Chris Voisard – Applied Creativity

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  • Mask Mania

    Post-covid teaching Part III

    A couple of weeks into that first post-lockdown school year, in September 2021,the principal of the Belmont, CA middle school, Ms. A, came striding into my classroom at break after unlocking the door with her master key.  She was flanked by the rest of the Top Gun admin, the two vice-principals, one a fledgling kiss-butt male, the other a more-experienced, laid-back woman.  They marched in masked formation to where I was standing at the back of the room, organizing the students’ wet paintings on the counter.

    “Can we speak to you?” Ms. A asked in her ultra-muffled voice, since she was wearing her customary double-mask.  

    “Uh, sure,” I said, smiling quickly before pulling up my own mask.  My first thought was that they were coming in to tell me what great art work the kids had been producing, because in my opinion, they had. I was pretty proud of my results so far, considering I was thrown into this job the week before school started.  Or maybe since I was new, and had been offered no support or mentoring, they were going to ask how it was going, or if I needed any help.

    But all three of them?  That was rare. I thought it must be important.  I tried to scan their faces as they sat down on the stools, looking for micro-clues, as I tend to do. Kids that grow up in crazy, unpredictable homes like I did, learn to do this as a survival tool.  Now, with everyone’s face half-covered, my hypervigilance was not serving me well.  I couldn’t read the room.  I didn’t know how to preemptively act.  Their empty eyes told me nothing.

    “Kids have been complaining about you.” Ms. A said without preamble.

    “They have?” I said, dumbfounded, and blindsided.  I was always a popular teacher.  Kids always wanted to be in my class. 

    “Yes, we’ve had ten students complain about you.  They don’t like the way you talk to them.” 

    Now my mind started spinning as to how this could be true.  First of all, these students would have to have the notion that complaining about a teacher is a thing. Was this a school policy?  Did they have a teacher complaint box?  Who would they complain to?  A parent, who passes it on?  I didn’t get it, I had never heard of such a thing.   I mean there were complaints about teachers. Like when a fellow teacher in my former middle school knocked a desk over and banged a kid on the head with a book out of anger.  I guessed he got reprimanded, since we all eventually heard about the incident.

    “Ten?” was my reply.  I could not wrap my head around how ten separate students didn’t like the way I talked to them, and all took it upon themselves to file a formal complaint. I didn’t figure it out until later.

    I forget what Ms. A said after that, I had left the scene and retreated into my head, a place that can be all-consuming when I let it.  The break was over, and all three filed back out, the two side-kicks not having uttered a word, but were apparently there to give clout and witness to the principal.  The bell rang, and the next group of 30 or so kids were waiting at the door, so there was no more time to think, as it was Showtime.

    Maybe a week later, Ms. A walked into my room again, this time while class was in session, and without warning, for what I guessed was an informal observation, since she sat down in the back of the room with a yellow legal pad and pen. 

    As a teacher, we have to have a formal observation every year, a thing that all teachers pretty much dread.  The date of the observation is given in advance, the teacher has time to prepare their most showy lesson plan, and I personally, would often prep the kids with a please be good, I’ll pay you back, candy, no homework, whatever, I promise!

    Then there are the informal evaluations, where the principal drops in unannounced to see how the class is going when no notice has been given.  Some principals do it a lot, some never darken your door.  They could walk in during a crazy chaotic transition, or when they’re all silently reading like angels, the hit or miss aspect being the purpose. 

    So, when Ms. A walked in that day, I guessed it was to check on the ‘way I talked to the kids’.  I thanked God that I was about to give a great lesson that I had prepped for, with a short lecture on an art technique, illustrations lined up on my computer to project as I spoke, with time for the kids to practice afterwards.  It could have easily been one of those times when I was just winging it.

    Score!  I thought.

    My lesson went without a hitch.  I lectured my heart out, making jokes, calling on students, illustrating key points on the board, the whole time enunciating slowly and loudly so that I could be understood under my mask.  I looked back a few times at Ms. A. who was writing copious notes on her legal pad. 

    A couple of hours later, I got an email from her with the subject line ‘Observation Feedback’.  I opened it right away, eagerly thinking I must surely have redeemed myself in her eyes. But the email said something like, While your lesson was good, I observed that you had to pull up on your mask at least 10 times when you were talking.  Please wear a proper fitting mask, preferably with a nose bridge wire, to hold the mask securely in place.

    I thought, 10 times?  Like the ten kids who complained about me. I suddenly wasn’t intimidated any more, I was pissed.  This was hyperbole, and it was directed at me.  She didn’t care about how well I was teaching or taking on this assignment. I was being targeted.

    Because the news propaganda was just starting to heat up about the Unvaccinated being the pariahs of society, I guessed it was because I did not give my ‘vaccination status’ when I got hired. At the time, I was given a card to fill out, asking for the date when I had received my vaccination, where, and what brand.  There was also a disclaimer saying I didn’t have to provide this information, and if I didn’t feel comfortable doing so, to check a box.  I hadn’t yet decided if I was going to take the shot or not, so I checked the box. They didn’t act like it was a big deal that I refused to give the information, but they did say I had to go to the mobile testing trailer that was parked on one side of the vast campus once a week for testing.  I thought, ok, no problem.

    So, once a week, I had walked across campus and into the little hospital on wheels parked on the end of the playground for the month or so school had been in session. The trailer was all sparkling white inside, featuring little glass vials with labels on trays, computers and clip boards, and three official looking people in white lab coats waiting, swab in hand.  People must have seen me doing this Walk of Shame to this remote area of campus repeatedly, not just for the occasional exposure scare, and started drawing conclusions.

    I was… Unclean.  I could feel it. I was becoming a Leper.

    When Ms. A had observed me, I had been wearing a cute paisley headband I had bought at the Russian River jazz festival over my mouth for a mask.  Up until around that time, the mandates still said you could cover your face with any cloth.  The first times I went into a store, I took to wearing turtlenecks so that I could pull the cloth up as I passed the glaring grocery store guards.  Admittedly, the turtlenecks and the silk headband were mild protests on my part, while still staying in the rules.  Ms. A was correct in the fact that I kept pulling on the mask, but it wasn’t to pull it up, it was to let air in so that I could take a breath to project my voice.  I did not understand how the other teachers managed to teach with their faces covered.

    I asked the kids. They told me their other teachers don’t talk, they just put their Chromebook assignment on the board.  Oh. They weren’t teaching at all.

  • Post Covid Teaching Part II

    Dream Job Nightmare

    The first hectic week in August 2021 I was employed in a public middle school, post-covid, in Belmont, California. I was handed keys, shown to my room, and given the task of transforming a science lab that was chock-full of expensive equipment, into some sort of art room, in a mere four days.  Never mind figuring out how I was going to devise an art curriculum for about 150 kids a day, I was physically immersed in trying to move mountains of beakers, burners, frogs in boxes, thermometers, scales, weights, books, and other stuff stored and forgotten about, out of the room so I could move in some art supplies.

    Wow! this district has money, I thought… I was used to begging for supplies, and teachers hoarding crayons. I was sweating solo during those hot August afternoons, looking for carts that were hard to find, as well as custodians or any human to help me answer questions in the vast, concreted prison-like campus.  Where was everybody?  I had questions! Usually, schools were bustling the days before school started, but this one was dead, I thought the teachers may still be hiding somewhere with a stay-at-home covid hangover. Whenever I ran into another human on the soulless campus, it was a masked face with suspicious eyes.   Finally, a woman came into my room, who I later learned taught science next door, and said without greeting or introduction, “What are you doing with all that equipment? It belongs to the science department.”  Hmm, not too friendly.

    I couldn’t find a teacher’s room where people gathered. Usually a school had a central hub with some snacks put out, but I couldn’t find one, except the office, where there were three women sitting in masks behind a fortress of thick plexiglass. I timidly went behind the counter to ask them a question, and was met with six eyes of full hostility. It seemed the only way people communicated at this place was via email. Every once in a while, I would take a break from my boxing and hauling, and reluctantly check the emails, and I was always sorry I did. I would rather exhaust myself physically than look at a screen trying to decipher emails. I saw nothing helpful about the first day of school, welcoming the kids, teaching, introductions of new teachers like me, or anything I wanted to know about.  All of the messages seemed to be about covid protocols: masking, testing, distancing, and cleaning, so I just skimmed over them, I couldn’t absorb it all and get my room ready at the same time.  One email, though, the day before school started, grabbed my attention, so that I had to go back and read it again.

    The letter said something like I’d like to introduce myself, my name is Mrs. So-and-so, and I am so excited that my son, who is in 7th grade, will be having art with you.  I thought you should know that I am the mother of two cis-girls, but (girl’s name), identified as bi last year, has decided to transition and now identifies as male, and would like to be called (boy’s name), and uses the pronouns he/them/theirs. His older sister is now in high school, and now identifies a lesbian, although she identified as non-binary last year.  I thought you should know this in case there was any confusion on the roster.  Also please note that he (boys name) is very sensitive to certain sounds, such as chalk on paper, so keep this in mind when you plan your art lessons.  Thank you and look forward to meeting you!

    I was like, what was that?  What’s a cis-girl?  They/ them? I really didn’t have time to think about what it meant, I thought that it must be a crazy lady who wants attention.  I had met plenty of mothers that demanded that their kid was somehow ‘special’ during my many years of teaching, but a 7th grade girl wanting to be called a boy? That was new, but I didn’t think much about it, I was too busy.

    School started, and on that first, beautiful sunny day, the air was still filled with slight wisps of the back-to-school feeling that I have experienced all my life, the excited reuniting, the chattering, the nervous self-conscious newbies, brand new outfits, sparkling white tennis shoes, and un-scuffed backpacks.  This ritual of rebirth happens every year even though the students and teachers have only been away from school for about ten weeks, and a common refrain is always, “What’d you do this summer?” 

    This year was different, the wisps of that familiar feeling were there, but under a heavy cloud of PTSD since the school had been shut down for 18 months, not 10 weeks. The only students who had physically attended the school before were the 8th graders, who had gone home in the middle of their 6th grade year, never to return until now. The 7th graders had only known the teachers and their fellow classmates via Zoom. The sixth graders were thrown out of their elementary experience in 4th grade, only to be injected into this teaming mass of around two thousand masked kids who meandered around the concrete, many of them standing by themselves looking down at their phones. There was no first day of school assembly, since gathering was to be avoided as much as possible, only orders barked out over the school intercom.

    I gazed out over the scene, standing at my classroom door, feeling like an idiot, not only as the new, somewhat unwelcomed teacher, but because I was wearing a mask. I didn’t know how I was going to reach these obviously traumatized kids with my face covered.  An old teacher’s saying is, ‘Don’t Smile Until Christmas’ so that you can establish that you are the strict, distant, emotionless boss at the start of the school year, and kids didn’t take advantage of you.  I generally didn’t follow that rule. Some have called me strict, but it’s only because I don’t want them to know right away what a pushover I can be.  I’ve connected with many kids with kind smiles, and I wasn’t going to have that important tool in my box this year. I had had many years of experience teaching middle school, but I had no confidence in what to expect this year.

     I had finished cleaning the class room, working like a maniac all weekend, and had put up the finishing touches of Van Gogh posters, art vocabulary, and inspiring Picasso quotes. I had only a few art supplies, some colored paper and paint that I had scrounged from the other art teacher who was very reluctant to give me anything although her room was overflowing with stuff.   The only things that I had been generously equipped with as far as supplies were cartons of boxed covid tests that took up two cupboards worth of space, sanitary wipes, disposable masks, rubber gloves, and gallons of hand sanitizer that we were to put in smaller bottles so that we could squirt each of the student’s hands as they entered the classroom, instead of shaking them or giving them high-fives.

    I somehow made it through the first few periods in a blur, hardly connecting at all with the sea of masked faces with expressionless eyes, but mostly trying to figure out how to take roll with the software system in the computer, and listening to the never-ending commands that came out of the loudspeaker. Please remember to only pull your mask down while you are eating, and to pull them up between bites, it said before the bell rang for recess. I had to go to the bathroom badly, but as a teacher I was used to holding it. I didn’t go before class started mostly because I only knew of one faculty bathroom on this vast campus, and it was like a five-minute walk away.

    “Hey, are we supposed to walk all the way down there to go to the bathroom during out ten- minute break?” I somewhat breathlessly asked the science teacher next door, who I now knew by name, since we shared a common storage space and copy machine between our rooms. She told me that teachers in our wing could use the single-stall handicap bathroom at the end of the building that was between a boys and a girls bathroom.  I thanked her, and ran along the building to the end, where I saw the three bathroom doors, only to find the middle door, with the handicap sign, locked.  I waited, walking in circles. I considered going in the girls’ student bathroom but I knew we weren’t supposed to. No one came out.  I knocked. No answer. I waited some more, panicked that break might be almost over, and yelled through the crack while slapping the door with my open hand, is anyone in there? I could hear movement, but no one came to the door.

    I looked around wondering what to do, getting desperate, when I spied a teacher on yard duty. “Hey, I’ve really got to go to the bathroom and I was told to use this one but it’s been locked all break, and I think there might be some kids in there.”  She walked over to the door, put her ear to it, barked a couple of words in an authoritarian voice, and taking out a ring of keys,unlocked it.  I was shocked to see a half a dozen kids in there, looking at their phones. “What are you guys doing in here?  Don’t you know this is where teachers have to go to the bathroom?” I yelled as the group of kids, dressed in Goth style, as they silently filed out without even acknowledging me. The yard duty lady didn’t say anything.  I’m thinking, what the hell as I pushed the torrent of pee out, and ran back to my classroom to get ready for the next period.

    I poked my head into the teacher-neighbor’s room. “Are kids allowed to go into that bathroom?  There were a bunch of kids locked in there looking at their phones, the yard duty didn’t seem to care, and I had to yell at them to get out.”

    “Oh, that’s the trans bathroom,” she said casually.  The trans bathroom?  I must have missed that memo.  I thought back to that email I got from that mother. I knew what trans was, in fact, I thought I knew about it more than most people, since my mother’s cousin, Jan Morris, was one of the world’s most famous and early pioneers of transitioning from male to female when he was in his 50’s. I had read her book, Conundrum that explained a lot.  It was my understanding gender dysphoria was very rare psychological disease.

    “The trans bathroom?” I repeated.  “How many trans kids are in this school to warrant a whole bathroom?”  I wondered if there could more than the kid with that crazy sounding mother, whoever that was.

    “Oh, around fourteen,” she said like it was the most normal thing in the world.

    “Fourteen?!” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “And are they all allowed to go into the one single toilet bathroom at the same time? The handicap bathroom that we’re supposed to use?”

    “Well, that is a ‘safe space’ for them,” and her sentence was cut off by the bell.  I closed my gaping mouth and went back to greet the next bunch of masked students.

  • Post Covid teaching: Part I Foreshadow

    How do you teach with a mask on?

    I didn’t get it. Projecting your voice, articulating clearly, making exaggerated facial expressions is all part of teaching. Just as important, is watching the kids’ faces, to see if they’re tuned in, checking their expressions for understanding. I have trouble enough deciphering what some kids are saying without them muffling themselves with a mask. Teaching is dialogue.

    There was no way. I would have to do something else.

    That was my mindset during that summer of ’21, when it was announced that California schools would finally fully re-open after two school years being ruined by lockdowns, shutdowns, and Zoom, but all students and teachers would have to wear a mask and try to stay 6 feet apart. I personally had lucked out during those two ruined school years, the first year painting a mural at a school, and the second year running a ‘pandemic pod’ of 14 kids at a pony ranch. Now it seemed my luck had run out.

    Then this teaching job appeared, I t seemed almost by Providence. I wasn’t looking really, I just told my plight to some former colleagues when we got together for lunch at Harry’s Hofbrau, where we had gathered in late summer to tell the tales of our war-time teaching during the pandemic. Little did I know that one of my old work buddies had recommended me to her principal, I’ll call her Ms. A, who was moving to a new middle school, and was hiring. My friend had told Ms. A that I was good at art. The next day Ms. A called and offered me a full-time job teaching art at a salary higher than I’d ever had in my teaching career thus far.

    Maybe my Lucky Pandemic streak had not ended! An art job! Even though I snuck art into every subject I taught, and a few times was the art specialist for elementary schools, teaching art full time was a job I had coveted since I had begun teaching, but I didn’t quite have my art credential yet. I needed one more pedagogy class to get my single-subject, but Ms. A was willing to hire me for the art position since school was about to start in a few weeks, and they were short of teachers. The district paid very well. Outside of the mask thing, it sounded like my dream job. How could I say no?

    I justified breaking the mask rule to myself by thinking that teaching art didn’t require as much direct instruction as teaching English, my usual gig, so maybe I could tolerate wearing the mask until they lifted the mandate. They would lift the mandate eventually, wouldn’t they? I imagined a hands-on classroom, children creating, in their own worlds, where oral communication might not be as important, art was the universal language! I justified further that there would be no test scores at the end of the year, grading would be simplified.

    I accepted the job.

    The first day of our two-week orientation, I was sitting in the sunny district office around the table with other new-hires, and we were each given a folded card to make a name plate, just as I often assign kids to do on the first day of school before I have learned their names. I often try to make even this lesson somewhat creative, teaching the kids bubble letters, or telling them to draw a symbol on their card that would help me remember them. They always treat us teachers like kids in these meetings, I thought to myself, when we were told to write our name on the card in large letters, and in the four corners write our favorite color, the city we live in, an adjective to describe ourselves, and our preferred pronouns.

    I did as I was told, filling in my city of Half Moon Bay, ‘orange’ as I always do for my favorite color, and creative for my adjective, the one I always use since it works when they require the adjective to start with the same sound as your name, so I was on autopilot, but when I got to “preferred pronouns” I didn’t know what they were talking about. Do people have favorite pronouns? Like the royal ‘we’? Or maybe ‘mine’ if they are particularly possessive? Maybe ‘everyone’ if they liked to be inclusive? I seriously did not get it. I looked around the table to see what everyone else was putting down, and I noticed most of the other teachers putting she/her/hers on their cards, except a guy who put he/him/his so I did the same as the other gals, but I was mystified. That’s how isolated I had been in my Pony Pandemic Pod with no access or time for the internet.

    The Asian woman who was in charge of the orientation, was wearing a mask as we all were, but what made it even more difficult to understand her was the fact that half of her face appeared to be paralyzed. Her one eye and the brow above it drooped down, and was slightly closed. When she pulled down her mask to take a sip of water, one side of her mouth turned down and didn’t move. She apologized and explained she had Guillain Barre syndrome, another thing I had never heard of, and reassured us that her condition wasn’t permanent, and bravely carried on lecturing to us for two weeks about the school district, that had a very thorough hiring process. I stared at her face daily during our orientation, finding her condition very strange. It was much later that I found out that this condition was one of the vaccine injuries often reported.

    Finally, I was brought to the school itself, a very large, modern concrete-penitentiary type of place with iron gates in front, to meet Ms. A. who was sitting in her windowless office eating out of a Tupperware bowl. When she saw me at her door, she carefully put on a mask, and then, to my somewhat amusement, a second mask over that. I inwardly rolled my eyes, wondering if this was for show.

    I sat down and she started going over some logistics emphasizing the masks and distancing procedures. “It is only required that the students wear the masks indoors, but we’re going to require that they wear them at all times when on campus, even during PE and music.” I’m thinking, ‘oh kaay’, and also ‘oh nooo’. She went on to talk to me about my application, ignoring completely my impressive resume and years of experience.

    “I see you have decided not to disclose your vaccination status,” she muffled to me, her eyes narrowing over the double-mask that I could see was somewhat digging into her face. “You are not required to disclose this, but if you do not, you will be required to take a covid PCR test in the mobile van that will be visiting our school once a week, who will share the results with you and the administration. The policy at this school is if you test positive for covid, even if you do not have symptoms, you must stay home for ten working days if you are not vaccinated.”

    I’m thinking, ok, whatever, I’ll go take the dumb test every week. I heard that they didn’t stick the probe all the way up into your brain like they were doing at first, god knows why. What I wasn’t going to tell them was my ‘vaccine status’ since I hadn’t taken the vaccine. Yet. I hadn’t entirely written off the idea; I was taking a more ‘wait and see’ approach. The more I waited, the more I could see I didn’t want to, unless I was forced to.

    Note the foreshadowing: pronouns, masks, vaccines. I thought a high-paying art position was my dream job. I pinched myself when I thought my teaching luck had continued during what I could see was a systematic dismantling of the California education standards during those lockdown years.

    It was a dream I suppose; I mean nightmares are dreams, right?

  • Shelter In Place

    Only a few days in, I knew the whole covid thing was a lie.

    Not that there wasn’t a virus, I was one of the first people I knew who got it.

    I’m not some grand prognosticator, it’s just when you grow up with lies, like in my case where they told me that my younger brother was my uncle, among other things, you get really good at sniffing out the Truth. Or at least that’s the case with me. Some call it hyper-vigilance.

    My early tip off was three little words: Shelter in Place. If not for the fact that I’m an elementary school teacher in California, I might not have known exactly what that meant.

    Friday the 13th in March of 2020, was the last day that I saw kids at school; playing in the playground, tumbling and touching, laughing with their heads back and mouths open wide, for a long, long, while. Spring break was only a week away, and spring fever was hitting hard. The kids didn’t feel like working, and neither did I. Ms. K, the principal, called us into special meeting that Thursday after school in the library. I was thinking, really? Can’t you just send out an email or something? An extra meeting was the last thing I wanted. On the other hand, it wasn’t too often a special meeting was called, so I was somewhat intrigued.

    “The students are not coming to school next week,” she told the assembled, tired-looking teachers, scanning the room for reaction. “We are being told to close an extra week out of an abundance of caution, so that they can get a handle on this virus that is going around.”

    At first I thought she meant because so many kids at our school had been sick. Lots of kids had been sniffing and coughing right in my face, and wiping ribbons of snot on the back of their sleeves. I had been working with kids one-on-one on a computer for English proficiency, and had to keep wiping down the screen and keyboard that was sprayed with sneeze spittle. But closing the school just because some kids were sick? That was unheard of. They don’t close school for anything, as much as I wished we could have a snow day or something once in a while, but no such luck in California.

    The room full of teachers sat for a full minute of stunned silence trying to digest this news. Ms. K continued, “Governor Newsom has ordered all the schools closed in the seven Bay Area counties, due to the spread of the Corona virus.”

    Oh, that? Sure, I had heard of this Corona virus in the background of my busy days, the guy who died in China, the three or however many cases they had detected in the US, mostly by people who travelled to China. I remember people being scared to go to the Chinese New Year parade in San Francisco that past February, but I thought that was ridiculous hype, and went anyway. I had heard that a State of Emergency had been declared, but I thought, yeah, yeah, that’s how they get money. None of the talk meant anything to me until I heard Ms. K say they were going to close the school. All the schools in the Bay Area. For a week!

    My first guilty thought: we don’t have to teach next week! Yahooo! And then we still get another week off for spring break? Two whole weeks without the kids, an extra week off? I think I can speak for most teachers when I say that while I love teaching kids, the job is, let’s say, taxing. I adore kids, more than adults, but at that point in the year the extra break was welcome. I could feel this somewhat verboten thought ping-ponging around the worn-out, spring-fevered, teachers’ brains in the room. Though most sat stoically stone-faced, no one would admit the glee I think we all felt until I heard a teacher behind me whisper, “What, is this Christmas? I thought it was Easter!”

    “You will all need to report to work next week,” Ms. K went on. “We will need you to help gather materials for the students to use during the extra week they will be at home. Although the kids will not be required to come to school, they will still be considered instructional days.”

    Anybody who is a teacher knows that any kind of “work” that doesn’t involve trying to wrangle kids attention, inspire them to learn, keep them following the rules while fostering and independent spirit, making them laugh, consoling their injuries, and loving them at the same time is not work. Any kind of task on a computer screen, or talking on a phone, or doing something menial, does not compare with the spiritual and emotional effort required to turn a classroom of kids into a cohesive community. So, whatever we teachers were going to be required to do the next week felt like an unexpected vacation.

    After we were dismissed, some of the teachers buzzed in corners, and a couple of teachers in the principal’s inner circle went up to talk to her in low voices. I thought I heard her say, “Yeah, I don’t think they’re coming back at all this year.” I thought I must have heard that wrong, and put the thought out of my head as being too impossible to fathom. Only later did that overheard remark come back to haunt me.

    The next day, on that Friday the 13th there was a palpable grief floating through the kids’ collective psyche, while we teachers were temporarily psyched up. They had definitely gotten the memo about the extra week off, but I was surprised to see kids crying here and there, some clustered in small groups, their arms around each other, heads down. Kids came up to randomly hug me. It felt like a funeral. Actually, it was, but I didn’t know it yet. The kids seemed to intuit what was happening though. “Aw, come on, it’s only a week,” I said to whatever kid was acting overly dramatic, as kids tend to act.

    Monday morning, we teachers all reported to an eerily empty school void of kid-noise and energy. The bells rang anyway, signaling nothing. We were told to go through the desks in all the classrooms, and start making packets of work that the parents would later pick up. I set to work in various rooms, putting crayons in baggies, and making stacks of work and books, and packing and marking them in paper bags. About half way through the day on Tuesday, I heard Ms. K make an announcement on the loudspeaker. “Everyone is to go home. Now. Please just drop what you are doing. The governor has announced a Shelter in Place.”

    I was like, what? Shelter in Place?

    I knew what that term meant, as most teachers do, because ‘Shelter in Place’ was one of the many emergency drills we practiced with the kids every year. Fire drill, evacuate the building, earthquake drill, get under the desk, unfortunately in later years, ‘active shooter’ or lockdown drill, close the curtains, lock and block the door, and keep quiet. Shelter in Place meant do not evacuate, immediately seek shelter in the nearest building or room, and if possible seal the windows and doors and turn off any air conditioning because of immediate danger outside. The danger could be some hazardous chemical material in the air, or else severe weather. Shelter in Place is a command that is only meant to last for a few hours.

    This is where the governor made a big credibility mistake with me, very early in the game, and I never believed another word he, or any other person in the government or public health said on the matter. Immediately my hyper-vigilant brain started rapid-fire spitting out questions as it tends to do, often to people’s annoyance. Like the evil covid germs were just floating around outside in the air? Invisible spiky red balls had permeated the atmosphere? Were we supposed to hold our breath on the way out to our car? Was everybody sheltering in place? And for how long? If there was imminent danger, why weren’t we sheltering there at school? And why only the Bay Area?

    I went to talk to Ms. K, being mindful to only ask a fraction of my zillion questions.

    I remember asking her if the gas stations were open because I didn’t have enough to get home. She told me they were, and right then I thought, if we have to Shelter in Place why didn’t they? Were they risking their lives? I left the school in a daze. Not scared, just dazed and confused. I tend to get slow and calm in emergencies. Driving home I looked around outside, observing, and thought that everything looked remarkably normal. I didn’t see people dropping dead in the streets like they showed in those fake Chinese YouTube videos. I saw cars driving, some people walking around, kids playing. I stopped and got gas; the workers seemed non-plussed.

    That’s when I knew they were trying to scare us. That’s when I knew it was all hype. Everything after that day of the ‘Shelter in Place’ announcement only confirmed my suspicions. That the government would outrageously lie to the people, did not surprise me. I grew up not trusting the government since I was a little girl with my semi-hippie parents, who sent me to school with a black arm band to protest the Vietnam war, and pointed out the flag-covered coffins of drafted teenagers coming back from Vietnam on our little black and white TV. ‘Question Authority’ was a prominent bumper sticker back then, and all the rock n roll heroes confirmed that you should never “trust the man” or the guys in suits. ‘Fuck the establishment’ is what I learned early on.

    The teachers were instructed to make one word signs, and take a selfie holding the sign. When the pictures were grouped together, it read “We miss you! We will see you soon.” I held the ‘soon’ sign. But we never saw the kids again that year, or the next. In fact, I never saw that group of kids at that school again.

  • Learning Loss Part 2

    ABC30 Fresno

    After spending that dreamy school year in the outdoor barn surrounded by ponies and chickens and mostly maskless children playing in the hay, I could not imagine going back into The System, or whatever was left of it after most of the kids had not been in school for a year and a half.  I’d heard stories from the outside. I’d seen pictures, like masked kindergarteners walking in lines with their arms straight in front of them to maintain the proper distance, or sitting outside in circles drawn on the asphalt to eat their lunches alone in silence.  I wanted no part in that.

    While I was lolling at Lazy H Ranch, reading Roald Dahl to my pod of kindergarten through fifth graders with a backdrop of golden hills dotted with horses, the rest of the school-world was tangled in a fierce debate of bureaucracy and fear, wrapped in the colored ribbons of the Tier System, purple being bad, very bad, then red, orange, and yellow.  There was no green tier, no, no one was ever completely safe from the covid boogeyman, unlike George Bush’s Terror Tiers, where at least there was blue and green; maybe you had a slight chance of letting down your guard and not worrying about being attacked by ISIS. Red was the highest tier in Bush’s system, but California’s covid tiers had purple.  I wondered why at the time, was it like a face being so angry it turns from red to purple?  I didn’t know, and still don’t. A district had to stay in an orange or yellow tier for 14 days to even consider opening.  At first, I checked daily with our tier status, but after a while, gave up, knowing it was as much of a sham as Bush’s Terror Tiers, based on nothing.  Sometimes our county would turn red for a few days, or a week, only to revert back to purple which meant we had to start all over again.

    California's Colored COVID Tier System ...

    I screamed my protests into the abyss at first, writing profanity laced emails to Governor Newsom or our public health director, Scott Morrow, pointing out how little sense this all made, how the goal posts kept moving, how bad it was for kids, and how arbitrary it all was.  That’s when I still thought that they might actually care about the kids welfare. Or ours for that matter.

    But in September of ’21 Newsom finally said the kids could all be back in school!  This was after months of the teacher’s union still fighting the reopening, arguing at first, that it would be impossible to keep the kids 6 feet apart with the size of the classes and classrooms, so those in power quickly recalculated to say, ok, only four feet apart would work, or just “do your best.” There were further demands that had to be met.  Teachers would be first in line to get the vaccines.  Masking, testing, ventilation systems, extra cleaning.  The teachers union got everything they wanted, to the tune of millions of dollars.

    safety barriers in classrooms

    There was a big distinction between the unions and the teachers wants.  My daughter Reyna went on TV to be interviewed as to how she was a teacher, and didn’t agree with the unions, and no union representative had ever contacted her to ask her opinion as to whether she felt ‘safe’ enough to go back to school.  Teachers were split.  While many felt like Reyna and me, that “remote learning” was mostly fiction, and morally wrong, many teachers I talked to loved it, or pretended to hate it but secretly love it, like a teacher who told me she cried every day, but went to live with her daughter and grandbaby for the school year, and had the students watch movies she recorded for science lessons. Teachers told me of going on hikes every afternoon, or having a beer or two while teaching.  There was no accountability, no low grades were allowed, and no discipline problems to deal with.  Sure, a few teachers insisted that the kids get out of bed and sit up during class, but mostly the kids were allowed to keep their camera off on Zoom calls, because of “equity”.  Some students might have been embarrassed to show their living conditions the unions argued.

    Lessons From the Disaster of Zoom Teaching

    I walked into my daughter Reyna’s house during the lockdown and she was in the middle of teaching her Home Arts (used to be Home Ec) class a cooking lesson in her kitchen.  She was teaching her heart out, talking animatedly into her laptop, bringing it over so that the camera showed her taking the cookies out of her oven. “How are your cookies looking?  Show me some of them!” she said into the computer. I walked around and looked at her Zoom screen, and only saw about five faces, the rest of the boxes that represented her class were black.  “Where is everyone?” I whispered to her out of screenshot. She explained to me how they weren’t required to turn their cameras on.  “I don’t think they’re even there,” I said.  She nodded her head in agreement.  She went on trying her hardest anyway.  It made me sad.

    So, like I said, I wanted no part of the public-school craziness.  Some of the parents tried to keep the Ranch School open another year, but it was not to be.  After a couple of false-hopeful jobs with my old district and my old principal, I half-heartedly looked around for a job that could be palatable in the teaching realm, but had just about given up, and resigned myself to collecting unemployment for the first half of the school year.  But then I had lunch with some colleagues from the middle school I worked at for many years, I told some of them my plight.  Within a couple of days, I got a call from the principal of that middle school, telling me she was moving to the Belmont school district, and would like to hire me at Ralston Middle School.  “What subject would I teach?” I asked, thinking I did not want the job. “Art,” she said.  She had been tipped off by my old friends that art was my thing. “And a couple of periods of study skills.”

    This gave me pause.  Teaching art had been my dream job. Although I incorporated art into all my teaching jobs, I had never taught it officially.  I had finished all the requirements for the art credential, passing the required art CSET (California subject exam for teachers) except for one pesky pedagogy class that they stopped offering at SF State during covid. I explained all of this to the woman on the phone, Sabrina Adler was her name. She seemed unfazed.  She spoke in a nasally, almost robotic voice, void of any emotion. I asked if I could get back to her, and she said yes, but she needed to know by that afternoon.  Wow, they really wanted me.  This was a switch from usually having to beg for jobs. I hung up the phone, and paced around the house, thinking.  I didn’t want to teach in a mask, and so far, had not taken the vaccine.  But an art job?  And a couple of periods of study skills, whatever that was, it sounded easy. How bad could it be?  They wouldn’t be on a computer. Then looked up the salary schedule for Belmont, and I was stunned to see that they hired at a high experience step, and that I would be making more money than I had ever made for a school year by a long shot.  It seemed like a Sign. Art and money. I paced and fretted a little more, and then called Sabrina back and accepted the job.

    Little did I know what I was letting myself in for.  Little did I know how much things had changed during covid. The teaching had changed, the kids had changed, the teachers had changed, the culture had changed, the expectations had changed, the attitudes had changed.  Everything had changed in only a year and a half.  That’s all it took. A year and a half of everyone staring at the internet and getting brainwashed, not by the classes they were supposed to be taking, but by the TikToks they had going up in the corner.

    I only had one little clue of what had happened during my year of oblivion at the pony farm.  A friend of the family of the farm, wanted their daughter to work with me as an aid.  She had been a freshman in college at a University in Florida, but had dropped out, due to covid pressures, she couldn’t handle it. So, she was hired at the ranch.  She was constantly looking at her phone, instead of paying attention to the kids, and when she wasn’t, I’d see her nodding off in class, her head jerking back, and her eyes looked funny.  Finally, I asked her if she was on drugs, and she told me yes, she was on four different psychiatric drugs, none of which I had ever heard of.  “Does your mother know this?” I demanded of her.  She said yes, and the reason she was tired is that she often stayed up all night.  This girl also told me that she that her generation was different, because they didn’t all go by the strict rules of being boys or girls.  The girl would have the kids go on their computers during recess when I forbade it, thinking they had enough computer time during their Zoom calls, but going behind my back.   I finally called her out on it.  She said, “Why should I have to work as hard as you?  You get paid way more money than me.”  I was shocked by her attitude, and explained that I had been teaching for decades, and that the first few years of student teaching I had to work for free.  She said that was my fault.

    I thought this girl was a one-off, a bad hire, a bad seed.  Little did I know that all the kids were watching the same TikToks, all the kids had been indoctrinated, all the kids had changed, just like the adults had changed. 

  • Learning Loss Part 1

    Learning Loss:

    No one ever imagined that we would still be locked down in September.

    September means back to school. New backpacks and shoes for the kids, and we teachers sigh to say good bye to the summer, but there are fresh bulletin boards and ‘Welcome’ signs, new rosters, and classrooms that had the floors polished in the summer. September meant new beginnings, new kids, a renewed sense of purpose after resting all summer. 

    Not that year.  The schools had been shuttered since the March before when they told us all to go home.  ‘I thought it was Easter, not Christmas, I heard a teacher whisper when the principal told us our spring break would be extended another week, to two weeks, to you know, ‘flatten the curve’.  We all know the story now, yadda yadda, the kids of California never went back to the classroom that year.  Nor the next.

    I spent the last half of the 2020 school year sitting on the school yard asphalt by myself, surrounded with buckets of paint.  Most teachers had to start Zooming, but since I taught ESL that year, they told me I could just go home and collect my paycheck. The thought of getting free money for doing nothing was unfathomable to me (but I guess a lot of stuff that happened that year was) but also immoral, so I asked the principal what else I could do to help.  She gave me the perfect job of painting a giant map of the United States on the playground.

    I sat, day after day, month after month alone, painting each individual state in a color palette of my choosing, my headphones on my head tuned in to Adam Carolla, the comedian I had listened to in the morning for years. He was a voice of sanity to me, my friend. 

    School officially ended that June along with my temporary job.  Painting the map of the states had inspired me to drive across this country of ours.  I wanted to see with my own eyes what was happening everywhere else.  I was prepared to drive alone, anything to get away from the irrational craziness I saw when I wasn’t in the refuge of my asphalt canvas.  I couldn’t bear to continue to witness the lines of masked people bracing themselves against the wind to get into the grocery stores, or physically fighting over toilet paper once they got in.  I had to get the hell out of Dodge.  The fact that the unelected health officer, Scott Marrow, told us to stay within five miles of our homes made the trip even more enticing. It couldn’t be like this everywhere.  My friend Merry ended up going with me.  ‘What if we die?’ she asked me before we left.  After all, we were going into the eye of the storm, the scary states that didn’t lock down, where covid floated in the air like a thick invisible blanket, they told us, where faces were obscenely seen because of the lack of masks. “Then we die,” I said.

    We didn’t die, and I was right.  The rest of the country wasn’t like us.  They all went back to school in September, rightly seeing the insanity of keeping kids at home staring into a computer. Not California. The 2020-2021 school year was upon us, and Newsom told us the schools were not opening, we had to continue to stay home to save lives.  Remote learning they called it. It was a joke.

    I didn’t know what I was going to do, but like the school year before, providence handed me the perfect job during that second Pandemic Lockdown School Year.  A one-room school house out in the country, as though my classroom was a cross between Little House on the Prairie and Charlotte’s Web, in a rough-hewn wooden barn.

    One wall had a white board where I kept track of the fourteen kids complicated Zoom schedules, another wall had horseshoes nailed into it in such a way that the students could hang up their backpacks and coats, another wall I covered with the kids artwork, and the fourth wall was non-existent.  Like, there wasn’t one, the barn had three walls.  That meant that I had an unobstructed, open-air view of the rolling hills, dotted with horses separated by white ranch style fences, and the smell of fresh hay and manure wafted around my classroom.  The en plein air classroom was a draw for some of the parents of the students that ended up being in my ‘learning pod’ one of the pandemic concepts already fading from our collective memory, where it was said that a random number of kids, say a dozen or so, could be together and it was ‘safe’ especially if air was circulating, and boy did the air circulate there!  Most pods had to buy HVAC systems, but ours was natural.  As beautiful as a semi-outdoor classroom was, it also meant that many mornings were freezing cold, and getting the propane going on the one heater we had wasn’t always easy. Also, since we were on a dirt road, clouds of dust would float in and settle on everything whenever a car or horse went by.

    I’d gaze out at the hills and horses and tell the kids that ranged from kindergarteners through fourth grade, that they were the luckiest students in the whole state.  ‘Whoever gets their math done can go on the hayride!’  was my daily refrain meaning that some lucky kids got to ride around the ranch in the quad with Breen, my stepson, and owner of the Lazy H Ranch, and throw flakes of alfalfa in the feeding troughs. 

    One corner of the barn had eggs in an incubator at the beginning of the year, and as the months went by, we watched the chicks hatch and eventually turn into four rust-colored teenage hens.  The chickens were like our kids that we had raised.  They wandered freely around the classroom clucking softly, and some of the kids liked to hold one of them in their lap grounding them to reality while they watched their teachers trying to explain math on their laptops.  The two barn dogs guarded us, but one always was licking his chops around the chickens, and the kids would scream at him to get away, until one day the dog came in the barn and I literally saw feathers come out of his mouth, like a cartoon.  We didn’t tell the kids for days that he ate one of the hens, and I privately cried.

    After ‘school’, we’d all go up to the hay loft and watch movies on a TV, and some of the kids would jump out the opening holding a rope, and land in the pile of soft hay below.  Two giant tire swings hung in the trees further up the hill, a thrilling ride where up to four kids could comfortably sit and spin dizzily around holding on to the thick chains. The kids all got riding lessons on ponies in the coral for their afterschool program.

    I was in an idyllic world, far from the ugliness of the lockdowns and people’s reaction to them. No television blaring propaganda, no radio to tell us to be scared. All it took was a mile or two to get out of town and completely change my reality into that of country living in the old days.

    The Zoom teaching made me sad though. The Chromebook laptops were the worst part. I remember the sight of one kindergarten girl named Steele diligently doing jumping jacks solo out in the courtyard behind the barn for ‘P.E.’ while staring at the computer.  A long-awaited annual fourth grade field trip to the Sanchez Adobe was watched by the kids on the computer while they pretended that they were making the mud bricks they usually got to make with their hands. Breen’s son, Chinny, in his senior year, wandered in and out of the barn.  He usually stayed in bed until noon, watching his high school classes on his phone in bed.  He missed most of his long-awaited football season, his prom, and his graduation, although the moms tried the best they could to make facsimiles, it wasn’t of course the same, the sadness was obvious in his eyes.

    I was privy to see how more than a dozen teachers interpreted ‘teaching’ during the lockdown.   I saw some teachers showing up over the Zoom every day, well, actually only four days a week, because they called Wednesdays ‘asynchronous learning’ a euphemism in the New Speak that meant ‘you’re on your own kid, and yahoo, the teachers get a day off’.  Other teachers just directed their kids to watch videos, and sent home thick packets of busy work.  I heard one kindergarten teacher tell the kids to go outside and observe nature for their science lesson.

    That school year went by like I was in a dream.  At the beginning, in September, we survived the ‘black day’ when the smoke from the fires was so thick the sun never came out, by hiking up to the ridge with flashlights, and watched the traffic below, the headlights barely visible. We made applesauce and carved pumpkins, and Santa and the Grinch made surprise appearances at Christmas.  In the spring we planted flowers in decorated pots for Mother’s Day, and at the end we held a formal graduation, complete with graduation caps that the kids made themselves.

    The horror of what the lockdowns did to most the kids didn’t hit me until the following school year.

  • Goodbye Pumpkin Fest!

    All good things must come to an end, and somewhat sadly, the party is . . . over.

    The Pumpkin Festival as we knew it, has, in my opinion, officially died. R.I.P. P-Fest! Bye-bye, so long, farewell! But as some people believe, the Spirit stays alive long after the body dies.

    The cause of death has been under dispute. Mr. Eblovi stated in The Review that “the unvaccinated” were responsible, a claim so ridiculously ludicrous, (as well as divisive and mean-spirited) that I won’t even bother trying to refute it. Another longtime local and occasional contributor to this independent journal tried, citing facts and studies, but his piece was ignored.

    To some, it might look like Pumpkin Festival died of natural causes. After all, it was getting old, big, and crowded, and it could be said that the festival was on its way to imploding. With the proper interventions, the festival may have overcome these problems and gone on to live a long and happy life, but unfortunately The City killed the festival a couple of years ago, in the name of public safety.

    Many may not understand the soul of The Fest, a phenomenon that grew out of the spirit of the people of the coast back then. The Coastside was a tight community of rowdy, feisty, and sometimes bawdy individuals who looked out for their own. ‘Our own’ meaning our community, all members, regardless of race, gender, or political affiliation. When Bev had the idea to fix up Main Street, everyone chipped in, and it was a party with live music and the Coast turned out en masse to literally paint the town with the proceeds of Fest.

    I was at every single P-Fest. The first Festival, in the basement of my friend Marcia’s house, the Old Montara School, some don’t count as official, but I was there as a kid, painting rocks and selling them for a quarter. The next one, that counts as the first, was in the grounds of the IDES only, and I went to see my dad, Ray Voisard, and his friend Dick Hazel, who had set up their paintings and were enjoying a casual afternoon showing the local artwork and drinking cocktails.

    From there, the P-Fest grew, and during those young, heady, expanding years I had so much fun celebrating our town, back in the days when ‘living life’ was more valued than safety. All of us locals would watch in amazement as the line of cars snaked their way over 92. All these tourists were coming here? To our little town? It was an anomaly, a once-a-year inconvenience that we loved, after all, we were hospital folk, and welcomed these occasional visitors with open arms.

    One year, early on, I sold my dad’s famous “Italian Sandwiches” salami and cheese, wrapped in red gingham cloth, for a dollar, and my friends and I had people lined up from the IDES building out to Johnston Street. I had “LOCAL” printed up on the back of the official Festival tee-shirt and skipped through the streets meeting up where only the locals knew to go: to the costumed Fireman’s Ball in the IDES hall, in the back of the Bakery, behind the beer booth, or up in the graveyard. We would watch the bands play for a bit at the grounds in the morning, but then end the day at The Inn or San Benito, people sitting in the windowsills, overflowing to the street, live music still going, tipsy people in costume, dancing, kissing, and cheering the tourists trying to leave town. We wouldn’t bother trying to go home until the town was once again quiet.

    But then.

    Well, I guess you have to start adding some rules, but once all that regulation and signage arrives, the spirit starts leaving. The yellow tape and temporary fences, the cops in the street directing people when to cross, and rules, and more safety, and eventually the Festival was becoming a large, unmanageable vessel. I was sad when some locals started leaving town that weekend to avoid the madness.

    Two years ago, is when one more intervention, one more stab at control by the City, was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, and the Festival was killed. Because of a shooting that had happened in Gilroy a few months prior, The City thought it would be a good idea to have the sheriffs dress up in army camouflage and stand on the roof of City Hall with automatic rifles during the beloved Parade full of kids in Halloween costumes, which the City abbreviated to five minutes. The faux military with body armor stood around the streets afterwards with a giant SWAT kind of tank vessel thing. Not exactly welcoming.

    And so, the Pumpkin Festival died.

    They tried to hide the death last year, and lucky for those now in charge, the pandemic restrictions gave The City good cover. Then this year, after having given the go-ahead to a one-day event, The City once again rubber stamped a big red ‘No’ on the Festival because of what they said were safety concerns, a common thing the government is doing lately, exerting power under the guise of health.

    It is common knowledge that there is little to no evidence that this virus is spread outdoors. Large outdoor gatherings are once again happening all over the Bay Area, the most restricted area in the country when it comes to rules based on the pandemic. It’s probably a good thing they put a kibosh on the planning, because the The City, who knows how to make rules but not how to throw a party, wanted gates put up, and proof of vaccine to enter, which would have been a buzz kill on par with the cops with AR15’s.

    So, our large and unruly Pumpkin Festival was killed in the name of Saftyism. I don’t believe our City Council were sad to stop the party, as they claimed, since they have shown very little support to local businesses during the past year and a half.

    But the undying Spirit of the true Coast lives on!

    Last year, like the citizens of Whoville when the Grinch tried to steal their Christmas, some of us carried on as usual. I had my traditional breakfast at my house, another home hosted the bakery tri-tip sandwiches, and another house hired truck full of pumpkins to come for the kids and fired up a juke box and a bubble machine. We hiked to the graveyard at night and told stories of Pumpkin Festivals Past. In some ways, it was more fun than what the P-Fest had become.

    I’m going to count last year as the First year of a new Pumpkin Festival that has grassroots and will grow from the ashes. This year, coming full circle, and the locals are having the fest in the grounds of the IDES, despite the City, just like the first year, a long time ago. Long live the Pumpkin Festival




  • Africa (China #3)

    China #3: China in Africa

    The summer before last, way back in the time before the rug was pulled out from under us, I travelled to Africa. On my Bucket List of Life was the desire to see the elephants in their natural habitat and Kenya did not disappoint. Kenya is the home of the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, a place to see rescued orphaned elephants being fed with gigantic baby bottles, and also Amboseli National Park, the best place in the world to get close to free-ranging elephants.                .

    Our guide on our two-week Safari was Oliver, an articulate, funny, and deeply knowledgeable Kenyan of the Kikuyu tribe who drove us three lady teachers for hundreds of miles around Kenya in a van with a convertible top. He told us about the history, customs, tribes, economy, and wildlife of the region, while navigating through sketchy roads and the open planes. I could write forever about what he taught us about Africa, but what is on my mind these days is China, and the way they are infiltrating the world.

    As we drove across country, Oliver occasionally pointed out slick, modern railway stations, some gleaming in the distance in the middle of nowhere, the modern architecture a sharp contrast to the crumbling railway stations abandoned from the colonial days. We had already seen the Nairobi Terminus, the most impressive public building in Nairobi. Oliver explained to us that the Chinese were building this massive railroad across Africa and was investing in the country.

    At the time, I thought, hmmm, why is China doing that? I mean, I know Chinese built some of our railroads in California, as labor force, but why were they investing in these massive, out-of-place structures?

    I found out that these railways in Africa were being financed (at the tune of 4.5 billion) by China since 2017 as part of China’s “one Belt, One Road” initiative, a multi-trillion dollar series of infrastructure projects that upgrades the trade routes between China and Europe, Asia and Africa. China is the biggest lender to the Kenyan government. China has built Kenya’s ports, roads, airports, bridges and trains, as Oliver told us. Many Kenyans think that these seemingly altruistic gestures from China have put them in a debt crisis. Last year the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned African leaders about countries that breed corruption and dependency and don’t train African workers. And now, that Kenya is having trouble paying the debt with their tourist industry down, control of ports could go to the Chinese.

    But I was on vacation in the carefree pre-pandemic days, and didn’t give that much thought to China building a bunch of stuff in Africa. I was on Safari! Lions and elephants and giraffes and water buffalo everywhere!

    Granted, a safari was not exactly how I pictured it, places are always more touristy than I imagine before I get there, and the Masai Mara was no exception. Open roof safari vans full of tourists touting their individual Safari companies crisscrossed the open planes, their drivers on walkie-talkies, giving word in Swahili when an especially rare animal was spotted. I almost cried the first time I saw dozens of vans screeching in the dirt, trying to get the best angle on a baby cheetah, the poor thing trapped and terrified between the gunning engines and maneuverings.

    The Safari vans and jeeps ranged from the high-class rich and fancy, with open sides and water bottle holders, to the funky VW vans, like we had. There were vans from all over the world. A van of French people here, Swedish there, Africans from other countries everywhere. People wore standard safari garb: big hats, sunglasses, and binoculars around the neck. Some had elaborate camera equipment, the people behaving as if their pictures were going to be in the National Geographic or something. But the groups that were the hardest to ignore were the Chinese. There were a lot of them, and they could be identified by the fact that they were covered from head to toe in what we now know as PPE. Rubber gloves, masks, hats, some face-shields, and some in blue paper pants and booties.

    Every time one of these mostly-silent groups of people came by, my friends and I would lightly poke fun of them to each other. “Here come the Chinese!” we would giggle. I thought how uncomfortable they looked all bundled up, not moving or talking. I was glad to be free in my short-sleeved tee shirt, feeling the warm breezes on my skin.

    One day we decided to splurge on a hot-air balloon ride over the Masai, something I had never done before. It was worth every penny get up super early to be driven over dark bumpy dirt roads to fields of giant balloons of every color being blown up with fire in the pre-dawn light. We boarded, and with our Australian woman pilot reassuring us, we floated around the African skies, the sun rising with us.

    After we landed, I was waiting for someone to pick me up, and I found myself in a van with an older Chinese guy. He had travelled the world he said, fifty-eight countries or something, and was smart, observant, and funny. I got into a long conversation with him, during which time he changed his blue disposable mask twice. I looked at him with fascination.

    “Ok, why do you guys wear those things?” I asked as he slipped the elastic around his ears.

    “For our health,” he answered though the hospital mask.

    “What is out here in the middle of nowhere that you’re protecting yourself from?” I looked around the calm, temperate planes. “Dust?” I told him I had been to China and I could see if they wore their masks there because of the awful yellow smog that permeated their skies. “What could be out here?” I asked, gesturing to the vast, cloudless blue skies.

    “It’s for our health,” he answered. “Look at me, I am eighty, I bet you would never have guessed it.”

    I could’ve guessed he was 80, although a healthy-looking 80, but what I would never have guessed was that a year later we would all be forced to wear masks in the USA and that if we resisted the idea we would be subjected to shame.

    I looked up why the Chinese wear masks after talking to that guy, and found out that some Chinese wear them because of a belief of Taoism, a Chinese philosophy that emphasizes that a person’s qi, or breath, is balanced by wearing a mask, preventing good air from leaving the body, and bad air from entering. Asians have worn masks for years, as a fashion statement, a show of respect, or to be anonymous in a crowded society.

    But also, Chinese are censored and silenced, and are afraid to speak their mind for fear of retaliation by authorities. The mask is a symbolic reminder of the lack of freedom the Chinese have in their speech.

    As I said before, let’s not be like China.

  • China #2

    Don’t be like… China.

    A couple of months ago I wrote a little blog about the trip I took to China twenty years ago. Actually it turns out it was only twelve years ago. I’m not too good with Time, but I am good with remembering my gut feelings. I figured out the year I went when someone told me that the Swine Flu pandemic was in 2009. And since I had caught that flu in China, I looked up the videos I took of that trip on my computer, and sure enough, I was there 2009, because my MacBook told me so.

    Me in China, 2009

    I do remember the date I left for China, only because it was the 4th of July. I got a ride to the airport right after the pancake breakfast, and the red, white and blue Americana hometown-hokey parade. As soon as I was on the plane I missed America. I never felt much patriotism for my country until I spent a couple of weeks in China.

    China gave me the creeps. I’ve had the creeps since I was a kid, so it wasn’t all China’s fault; part of it was past conditioning that China triggered. What activates my inner fear? When something is fake, someone is lying, something is inauthentic, and I’m not able to speak my Truth about what I know I see for fear of repercussion. My family system was organized around a big lie, and I prophetically dreamed I found my tongue on the tile floor in the hallway when I was four. Orwell’s 1984 affected me so deeply in 8th grade that I threw the book across my room late at night and huddled under the covers shivering in fear.

    And now, during these Covid Times, I wake up with that creepy feeling every day. Maybe those childhood emotions were some kind of premonition that I would be living, right here, right now, in a time where the public narrative is controlled, manipulated, and censored. Not just by the government, but by the news, social media, and worst of all, by each other.

    I remember a rare night I was alone while visiting China, with no one around, no one watching my every move. I was in my private cabin on a cruise ship that was floating me down the Yangtze River. It was a relief to be alone for a night, with no roommate, so that I could separate my thoughts from the barrage of information that was being thrown at us teachers who were on the tour. The Three Gorges had given us some spectacular scenery that day, but the brown polluted water and the yellow sky nauseated me. When the tour guides proudly showed us the massive hydroelectric dam the country had built for billions of dollars, and cheerfully explained to us how the government had relocated over a million people in order to flood the river to harness its power, I was further sickened. They explained that the government had built new apartments on higher ground for these displaced farmers, families who had lived for generations on the banks of the river, and the guides pointed out a few of the new structures out to us. I was sure, as I gazed up at the tall, gray, non-descript apartment buildings, void of any character, that these buildings had killed what was left of the river-farming souls of these people. Beyond the polluted sky and water, I was further sickened by the country’s cavalier attitude toward human rights.

    Rollin’ down the Yangtze River

    My cabin on this luxury cruise ship had a TV, and when I clicked on the remote I found CNN, the only channel that was in English. I felt like family had entered the room. CNN, my trusted friend, the voice of reason, the voice of Truth in this lying god-forsaken country; I was so relieved. God bless the USA where we can breathe and know the real news I thought.

    I was finally able to hear about the riots that were going on in the Hubei province of China. The riots had broken out the day that I landed, July 5, 2009, and the only reason I knew about any dissentience going down at all, was because my friends and family had been emailing me, asking if I was all right, if I was anywhere near the violence. I already knew that the Chinese practically invented censorship; I taught that in my 6th grade social studies classes, telling my students that Emperor Qin introduced the concept way back when, with the burning of books and the killing of scholars, the same guy who built all the terra cotta warriors I had gone to China to see.

    CNN didn’t censor the riots, in fact they highlighted them in their broadcast, and I was able to see first hand footage of the Uyghur’s protests. Just like in our country’s recent riots, people disagreed as to what turned the protests violent. The Chinese government said the riots were planned, and the Uyghur exile groups said it was because of excessive police force. Laying in my comfy bed, I was grateful to finally be able hear about an event that was going on so close to me, an unbiased account giving multiple points of view, as was what I expected by a news source that I had trusted for years.

    Now CNN has turned into some kind of a Propaganda Theater, much like the rhetoric I heard nonstop during my visit to China. I remember the moment I realized CNN had changed, and that day was last year, when Bernie was clearly dominating that first Super Tuesday in practically every state in the running. Even though he was winning, and winning big, Anderson and Don kept dismissing it, saying it was early, it was early, and everyone knew he wasn’t going to ultimately win. Don Lemon said his mama was a black southern Democrat, and she was voting for Biden. I was like, huh? Bernie is crushing it, what are you talking about? Then there was Chris Cuomo dramatically coming upstairs, Live! to reunite with his family after his bout with Covid. I can only stomach watching it for a few minutes now, watching Chris and Don claim their love for each other, and then go on to dramatically denigrate Republicans, or put the fear porn in overdrive regarding the pandemic.

    What happened to that news outlet? It’s more like what happened to all news outlets? I’m not going to try to explain the dizzying array of corporate takeovers, anti-trust lawsuits, financial ties and interests, mega-monopolies like Warner Media, China Media Capital, and ATT, merging, divesting, and merging again and all the billion dollar shenanigans mixed with political interests that have gone down in the past few years. Try reading about who owns what in the media and why. I went down an Internet rabbit hole trying to figure it out, and it is so complicated, I don’t want to waste my time trying to understand it anymore. What I have started researching are independent, unbiased news sources that I can trust and follow, and make up my own mind about things.

    I didn’t know about all these takeovers and big money behind the scenes, or I didn’t pay attention. All I know is that I felt it on a gut level. Something had changed. Then I saw it in my beloved Chronicle, and heard it on NPR, the background radio of my life for decades. The tone of voice in both of these news sources was fear mongering and sad, even the little bits of music between stories on NPR now has a melancholy sound. I realized that we, the American people, are being manipulated and censored by the media, because of interests that are gigantic, and have absolutely nothing to do with us, down here in Anytown, USA, flipping the remote, or surfing the web.

    Back to my China trip, the surrealistic creepy feeling was intensified when we were being given the tour of Tiananmen Square. Like I said last time, no mention was made of the 1989 movement when some brave students protested for democracy and the Chinese government murdered thousands of them. Our cute, young, diminutive tour guide, with her colorful parasol held high so that we could find her among the crowds, made no mention about this incident. As we waited in line to see Mao’s tomb, and the guide spouted off a litany of facts about the square, Mao, Lenin and Marx and the building, I asked her where she gets all her information. She laughingly told me that she looked a lot of it up on Google. I told her that Google tells us about the Tiananmen Square massacre when we look it up, and she told me what she saw made no mention of such a thing.

    I remember thinking at the time: Ew! Google censored information for the Chinese government? How could they? I loved Google back then, even the colorful little logo made me happy, like the Disneyland font, and I was proud that my very own Bay Area had started such a cool hip search engine. For someone like me who loves to research, Google was a dream, after years of playing around with microfiche in college libraries trying to find reliable sources for my school papers and theses.

    Update, a dozen years later, on those Uyghur people who were rioting back in
    2009. Up to a million of them are now living in over 400 giant “re-education”, (more like prison camps), in Xinjiang where these Muslims are having their “thoughts transformed” by the Chinese government. There are close to 400 of these compounds, with over a million people inside.

    While listening to the mainstream media news lately, I heard someone mention the word “reprogramming”. The first time, I was cooking dinner, and it was background noise, but my antennae stood at alert. Did I hear that right? Since then I’ve heard this term used at least four other times, and it is in reference to Trump supporters, which is half the country. No, I am not a Trump supporter, but I’m sure they’d find their reasons to reprogram me too. Then I read my beloved Barbara Boxer had registered as a foreign agent for a Chinese surveillance firm called Hikvision, a company that helps with those reprogramming prisons those Uyghurs are interred in. Her job was to provide “strategic consulting services” to the company’s subsidiary here in the US. She later withdrew, but only because people found out. We should all pay attention and ask what is going on.

    Let’s be like… what the United States originally stood for. Let’s not be like China.

  • Twelve Years Ago I Visited China

    Twelve years ago I visited China.

    I was teaching ancient civilizations to middle school kids at the time. When I saw the photo of the terra cotta warriors in the social studies textbook, I was blown away that such a spectacle could exist. Several football fields full of life-sized armies of clay soldiers, horses, musicians and acrobats, each with an individual face, had been unearthed in 1974, I learned. I vowed to someday see these statues in real life. When serendipitously I heard of a group that took teachers to China for a two-week tour for free, I jumped at the chance.

    I was a little in love with China back then.

    It was the time in my life when I starting to explore Buddhism and meditation, so teaching sixth graders about China fishtailed with my own interests. I loved the philosophy of Confucius. The yin yang symbol was cool and popular at the time, plastered on skateboards or dangling from earrings, and I loved learning the real meaning of the light side of the hill and the dark side, and how both were inherent in everything. I loved The Tao of Pooh, and started studying the Tao in earnest. I started going to an acupuncturist if I felt bad, or even if I felt good. I loved Chinese calligraphy and watercolors, and started taking classes to learn the art and the meditation of their pictographs. I painted the Chinese symbol for love in my bedroom. I got my first tattoo, the Chinese symbol for truth, on my ankle.

    I was excited when I learned about our whirlwind itinerary. The group of twenty teachers would visit Xian, the sight of the warriors I wanted to see, as well Beijing. We would go on a cruise down the Yangtze River and see the Olympic stadium, a Chinese ballet, the Great Wall, and a whole host of activities the first week, and the second week we would study the history and culture of China in order to bring back information to our students. We would be required to take Chinese lessons online before we went, way before Zoom was ever invented. In order to have our trip paid for, we were required to be observed teaching lessons regarding the trip to our class upon our return.

    After my visit, I hated China, and vowed never to return.

    I realized early into the tour that entire two-week trip was nothing more than a giant propaganda brainwashing of us teachers, so we could take their views back to the states and indoctrinate our students. The first week we were treated with luxury, including five star hotels, the finest cuisine of each region, the touring of the best schools, evening entertainment, and a cruise complete with a doctor cupping us. The pace was such, that we were exhausted and satiated, with little time to think. Week two found us in barrack like dorms, where we attended class every day to have the history of communist China rewritten for us from their perspective.

    I could feel the presence of Chairman Mao and his authoritative government everywhere I went. We were taken to bookstores where our guides took notes on what we read. In Tiananmen Square no mention was made of the protests or the protesters that were killed. We saw how the highways we traveled were beautifully landscaped with fresh flowers to impress us, but I could see the slums and shanty houses right beyond. The high school we visited was brand new, and apparently state of the art, but so shoddily and hastily built that the crumbling walls and leaking roofs were plainly apparent. We visited a museum that boasted of China’s environmental program and initiatives, but the sky outside, that we saw with our own eyes, was never blue, only a sickly yellow. We saw where the Yangtze River Three Gorges dam was built, and how the government had no problem flooding the shores, displacing millions of farmers, and destroying ancient temples and artifacts. Although we visited one Buddhist temple, our tour guides told us that religion is frowned upon, because the more important focus of all the people was making money.

    I tried to talk one-on-one to the guides as much as possible, but they were tight lipped. I asked them about Google, and if they knew that their information was being censored. I asked them if they believed in God. I asked them if they minded giving up their kids, and only seeing them once a month in order for them to do their jobs. I asked them why people weren’t allowed kiss in public.

    I wondered why people in hazmat suits with face shields and helmets took our temperature with those little guns on all our plane flights. I thought everyone was wearing masks because of the smog, but no, a flu was going around, but I had never heard of it, and when I got home I was in bed for two weeks with the only case of the flu that I have had in my adult life. Only then, did I learn about H1N1 or the term ‘Swine Flu’.

    The virus had followed me home.

    And now it’s back. Everything I hated about China, the censorship, the authoritarian regime, the brainwashing, the fake news, the propaganda, the whitewashing of bad truth, the illness, the masks, the distancing, the smoky yellow sky, the lockdown, the rewriting of history, the focus on money, the discouraging of gathering and religion has permeated American soil. It’s all here, along with their new ugly virus. The shocking part to me is how Americans so easily succumbed and even embraced, the ways of China.

    I am glad I saw those Terra Cotta soldiers up close.  The magnificence of the vision of this guy Emperor Qin, or Ch’in, who had them built in his honor, (and of whom China is named after) was something to behold. The grandeur of this ruler’s vision, and his attention to detail, is what enabled him to implement his authoritarian rule over the vast land. But eventually, his well thought out means of controlling people ended when rebellion erupted.  People can only be held down for so long.