Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

I’ve spent a lot of time in my life looking at trees and have followed, with my eyes, how the branches split into twigs and taper into leaves from quite a young age. This sort of close observation should be a prerequisite for drawing something whether in a realistic style or in one that requires primarily an understanding of the spirit and the idea of the tree rather than its actual physical details. In kindergarten, however, it proved to be a source of frustration in part because my fine motor skills were insufficient to allow me to draw what I saw and in part because when we had to draw trees as part of an in-class activity we were only given enough time to make lollipop-shaped deciduous trees or vaguely zigzag evergreens. Once when the teacher saw me growing frustrated (and falling several steps behind the rest of the class in the process), she told me to just draw the trees the way everyone else did.

I don’t mean to pick on her individually. I won’t even disclose her name (especially since it may have been the classroom assistant rather than the teacher). She probably believed she was doing the right thing; the problem, after all, is structural. Schools too often do not have as their goal the development of creativity and individuals’ ideas, abilities and vision but, rather, the creation of workers who can produce to schedule, who meet standards and only go beyond them in accepted ways and only when there is sufficient time to allow for it. There is no allowance for students to progress at their own pace, even when allowing extra time would mean that they would create something unique.

The worst teachers accept this. The best teachers struggle against it but are limited by class size, the demands of parents and administrators, and similar factors.

In the end, this incident became the most vividly remembered of several which together convinced me that I couldn’t really draw or create much of anything with my hands, except to the extent that camerawork counts.

That may be for the best in my case. I’m probably better at writing than I could ever be at sketching or painting. But I wonder how many genuine talents are suppressed in similar ways.

In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Susan Straight has an essay about the problematic rise of Accelerated Reader software. This program seeks to quantify the difficulty of books and. awards points on this basis. In the process, it manages to value Gossip Girl over Hamlet. I am less concerned with the specifics of how it evaluates books, however, than with the effects of such a program and the social trends it represents.

By assigning numbers to books, the system discourages students from forming their own independent judgments. If you don’t like the Harry Potter series, the system tells you that there must be a problem with your tastes since those books are worth so many points. Indeed, the use of hard numbers creates the illusion of objective ratings (and thus the possibility of an objectively selected canon). Of course, there’s also the question of who decides which books get to be ranked.

The selection of criteria for the ranking of books is inherently subjective and in this case reflects a view of reading solely as a mechanical skill, not as a way to discover new ideas, not as a way to understand one’s own life better, and certainly not as  a way to learn about people whose lives are different from your own. It demonstrates a focus on the how of reading without considering the why of reading. (The same focus that killed Reading Rainbow.) While making certain that students have adequate vocabulary and reading comprehension is important, it is far from the only purpose of reading. A system in which that is the only value gives students the skills they need to fulfill workplace functions but not to become engaged citizens or to examine the world around them. It’s a recipe for quiet desperation and for cultivating a taste for apparently straightforward answers and evaluations whether or not they are accurate and sufficient.

A recent New York Times article surveys campus studies that have discovered a number of different effects of having interracial roommates. The effect that makes the headline, however, is to my mind the most obvious: that living with someone of another race can reduce prejudice. According to the article:

Several studies have shown that living with a roommate of a different race changes students’ attitudes. One, from the University of California at Los Angeles, generally found decreased prejudice among students with different-race roommates — but those who roomed with Asian-Americans, the group that scored the highest on measures of prejudice, became more prejudiced themselves.

That last part did strike me as unexpected, in part because during my second year at Evergreen, I roomed with a young woman of mixed Japanese and Irish heritage (Hi, Christine!) who certainly wasn’t any more prejudiced than anyone else I knew at the time (yes, I know anecdote =/= data).

While it is difficult to evaluate one’s own level of prejudice, I do know that living with her, and seeing how different incidents and statements affected her, woke me up to a lot of my white privilege. I won’t go into specifics here because it is more her story than mine, but I learned not from demanding that she explain things to me (though I probably was guilty of this on occasion) but by living through things with her.

It is living separately that allows prejudice to continue. Because of this, educational institutions that want to develop whole citizens and not just cog-in-the-machine workers do have a real interest in making sure that their student populations are diverse. At the same time, it must be remembered that it is not the responsibility of people of color to open up their lives to white people just because we want to understand.

The school where I completed my AAS (concurrently with my high school diploma) is part of the trend of community colleges granting four year degrees mentioned in this NY Times article; Bellevue Community College has just recently dropped the “community” from its name in recognition of this shift. The truth is, however, that I have mixed feelings about this trend.

One of my first thoughts on hearing of my alma mater‘s name change was that it was really about time. As far back as 1995, I remember that the math and science courses I took (on the “for majors” track, even though I knew I would be focusing on literature eventually) were in every way the equal of the courses at the University of Washington (well, except for expense; in the math department, they even printed their own instructor-authored textbooks to keep costs down). Indeed, when I would compare notes with friends who were taking the same courses at UW, I found that I often had the more difficult syllabus. It wasn’t only the sciences either: people who took the same Arthurian Lit course I had were able to petition to have it counted as an upper-division course at UW. Indeed, the variety of backgrounds of my classmates meant that I was exposed to a far broader range of interpretations of texts than I have found in any other educational setting.

Though there were also remedial courses offered, the level of quality in the classes I took was maintained despite the lack of competitive admissions. In other words, community colleges tend to be transformative institutions rather than selective ones.

As they move to offer four-year degrees, they thus have the potential to upset our notions of who can (and should) be educated to the level of a BA. On the other hand, I worry that the dropping of “community” from the names reflects a shift away from this, a way of downplaying the commitment to higher education to all who want or need it.

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