THIS IS NOT NORMAL

 THIS IS NOT NORMAL

My daughter Lillian is an elementary school principal.  She wrote something a couple days ago in response to the school shooting in Texas that left 19 children and 2 teachers dead. The piece was published today in the Polish Daily News in Chicago.

Here's what she wrote:

I’ve been in public education for 18 years. Ten years as a high school English teacher and eight years as an administrator. I am currently finishing my second year as an elementary school principal. I’ve been in lockdowns and lockdown drills.

I’ve had to plan what I would do in my classroom to protect myself and my students. My last year teaching, I had a couple of filing cabinets which probably seemed awkwardly placed to the casual visitor, but which I had put there deliberately to create a blind corner you couldn’t see from the door or the windows. I also figured the thick metal and folders stuffed with exams and essays could help slow bullets. I was hoping to save my students by offering their drafts of college application essays as collateral damage.

As an administrator, I’ve had to plan for the worst case scenario. I’ve locked my buildings down. I’ve searched for weapons and bombs. I’ve worked on reunification plans. I’ve planned which classrooms and hallways would be for relieved parents and which for those who will never see their children alive again. I’ve had to remind my colleagues that if the worst happens we can’t expect all our faculty/staff to be able to help. Some of them will have their own children to search for.

I’m also a mom. My daughter is in middle school. She has grown up with lockdown drills. When she used to play school with her dolls and stuffies, practicing lockdowns was part of the lesson. Now that she is older, she knows that her phone has to be fully charged when she goes to school—it has to be on do not disturb, but it can never be turned off in case I need to find her. In case something happens.

There are lots of things I should worry about when I send my daughter to school in the morning—who she’ll sit with at lunch, whether she’ll do a good job on a presentation, whether she’ll get the part she wants in the school play. I shouldn’t have to worry about whether someone will enter her classroom and shoot at her or her friends. The parents who send their children to my school shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not their children will come home. My teachers shouldn’t have to worry about whether today will be the day they have to die shielding their students from a shooter.

Something has to change. We have to change. We can’t keep acting like this is normal.

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/to-nie-jest-normalne-this-is-not-normal/

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WHAT THE SISTERS TAUGHT ME

WHAT THE SISTERS TAUGHT US

I received a letter recently from a fellow who frequently reads my columns in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy.  He was disappointed in some of my recent columns, especially the one defending Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a book about the Holocaust.  This reader thought my article was a waste of time and simply opened up a lot of unhealed wounds.  He suggested instead that I should write articles about Catholic schools in Chicago.  He feels they are losing students because they are under attack by atheism, LGBT culture, and the forces of Anti-Catholicism in America.

My first response to the letter was to just ignore it, but then I started thinking about how much going to a Catholic school changed my life.  

I started at St. Fidelis, a parochial school in Chicago, in 1954 when I was 6 years old.  I was a refugee and could barely speak English then.  The sisters at that school pretty much made me the person I am.  They prepared me to be the university professor I was for 35 years and the poet and novelist I am today.  Without my Catholic schooling by the nuns at St. Fidelis, I don’t know what I would have become.  

Thinking about all of this, I thought about the other students at St. Fidelis and how the sisters changed their lives.  I’m in a Facebook group devoted to St. Fidelis.  There are about 500 former students in the group, and I asked them what they learned from the sisters.  

Here’s what the other students who attended St. Fidelis told me.

Probably the most important lessons were in the area of basic skills: reading, writing, and mathematics.  Reading and writing were primary.  I felt that way myself.  I came from a working-class home where my parents had very little experience with either reading or writing, but by the time I was in second grade I had my own library card and was a frequent visitor at the Humboldt Branch of the Chicago Public Library.  The nuns were also committed to make us math champs.  Some of the former students talked about playing Baseball Math, a blackboard competition to see who could answer math questions the fastest.  I remembered Sister Xavier expecting us to define math terms as fast as we could.  She would shout out words like “minuend” and “subtrahend”  and expect us to shout back the definition without hesitation.  

These basic skills were supposed to prepare us for high school, and they did. Many of us found ourselves in college preparatory classes in high schools.

Today, looking back on all this, it seems remarkable. A number of students at the school were first generation Polish Americans or Displaced Persons who had come over from refugee camps after the war.  We were the children of moms and dads who spoke little or no English, and still we were transformed by the sisters at St. Fidelis into people who became college professors and doctors and medical researchers and scientists and army officers and journalists and writers.

Thanks to those sisters.

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/czego-nauczyly-nas-zakonnice/

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