RHS 125th Anniversary

Ridgewood High School is celebrating in a big way tonight its 125th anniversary. They have a huge tent and expect around 400 people to attend. Let the good times roll!

Remembering Kent State 1970

"On May 4, 1970, Guardsmen attempted to disperse an anti-war demonstrations. They used tear gas, which some protesters threw back at the soldiers. Eventually, the National Guard opened fire. There were 67 shots in 13 seconds, killing four and wounding nine others.

The shooting happened after days of protests on campus about the U.S. expanding the Vietnam War into Cambodia. The city of Kent was declared a state of emergency and the governor sent the Ohio National Guard to the campus."

In the autumn of 1969 my Fifth grade class at Willard had a teaching intern who was attending Kent State. She was long gone from our classroom by the time of the shootings at her alma mater. We had half expected her to return to see us after she was planning to graduate that spring of 1970.

I can see now how that would have been impossible for her to do. I can only imagine how her life would have been changed and that events like her teaching internship might have seemed like from another lifetime.  

It takes a tremendous amount of optimism to be a teacher. Though sometimes it can take as little as 13 seconds of listening to the sound of gunshots to turn an optimist into a cynic and pessimist. I have always wondered how student teacher eventually turned out and if she eventually became a teacher. I have always hoped she allowed herself to believe that goodness pervades reality. Despite my wish, it wouldn't surprise me if the unintended consequences of her decision to attend Kent State and become a teacher had caused her to rethink every aspect of her life. 

This Is Life

Back in the halcyon days of my youth my brothers and I were required to read to our parents. This was after our parents had decided that they had been reading to us for long enough and it had become our turn.

Reading had became a habit for me after I learned to piece together words into sentences in the first grade. Not long after this I began to dutifully go outside no matter the weather and pickup the NY Times from the driveway. I may have only read the Sports pages, after a quick scan of the front page, but it was reading. Later on in high school I would begin reading the Wall Street Journal which my father brought home each night after reading it for himself on the train to and from Hoboken.

Now we live in a visual society as opposed to the tactile one of my youth, where the ink from the newspaper remained on your hands as a reminder. Children might still read to their parents but it's probably from a tablet or phone, not a book. What does this seemingly small decision as to the choice of reading medium going to mean for the rest of their lives? Mercifully, I don't know for sure. It's different from my experience but not all together a bad experience. I'm willing to accept both but I still love the feel of a newspaper, with the added bonus that the ink no longer comes off on your hands and fingers. I also appreciate the different weight each individual book will has. When I pick up a heavier tome like my old Norton Anthology of English Literature the added mass causes me to pause and prepare myself to read. Given all the choices of authors and subjects which exist it's a good thing to reflect before engaging. The electronic media makes it much easier to skip around among topics and authors, without having to leave one's seat. I think the act of searching for a book, picking it up, and finding a place to begin or continue is lost upon today's generation. The search fills me with anticipation and even excitement. Flipping through the titles of electronic books gives me none of this. The books on my bookshelf tell the story of where I have been--"they're the story of my mind'' as the British Novelist Penelope Lively would say. The books I have kept reveal my life in countless ways a glance at my collection of electronic titles would never begin to indicate.

Recess

The time in elementary school we used to have in which no college-bound goals were being pursued was named "Recess." That is how I describe those 25-30 slots of time. In junior and senior high school these times were referred to as physical education and we changed our clothes in locker rooms to engage in these activities.

In elementary school there were no locker rooms and the gyms were tiny. We were smaller then so I guess there wasn't the need for large open spaces.

I think anytime we were given a break from the grind of advancing to the next year in our schooling was good. We could have simply been sitting on our desks throwing a cotton ball around in complete silence and that to me was a fine way to break up the routine of our day. I actually think it was called "Silent Ball" because you weren't allowed to speak and if you dropped the ball you had to get off your desktop and sit in your chair. The game proceeded until two were left.  The final participants could be on opposite sides of the classroom. To watch these final moments of the game couldn't help but raise your heartbeat because you had to watch the action and control your voice. Hand signals were all that were allowed and the game was largely self-regulated in order to give our harried and over worked teachers some time to gather their thoughts and catch up on their paperwork.

Almost 50 years have passed since my last game of Silent Ball, and I don't know if the Ridgewood Public Schools still call this form of activity "Recess." I do know that I read about today's elementary school children being diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder at an alarmingly high rate and can't say what the equivalent to this was in my day. Maybe it didn't exist, but who knows for sure?

I do understand that people today across all age groups tend to believe that our well-being can be measured by what we own. Though I would side with those people who think this is not a long-term route to happiness.

I would also suggest that our development into mature adults requires imagining life without material possessions and believing that we can actually be happy in a set of circumstances where opulence is not the end goal. In our Silent Ball moments we experienced the mild deprivations of not being able to speak or leave our seats on the top of our desks. We learned indirectly in these blocks of time called recess the time honored practice of being grateful for freedom of speech and movement. These freedoms we hopefully later discovered in our development into adults were our real needs.

I guess I am saying that for people to be truly happy they have to distinguish their wants for material things from what they truly need. In Silent Ball their were moments when we we desired to shout out to those around us that someone had left their seat in an attempt to catch the ball being thrown around the room in silence. We knew this violated the rules of the game, but we also knew the rules said we couldn't speak. This sort of thought provoking task I'm not sure our teachers had in mind as their goal for our recess time. It's nice to believe their were molding young minds, when in actuality they were trying to catch their breaths from the pace of tutoring young minds five days a week. I don't blame them at all. Sometimes the best things we can teach are by those examples we set when we are just being ourselves.