Re-making the Grade

In which we see a student
poke a hole in a
stone wall of perception

The Felix Chronicles, #23

"Aha -- so there you are," Nate says to me as I'm about to ascend the stairs to my office. "I'd just been upstairs waiting for you, and decided you weren't going to make it."

Damn. I had hoped to use the twenty free minutes I thought I had to catch up on my e-mail. Nate has been talking for weeks about coming to see me about that research essay of his. He never showed up last week for his appointment (something about a math test that ran long), which I didn't mind. I don't recall setting aside this time to talk, which we may well have. I don't write down appointments at times I expect to be at my desk anyway. Scheduling with students tends to be a fluid affair on both sides.

"Sorry I'm late -- I got hung up at the attendance office," I say, as if I knew he was waiting. "But I'm glad you're here. It's about your essay, right?"

"Yes." His affirmation has an assertive quality.

"Well c'mon back up. We'll finally talk about it."

Nate turns around and follows me as I head to my desk; I gesture for him to take a seat in what is happily an otherwise empty room, as the colleagues with whom I share it are all off teaching. While he pulls his essay out of backpack, I open up my laptop, check my phone (no messages) and look up to face him. "So, Nate, what's on your mind?"

"It's about my grade on my Stonewall Jackson essay. I worked hard on it, and think I deserve a better grade."

My gradebook is at my left. I silently pick it up, flip to Nate's class, and look at the ledger. B+. Actually, I think of that as a high grade for Nate. He's been B or B- for most of the semester. I really don't remember much of this particular essay. But my perception of Nate at this point is pretty well established. Prosaic ideas, weak organization: He's simply not an A student. "Why don't you tell me in your words what my message was to you," I say. My standard opening gambit.

"You told me that my essay wasn't focused," Nate reports. "That I had competing ideas. That I said that Jackson was brilliant tactically at the Second Battle of Bull Run and Chancellorsville, and that I also talked about how popular he was with his men. Which you said didn't seem relevant."

Now I remember. "Right. You had competing theses. Actually, Nate, I thought you had done a reasonably good job on that essay. The first draft as I recall was a mess." An understatement, and one that compounded my perception of him as slapdash. I remember Nate was the last one to board the bus at one point on last fall's Boston trip. Claimed the bus driver told him the wrong corner. Whatever the reason, I was annoyed. And it's lingered with me, fairly or not.

"Yeah," he concedes. "I got off to a late start on the project. But I worked hard on it. You said the first draft was a report. That I didn't analyze. I guess that's true. But I did a lot of research after that. And I thought I was making a good point, doing what you asked, when I emphasized his ability to strike quickly and confuse Pope and Hooker."

"That's right," I affirm. You came a long way, Nate. And I wanted to honor that, which I thought I was doing with the B+. But in a way, you did too much of a good thing. I didn't see why his personal popularity was really relevant to your argument." I pause, as I remember something else: "And you have this bad habit of making unnecessary assertions. I mean, what difference does it make if Jackson was popular? And what evidence do you have that he was popular?" I've never thought of him as a particularly beloved general, like Robert E. Lee. He was a weirdo -- sucking those lemons all the time, raised arm into battle, and all that -- and he worked his soldiers brutally hard."

"That's the thing," Nate says, as if he's about to play a trump card, though I have a hard time imagining what that would be. "I was making a point about leadership. Jackson's ideas about tactics alone never would have made much difference if he didn't inspire his men."

"Yes, but do you have any evidence that he did? You don't support the point."

"Yeah, I do," he responds. "When I went to my branch of the New York Public Library over spring break, a librarian there showed me a couple memoirs and I have the quotes." He pauses and purses his lips: he's unhappy, but his ire is turned inward. "I meant to put those quotes in," he says. "I can see they would have helped."

"Yes," I say, "they would." I feel like I have the tactical upper hand here. But I also feel a twinge of guilt. Though I don't find the argument entirely compelling or convincing, I see Nate had real reasons to forge the link he was trying to make between tactics and popularity. And I'm surprised that he did bona fide research using primary sources. "Let me have a look at that," I say, taking the essay from him. Though there's no mention of popularity in the introduction -- there really should be if it's going to be central to the larger argument -- I see the fusion of tactics and popularity into to the key concept of leadership is explicit in the conclusion. I've sold Nate short -- not a lot, but definitely a little. But I don't want to concede that, for my sake or his.

"Okay," I say, resolving on a strategy that has a substantial amount of truth to it, "what I'm seeing here, Nate, is a classic pattern in which a writer has real ideas that he doesn't convey clearly enough to a reader. The reader wonders why the writer is saying what he is, and concludes that the writer is confused or fuzzy-headed. But the problem is in the realm of execution, not conception. I think that if you did a better job early on at conveying the relationship between Jackson's strategic brilliance and his appeal to his men, and being explicit that they're components of leadership, and then supported that point with the evidence you forgot to put in, the essay would be considerably stronger. Why don't you take another shot at it? Wouldn't take much work. Make those fixes and I'll see my way to doing something about that grade."

You can forget the straight A, I think to myself. I'll concede A territory to Nate, but still don't think of him as a sufficiently graceful writer or original thinker to merit more than an A-. (John, the chair of my department, calls this "protecting the A.") But I now see in a way I haven't before that Nate may get there -- and that the persistence he's shown today will be a factor in helping him get across the threshold, whether or not it happens on my watch.

"Sounds good," he says, clearly satisfied. "When do you want the re-write?"

"I dunno. How about Friday?"

"Can I have the weekend? I have a Spanish test on Thursday and a really big lacrosse game."

Don't push your luck, kid, I think. But really, I rebuke myself -- what difference does it make? I'm only going to skim it for the changes we've discussed anyway. "First thing Monday morning, then. Put it in my mailbox."

"Thanks a lot, Mr. Cullen. I appreciate it."

"No problem, Nate. Always good to learn a thing or two about ol' Stonewall Jackson."

And, I think as he leaves, a thing or two about my limits. Even if it stings a bit.

Big School

The following address was prepared for the Senior Dinner, held at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School on June 8, 2010

When I learned that I was to be the speaker at Senior Dinner, which I regard as one of the great honors of my career, my first reaction was joy. My second, of course, was dread, dread of the sort I’ve been inflicting on my students for years. Now it’s my turn to try and be interesting. Touché, kids. That’s a French term. It means "also awake at 3 a.m."

One thing I’m always telling my students when they sit down to write for me is that they should always begin with a question of audience: To whom are you speaking? This is a simple question, but a necessary one. The answer for this particular assignment seems obvious enough: I’ve been chosen by the student body to address the student body. But insofar as it’s true, I’m not only addressing the student body. As my students know, if I was only addressing the student body, this speech would have a great many four letter words in it. But that would get me into a bit of trouble with some of the people John Love generously calls “grownups.” Of course, it should be said that my penchant for using four letter words is a piece of pedagogic stagecraft I learned from one of the important grownups in my life, my father. I don’t know whether my dad acquired his distinctive patois from his years on the New York Fire Department, or whether he got it from his father, a longshoreman down at Chelsea Piers, also known, thanks to our good friends the Bernsteins, as ECF South. Now, there, ladies and gentlemen, was a workingmen’s school. I will also tell you, good students of Fieldston, that if your apartment was on fire, my Dad would be cursing you every step of the way as he carried you from the burning building. That’s just the kind of guy he is. (When I mentioned this to him, he laughed and said, “Goddamn liberals.”)

Now, my dad isn’t here tonight. But of course your parents are here tonight. That’s why, as part of a Senior Dinner speech, I probably should be using phrases here like “precious cargo,” and expressing thanks on behalf of the faculty for lending us your children, and all that crap. This is also the place where I insert a joke about how writing that check to Wash U is going to feel downright painless compared to all these years of paying Fieldston tuition. Then I can cross parents off the checklist.

 Then it’s on to the faculty and staff. This is the point in my speech where I gently rib my colleagues by wondering how long it takes the inimitable Bob Montera to metabolize a cannoli (in some ways, probably about fifteen seconds). This is also where I reveal, on good authority, that Felix Adler loved Broadway theater, because Bill Werner used to take him to backstage to meet people like Eugene O’Neill and Lena Horne. “Act like you’ve been here before,” Bill would whisper to the starstruck Adler.

Then we come to the audience participation part of the speech.  I say, “blah blah blah Dotty Hanson, ladies and gentlemen, let’s give her a hand.” (Please applaud.)  I say “blah blah blah Mark Stanek. (Please applaud.)” I will now demonstrate my good progressive credentials: “Blah blah blah catering crew.” (Gesture.)  We’re like family, right, Liz? Never around when it’s time to clean up.

That done, I will pivot and turn my focus to the people who are texting about the party that will be starting about an hour from now, and that of course is you, soon to be ex-Fieldstonians. (Semiolon; close parentheses.) But insofar as I can possibly make things interesting tonight, I thought I’d tweak the formula by addressing you not as who you are tonight, but instead as the people you will be in ten years, because I think that’s about the length of the next segment of life course you’ve now embarked upon, that increasingly long stretch in our society  between when childhood ends and adulthood begins.


I want to begin the process of talking to your future selves, however, by first inviting you for a quick trip down memory lane and asking you to remember that long ago time when you were just starting the college process. Actually, as some of the people in this room know, I happen to be the father of a Form V Fieldston student, and this spring break we began that journey that you all recently finished. You remember how that goes: You start by thinking in terms of broad categories: near versus far; city versus country, and, of course, big versus small. From the start, my son Jay has been very open-minded about the process, but he was also clear at the outset that he wasn’t much interested in a small liberal arts college. Can’t be small. No Williams, no Amherst, no Sarah Lawrence, where his mother teaches (God forbid he should avail himself of the free tuition.) Small is been there, done that. Jay has loved going to Fieldston, but let’s face it: Fieldston is small – my own graduating class was one and a half times the size of this whole high school. Now Jay is a good kid, and he indulged his father and his college counselor Harry Dawe by paying a visit to Davidson College down in North Carolina three months ago, which is, by liberal arts college standards, on the small side. As it turned out, he really likes it, and he plans to apply. As you know, experiences like these can be formative ones in the life of a family. So it is only natural that a father like myself will bring his paternal instincts to bear and helpfully say, “I told you so.”

We of course have no idea what will happen with Jay and the whole college process. Though I will say that if all goes well, this time next year I’ll be sitting where you are now, glancing surreptitiously at my watch, and grousing that at least at Fieldston you don’t have to pay housing fees.

Now by that point, you all will have your first year of college behind you. You will have had that bizarre experience of freshman orientation, meeting and befriending people for little reason other than the fact that they happen to live two matchbox-sized rooms away from you and don’t like their roommate any more than you like yours. And in the coming days, you will find yourself standing beside one of these people at three o’clock in the morning, lending your moral support as she vomits profusely beside you behind the frat house. And as she retches, you will marvel how it is that you find yourself placing a gentle hand on her back – that in a life that has been so much a matter of deciding what you want, of choice, that you find yourself in relationships that are not entirely a matter of your control. Five years from now, you’ll be a cherished guest at the wedding of this cookie-tosser. Twenty years from now, you’ll be writing a check for her kid’s bar mitzvah. He’s a spoiled brat, but what can you do? This is what friendship means.

 But I’m getting ahead of myself. About four years from now, you’ll be graduating from college. It will turn out to be much easier than you expected, because after surviving a year of intensive chemistry with Compton Mahase, pretty much anything seems easy by comparison. And so your parents will once again be trudging through another set of rituals not unlike the ones you’re finishing up now. They’ll be gazing surreptitiously at their watches listening to some speaker making a lame joke about how paying tuition at Duke Law School will be a breeze because it’s only be a matter of three years rather than four. You’ll bounce around for a while in the months and maybe years following your college graduation – it’s likely to be one of the more unsettling moments in your life – while you try to figure out what you’re going to do with yourself. By your late twenties, you will either have started graduate work or started kidding yourself that you might go; you’ll be married or starting to wonder why you’re not; and a few of you will actually have children of your own while the rest of you try to avoid making the same mistake. Hopefully, by the time you’re at the end of your twenties you’ll have a pretty good idea about what you want from your life. You’ll spend your thirties chasing what you want; your forties realizing you’re not going to achieve what you want; your fifties realizing you’re going to lose what you have; your sixties actually losing what you have; and your seventies trying to find your glasses. In your eighties you’ll be hallucinating that you’re back in Form IV, telling a bewildered Coach Bluth that it doesn’t matter that you suck at basketball. You’re still a good person. “He knows,” your daughter will be telling you, placing her hand gently on your back. He knows.” But again I digress.

 My real point is that over the course of the next decade, I expect you’ll be paying periodic visits to your high school alma mater. At first it will feel weird, because life will have actually gone on without you, and you’ll walk into Lorenzo Krakowsky or Nancy Banks’s office to find that the kids there actually seem to think they own them the way you did. And as you walk around the campus, you’ll think: Jeez, this place is small. Way back when you were in seventh grade – and, of course, you’re old enough to have attended Fieldston before there was a separate middle school, back in those golden days before the catastrophic decline in admissions standards – the place seemed huge. Then it seemed to fit you just right. But now it’s shrinking. And it will keep shrinking over the course of the next few years.

And then a surprising thing will start to happen: Fieldston will start to get big again. You will have spent the last decade feeling so palpably that you’re a free agent, moving from school to school, job to job, city to city, establishing yourself. It will only be then, about ten years from now, that you’ll begin to see in a way you never quite fully grasped how much you’re a product no less than an agent, that you’ve been imprinted by an institution that has defined you all the time you thought you were inventing yourself. 

But here’s the funny thing about this institution: it’s based on an idea. Actually, this doesn’t happen all that often. Survival, economic gain, pleasure: these are some of the reasons institutions, even academic institutions come into being. But this one is premised on an idea, namely that the world can, in fact, be made into a better place.  Now, I will confess to you that I, who has been educated somewhat differently than you have, am not entirely sure the world can be made into a better place. And I’m mindful, as I know many of you are, that the people who came up with this idea, and those who of us who sustain it, can be a little full of ourselves.  But it’s a proposition that I’m willing to entertain, particularly because it’s one that has somehow conjured up a building in which toilets flush, emails get sent, and meals get eaten every day. Not bad for an idea.

But that’s not all this notion that the world can be a better has conjured. It’s also conjured up an institution where you can find a teacher whose work has been purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (That’s Nancy Fried; check it out.) It’s conjured up a place where an adolescent can not simply participate, but design, a community service action project that actually helps people. It’s conjured up things called MADs and FADs and ALPs.

All of this was in place when you arrived. But there are other things which, as you reflect on them in the decade since you graduated, were of your time, and which are now beginning to seem more striking. Perhaps that’s because they’ll seem ahead of their time, or perhaps it’s because they will be the kind of thing people make fun of, though more likely than not the people who do so will be ones you don’t like that much, like the idiot president we will no doubt soon have. (Because, let’s face it, kids: it’s all downhill from here.) I’m talking about things like fact that you had a “green dean” way back in 2009. Or that in a time when gay people were still being demonized in public life, you had a gay head of school, about whom the most relevant facts were how good he was at his job and how sorry everyone was to see him go.

And you’ll ask yourself: What does this mean for me? Who does this mean I am? And it’s at this point that I’m going to have to bail out on the prediction side of things.  Nor, since I am now a former teacher as far as you’re concerned, will I be dispensing any pearls of wisdom, which was never my strong suit anyway. Instead, I will end by expressing a series of hopes. One, that you will prosper in your chosen endeavors. Two, that you will savor the joy of friendship – which, among other things, will involve placing a reassuring hand on the back of a barfing friend at three a.m. behind a frat house. (You can always use the opportunity to reminisce at length about a speech you once heard by an old History teacher back at your high school, which I’m sure will go over very well.) And finally, that you will always have room for an idea – a good idea – a possibility that will remain alive because at the start of a life in which you remain blessedly young, you had the good fortune to attend a surprisingly big school.

All right, kids. That’s all for now. See you on Facebook.

Big School

 In this graduation season, a reprise of the address I delivered the Senior Dinner, held at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School on June 8, 2010.

When I learned that I was to be the speaker at Senior Dinner, which I regard as one of the great honors of my career, my first reaction was joy. My second, of course, was dread, dread of the sort I’ve been inflicting on my students for years. Now it’s my turn to try and be interesting. Touché, kids. That’s a French term. It means "also awake at 3 a.m."

One thing I’m always telling my students when they sit down to write for me is that they should always begin with a question of audience: To whom are you speaking? This is a simple question, but a necessary one. The answer for this particular assignment seems obvious enough: I’ve been chosen by the student body to address the student body. But insofar as it’s true, I’m not only addressing the student body. As my students know, if I was only addressing the student body, this speech would have a great many four letter words in it. But that would get me into a bit of trouble with some of the people our principal, John Love, generously calls “grownups.” Of course, it should be said that my penchant for using four letter words is a piece of pedagogic stagecraft I learned from one of the important grownups in my life, my father. I don’t know whether my dad acquired his distinctive patois from his years on the New York Fire Department, or whether he got it from his father, a longshoreman down at Chelsea Piers, also known, thanks to our good friends the Bernsteins, as ECF South. Now, there, ladies and gentlemen, was a workingmen’s school. I will also tell you, good students of Fieldston, that if your apartment was on fire, my Dad would be cursing you every step of the way as he carried you from the burning building. That’s just the kind of guy he is. (When I mentioned this to him, he laughed and said, “Goddamn liberals.”)

Now, my dad isn’t here tonight. But of course your parents are here tonight. That’s why, as part of a Senior Dinner speech, I probably should be using phrases here like “precious cargo,” and expressing thanks on behalf of the faculty for lending us your children, and all that crap. This is also the place where I insert a joke about how writing that check to Wash U is going to feel downright painless compared to all these years of paying Fieldston tuition. Then I can cross parents off the checklist.

 Then it’s on to the faculty and staff. This is the point in my speech where I gently rib my colleagues by wondering how long it takes the inimitable Bob Montera to metabolize a cannoli (in some ways, probably about fifteen seconds). This is also where I reveal, on good authority, that Felix Adler loved Broadway theater, because Bill Werner used to take him to backstage to meet people like Eugene O’Neill and Lena Horne. “Act like you’ve been here before,” Bill would whisper to the starstruck Adler.

Then we come to the audience participation part of the speech.  I say, “blah blah blah Dotty Hanson, ladies and gentlemen, let’s give her a hand.” (Please applaud.)  I say “blah blah blah Mark Stanek. (Please applaud.)” I will now demonstrate my good progressive credentials: “Blah blah blah catering crew.” (Gesture.)  We’re like family, right, Liz? Never around when it’s time to clean up.

That done, I will pivot and turn my focus to the people who are texting about the party that will be starting about an hour from now, and that of course is you, soon to be ex-Fieldstonians. (Semiolon; close parentheses.) But insofar as I can possibly make things interesting tonight, I thought I’d tweak the formula by addressing you not as who you are tonight, but instead as the people you will be in ten years, because I think that’s about the length of the next segment of life course you’ve now embarked upon, that increasingly long stretch in our society  between when childhood ends and adulthood begins.


I want to begin the process of talking to your future selves, however, by first inviting you for a quick trip down memory lane and asking you to remember that long ago time when you were just starting the college process. Actually, as some of the people in this room know, I happen to be the father of a Form V Fieldston student, and this spring break we began that journey that you all recently finished. You remember how that goes: You start by thinking in terms of broad categories: near versus far; city versus country, and, of course, big versus small. From the start, my son Jay has been very open-minded about the process, but he was also clear at the outset that he wasn’t much interested in a small liberal arts college. Can’t be small. No Williams, no Amherst, no Sarah Lawrence, where his mother teaches (God forbid he should avail himself of the free tuition.) Small is been there, done that. Jay has loved going to Fieldston, but let’s face it: Fieldston is small – my own graduating class was one and a half times the size of this whole high school. Now Jay is a good kid, and he indulged his father and his college counselor Harry Dawe by paying a visit to Davidson College down in North Carolina three months ago, which is, by liberal arts college standards, on the small side. As it turned out, he really likes it, and he plans to apply. As you know, experiences like these can be formative ones in the life of a family. So it is only natural that a father like myself will bring his paternal instincts to bear and helpfully say, “I told you so.”

We of course have no idea what will happen with Jay and the whole college process. Though I will say that if all goes well, this time next year I’ll be sitting where you are now, glancing surreptitiously at my watch, and grousing that at least at Fieldston you don’t have to pay housing fees.

Now by that point, you all will have your first year of college behind you. You will have had that bizarre experience of freshman orientation, meeting and befriending people for little reason other than the fact that they happen to live two matchbox-sized rooms away from you and don’t like their roommate any more than you like yours. And in the coming days, you will find yourself standing beside one of these people at three o’clock in the morning, lending your moral support as she vomits profusely beside you behind the frat house. And as she retches, you will marvel how it is that you find yourself placing a gentle hand on her back – that in a life that has been so much a matter of deciding what you want, of choice, that you find yourself in relationships that are not entirely a matter of your control. Five years from now, you’ll be a cherished guest at the wedding of this cookie-tosser. Twenty years from now, you’ll be writing a check for her kid’s bar mitzvah. He’s a spoiled brat, but what can you do? This is what friendship means.

 But I’m getting ahead of myself. About four years from now, you’ll be graduating from college. It will turn out to be much easier than you expected, because after surviving a year of intensive chemistry with Compton Mahase, pretty much anything seems easy by comparison. And so your parents will once again be trudging through another set of rituals not unlike the ones you’re finishing up now. They’ll be gazing surreptitiously at their watches listening to some speaker making a lame joke about how paying tuition at Duke Law School will be a breeze because it’s only be a matter of three years rather than four. You’ll bounce around for a while in the months and maybe years following your college graduation – it’s likely to be one of the more unsettling moments in your life – while you try to figure out what you’re going to do with yourself. By your late twenties, you will either have started graduate work or started kidding yourself that you might go; you’ll be married or starting to wonder why you’re not; and a few of you will actually have children of your own while the rest of you try to avoid making the same mistake. Hopefully, by the time you’re at the end of your twenties you’ll have a pretty good idea about what you want from your life. You’ll spend your thirties chasing what you want; your forties realizing you’re not going to achieve what you want; your fifties realizing you’re going to lose what you have; your sixties actually losing what you have; and your seventies trying to find your glasses. In your eighties you’ll be hallucinating that you’re back in Form IV, telling a bewildered Coach Bluth that it doesn’t matter that you suck at basketball. You’re still a good person. “He knows,” your daughter will be telling you, placing her hand gently on your back. He knows.” But again I digress.

 My real point is that over the course of the next decade, I expect you’ll be paying periodic visits to your high school alma mater. At first it will feel weird, because life will have actually gone on without you, and you’ll walk into Lorenzo Krakowsky or Nancy Banks’s office to find that the kids there actually seem to think they own them the way you did. And as you walk around the campus, you’ll think: Jeez, this place is small. Way back when you were in seventh grade – and, of course, you’re old enough to have attended Fieldston before there was a separate middle school, back in those golden days before the catastrophic decline in admissions standards – the place seemed huge. Then it seemed to fit you just right. But now it’s shrinking. And it will keep shrinking over the course of the next few years.

And then a surprising thing will start to happen: Fieldston will start to get big again. You will have spent the last decade feeling so palpably that you’re a free agent, moving from school to school, job to job, city to city, establishing yourself. It will only be then, about ten years from now, that you’ll begin to see in a way you never quite fully grasped how much you’re a product no less than an agent, that you’ve been imprinted by an institution that has defined you all the time you thought you were inventing yourself. 

But here’s the funny thing about this institution: it’s based on an idea. Actually, this doesn’t happen all that often. Survival, economic gain, pleasure: these are some of the reasons institutions, even academic institutions come into being. But this one is premised on an idea, namely that the world can, in fact, be made into a better place.  Now, I will confess to you that I, who has been educated somewhat differently than you have, am not entirely sure the world can be made into a better place. And I’m mindful, as I know many of you are, that the people who came up with this idea, and those who of us who sustain it, can be a little full of ourselves.  But it’s a proposition that I’m willing to entertain, particularly because it’s one that has somehow conjured up a building in which toilets flush, emails get sent, and meals get eaten every day. Not bad for an idea.

But that’s not all this notion that the world can be a better has conjured. It’s also conjured up an institution where you can find a teacher whose work has been purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (That’s Nancy Fried; check it out.) It’s conjured up a place where an adolescent can not simply participate, but design, a community service action project that actually helps people. It’s conjured up things called MADs and FADs and ALPs.

All of this was in place when you arrived. But there are other things which, as you reflect on them in the decade since you graduated, were of your time, and which are now beginning to seem more striking. Perhaps that’s because they’ll seem ahead of their time, or perhaps it’s because they will be the kind of thing people make fun of, though more likely than not the people who do so will be ones you don’t like that much, like the idiot president we will no doubt soon have. (Because, let’s face it, kids: it’s all downhill from here.) I’m talking about things like fact that you had a “green dean” way back in 2009. Or that in a time when gay people were still being demonized in public life, you had a gay head of school, about whom the most relevant facts were how good he was at his job and how sorry everyone was to see him go.

And you’ll ask yourself: What does this mean for me? Who does this mean I am? And it’s at this point that I’m going to have to bail out on the prediction side of things.  Nor, since I am now a former teacher as far as you’re concerned, will I be dispensing any pearls of wisdom, which was never my strong suit anyway. Instead, I will end by expressing a series of hopes. One, that you will prosper in your chosen endeavors. Two, that you will savor the joy of friendship – which, among other things, will involve placing a reassuring hand on the back of a barfing friend at three a.m. behind a frat house. (You can always use the opportunity to reminisce at length about a speech you once heard by an old History teacher back at your high school, which I’m sure will go over very well.) And finally, that you will always have room for an idea – a good idea – a possibility that will remain alive because at the start of a life in which you remain blessedly young, you had the good fortune to attend a surprisingly big school.

All right, kids. That’s all for now. See you on Facebook.

King's Survey: Imperial Resorts

Wreckage of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, 1898

In which see the temptations, and complications, of empire

So, Emily, what are we going to do about Samoa?

—You tell me, Mr. K.

No, you tell me.

—That’s not my job.

Oh yes it is. You’ve got a job to do. You’re a student.

—Well then I need a raise.

Fine. I’ll double your salary.

—Aren’t samoas Indian food?

—No, that’s samosas.

—Oh. I love those.

Samoa refers to a set of islands in the Pacific.

—Well, in that case, I know what we should do. Make a trip there. I could use a vacation.

So, Em, you’re saying we should occupy Samoa.

—Well, I’m saying we should resort to going there, if you know what I mean.

As a first resort, or a last resort?

—What the hell are you two talking about?

Adam, I’m not entirely sure where Em is, literally or figuratively, but I’m talking about what the United States should do about the Samoan Islands, which have been in turmoil for the last decade or so (I should point out that we’re in the 1890s now). There’s been a long Civil War going on there, and the British and (especially) the Germans have been tussling for control. My question is what stance the United States should have.

—Why should we have any stance?

A fair question. Overseas involvement of this kind has not really been a major feature of U.S. foreign policy. But as you know, the world is changing. In particular, European nations are gobbling up territory in Asia and Africa. Actually, the U.S. has been increasingly interested in pursuing commercial interests around the world. In the 1850s, an American naval squadron under the leadership of Admiral Matthew C. Perry demanded that Japan open up its markets, a move that precipitated revolutionary changes in that country, and one which as led to an extraordinary military modernization of Japan, which, as we approach 1900, is on its way to becoming a major world power. (Perhaps Perry should have been careful what he wished for.) In 1867, Secretary of State William Seward, who served under President Lincoln, negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia, which a lot of people thought was a dumb idea—they called it “Seward’s Icebox,” or “Seward’s Folly,” until gold was discovered there in 1896. Pacific Islands like those in Samoa are increasingly valuable as coaling stations for ships (now that the age of sailboats is over), and any nation that wants to be a major-league player needs them. Germany in particular is playing catch-up—it only officially became a unified state in 1871—and is trying to rack up properties around the world while some are still available for the taking.

—Adam's right. I still don’t get why we should care about any of this.

Well, Sadie, maybe we shouldn’t.

—Maybe we should let the Samoans decide what they want.

There are two problems with that seemingly sensible approach, Kylie. The first is that the Samoans themselves are divided. One reason they’re divided is that outside powers are meddling in Samoan affairs. Which brings us to the second problem: letting the Samoans decide what they want in effect means letting the Germans (and maybe the British) take over everything. Do we want that?

—Why should we care?

Well, maybe we shouldn’t. But Germany has been expanding mighty rapidly, and that includes places like South America. When European powers go into places like Columbia and Venezuela, they lend a lot of money and generate economic development, but they also generate a lot of debt. And when those countries can’t or won’t pay, the European powers send gunships, which is a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. What I’m saying is that if we don’t try to check the advance of the imperialist powers, they end up pushing people around, and we may end up being among those people.

—Doesn’t sound like a good situation. I think we have to stand firm. Let’s take Samoa.

—Don’t they provide us with good NFL players now?

Indeed they do.

—All the more reason, then.

—Are the Samoans going to be better off with us? Have they been?

Well, you know, Yin, I don’t know. And you can attribute my ignorance on this count as an artifact of my ethnocentrism, or my imperialism, or my racism (take your pick or all three). Five Samoan islands are U.S. territory. They get to vote in primaries, but not presidential elections.

—That’s weird.

There are all kinds of quirks in the way the U.S. runs its overseas territories. In any case, I think Jonah’s right. Let’s agree to take Samoa.

—Really? Have we agreed?

Has anyone objected? I haven’t heard anyone say no. Good. We’re moving on.

—Hey!

—He’s making a point, Kylie.

About Cuba.

—Cuba?

—Uh oh. Here we go.

As we know, Cuba has been a Spanish colony for over 400 years now. They are horrible colonists. The Cubans have been in a state of almost perpetual rebellion against the Spanish for the last 20 years. Our presidents, most recently President McKinley, have tried to reason with the Spanish to be less brutal. But they won’t listen to us.

—I wonder why.

Well, it is true that some Americans have had their eye on acquiring Cuba since the 1850s, when proslavery advocates wanted to annex it. And it is also true that the assistant secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, has been advocating a major U.S. naval buildup, and Cuba could be a nice piece of real estate. But let’s emphasize the humanitarian dimensions of the Cuban situation, shall we?

—Let’s not and say we did.

—Are we talking about the Spanish-American War now?

Indeed we are.

—So how did it actually happen?

Well, amid spurned offers for mediation, and some lurid press coverage in the United States, President McKinley sent a ship, USS Maine, to protect American interests in Havana. In early 1898, the Maine blew up.

—Who did that?

Nobody knows.

—How convenient.

Historians now belief it was an industrial accident. But there was a widespread belief—or, at any rate, a widespread assertion—that the Spanish did it. There was also an intercepted diplomatic cable that referred to President McKinley in unflattering terms.

—What did it say?

That he was “weak.”

—Oh well, then, you have to go to war.

That spring, the United States did so. Undersecretary Roosevelt, who was probably taking on more responsibility than his boss would have liked, had dispatched ships to the Philippines, which were also rebelling against Spanish rule. At the Battle of Manila Bay, the U.S. wrecked the Spanish fleet. A few months later, the U.S. invaded Cuba (Roosevelt left his desk job to lead an attack as an officer at San Juan Hill, which made him a national celebrity). Though the operation was in many ways amateurish, the Americans won there too. By the fall of 1898, the Spanish sued for peace.

—So that’s how we got Cuba.

—We didn’t get Cuba, did we?

Right.

—Who?

Both of you. The U.S. had declared war on a basis of liberating Cuba—Cuba libre! went the slogan—so simply taking the island would have posed political problems at home and abroad. And here I should point out that there was significant opposition to the war in the United States.

—Thank God. I was beginning to think we were all jerks.

So Cuba became independent. Sort of. There was a provision to the U.S. treaty with Cuba, the Platt Amendment, which basically said: you’re free to do what you like, unless you do something we don’t like. For the next sixty years, Cuba became a de facto U.S. colony—except for the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, which was actually U.S. property. Which it remains, even after the Cuban revolution of 1959, when the nation became Communist. But the U.S. did pick up possessions from the war in Guam (also out in the Pacific) and Puerto Rico. Which remain U.S. territories, with varying degrees of ambivalence on their part of its residents, to this day.

—What about the Philippines?

Ah, good question. So I told you that the Filipinos were in revolt against the Spanish. They were very happy to get help from the Americans. They were a good deal less happy when the Americans hesitated to leave after the Spanish defeat while the U.S. government decided what it wanted to do with the Philippines. The Filipinos under the leadership of a man named Eduardo Aguinaldo led an insurrection against the U.S. occupation for a few years after the war ended that was finally put down. The Philippines became U.S. territory until World War II, when it was occupied by the Japanese. After the war the Filipinos got their independence, but again, the U.S. maintains a huge naval installation there.

But if the Philippines was a U.S. possession, Filipinos were not U.S. citizens. There was a lot of litigation about this, but the Supreme Court finally ruled that the Constitution follows the flag, but not necessarily right away.

—What’s that supposed to mean?

Go to law school and find out. We’re getting out of my pay grade, Adam.

—So are you saying you want a pay raise, Mr. K.? Should I double your salary?

Nah, Em, I don’t want the hassle of more responsibility than I already have. But I do want to ask you a final question.

—You with the questions! Go ahead. I’ll accept the hassle of responsibility of thinking for the whole class.

Great, though your classmates can pitch in. My question is: What’s happening to the United States’ place in the world in these closing decades of the 19^th century?

—We’re becoming a bunch of jerks.

—We’re becoming a world power.

—Same thing.

—Not it’s not. It’s like Mr. K. said about the Samoans. If we don’t do it, someone else will. And that someone else will be worse than us.

—Really? The Cubans were oppressed by the Spanish. Then they were oppressed by the Americans. What difference does it make?

—Actually, that’s an interesting question. Do we know who was worse? Can you tell us, Mr. K.?

I don’t know that I can give you a clear-cut answer to that, Kylie. Partly it depends on what your standards are. Which is the kind of thing I’m hoping conversations like these will help you develop.

—Good luck with that.

Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying. Or maybe you can. I hope you won’t.

Jay's way

In which a teacher prods a class to cast a cold eye on an American Dream

The Felix Chronicles, #21

JAY GATSBY IS A PATHETIC FRAUD.

I point to the file I've just clicked open on the Smart Board. It's a document in bold type, consisting of nothing but those five words. “What do you think, folks? Is Gatsby a pathetic fraud?”

"Absolutely," say Roy without hesitation.

"He is not!" says Kim.

“He makes up his identity,” Roy says. “Gatsby pretends to be something he’s not.”

"So you think he's a fraud, Roy," I say. "And pathetic?"

Roy is nodding his assent when Jason jumps in.“No,” he says. “Because even though Gatsby makes things up Nick Carraway admires his hope and his ambition.”

“Well that’s what Nick thinks,” I say. “That’s what Jason thinks, too?”

He nods. “Yes, I do.”

Becky weighs in. “He was definitely a fraud, she says. But I’m not sure about pathetic. He did questionable things on the way up, but the fact that he was striving for something – he might not be pathetic.”

“Oh no, he’s definitely pathetic and a fraud, says Nate. "He got where he was through fraudulence, cheating and going around the law –”

I interrupt: “That’s fraud in the legal sense of the term. A crime.”

“Yes, he continues, and he’s pathetic in the desperation with which he wants Daisy Buchanan."

"Okay. But let’s step back,” I say. “When you’re confronted with a statement like 'Jay Gatsby is a pathetic fraud,' what’s the first thing you should do?”

A moment of silence. I don’t expect an instant answer – actually, I’ll feel better if it emerges after a moment of consideration – but I’ve been hammering at this point long enough in our papers and our discussions to expect at least some clarity on this point.

I hear an indistinct female voice. “Define.” A little tentative, but at least it’s an assertion, not a question.

“Right,” I say emphatically. “You’ve got to define your terms. Now let’s go back to the easier part of this: Is Jay Gatsby a fraud?”

A chorus of voices: “Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because he pretends to be someone he’s not,” Ellen says. I note that at least some of the facts are reasonably clear: the man who calls himself Jay Gatsby was actually born James Gatz, he makes inaccurate factual statements about his background (among them that he lived in San Francisco, which he describes as “the Middle West”), and so on. There are other, unverifiable claims he makes that we can regard with some suspicion, but in any event there is no empirical doubt – the man says things that aren’t true, ipso facto (I slip in a little vocabulary building here) he is a fraud. Right?

I’m expecting, even inviting, a challenge, but I don’t expect it to come from Nate. I’m not so sure, he says.

“Wait a second – didn’t you just say he was both pathetic and a fraud?”

“Well, I’m thinking about it,” he says. Noting Ellen’s observation that he created a character for himself, Nate notes that when James Gatz adopted the identity of Jay Gatsby, he invented that person and became that person. He followed all the rules of the person he invented.

“So,” I say by way of offering an example, when Gatsby describes himself as “an Oxford man,” he’s saying something that’s factually accurate – he did go to Oxford – just not in the way people customarily think of it, getting an undergraduate degree and the like.

“Exactly.”

Joey jumps in. “They’re all a bunch of frauds.”

Really? How so?

“Daisy is pretending to be a faithful wife; Myrtle is pretending to be belong in the world of Tom, with whom she’s having an affair, Jordan is pretending . . . .”

“ . . . that she cares about anyone but herself?” I offer. Joey nods. We all get the point.

“Of course,” I say after a pause, “by this standard, we’re probably all frauds.” No takers on that one.

“The point about Gatsby,” Kim says, "is that Gatsby seems to have a kind of higher purpose. That’s why Nick admires him.”

Nick Carraway again. I don’t want them to lean on him so much. At least right now.

“Okay,” I say. “You understand my real point here, which is less about whether Gatsby is or isn’t a fraud, and more about having a clear standard by which you measure the term. Now let’s move on to a term I suspect is a little less clear: pathetic. What does it mean to be pathetic?”

A long pause. I repeat the question.

“Lame, “says Nate. “That’s a word that comes to mind.”

“To get to a desperation point, says Liza. To stoop to a certain point.”

Another pause.

“I guess it’s time for me to share my secret dream with you,” I tell the class. “My secret dream – I take a suspense-building breath – is that I really think I can make it in the NBA. I want to become a professional basketball player.”

A few smiles.

“I mean, yeah, sure, it’s a long shot. Yes, I’ll have to lose a few pounds, work out a little harder. And yes, I’m not all that tall. But if I’m willing to work at it, and give it everything I’ve got, I mean, why not? I can do this! I mean, this is America, right?”

By this point in the school year, they’re used to this routine. No one is jumping to take the bait. “So I ask: Am I pathetic?”

“No,” says Kim. “You’re not pathetic.”

“Why not?”

“Because I think that having dreams is never pathetic.”

“Even my dream of playing in the NBA?”

“No matter how unattainable dreams may be.”

“Wait a second, I say in a voice of mock indignation. Are you suggesting my dream is unattainable?”

“No! NoNoNo!” The class relieves itself in collective laughter as Kim struggles to avoid giving offense. “Your problem is you’re too nice,” I tell her, as the class laughs some more – a well-known aspect of her personality is suddenly on public view, and my guess is that not all of this laughter is entirely sympathetic. Do they also see her grit? She waits for the laughter to subside to finish making her point. “Striving for a dream is never pathetic," she insists. "Even if it’s unattainable. That may be hard for a person to deal with in the end, but it’s not pathetic. Gatsby realizes that his dream is never what he made it out to be, but – "

“– are you saying Gatsby’s dream is also unattainable?”

“Well, he kind of got her, at least at first. But what I mean is that dreams and goals are what make life . . . . “

I finish her sentence: “Miserable?” The class roars with laughter. It feels like some tension is being discharged.

“No! No!” Kim shouts fruitlessly among the din. But it’s clear she’s not quite ready to yield.

This is good.

“Dreams are vicious things, Kim, are they not?”

“No.” She sounds almost contrite.

“No?”

“No.” (A little more assertive.) “You have to keep pushing. You have to deal with the pain of it, and maybe have a new dream. Because that’s how you keep going, how you keep going forward.”

I’m moved by her ingenuousness, but say nothing. Instead, I shift my gaze to Joey, who has been watching these proceedings with unfeigned amusement. “Do you endorse my dream of making it in the NBA? You think I should do it?”

He shrugs. “Sure,” he says, an affirmation of heartless indifference.

“Wow,” I reply with exaggerated indignation. “I can't tell who's more cruel. Kim for encouraging me, or you for dismissing me.”

"I'm not cruel!" Kim protests.

Ellen is more measured. “If you’re striving to better yourself, that’s fine, she says. "But if you start closing off other avenues – like if you quit your day job and waste all this money training –"

“What are you implying?”

“Well, obviously you can’t make it in the NBA.”

“Oh really? Well what if I’m a Kim guy and insist on it? That makes me pathetic?”

“In my opinion, yes.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re throwing away what you have for the sake of something that’s never going to happen.”

“Hmmm.” Silently putting aside the question of just what she’s referring to in what she thinks I have, I shake my head and say she’s given us a pretty good definition of pathetic. Does it apply to Gatsby? Is he pathetic for chasing Daisy?

“Yes. “

“Why?”

“He wants to repeat the past, he wants to take back those five years,” she says, referring to a famous line in the novel (“Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!”). Gatsby wants Daisy not to have married, not to have had a daughter, not to have never had feelings for her husband Tom.

“That’s pathetic.”

The clarity of Ellen’s reasoning is impressive. I wonder if she has effectively played out the string. But then Joey continues to develop his earlier point. “Actually," he says, "it’s the other characters in the book who strike me as more pathetic.”

“Really? How so?”

“They’re so bored with themselves. They don’t know what to do.”

“Why is that pathetic? I mean, maybe it’s obnoxious, or just unattractive. But pathetic?”

“I think it’s pathetic, I guess, because they don’t have dreams.” (Shades of Kim here – who would have thought?) “Because they’re already wealthy.”

I note that Liza had used the word “desperate” when we began trying to define the word “pathetic.” But the characters of Daisy, Tom, Jordan: Are they desperate?

“Yeah, I think so,” Joey replies. “Daisy is desperate to do something with her life.”

“All right then. So here’s our Spark Notes summary of The Great Gatsby” (a few chuckles as I speak): “It’s a book about desperately pathetic frauds, of whom Gatsby is the least pathetic and fraudulent.”

I’m inviting disagreement, but assume it’s going to take a moment to coalesce. So I’m particularly surprised when Ginger raises her hand with a face that suggests obvious dissent. For months now, I’ve been using every official channel (and a few unofficial ones, like a word to her advisor) to tell Ginger I’d like to hear from her more. In part this is because her exams and essays are so weak that class participation is the one avenue I see open in terms of having a discretionary lever with which to raise her grade into the relatively safe C range. The one time we had a conversation about this directly, she grew defensive to the point of hostility. I don’t think of her as especially bright – in the terminology my wife sometimes casually uses in the privacy of the dinner table, she has “a gray matter issue” – which she may know and believe independently. Alas, her pattern of diffidence may the most concrete evidence I have of relevant intelligence. I'm reminded of the old Abe Lincoln joke: it's better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove any doubt.

“I just don’t see him as a pathetic fraud, she says. Actually, I think he’s kind of a tragic hero.”

Not bad, Ginger, I think. Not bad at all. “Well now, that’s a term we haven’t heard in this discussion. Tragic hero? How so?”

“Well, because of stuff that people like Kim and Jason have been saying. He has something and he works hard toward it. He’s like the most developed character in the book.”

Chris, who has been quiet thus far, has raised his hand, ready to take it from there. I’m pleased. There’s something palpably sane about Chris – he’s consistently pragmatic in his commentary, while evincing a sense of sympathy for any character he’s assessing, whether real or fictional. He seems like he’d be a great friend. The thought occurs to me that he’s gay (a couple gestures, his well-known presence with the theater crowd), which, if true, is an orientation he seems to inhabit with a sense of equilibrium uncommon in adolescents. I find myself wondering to what degree his parents get credit for that. “I agree with Ginger, he’s now saying. "I think we’re putting far too much emphasis on the attainability of the dream in deciding whether it’s pathetic or not. Actually, I think Gatsby was successful on a lot of levels. He imagined a life, he lived it out, he gained a lot of respect –"

“Well OK,” I acknowledge. “That’s true. But those are means, not ends. You’re saying that if I lose twenty pounds, improve my jump shot, maybe improve my sense of athletic fashion, I’m not pathetic, even if I don’t make it to the NBA, right?”

“Right. Because you’ve moved toward your goal –"

“ – as long,” Ellen chimes in, “as you don’t let it define your life.”

I nod, considering this approvingly. “All right. I’ll buy that. But let me ask you this: To what degree does the goal itself matter? Maybe it’s not pathetic to devote, or even lose, your life in a quest for world peace or to defeat racism. But Gatsby had a dream of winning the heart of Daisy. Here I gotta ask: Daisy? Like me in the NBA, no? More to the point: What kind of dream is Daisy? I’ll tell you what makes Gatsby pathetic: It’s that Daisy is what he wants!” Here I make feminine gestures with my hands and adopt the most ridiculous voice I can muster, quoting her inane reaction to Gatsby’s wardrobe when getting a tour of his house: “Oh the shirts! I don’t think I’ve ever seen such beautiful shirts before!” I know that the laughter that ensues is as much for how foolish I look in mocking Daisy than in the foolishness of Daisy herself.

Kim’s not interested in a cheap laugh. “I don’t think it’s really about Daisy, she says, as if she hadn’t heard anything but my question. It’s more that Daisy is a symbol of a larger dream.”

“Yes,” says Chris. “I mean even when he was a kid, Gatsby was making that list of things to do.”

“Like ‘Be Nicer to Parents,’” I quote, part of an inventory that included “study needed inventions” and “practice elocution,” suggesting that Gatsby was a kind of warped Benjamin Franklin from the very beginning. “Be nicer to parents: Now there’s a moron for you.”

Kim is still working through her idea. “Daisy represents everything that Gatsby wants, she’s saying. It’s the house, the pool, the status.”

“So Gatsby objectifies her? She’s a status symbol?

Yeah.

“Unlike all of you, who when you fall in love are actually in love with the authentic person, not some notion of what they appear to be. I’m almost sneering here. But we don’t make that mistake now, do we?”

Kim is trying to sidestep the question. “Well, that’s what he does, seeing her as the missing piece to a puzzle.”

“But that’s pretty shallow, isn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

“I mean, you wouldn’t make a mistake like that, now would you, Kim?” Kim clearly doesn’t like this line of questioning. I don’t blame her. Fortunately for her, class is just about over.

“I guess not, she says.” Books are closing. The classroom door has opened slightly; kids waiting to get in are sending a not-so-subtle signal. With a wry smile, I gesture toward the door. “All right then. See you tomorrow.” Class has ended on a discordant note. I’m satisfied.

“I guess not,” I repeat aloud to no one in particular as I gather my notes. Eduardo, the ethics teacher who has the class next, makes a gesture of hello as he tinkers with the Smart Board behind me, making the question of Gatsby’s pathetic fraudulence disappear. I guess not, too. Kim’s a pretty level-headed kid – diligent, committed, maybe a streak of melancholy. Then again, plenty of smart people have done plenty of dumb things when it comes to matters of the heart.

But that’s where we are: in the realm of educating guesses. In wonder how many of these kids were aware that for most of the last fifty minutes this was only nominally a History class. The interdisciplinary reach into English could be justified relatively easily; the move into judging Gatsby’s dream is more of a stretch. That’s not only because the discussion was conducted on ahistorical terms – we treated Gatsby’s dream as if it was a current event when in fact there are all kinds of ways it was historically determined – but because the line of discussion led me to query the ingenuous Kim about a matter that’s none of my business. I claim no special expertise in measuring the legitimacy or basis of love (though I perhaps illegitimately count the fact that I’ve managed to stay married for twenty years as among my most substantial accomplishments), and even if I did, the notion that a lively discussion in history class might avoid a broken heart is a conceit that . . . well, that’s exactly what it is: a conceit. I am the true pathetic fraud here, acting as if any of this really makes a difference.

Very well then. Let the dream begin again.