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Opinion
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- Written by: James BlueWolf
Three of my children were labeled as having "disabilities" – all graduated with minimal reading, writing and math skills. This, despite the fact I read to them, gave them books and presented an example by reading constantly in their presence.
Still, they never developed a “love” for reading. The girls didn't suffer too much, but for my son, public education was devastating. The system was always demanding that he curtail his natural energy, always waiting for him to "change," for him to get "serious." By the time he reached that point, at 23, all the negatives of his educational years had left his esteem in shreds.
He eventually did get his diploma, but has read only one book, cover to cover, his entire life. And although his lack of reading skills have not curtailed his ability to make a living (he makes more money than I do an hour), in his daily life all those essential and mundane details that require reading comprehension are beyond him.
In Native families, we expect our kids to grow up fast. In Native society, a 9-year-old girl is perfectly able to feed and take care of her brothers and sisters responsibly. If you don't believe me, you need to take a few trips into the Third World, where real life still exists.
Americans want to keep their young people “children” far past the age necessary. Just look at the films of the '40s and '50s and you see college-age kids being treated the way we treat our early high schoolers today.
Native teens resent being looked down on by adults who actually believe the myth that what happens in a student's late teen years has some large effect on their progress toward adulthood. Native people know that what is important occurs much earlier in life – from 3 to 13.
Native people also treat our boys differently than our girls. Our system of education recognizes that boys must be allowed to be freely active much longer than girls. Aunties and grandmas are able to teach our daughters to handle complicated crafts and family responsibilities many years before the boys can be expected to follow their uncles and grandfathers.
It is in the temperament of most boys to need constant activity until the age of 11 or 12. My older sons never attended any educational facility until sixth grade, age twelve. By ninth grade they were "caught up"! By giving them those extra years of freedom, they progressed at an astonishing rate.
Putting boys and girls together in school is one of the worst things we do in today's social environment. Both sexes suffer terribly from this misguided "mixing." Many of the boys' ability to progress is virtually destroyed by the fifth grade, and the girls' progress is impeded by the distraction, time and effort each teacher must take to discipline and control the boys.
Just poll your fifth grade teachers in-county and ask them to discuss this issue – those who are honest will report the truth. Many boys are left completely behind during this time, while the girls are ready to explode ahead.
We need to ask what the goal of education is. It can no longer be a simple acculturation or right of passage. Education must be more than a vehicle of academic achievement toward social or economic success.
We need to balance old-time survival skills with new-age information technology. We need students to learn where to search for and find needed information and how to process that information for their immediate benefit rather than focusing on retaining bundles of irrelevant facts.
Students need the tools to educate themselves, find tutors, and experience a real-time gathering and processing of information to function in today's society. We need honest assessments throughout their school years to identify their strengths and weakness, attitudes, interests and motivations. These assessments should drive their programs and this tracking should occur until they self-identify with a vocational or academic future. Some of our present facilities only focus their energies on those taking the academic track – the others are left guidance-less.
American Indians have based our ideals of educational technique on oral language skills, visual learning, social motivation and acceptance of all levels of skill. It mirrors the values of our Peoples and supports the traditional social structures of the family and Tribe.
For our children to be successful we need new environments, fresh perspectives and revamped concepts of curriculum and educational organization to carry our children and grandchildren into a safe and secure future.
To do this we should be creative and fearless, examining any educational alternative; no matter how far from the mainstream it may seem.
James BlueWolf is a artist and author. He lives in Nice.
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and cocky posturing.
Would an employer hire someone solely on the basis of what that person says about his or her past, abilities and future ambitions? Shouldn't we do away with these painful charades, these staged town hall meetings and completely superficial presidential debates that are an insult to the intelligence of Americans, and hire politicians uniquely on the strength of their resumes?
These resumes, of course, would have to be compiled by totally objective, independent parties examining their entire careers and reporting all their actions, along with all the corresponding promises, failures and betrayals. One would think such should be the role of the national media, if its actual intent was to give relevant information rather than entertain and distract us into mental numbness.
Would it be time consuming and complex? It would be a lot quicker, simpler and cheaper than campaigning, but it might be difficult then to find anyone who qualifies. Still, it seems to me the hiring of a president should not be based on whether he or she has good hair, good religion, good marital status, good teeth and a great smile, a twinkle in the eye and a pleasant personality on camera. Obviously, Washington is not Hollywood, we all know there is more truth in Hollywood's fiction than in all of the Capitol's reality.
We need to stop looking at the package and carefully examine the contents ... perhaps politicians should be labeled like a can of soup, wearing their resumes on their backs. They already hire professional PR firms to be packaged, promoted and sold like toothpaste, so let's treat them like soap, but let's keep them wrapped to prevent their becoming slippery!
Seriously, we need to stop looking for "leaders" and worshiping power, authority and wealth as was done during the dark ages, and start demanding that these employees of the nation do their job honestly, like janitors and bank clerks.
The pomp and decorum that still plague every presidential swearing in ceremony are left over from a transition from monarchy to representational government, before the economic advances of a middle class erased a Victorian-type gap between the refined and perfumed elite and an unwashed, uncouth, illiterate, brutal, Charles Dickens-type starving and abused populace (granted, the rich keeps getting richer, but the public no longer smells).
I think that, in this 21st century, we can do away with these attempts to cause government to appear to be embodied by one person made bigger than life by these irrelevant ceremonies and this deference, and ask of these so called leaders that they act not in accordance with the demands of the corporate-banking world exclusively, or of the elite minority, but of the American public that is far more intelligent, creative and imaginative, ambitious, innovative and courageous, and in spite of it all better informed and educated than the majority of these politicians, whose oratory performances are nauseating to witness and yet the least offensive of the overall effects of their presence.
Raphael Montoliu lives in Lakeport.
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- Written by: Donna Christopher
We have some really wonderful, on-the-ball deputies patroling Lucerne of late and they are always a welcome sight. We appreciate the higher visibility of the Sheriff's Department. But what in the world does this have to do with the park?
Last Sunday morning a patrol car pulled up towards the top of Ninth Avenue and the deputies got out to check something in the creek. Of course the neighborhood came out to see what was up – we love this place!
There were two bikes in the creek and suddenly a more-than-middle-aged man came up from the creek down by the highway end of it. He said the bikes were his and his "grandson's” Had this been true it would have been one of those "aww, how nice" moments.
It wasn't. One of the neighbors immediately recognized this person from the Megan's Law Website for the county. We shiver when we think of what could have happened. Of course he had all his paperwork in order and was interrupted before anything hideous happened. There was no choice but to let him ride away, sans child.
I see a correlation between latchkey kids/feral children and the high concentration of perverts in Lucerne. A neighbor towards the end of Eighth Avenue saw a man that, from her description, matched this fellow, who came crawling out of the willows down by the highway end of the park at another time.
Currently there are signs at both ends of the park that call it Victoria Creek Park and list hours of 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. It has now been accepted that it actually is Lucerne Creek from documentation dating from the early 1900s.
This neighborhood is very concerned about the hours of operation of this unimproved park. It literally is in our front yards and the neighborhood has taken care for it for decades. We've kept it mowed to keep down fire danger, tried to stop erosion and kept trash picked up. We've called for assistance a myriad of times when vacationers decide to set up their RVs there to avoid patronizing a local park.
This is more than a residential area, it is a great neighborhood with a variety of folks from seniors to young children. We (I collected 28 signatures on a neighborhood petition) simply are not comfortable at all with the proposed park hours and feel that sunrise to sunset are reasonable time frames for activities in the park area. If this guy is this brazen in the daylight, can you imagine his attitude if he has the right to lay in wait in the dark while complying with hours of park operation?
Kim Clymire from the Parks Department, which does an amazing job in Lucerne considering vandalism, has let us know that in order to have the park hours be sunrise to sunset it will require authorization from the Board of Supervisors.
Please help us protect our children, our neighborhood and the last wildlife corridor that provides access to the lake in this area of Lucerne. Please let your supervisor know that sunrise to sunset is a reasonable request for a park that is in such close proximity to homes.
Trust me, the last thing anyone wants to see is two-teeth Scary Sherry, drunk as a skunk, hanging out in front of your house at 10:45 p.m. cussing a blue streak. Or, for that matter, Chester the Molester climbing up out of the creek bed. It can give you nightmares.
The Lake County Board of Supervisors can be reached at 263-2368.
Donna Christopher lives in Lucerne.
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- Written by: Pia Jensen
I am about to complete my first degree and will continue with a masters in Communications. I have a lot of catching up to do. If I stop at the BA, I'll still be far behind most people my age in preparing for retirement. Feeling responsible for my undergraduate loans, I pay attention to the current balance and try to figure out when I can actually start paying it back. In the meantime, the interest accrues and my debt grows vast; it is far more than I actually borrowed at this point.
Believe me, I tried to afford to begin paying, but what can a person do on a disability check, or on a minimum wage job? Survive. That's all. And the loan debt grows, for all students. When we graduate, we will have debt burdens far greater than our parents who went to college. We will also have far more competition in the workforce than our parents did. And, the cost of living is far greater now; inflation has outpaced income.
So what does a student in debt do? Fortunately for me, hard work and perseverance has paid off and I will begin a new job which pays more and I can begin to pay off the interest. That feels pretty good until I look at the fact that my undergraduate loan is maxed out. I'll be paying off the interest for a very long time. If I do well in my new job, I can look forward to new employment opportunities that will more than double my income. That will be four to five years down the road. In the meantime, I keep receiving letters from loan companies inviting me to consolidate my loans. I did that once and it increased my debt burden. Those offers go in the round file and I wonder if I will ever know how they got my address. I thought that was supposed to be confidential information between myself and the originating loan company.
The first time I chose to consolidate, I thought it seemed like a good idea. I was wrong and I see the error of my choice now. I would have been better off without the consolidation. When I seek information online, since I can't believe the letters that flood my mailbox, I begin to feel numb.
I don't trust most of the Web sites, because they want me to consolidate my loans with them. There must be at least a couple hundred websites offering students a way to better manage their student loans. But, where is the government oversight? How can I trust that any of these companies are legitimate when most have somehow already breached confidence by getting my postal address and sent me consolidation offers? Legislators have become aware of consolidation issues and unfair lending practices. I read this past year that Congress was looking into unscrupulous practices that leave students with unbelievable debt burdens. Will it really make a difference?
Will the federal government enact more laws to protect students, when laws already exist regarding lending practices? We already know that loan companies are breaking the law by culling confidential information. Will they really change their ways? Will the federal government find a way to provide relief for students whose $12,000 loans ballooned to $30,000 loans due to consolidation and interest accrual?
The future may not be so difficult for me, as an older student with well-developed skills and workplace experience, but what will happen to those students whose skills are not well-developed and who don't have much workplace experience upon graduation? What sort of debt burden is going to plague the future of our youth?
It is not uncommon to see news stories about students at the age of 19 looking at a debt of $150,000 for an education that hopefully will land them a job which will provide great financial rewards. Many students will graduate with their first degree carrying a debt load of $40,000. Interest rates are no longer fixed at 5 percent and students are prey to loan companies which care not one iota about that student's future. Bankruptcy is not an option. Federal grants have not kept up with inflation. Housing costs soar. Fuel costs are soaring, and probably won't come back down. What can we do, besides cringe every time we view our loan statements?
We can write our legislators and hope that some relief will come of the investigations into unfair lending practices. We need effective help from our representatives if we hope to make a better life for ourselves after graduation. Students have a tough financial time while in college; their reward upon graduation should be the ability to afford life. I am thankful that our government has instituted employment opportunities which allow students options to pay back their loans through work with the government. Perhaps that concept can be used in the private sector as well, by offering companies tax relief by hiring students with debt burdens due to student loans.
Otherwise, how can we possibly hope to crawl out from these outrageous debts? Write your Congressional representative today: www.house.gov/writerep/.
Pia Jensen grew up in Santa Rosa and is former vice-mayor of Cotati. She visits Lake County on occasion to see family. She lives in Florida.
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