death of a friend many years before and you feel, why don’t they just get over it and move on? The reason is simple: they can’t any more than the diabetic can make that condition go away—not without help.

Let me state as clearly as I can: there is no cure for depression. You can take fistfuls of anti-depressants, take personal, group, and couples therapy, have a religious conversion, take a long vacation, get a new boyfriend, but the best you can hope for is to alleviate the symptoms and learn to live with them. I am in no position to argue with any physician or psychiatrist who says otherwise—I don’t have the specialized training and knowledge that they do—but I have been living with this for at least the past 50 years—if not longer—and have met hundreds of people suffering from the same debilitating condition.

That does not mean that there is not hope. For the past several months I have been living in a state of calm peacefulness. It took an awful lot of personal work to get here, but I know that there are no guarantees that this will last. Stress will return, build up, and start to tear away at my wellbeing.  But, I now know an awful lot of ways to cope and how to minimize the effects.

Depression

Depression. What a depressing topic! But, they say you should write what you know about and I do know about depression.

A few years ago I was diagnosed with Dysthymia, a life-long, or—at least—decades-long disorder characterized by a general mild depressive state with periods of profound depression. In other words, I tend to see things as more grey than they really are, even at the best of times. Mostly this is self-directed, such as low self-esteem—a sense of unworthiness or that “they” are going to realize that I am a fraud. No matter how much positive feedback I get, those feelings still nag at the back of my mind. I tend to, as a result, swing between periods of feeling incapable and periods of supreme self-confidence. Bipolar disorder (manic-depression) is often associated with depression, but it is not as marked in my case.

I want to explain this, because depression is so wide-spread today that it is estimated that at least 20% of North Americans could be diagnosed as having a depression disorder. It’s no accident that sales of anti-depressants are so high. At the same time, it is also no accident that dismissive remarks about the “Prozac-generation”—aw, feeling sad? Take a pill! –are so popular. Many people just don’t get it. They tend to view depression as an excuse for laziness, and its sufferers as unjustified complainers. Can’t get out of bed in the morning? All you need is a good swift kick in the ass!

Try to imagine that a heavy weight is pressing down on you and, no matter how hard you try, you can’t shake it off or escape from under it. It is so easy for an outside observer to assume that you don’t want to. I have described my serious bouts of depression as a feeling that the black dogs are circling round me and closing in, or that there is a blackness just outside of my peripheral vision waiting to overwhelm me. Apparently that is a fairly common description of the state of being as reported by those depressed.

The point of those two metaphors—of the circling black dogs or of a black cloud closing in—is that they are beyond control of the suffer who may well be trying to stave off what he sees as inevitable: that he will be overwhelmed by and consumed by the negativity expressing itself in his head. The depressed are not crazy; they know that they are facing a battle or that they have given up. I knew it was not healthy when I slept 20 hours a day, but, there was nothing I could do about it. You have to sleep, you sleep. People who can’t face the prospect of eating know that their repulsion towards food is not a normal reaction. But, they can’t ignore a gagging sensation whenever they think of eating.

There are many causes. But, underlying it all is a physical basis. Whether the physical changes are a result of, or a cause of, depression is irrelevant: they are there. Moods, thinking, emotions, are related to chemicals in the brain. You might not like to think of the rush of “love at first sight” as a release of hormones from various bodily organs. Which one is the primal cause: the experience or the chemicals? Does it really matter? Low levels of two important hormones that affect the functioning of the brain are common in people suffering from depression: dopamine and serotonin.

Dopamine affects behavior and cognition, motivation, sexual desire, sleep, mood, attention, and learning. A shortage of it in the brain can cause difficulties in all those areas and more. Serotonin is the “feel good” hormone that affects one’s feeling of well-being and happiness. Both of these chemicals are created in the body and are broken down by normal functioning, but the rate of loss can be affected by various drugs, variously known as “anti-depressants.”

Of course, if that’s all that depression is—a deficiency of certain chemicals—depression would disappear overnight. If only it were that easy. Some of my friends would still be alive today if that were the case.

Life, the universe, and everything

I used to enjoy reading textbooks about the “big” picture. You know, the history and future of the universe—that sort of thing. Unfortunately, I loaned most of my books to someone who never returned them. Still, it’s a subject that has always fascinated me.

Take the subject of entropy, for example. Entropy in the engineering sense is lost heat (the second law of thermodynamics: entropy of a system always increases or remains the same).  Another way of putting that is that thermal energy always flows from higher temperature to lower temperature. In layman’s terms: things cool off. Eventually, everything in the universe will become the same temperature (heat death). What has this to do with anything? Well, one way of describing time itself is the movement from low entropy to higher entropy. At the end, everything will be homogeneous (absolute entropy).

This suggests that a time existed when the universe had no entropy. We could describe that state as being infinitely hot. Now, to move from infinity to a measurable interval is clearly impossible. The best we can ever do is approach closer and closer to infinity, but we can never reach it. That’s what infinity means: no end point. That is why we cannot talk about the “beginning” of the universe, or “what happened before the beginning.” The best we can do is get closer and closer to a “starting point,” but we’ll never get there. We can talk about a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second of the existence of the universe, but we will never get to the “beginning.”

Now, the movement of time from near-zero entropy to near-infinite entropy is only one way of looking at it. Not everything is always breaking down and disintegrating as it dissipates its heat energy. Things do get put together. Like stars, chicken eggs, and social structures. This suggests a force that is working against entropy; in other words, moving from near-infinite to near-zero entropy. So, are there two arrows of time, headed in opposite directions?

Maybe an example would help. Drop a chicken egg on the floor. Its structure of shell, yolk, and sac is destroyed. In other words, it’s a mess. Now, reassemble this mess into a perfect egg. You can’t do it. In this case, entropy has increased and the only way back would be to reverse time. On the other hand, where did the egg come from? It began as a single cell in a chicken. It divided and kept dividing as different parts of it began to assume different structures. In the end, we have an egg with yolk near the middle, a sac wrapped around it, and all encased in a hard shell. This is a movement away from the “natural” process of always increasing entropy, seemingly violating the second law of thermodynamics. I think that a better way to describe it is the process of repackaging energy. The chicken actually “pulls” energy from its food and converts some of it into egg. The egg or, if it develops fully and produces another chicken, will eventually give up its energy to another life-form in the form of food.

You could describe the entire process of the evolution of the universe, of the planets, of life, etc. as working against rot and decay. It would be nice to think that—it has a nice positive ring to it and can be used to justify the belief in the existence of a higher order, a God, or a purpose. The assemblage of atoms into molecules, of molecules into stars and planets, of planets into systems—some of which support life—has an almost heroic aspect to it. But, I want to draw your attention to a very simple and common observation.

Where do rocks come from? They are created when materials are subjected to incredible pressure and heat, found, for example, in the earth’s mantel. And, where do they go? They get broken down by wind, water, cycles of heat and cold, and eventually end up as sand. And, where does the sand go? Eventually, it gets swallowed up in the movements of the tectonic plates and remixed back into the mantel.

And, when did this process begin and when will it end? Well, it began when dust and rocks coalesced into a planet large enough to support such a process. It will end when the planet disintegrates back into dust and rocks. And that dust and those rocks will eventually coalesce to form another star or planet. And so on, until the universe runs out of heat energy, and everything will stop forever. Unless, of course, the universe collapses back into itself, thus reversing the flow of entropy and building up unbelievable temperatures once again that will restart the process.

Just something to think about.

Historical Imperatives and me

One of the music forums I participate in is focused on more theoretical discussions. Today a fellow I have run into before posted a longish article asserting that only the “classical” music of Christian Europe and some notable early 20ieth century pop writers like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin produced any music worthy of serious consideration. I expect that most of you, even without any detailed knowledge of musical history, realise what a crock that is. I made my (now almost routine) reply accusing the poster of academic elitism. I have nothing against anyone preferring to listen to pre-20ieth century European music or the music of Cole Porter, but to present this as if that is the only “good” music (and, by definition, everything else is garbage) is absurd.

This reminded me of a situation in my adolescence when I was taking a grade 12 history course in the evenings in an effort to graduate secondary school. (That was before I gave up on the idea of wasting any more time on high school and applied for and was accepted into a university without, what high school propagandists promoted as essential for getting anywhere in the world, a secondary school graduation certificate. I must be one of the very few high school teachers who never graduated high school—a situation my students thoroughly approved of.)

In any case, this was a course in 20ieth century world history. In one of the first classes the teacher drew a sketch on the board where he circled Greece-Rome then drew a westward arrow pointing to a circle labelled “Europe” and, from that circle another westward leading arrow to “North America.” He then extended the arrow and drew a heavy circle around “Vietnam.” That, he explained, was what the entire conflict in Vietnam at that time was about. They were resisting the inevitable historical westward march of “civilization” around the globe. I was outraged, even then at the tender age of 18.

Like my musical friend, the teacher was cherry-picking a few of his favourite places and then linking them together while ignoring everything outside of his somewhat narrow point of view. First of all, the Greeks and Romans did not discover civilization. Civilizations, as defined by having a common code of laws and procedures governing large numbers of people, are as old as, well, civilization itself. How can one ignore the civilization in Egypt that lasted more than five thousand years? Well, it didn’t fit the teacher’s “ever westward” idea. The “civilization” thing would have had to travel north and east to get to Greece, even assuming that that was its only stop. The Mesopotamian civilization survived a mere 2,500 years and the Indus Valley civilization lasted some 2,000 years by contrast.  Chinese civilization has been around for an estimated 9,000 years (though that is by inference and archaeological evidence; there are no written records from before about 1500 BCE). The Arab civilization was around before the Europeans got their act together. More recently we have had the Mayan civilization, the Aztecs, the great African kingdoms, and the civilizations that flourished in North America before the Europeans arrived. Let’s not forget Japan, whose history as a civilization is almost as old as China’s, and south-east Asia generally where many smaller civilizations grew and disappeared.

Oh, and compared to all these other civilizations, North America is a baby having survived a mere three hundred years so far. There is also the inconvenient fact that there was a timeout of approximately 1,000 years between the fall of Rome and the introduction of this brand of “civilization” into Europe during the Renaissance, making something of a mess of the idea of a continuous connection between ancient Greece and modern Vietnam.

But, none of these facts supported this teacher’s theory of historical imperative, and, so they were ignored. Neat. Using similar techniques we can “prove” just about anything we want to. I must be next in line to the British throne. All I have to do is ignore the tens of millions of people who have a superior claim to mine. Let’s see: the art forms of the folks who inhabited the Bering Strait area 10,000 years ago are the best the world has ever produced. I don’t have to strain my brain at all to ignore every other art form that the world has produced.

Any time someone tries to draw simple connections through the history of anything he is talking through his hat. The history of everything, from a family tree to the Austrian monarchy, from ship-building to knitting is a complex web of blind alleys, far-flung influences, coincidences, and dumb luck.

“Historical imperative” (or “my favourite music good; everyone else’s bad”) is a result of minimal knowledge and lazy thinking.

Doomed to repeat history?

I have a photograph of my paternal grandparents taken on their wedding day in 1893. My grandmother appears to be about 16 – 18 years old, and, her new husband in his mid to late 20’s. I can’t be precise because hair and clothing styles have changed so much. Be that as it may, my grandmother—grandmother, not great-grandmother—was approaching middle-age before women got the vote in this country and she would have died before they got it in some jurisdictions.

When I was young, women still had little credibility in business and the law. A white-collar male’s testimony had much greater impact than a “house-wife’s.” And children had no rights at all. There was a curious disconnect regarding children. One could join the military at the age of 18 (though many had ignored that restriction in the World Wars), but one could not purchase alcohol or vote until the age of 21. Oddly enough, children were tried in adult courts and sentenced to adult prisons after they reached the age of 16. And, in one case that has haunted me all my life, in 1959 a 14-year-old boy was sentenced to be hanged. Fortunately, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and eventually, after being judged guilty of a horrific crime for about 46 years, a judicial review concluded that Steven Truscott’s original trial had been a gross miscarriage of justice and the courts acquitted him of the charges. The point is made: criminally responsible for your actions at 16, but not responsible enough to handle alcohol or the vote for another five years.

In the late 1960’s bleeding heart liberals, like Trudeau and others of his ilk, sought to correct the contradictions in our treatment of adolescents. Voting ages were lowered to 18, and the legal age for purchasing alcohol lowered to 18 or 19 in different jurisdictions. In criminal cases, soft-hearted left-wingers thought it wrong to put children into prisons with hardened criminals, describing the situation as sending young offenders to finishing school. They went so far as to argue that children might learn attitudes and tools of the trade of their fellow inmates. Better, they argued, to mollycoddle them by keeping them away from adult criminals and working with them to ensure that they had options other than continuing on the road to perdition.

Despite the fears of clear-thinking individuals everywhere, children did not turn into criminals en masse because the courts had gone soft on them. In fact, over the next 40-50 years criminal rates consistently fell in Canada, and in other countries that had adopted similar attitudes. At the same time, jurisdictions governed by common-sense where criminals and youths were being sentenced to harsher and harsher punishments, the crime rates sky-rocketed.

Now, you might argue that none of this makes any sense and that we have to “get tough” in order to keeps our streets and communities “safe.” The fact that such streets and communities are far safer environments than they were in the 1950’s is irrelevant: we have no choice but to clamp down to “protect society.”  And so we get omnibus laws filled with contradictions, legal inconsistencies, and counter-productive measures because “the overwhelming majority of Canadians want safer communities.” I’m sure than an “overwhelming majority” of Canadians like maple syrup as well. I bet that they even want to “protect children” and “drive safely.”  In fact, they want to do all sorts of good things.

But does that mean that the next time a Steven Truscott case comes up, we should sentence a 14-year-old to death and make sure that the sentence is carried out, just to show how “tough” we are?

On Welfare

 I find that often when arguing with folks who think that people on welfare are lazy bums sponging off the taxpayers, the only argument they can come up with to support their claim is anecdotal. They know of, or heard of, someone who is cheating the system. Period. End of argument as far as they are concerned.

The trouble with relying on anecdotal evidence is that you can find a story somewhere to support whatever claim you wish to make about anything. So, to answer the argument that welfare recipients are lazy bums sponging, etc., let me quote some anecdotal evidence that demonstrates the opposite of that claim.

My introduction to poverty came relatively early. At the age of 14 I was on my own and, for the first six weeks or so, stayed at the Salvation Army Hostel at Sherburne and Queen Streets in Toronto. Anyone with a passing familiarity with that section of Toronto can recognize that that is hardly a suitable environment for a sensitive and immature lad. Toronto’s homeless men gather in front of the building, smoking, furtively drinking suspect alcohol, and cursing all day until they are let in for the evening. At the time, prostitutes openly solicited across the street. Now, you might suspect that I was a target for all the um…perverts?...and con artists that “we all know” gather in such places. However, I regret to inform you that I always felt completely safe and protected. Instead of taking advantage of this naive youth, most of the men were very protective of me and made sure that I was taken care of.

For the next seven years I lived in some of the “worst” parts of Toronto and then I moved to Montreal where, as a student, I lived in poverty in the slums for the next decade. After that I went off to a small impoverished rural community to teach secondary school.  Many of my students were bussed in from 40 or more miles deep in the woods and even more lived in what might be called “shacks” by our modern standards. Yes, I know all the stories about how First Nations, or Aboriginals, or “Indians” live off of huge government grants. Tell that to some of my students who lived in log cabins with no running water. I never, once, saw any evidence that anyone was living high off the hog courtesy of the Canadian taxpayer and, yes, I knew many of the band leaders personally. Eventually some of my students themselves came to occupy important positions in the community—and there still were no signs of immense wealth.

Skip ahead a few years to the period of 2005 to 2010 when I worked as a tax preparer in a small city in eastern Ontario. It is no exaggeration to say that at least 90% of my clients were either on social assistance or getting by on Old Age Security and the Canada Pension Plan. I heard literally hundreds of stories as I probed backgrounds in an effort to determine what tax breaks my clients might be entitled to. I heard it all. And, yep, a few of them were taking advantage of the system, some shamelessly. But, guess what? Those people were a tiny minority. Most of the clients on welfare or government assistance were poorly educated with no opportunities to ever do anything other than work in restaurants or retail for minimum wage—what the more privileged among us disdainfully refer to as “McJobs.” Many of them were ill. Some had obvious learning disabilities. Some were abandoned mothers with small children. Another tiny minority were fighting addiction problems.

“Fighting?” Why bother to fight when you can live off free government handouts? I don’t understand why those with secure reasonably-paying jobs would think that depending on social assistance is a desirable life-style. Most hate it. They hate the fact that where they live, what they do all day, who they spend the night with are of any concern of the government. But, most of all, they hate being dependent. Some find that when they try to get off welfare the system clubs them back down. If you earn any money, it gets deducted from your cheque and you could be kicked out of the subsidized housing that you depend on. They hated coming to see me hoping to get a few bucks from the tax people and hated the questions that I had to ask. I often hated it—personally I could give a damn who they slept with and for how long. And if a woman claimed that the child with her was hers, could she prove it?

You might argue that that’s the price you pay for being dependent on taxpayers for support. But try putting yourself in their position. You’re a young woman who gets pregnant, your boyfriend abandons you, and your family kicks you out. Are you supposed to take your child into a corner of an alley and wait to starve to death? You’re a middle-aged man who is injured on the job and can no longer look after yourself. Your wife gets tired of looking after you and kicks you out. Are you supposed to crawl into a dog house and wait patiently for the end? You’re anyone who faces intolerable pressure and finds solace in drugs or alcohol. You become addicted and dysfunctional.  What are you to do? Your apartment burns down with all of your possessions. You have no money, no clean clothing, no decent food. Unfairly accused of a crime or unethical behaviour and, as a result, are now unemployable? Life sometimes sucks. And bad things do happen to good people.

All the world’s religions tell us that we are indeed our brother’s keeper; that we have an obligation to look after those less fortunate; and, to face the reality that: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Next time you are approached by a shabbily-dressed person on the street with a hand out, imagine that you and he exchange places. How do you feel now?

A possible candidate for the presidency of the United States recently said that if you are not rich and healthy it is your own fault. Well, one can just hope that he doesn’t become the victim of a dreadful accident and be abandoned by everyone he knows. That is exactly what has happened to many other people, even the “good” ones like you and me.