Who Cares? (4/6)
The day after we got the news that Adam Vinatieri was leaving the New England Patriots for the Indianapolis Colts, my colleague Steve Chabot came stalking into the English office and announced, ³This is worse than Johnny Damon.²
     Ann Moller, another English teacher, reported that her son Jed, when he heard the news in his car, pulled off the road to place a call to his father. ³He really needed to talk to Ken about it right away,² Ann said. ³Can somebody explain this to me?²
     Well, he cares. A lot of us care about sports, perhaps too much. Most of us are men, but it¹s not just men. My daughter Liza called us after midnight when the Red Sox beat the Yankees in 2004. About a week later our son Joel did the same thing when the Sox won the World Series. They both knew we¹d be asleep, but we didn¹t mind because the fact that they felt safe in waking us up to share their joy showed they care about us, too.
     But I think Ann was asking why we care so much about sports. One of my favorite writers, Roger Angell, addressed the subject in a famous essay on the 1975 World Series. ³It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team,² he admitted.
      ³What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or emotion that has almost gone out of our lives,² he went on. ³And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved.²
     The business of caring has been much on my mind lately. I tried to engage one of my students in a conversation about respect recently, and her answer to every one of my questions, comments, predictions and threats was ³I don¹t care.² That fit my colleague Lisa Cochran¹s recent summation of the problem with the students in her lower-level classes: ³They don¹t care!²
     It¹s not that adolescents lack the capacity to care. They care about sports, for example. They care about their friends. Sometimes they care too much. A couple of Fridays ago, there was an ominous atmosphere in the halls. One of my advisees was weeping and wouldn¹t explain why. Other teachers reported a riptide of whispering about relationships gone wrong. I saw a girl hammering a locker with her fist, shouting ³I hate this school!²
     Just the night before, I was in the Lucy Hurlin Theatre with 30 or 40 members of the community who cared enough about public education to give up an evening to talk about what ConVal students ought to know in order to receive a diploma. For those who couldn¹t make it, we¹re going to have another session like it tomorrow morning, starting at 8:00 a.m. in the theatre.
     The group was sharply divided about whether ConVal should require every graduate to accumulate 26 credits, or to allow some students to graduate with the state minimum of 20. Perpetual gadfly and independent thinker Fran Chapman questioned whether we need diplomas at all.
     But there was much agreement, too. They covered a wall with posters listing the things our children need to learn -- not just the basics of language, science, math, and social studies, but also how to manage money, raise children, deal with people from other cultures, and cope with the upheavals and dislocations that the future is sure to bring.
     It was moving and inspiring. But I couldn¹t help feeling that one important question had not been addressed. For most of our students, who are motivated and eager to learn, and who have the love and support of their families, it hardly matters how many credits we require in what subjects. The tough part is this: what do we do for the ones who don¹t care?