What’s Your Sign?
Thinking back on a
conversation with a young woman about the meaning of things.
I should let the sign do the talking. It says exactly what I
think. But sometimes people ask me about it and I have to say something.
Last week a young woman who works for the Department of
Education, whose big building I stand in front of on the sidewalk every morning
for an hour with my sign, approached me and said she sees me there and don’t I
think they’re doing that, teaching the kids to read?
I rushed out an answer; something about how the numbers we
read in the paper, the reading scores, show that, no, they certainly aren’t
teaching the poor kids to read well. I said it too hurried probably
(there were people passing us there on the sidewalk and I wanted them to see
the sign), which, I’m sure, made me seem distracted and aggressive. I felt glum
later that I’d poorly represented my thoughts to her. Which is of course why
writers write: to give a more extended answer/critique/suggestion to the things
they see wrong with the world.
Here’s what I should have said. I should have said how dare
the department begin yet another school year without a plan to attack the
sinful lack of ability to read well that so many of their students suffer from?
I should have said I hadn’t read anywhere that some new plan was in place to rectify
that. If she’d said the Common Core curriculum was going to do that, I’d have
said, no it’s not. Not that it’s a bad idea for a program, but it’s just not
meant to tackle the tough stains. Something stronger is needed for that.
I thought about taking my sign to the debates the candidates
for mayor have been having. But I decided to keep holding it in just the one
place I hold it in the morning on Chambers Street. I wasn’t going to chase down
the pols. I don’t think much of this batch at all. None of them has spoken
about the problem I see as the most urgent: teaching all the school kids to
read well. These candidates are an unimaginative group of people. How could they not see that as the biggest
problem? It really is the crucial problem. Solve it and almost everything else
will fall into place. Sometimes when a person walking by my sign will say, I
couldn’t agree more, I’ll say, it would change the world. They almost always
nod in agreement.
Just before Labor Day I took the train to Chicago to meet up
with one of my sisters and my niece to drive to Northern Michigan to my other
sister’s cottage. I like the train. I like looking at the Hudson River out the
window. It’s a long ride, but I take a book with me and some magazines and a
notebook. You can walk through the cars and look at people. The poor people
sleep almost the whole way. They bring old pillows and sheets. They don’t read.
They look at movies on their screens when they aren’t sleeping. Their kids
aren’t reading anything either. They’re restless and you hope you aren’t
sitting across the aisle from them. If I had a chance to talk to the young
woman again, I’d tell her about the train.
The book I took with me, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance, I’d read 40 years ago when I was a teacher in Cleveland. I
taught school to get out of going to Vietnam. A lot of young men did that then.
It wasn’t only to avoid the draft that we did that. It was an idealistic time
and teaching in urban schools was a way for us to change the world. The book
evokes that era. It brings back vivid, wistful feelings. It’s not lost on me
that I still say teaching poor kids to read well could change the world. I
believe it. It’s tragic that that mission is still not being accomplished.
Forty years later. My hair’s turned gray. I have five grandchildren.
Here’s the first paragraph of the book. I can see by
my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of my cycle, that it is
eight-thirty in the morning. The wind, even at sixty miles an hour, is warm and
humid. When it’s this hot and muggy at eight-thirty, I’m wondering what it’s
going to be like in the afternoon.
Reading is our best, most enduring pastime. TV and movies
are stimulating in their way. So is listening to music. So is noodling around
on the computer. Sports and exercise excite parts of us. But reading is that
quiet, deeper pleasure that talks to us privately. It makes us dream our dreams.
I’d like to have said to the young woman the other morning that we’re taking
dreams away if we don’t teach kids to read well.
What she really should do is hold my sign for a week. She’d
see the faces on people who look at the sign.
I just hold the sign. I take no credit for its message. That
came to me from I don’t know where. Maybe in a dream I had.
Another school year is beginning. I’m excited. Kids will be back on the street
where I stand with the sign. College kids. High school kids. Little kids with
parents or nannies. Some in cute uniforms. Some of the little ones will try to
read the sign. They’ll keep looking back at it as they pass me. You should see
their faces when they work their way through the words and decipher the
message. They’re very proud of themselves.
There are some adults who also look back as they pass. They
couldn’t read it at a glance. You wish the young woman could see that. You wish
she would tell her next department meeting what she saw.
I take the 6 train in the morning, with my sign and a book
and some of these newsletters, from where I live on Third Avenue in the 20’s
down to Chambers Street. It’s a quick trip and I maybe get three pages read
each way. I’d get more read if I didn’t look around at the other riders so
much. Many, maybe most, of the people are the same every day. I like to see
what they’re reading. More people than I would have guessed are reading the
free paper they hand out at the subway stops. Some people are reading a daily
newspaper. Some have Kindles. Not that many though, which surprises me. The
people I stare at the most are the Asian mothers or fathers or grandparents
with little kids. They make sure that the kids have something to read, or they
give them word search pages and a pen or pencil to pass the time till they get
to Canal Street. If I had not been in such a hurry when I was talking with that
young woman the other day, I could have told her about that train ride too.
