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The Gospel of Wives
Wives everywhere possess the firm belief
Of all their many roles, the one that’s chief
Is sparing husbands from the sheer mayhem
That would befall their lives, if not for them.
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Beneath the Bad Manners
Her brother, on belief that she is loaded,
Shows no desire to pay for anything,
And notwithstanding how much she has doted
Upon him not one “thank you” can he bring.
His disregard of basic etiquette,
Will understandably invite disdain,
But more grief’s in the likely predicate—
That he bears omnipresent mental pain.
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The Change That’s Needed Most for Education
I met a K through 12 administrator,
Her viewpoints were, of course, unknown to me.
I asked if she could change one thing for children,
What would her foremost alteration be?
I hoped she’d rail on politics or unions—
Some controversy worthy of a poem,
But schools were not where she fixed her attention,
For kids’ horrendous problems start at home.
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Russel Winick recently started writing poetry after ending a long legal career. He resides in Naperville, Illinois.
Nice poem, Russel. I remember a wise veteran guidance counselor, Mary Montel Bacon, who worked in urban schools, telling a group of principals and administrators, “You got what you got! The parents ain’t keeping the good ones at home and sending the riff-raff to your school. They’re sending you the best they have. Now, deal with it!”
Interesting anecdote for a challenging job. Thanks Rob!
I think we should name your concise poems full of wisdom, “Winickisms.” They are humorous yet filled with serious intentions.
And your always-kind comments are “Royalties.” Thank you Sir.
These three pieces are a kind of trilogy of complaint. The first suggests that men are naturally trouble-prone, and need their womenfolk to keep them from catastrophe. I’m reminded of the line from Romeo and Juliet, when Capulet’s wife says to her ready-to-fight husband: “Thou shalt not stir a foot to seek a foe!”
The second is on a mulishly ungrateful and impolite sibling, and the shrewd judgment that the cause of it all is some kind of psychic trauma. That is often the case.
The third touches on a perennial pedagogical problem: the fact that some students are already rendered virtually unteachable by their home life and their environmental experiences. A brutal father, a neglectful mother, violent streets, and constant crime don’t prepare one to sit quietly at a desk and learn the alphabet and multiplication tables.
Thank you Joseph, for these observations. As to the third poem, yours is exactly the point that I understood the administrator to be making.
There’s a lot of wisdom here, Russel, as always with your poems. The one about wives made me laugh out loud! But not because it isn’t true; my husband tells me that it is.
Cynthia – The wives poem came from a comment by a wife, which was promptly agreed to by two other wives. And it’s true in my house as well, with lots of reality behind it. Thanks as always for your kind words.
Dear Russel,
The third poem hit my heart. I taught in a Baltimore suburb public school in the 90’s. I quickly discovered that many children in my first grade classroom had significant needs that needed attention before education in the three R’s could reasonably begin.
Gigi
Tragic but true Gigi. Thank you so much for sharing your experience.
It is amazing how wives take the credit for things going well but as soon as they don’t it is always his fault! Which is also true of schools. If a pupil does well then it is due to amazing teaching but if they don’t do so well , then it is down to many reasons.
And of individuals , there are so many reasons why they cannot do what they should or do what they should not.
Of course outcomes in life are multi-factorial but some accountability is also good.
Thank you for these very thought provoking poems.
Thank you Mia, for your intriguing perspectives. I’m glad that you enjoyed the poems.
Humor and insight in all three. The last one hit closest to home for me (albeit vicariously). My wife taught elementary school for several years in a tough neighborhood where it was a rarity for any of the kids to have a stable support structure. They all suffered greatly for it.
Thanks Warren. Yes, that’s the main reaction which I’ve received to that poem.
Poor administrator! She sets up herself and her school for failure, by wishing to change what she has no control over. Totally impractical. There are a few things schools can do, and these days often do, to facilitate learning. The main one is to feed children breakfast and lunch; at least the students will not be hungry if parents are too poor or too neglectful to provide meals. But the function of a school is education, not nutrition. A school administrator who fixes her attention on the home should stop stealing her pay from the public. She supervises a host of employees (sometimes four instructors and aides per classroom) and still cannot manage to educate?
As a teacher who decided to homeschool, I saw very easily that the large problem in government schools is curriculum. Sad to say, there are too many things they are not permitted to teach, and many lessons of little use they are required to teach. A valiant principal can work around this, and achieve something. The head teacher in a classroom can stack the state curriculum in the closet, and provide better at her own expense. But as a parent, I could not trust to such distant possibilities for my children over the course of 13 years.
Home and family breakdown impedes education, surely. But that changes nothing about the mission of schools. Sorry, Russel, but I’d tell your administrator that her complaint has nothing to do with her job. None of us work in a perfect world–and no teacher ever did. Let her change what she can with resources available. Instead of bemoaning the home, make pro-active homeschoolers her model.
Thanks Margaret. I was expecting some reactions like this, and you didn’t disappoint. In fairness to the administrator, we had essentially just met, and had just a short amount of time to converse. Plus we were on a boat on a holiday weekend, so she may not have been in the mood to get too deeply into the subjects of my probing questions. She did speak of the extensive efforts her school makes to try to educate the children from some of the most unfortunate circumstances, but acknowledged that occasionally they aren’t successful. Thanks for sharing your always-interesting perspectives!
Russel, I too love your smile of a poem: “The Gospel of Wives” – as the old saying goes: “Behind every great man is a great woman.”
“Beneath Bad Manners” is rather sad and most compassionate – a lesson to those quick to judge.
And, on the subject of judgment, “The Change That’s Needed Most for Education” is a prime example of how blame-shifting does very little to assist our children in all areas of their lives. It’s a parent’s duty to teach their children how to conduct themselves starting with basic manners. It’s a teacher’s duty to ply mannerly children with the knowledge they need to become intellectually successful and independent. When the parents and the education system take full responsibility, the child gets a fair start in life. Sadly, life isn’t fair and more and more children are suffering because everyone is blaming everyone else instead of sparing the children the sheer mayhem that befalls their lives by helping them. I couldn’t resist playing with a few wise words from your first poem. I apologize for my cheekiness, Russel.
I’ve been a teacher since 1968, at the junior high school, the high school, and the university level. It is certainly true that (ideally) both parents and educators must take their responsibilities seriously, and when this happens the student has a solid chance of learning and developing.
But sometimes (and more frequently nowadays) this does not happen. Yes, of course the teacher must work with the human material that shows up in the classroom, regardless of deficiencies or bad attitudes. But a major problem today is the increasing and utterly stifling micromanagement of curriculum (and even pedagogical methods) by departments and upper-level administration. A teacher at the grade school and high school level has no leeway whatsoever in how he may handle a class, or what subject matter he may present, or how he may present it. He is not treated as a professional, but as a functionary.
This evil is now creeping, slowly but steadily, into university-level teaching. But why should this surprise anyone? It has happened in the medical profession, where doctors have pretty much lost their autonomy of diagnosis and practice to become bureaucratized by both the government and the big insurance companies.
Joe, we live in a world that is so far from ideal at present that our children are suffering dreadfully. You have pointed out clearly exactly why this is, and my heart aches for the position excellent teachers (who would be a shining asset to the education system) find themselves in. And yes, it’s the same for many formerly lauded professionals to the point where trust in institutions and experts is at an all time low. Good people are suffering at every turn. But many still don’t see it. Sadly this includes the young parents who have already gone through a system that has pushed an ideology rather than an education, and their children are feeling the full force of it. Churches often play an integral role in homeschooling, and many churches are pushing ideologies. Evil is the only word for it.