January: In and Out, Back and Forward, Endings and Beginnings

January. Thanks to the collision of Percy Jackson (as in The Lightning Thief), Xena (as in "Warrior Princess") and social studies (as in the 6th grade curriculum on the Ancient World) with my daughter's imagination, January's relationship to the Roman god Janus is one of our current topics of conversation.

Janus: the Roman god of doorways and gates, beginnings and endings, and decisions. He was quite popular back in the day and his distinctive head (with two faces, one looking back, one looking forward) appears frequently on ancient coins and carvings. In our time, he also shows up in the name of a door manufacturer and a family of mutual funds.

Doors, decisions, financial questions, endings and beginnings are such January things. Doors open to welcome company, closed against biting winds. Year-end tax issues, charitable contributions, decisions on the benefits package from an employer, New Year's resolutions.

And another year older, both ourselves and the ones we love.

I did some looking back this fall. I asked my mother about a specific group of pictures taken by my father's parents on a trip to his home town in Georgia. She brought out what she had.

I didn't find the pictures I was looking for. I found something I needed: pictures of smiles. Smiles I was not around to witness, was to young to notice or had forgotten in the more recent years when they were thin on the ground.

I found a picture of my grandfather taken in the early days of his life with my grandmother. They must have been traveling, for a car features prominently in the background. A boyish joy radiates from the sepia image, even though he was 31 when they married. By the time I knew him, he was imposing and sometimes stern in the way of grandparents born in the first decade of the 20th century. It was hard to imagine him being young, being something other than the upright head of the family I remember from childhood, or the quiet gentleman courteously stepping aside for his rushing children and grandchildren as the world changed and his mind began to fail him. But there it was, in that picture.

I found pictures of my grandfather's beloved baby sister. She never married but lived quite a life. Pictures of friends - oh, I wish I knew how to be the friend she was. Photographs from trips to England and Italy, and to visit us. I had known how much fun she was to be with, but had been was too young to notice the beauty and confidence of a woman who had gone after what she wanted. I noticed it now because old age stole the confidence and left her with only depression and memories of depression. This sad person was the one at the top of my memory stack. It was good to be set straight.

And I found a picture of my grandmother, the woman who made by grandfather grin like a boy. She was a loving grandmother, but not the warm and fuzzy type. The box of toys she kept for us was very small and unimaginative (to my mind). She had high expectations and was hard to please. I remembered proper, grandmotherly smiles, not laughter. But my mother had snapped a picture that told a different story. There she is, at the head of the children's table one Christmas, beaming at us and laughing with us over something extremely funny.

It is a crying shame that the evils of the present can work back and eat at the love and joy that used to be. It's not that there was no pain or heartbreak, because there was. Even (maybe especially) humans that love each other can do horrible things to one another. But to remember only the bad isn't healthy.

My heart is lighter now. Looking back gave me these smiling faces to replace the weary, even blank shadows of later photographs. I have my family back in a way I never thought possible. And I have perspective that sends me forward in peace.

Healthy heart. Moving forward. Peace. January.

*****

Check out my blog at http://steppingbacklookingcloser.blogspot.com/ to leave a comment or find past columns.

(Cleveland Post, January 5, 2012)

 

Repeating History (Cleveland Post, October 20, 2011)

I have been fascinated by the past for as long as I can remember. It started out with the dresses - I wanted to live in "olden times" because I wanted to wear pretty dresses when I pretended I was Cinderella going to the ball. Contemporary fashion at this stage in my life was no help. It offered only the ugly present - loud colors, fake fibers, bell bottoms and mini skirts that couldn't twirl.

The desire for long dresses lead me to read historical fiction, which lead to tales of adventure. And, as books for young people are generally written by adults who want youngsters to learn a thing or two, I came out with a respect for history, for education, for knowledge, and for truth (sneaky buggers!).

****

The past is all around us but usually keeps to itself. Not this week.

Innocently plowing through a book on my "should read" list, I was startled to read about Wall Street and bailing out the bankers. Occupying Wall Street wasn't an option for the people on the page, but the blame for the economic mess had a familiar ring.

A little further on, another zinger: "First it proceeded to save most of the bankers who were not already wholly liquidated, dead or in jail. Usually, that was accomplished, indeed, by having the depositors agree to lose a more or less great part of their savings."

"It" was the New Deal, and the economic disaster being blamed on Wall Street was the Great Depression. The book hiding such electric connections between past and present was The Mind of the South by W. J. Cash It was published in 1941, before 'Great Depression" had earned its capitalization and when there was only the World War.

We've been here before.

Yeah, yeah. Everybody knows "those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it." Or something like that.

That sounds good. But for what purpose do we study history? What do we hope to learn?

How to avoid wars tops the list for me, followed by how to govern justly, and provide citizens with the framework for all to live and prosper.

Just because we learn it, does it mean we have to implement it? I think that, for some things, some folks - with much fidgeting and sweating and embarrassment, answer "no."

Again from The Mind of the South: "The Democratic politicians in Washington who managed the practical distribution of relief funds, observing cannily that money spent in a section which was certain to be Democratic anyhow could have no effect for political purposes...these politicians dealt with Dixie with a striking niggardliness."

According to Cash, Works Progress Administration wages in the South were as little as half of what was paid in other areas less certain to deliver Democratic votes. Surely we know better than to play those games?

And on the subject of fears of political favoritism at the University of North Carolina, William Powell writes in North Carolina Over Four Centuries: "Republicans charged that non-Federalists were dismissed from the faculty, that anti-Republican books were used, and that the young men of the state lost their Republican principles after a stay in Chapel Hill." The Republican legislature took steps against the university, only to draw criticism from around the country.

Of course, this legislature was acting at the opening of the 19th century, and these Republicans were Democratic Republicans, evolutionary forebears of Democrats as we know them. Last week's elections show some (on both sides) still see monkeying with education as a partisan tool.

*****

Back when the past mainly held my interest with satin and petticoats, it offered one other attraction. Security. Watching your parents watch the evening news in the late 60s was a scary thing. Society was changing in a very disorderly and disrespectful manner. There was a sense that "back then," society had been orderly, that folks knew what things were proper and how to properly do them, and all those other problems could be worked out politely if people would just be patient.

That perception is not history. It is nostalgia.

As a culture, we've been here before. As individuals in this place and time, this is new territory. We haven't got everything worked out the way it ought to be, and even things that are settled don't stay that way.

There's still lots of adventure to go around.

Back to School -- As A Parent (Cleveland Post September 8, 2011)

Everybody who went to school has an opinion about education.

It may go off the radar after graduation. As fast as they can, graduates turn their backs on childhood and look to the start of 'real' life, and a chance to earn some money. Perhaps they journey to far off lands, over to the next county, or just down the road.

They take on more responsibilities, maybe get married and start a family. That leads to worrying about the future, the economy, taxes, and right on up to attention to politics. The day comes when they start listening to the news, and education is right there in the middle of it.

The loudest education news is rarely good. In the last sixty or so years, alarms have been raised about students who can't read, teachers who can't teach, 'new math', social promotion, falling standards, political correctness, revisionist history, violence. Popular wisdom is convinced American education is crumbling and has only to point to the education majors on The Tonight Show's 'Jaywalking' segment to prove its point.

Many find themselves thinking, 'They wouldn't have put up with that mess when I was in school!' Or "They knew better than that where I went to school."

For some of us, this is what's in our heads the day we show up to register our child for kindergarten.

And so, a couple of misspelled words later, a counter-intuitive request for information becomes Evidence: Evidence that Education is Going to Pot in a Picnic Basket.

Well, maybe. Maybe not.

By taking deep breaths and listening more than opining (not an easy thing for me!), I have found a lot to praise in my six years' experience with the teachers and administrators in our school.

The teachers and administrators are professionals. They know their stuff. They work in partnership with parents. They are doing creative, informative and exciting things in the classroom that build a solid foundation for subjects to come.

As someone who hated math, the most exciting things I have seen are in math. Teachers show students a variety of ways to come at a problem in order to solve it. They are challenging the myth that "word" people can not be "math" people. This is a good thing.

Discipline and behavior can be particularly sore points when it comes to children and school. I have seen kindergarten teachers bring their classes from enthusiastic cutting and pasting to silent attentiveness in a count of three. I have seen students come into class, put away their belongings and settle into morning work without a word from the teacher. I have seen students who understand they are there to learn and who do their part maintain an environment that makes learning possible.

I have found that schools in North Carolina have significant local control. While the state sets the curriculum and counties have fundamental policies, there are many things handled differently at each school. As an example, one school may allow homemade cupcakes for birthdays, while the one down the road may require store-bought foods to prevent food-borne illness or allergies. Specific discipline procedures also vary. One size does not fit all.

School officials operate under the huge number of constraints we as a society have placed upon them. Everybody knows this. But knowing doesn't always prepare one for how crazy some requirements can be. They may or may not have anything to do with learning. They are frequently at cross purposes.

Legal requirements govern things from the length of the school day to the quantity of peanut butter on a school-provided PB & J. Fiscal constraints reach their tentacles into issues far beyond the availability of technology in the classroom or the cost of more buses. As Johnston County's Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Ed Croom, said during his Kitchen Table Discussions earlier this year, if Federal law states money must be spent on red pens and only red pens, it can't be used on anything else, even if you don't need red pens.

These obstacles leave lots of room for decisions to look, well, less than brilliant. I still, on occasion, wonder what the world is coming to.

But the fact is that I am quite pleased with the things my children have learned and they ways they have grown through attending Johnston County Schools. That first hand experience and personal satisfaction has to be the foundation of any opinion I hold on education. No matter what they say in the news.

They Didn't Do It That Way When I Was in School! (Cleveland Post, August 25, 2011)

"They didn't do it that way when I was in school." This thought passed through my mind over and over again the first year or two my daughter was in school.

It started with kindergarten orientation and a question on the information form about toilet training. Hidden in the institutional jargon was the question "Can your child go to the bathroom by herself and wipe her own bottom?"

I knew potty training was a controversial issue with some parents, but what, I thought, is the world coming to when there are children entering kindergarten who can't go to the bathroom by themselves?

The arrival of the 'Welcome to School' letter from the teacher and assistant didn't ease my fears: it was informative, cheerful, inviting, but sprinkled with bad grammar and improper punctuation. Educational rigor begins in kindergarten, and if the teachers were not rigorous in their own writing, it could only go downhill from there.

But the letter turned out to be a fluke, not at all representative of the conditions in the classroom. The teacher was great, the TA genuinely loving and supportive in the way that builds character, not ego. The classroom was pleasant, my daughter liked school. I took a deep breath, closed my mouth and concentrated on inputs from my eyes and ears.

I did ask questions, but tried to ask them non-judgmentally. That's not easy.

The crux of the matter is that school is something we all know something about. Everybody spent at least nine years and more likely twelve or thirteen years of their life under the direct influence of a school system. It is something we all feel we can speak on with some authority.

But: what is it that we really know?

For starters, we know what it was like at our school, when we were in it -- how many years ago?

Somewhere into my daughter's third or fourth year in school, it occurred to me to calculate how long it had been since I was in school. Yikes.

And then there was location. Reading, writing and arithmetic may be universal, but the schools instituted to teach them are governed by local ideals. Rural, suburban, and suburbanizing school systems each come at education with different experiences. Further, each principal adds his or her own stamp, for better or worse.

Its mind-boggling to think how much the world has changed since my generation started school. Back then, my parents rented black telephones from the telephone company. The phones had curly cords and rotary dials.

Kindergarten was a half day. We had a real piano in the classroom and my teacher played it while we sang. I didn't learn to read until first grade, when I met Dick and Jane. "New math" came along in third or fourth grade.

Our elementary school averaged between two and three classes per grade and went from kindergarten through sixth grade.

We had safety patrols - older students selected by their teachers to receive special training from the county police and deputized to enforce proper behavior on the bus. They got to wear cool dayglo orange belts and badges, and served as color guards for the school flags.

On the bus, the only kids with assigned seats were those who caused trouble.

Junior high school covered seventh through ninth grade. My year was first to attend the brand-new one. It had a "media center" (not a library) and was air conditioned. It was built with "open" classrooms - movable partitions, few solid walls,-- to make the learning experience more flexible and open.

By ninth grade, they were adding walls.

*****

A school system reflects the world around it. Outside the classroom, we had landed on the moon, resisted Communism by sending young men to bleed and die in Vietnam, and integrated classrooms. We watched Richard Nixon create the Environmental Protection Agency, go to China, and resign in disgrace. We had reacted in horror and outrage as the Arabs embargoed oil, gasoline prices rose and Japan addressed the problem better than Detroit, with small, fuel efficient cars they gladly exported for our use. And, with much pride and many worries about the future, we celebrated our Bicentennial in 1976.

And that was all before I graduated high school.

*****

How were your school years different? I'd love to hear about it. Send me an email at ksvolcjak@gmail.com

Road Trips in Time (Cleveland Post, July 28, 2011)

Old Drug Store Road. Cleveland School Road. The old Apex-Macedonia Church Road and Holly Springs Road, widened and upgraded (pun intended!) into Tryon Road, connecting Garner and Cary. Road names fascinate me because they are a key to history. I have been pondering them quite a bit the last several months.

It all started with the puzzle of Cornwallis Road. The name didn't register as an anomaly at first. Growing up in a land of subdivisions and numbered highways, road names were about as meaningful as hexadecimal IP addresses. They needed to name a street in the subdivision so they slapped on girl's names or the names of powerboat manufacturers. Useful, but not significant.

At some point, I had a "duh" moment and made the connection to the Revolutionary War. General Charles Cornwallis crossed from South Carolina into North Carolina in September of 1780, lead his troops up to Guilford Courthouse in Alamance County where he fought the Americans in March of 1781(It was one of those battlefield triumphs that leads to the ultimate loss of the war). After that battle, he made his way down to Wilmington.

Could it be that his route had passed through this part of Johnston County, leaving his name on the road he traveled?

Nope. At least that is the resounding answer given by his well-documented campaign. To get from Alamance County to Wilmington, he went west of us, down to Fayetteville and through Bladen County. When he left Wilmington for Virginia, he stayed to the east, going through Goldsboro and on up to Rocky Mount on a route approximated by present-day US 117 to US 301.

So, why the name? And how long has this road been known by this name?

A historian trying to put together pieces of another historical puzzle may have left a bit of an answer to the second question. Armies weren't the only ones on the move in 1780. Between 1771 and 1816, the man referred to as the father of American Methodism traveled over 300,000 miles (yes, I counted the zeroes correctly). Bishop Francis Asbury diligently recorded his preaching and his journeys in his journal, which was published after his death.

Now, Mt. Zion United Methodist Church on NC 50 near the intersection of NC 42 was founded in 1809, built by John and Susan Leach on land they donated. A history of the church refers to Asbury's journal and states, "he mentions that in 1812 on his way from near Fayetteville to New Bern, he went by Mt. Zion Chapel to preach. Since the old "Cornwallis Trail", which was a much-traveled thoroughfare in those days, ran near the church, this "Mt. Zion Chapel" could have been our Mt. Zion."

So, maybe it has been around a while.

There are other roads named after Cornwallis. A search on "Cornwallis in NC" brings up a number of roads to the west and a few to the east. In addition to the one in Durham and one in Kinston, there is a Cornwallis Drive in Greensboro and one in Mocksville.

As I pondered this question, I have pored over what old maps I can find, and looked closely along any road I happen to be on. One of the things I have noticed is that the roads quite often bear the name of the place to which they lead. New Bethel Church, Cleveland School, Apex-Macedonia Church, Benson Highway, Old Garner Road.

And I wonder: what if some of these Cornwallis Roads were so named because they were the roads that lead to General Cornwallis' encampments, or to the encampments of the American forces opposing him? Were these the roads to follow if you wanted to get in on the fight? Were they used by messengers, or to transport supplies, or by reinforcements from other areas?

I don't know. But I would love to hear from any one who does.

*****

Note on General Cornwallis's troop movments: I found a neat website. EleHistory.com is focused on "visualizing and quantifying history." Under the web application heading, there is an interactive map "American Revolution Sites, Events, and Troop Movements" that shows exactly that for dates from May 1780 through April 1781. Information is still being added and there are some limitations, but this is history for a digital age.

Note on history of Mt. Zion Methodist Church: The quotation included above is from a photocopy I found in the Heritage Center in Smithfield. Neither the author or title of the book from which it was taken were included on the photocopy. Any information on this book would be gratefully appreciated.

Red, White and Blue, Past, Present and Future (Cleveland Post June 2, 2011)

Stepping Back, Looking Closer: Red, White and Blue, Past, Present and Future

by

K. S. Volcjak

The holidays are upon us. No, I am not referring to some indecently early Christmas sale. The red, white and blue holidays: Memorial Day, The Last Day of School, Flag Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day.

If we let them, these days can show us the intersection of our past, present and future. We look back, because it is important to remember and consider where we have come from. Just as it takes two points to construct a line, connecting that point from the past to the present can show us where we are going. Connecting that point from the past to where we want to be in the future can tell us something about where we are in the present. And sometimes where we are in the present can yield new understandings of the past which we can use to plot the future.

Independence Day is the lodestar. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

The Declaration begat the surrender of the British in 1781, the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the disastrous Articles of Confederation and then the Bill of Rights which made the Constitution palatable to the states and so brought into being our present form of government.

But the Constitution had a few blind spots. Something was amiss for it to stand silent and allow a man like John Chavis, a Revolutionary War veteran, Presbyterian minister, and highly regarded educator, to die impoverished in the 1830s because the country he had fought to establish rescinded his right to vote and teach in the aftermath of the actions of another educated black preacher, a man named Nat Turner.

Both North and South looked back to the Declaration and to the Constitution and plotted a course forward, courses that intersected in the Civil War. The victors of the Civil War gave us May 30 as Memorial Day because it was not the anniversary of any battle. Also known as Decoration Day, it took a while to filter south and, in the early days, competed with other dates, such as Jefferson Davis' birthday (June 3).

The Civil War also gave us Juneteenth, a holiday I didn't learn about until recently. It commemorates the events of June 18 and 19, 1865 in Galveston, Texas, in which the last remaining slaves learned of their emancipation. Although the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect January 1, 1863, for obvious reasons it was not recognized by the Confederacy. General Gordon Granger and his Federal troops remedied that upon their arrival in Galveston June 18. On June 19, General Gordon read "General Order No. 3," which begins, "The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free."

One more step towards the truths we hold to be self-evident. Juneteenth was made an official state holiday in Texas in 1980, and is recognized in 39 other states, including North Carolina.

The Last Day of School is a sort of civic holiday (as is The First Day of School!). As a society, we agreed that education was important enough to be compulsory. A solid public education system is the foundation of a solid democracy. An excellent public education system ought to yield an exceptional democracy. Looking back, looking forward, where are we at present?

And in the midst of these days is Flag Day. On June 14, 1777, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Stars and Stripes as the flag of the United States of America. It wasn't until the Civil War loomed that anyone thought to honor the flag with a day of its own. School teachers in the 1880s provided some momentum for this holiday, but it wasn't until 1916 (in the shadow of the Great War across the Atlantic) that President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed June 14 to be Flag Day. In 1949 (in the dropping temperatures of the Cold War) an act of Congress made it National Flag Day.

The flag was not a rallying point in the '60s and '70s. Americans burned American flags in protest and people who didn't agree with the government were branded "un-American."

What rubbish.

One of our greatest accomplishments in the years following 9/11 was learning to recognize the loyalty of the opposition. We may not agree, may think they are war mongering fools or ivory tower dreamers, but we don't label them "un-American."

We have learned that the flag is not a symbol of the current administration, but of something much more powerful. It is the symbol of our hopes and dreams as Americans, for America. The present and the future.

We've come a long way.