Toilantrouble

Oh No, Not Again

Once more, summer appears to have expired prematurely.

It had so much to live for. My peach tree is full of ripening fruit. The roses have cried havoc and let slip the flowers of August, the Saturday farmers' market looks like an explosion in a jelly bean factory--color and flavor, sweetness bursting in every direction--and the metaphors have become positively lurid. That is the way the summer ends, not with a bang perhaps, but with a shout.

We begin working in our Northern California school district  in early August, that is, well before the ides. There is nothing wrong with this in the larger sense, especially given that it means we end the school year in the freshness of early June.  I'm only saying that it clashes with the iconic notion that school begins in the fall. First semester is called fall semester, I imagine because the majority of it occurs in that quadrant of the year that we call fall, or autumn when we're talking plummy. However, that ignores the fact that a substantial portion of it, about five weeks, occurs in summer. If primogeniture were taken into consideration, summer would, in fact, have the greater claim to the name, being the first season out of the chute, academically speaking.

But I am not complaining. I have summered well. I have seen and read things I had not hitherto seen and read. Some of the seeing occurred in familiar territory re-examined, as with the trip to Los Angeles, and some of it on a late July road trip to places I had only known in pictures.

We left our home in Davis on a Sunday afternoon and rendezvoused with our friends the Stones at their hilltop home in a place called Agua Dulce, in the high desert northeast of Los Angeles. From there, the next morning, we set out across the California desert, through Nevada to southern Utah, where we entered our first camping spot, Zion National Park.

Zion is one of those places about which one should probably remain silent, as words are not quite equal to the task of describing it. Instead, one should adopt a beatific look and go, mentally, to the place of the painted wind in the canyon of the sky and imagine a Ute with a flute playing ethereal melodies that float like hawks, and dive like raindrops, seep silently through sandstone and emerge on immense yellow, red and green-streaked cliffs to water tiny hanging gardens. The place owes its name to the Mormon settlers who began coming to Utah in the mid-1800s. They called it Zion, I believe, because they thought they were Jews. They had the whole polygamy thing, which the original Jews had abandoned some thousands of years before, and the beard thing, which Jews had abandoned more recently, except in parts of New York. These latter-day Zionists had the foresight, however, not to bring any Palestinians with them, which saved them no end of trouble.

Our three days in Zion were spent at leisure. We had dogs with us, which restricted our movements somewhat. They are not allowed on most of the trails in the park, but we solved that issue by touring and hiking in shifts. A convenient, free shuttle takes visitors to any number of scenic spots and trail heads. There are no bears in Zion, or at least none that frequent campsites, so we were a bit lax on the first day about leaving edible things about camp when we went out. This was a mistake, because whereas there are no bears there are rapacious squirrels. If bears can be compared to sharks, then squirrels are little, furry piranhas. They take smaller bites, but with far greater frequency. You've seen they twitch their little tails, scurry about and chatter constantly in that squirrely way. They eat with the same frenetic energy.

We left Zion and, as it is in the neighborhood, we decided to have a look at Bryce Canyon National Park. It was worth a look. While close to Zion, Bryce projects a strikingly different geologic character. Similarly ruddy and majestic, Bryce is more curvaceous than Zion, as if the great sculptor had been trying to get in touch with his feminine side. Another difference is that our experience of Zion was, for the most part, from the bottom up. The highways and camping areas are built largely along the canyon floor. Our vantage point at Bryce, on the other hand, was the rim of the canyon, which added a thrill of danger to the experience.

The next leg of our trip was a long one, which ended in northern Utah at a place of paleontological as well as geological significanc, Dinosaur National Monument, which is notable for its pocket canyons and huge fossil quary, where human beings have desecrated the graves of countless dead dinosaurs, although I am told that, by one definition, a grave is no longer a grave once the organic material has been replaced by minerals, as is the case with most dinosaur remains. It gives one pause. Are cemetery plots really a good value? I am also told that many of the fine dinosaur skeletons that appear in natural history museums throughout the country were excavated at Dinosaur National Monument. This, unfortunately was only a stopover for us. We arrived late in the evening at a beautiful campground on the Green River and stayed only until the next morning, when we decamped for the state of Wyoming and a link-up with our daughter, Christi, who works at the National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander. That leg of the trip took us over the proverbial high plains of the West and at times it looked as if we were driving along the top of the world. We reached Lander at about dinner time and checked into our motel. Christi was visiting with friends, but joined us after dinner. Lander is a pleasant town, a place of boots--both the cowboy and hiking varieties--and large, silver belt buckles. It is bordered by mountains and boasts some world-class rock-climbing nearby. We are told that most, if not all, of the Leadership School's 200 employees gather in the evenings at the Lander Bar, an establishment reputedly once frequented by Butch Cassidy.

After scooping up Christi the next morning, our caravan departed for Grand Teton National Park, a place that is both grand and Tetonic. One expects Valkyries to flock, singing thunderously, from the startling, glacier streaked peaks. Rivers, lakes and grasslands spread peacefully below the fortress-like mountains. Enormous, billowing clouds floated through the sky and coalesced each of the three afternoons we were there into hail-dropping thunderstorms. Our dog, Georgie, got some much needed water time as she and I went swimming in Jackson Lake. Christi and I went on a 10-mile hike and were rained upon seven times.

From Grand Teton it is only a short trip to Yellowstone, patriarch of America's national park family. A natural museum of geology's wilder, more dangerous side, the park is a reminder that beneath ithe earth's placid exterior beats a heart of fire and liquid stone. Pour water onto it and spurts back out as a devastating blast of steam, or bubbles ominously up as super-hot, sulphurous mud. The whole place seems other-worldly although, of course, it's no other world, it's our own little mama showing her schizophrenic side. The whole place is a giant volcanic caldera that, we are told, is likely to erupt again in the not-too-distant future, perhaps even in the next couple of centuries. And when it does blow, it is likely to cut quite a swath. The dinosaurs could go extinct all over again. All of this lends a certain poignancy to having seen it. Who knows, it could be closed next year, along with most of the western United States.  It reminds me of the line from Firesign Theater, "You must see the palace. It won't be here long. They are cleaning it."  I loved Yellowstone, which--in addition to a spectacular golden canyon, rolling grasslands, rivers and cataclysmic waterfalls--afforded the best defined wildlife experience of the trip. Yellowstone bison appear to be arranged especially for photo opportunities for they can be seen from all possible angles and from any number of distances during the course of an afternoon's drive. Around one bend they're grazing majestically on lush grass by rushing waters and next they're chatting with motorists by the roadside and posing for pictures, for which they charge a small fee. While bison are cuddly in the same way that woolly mammoths must have been cuddly, we are warned by those who know them not to feed them or to get too personal with them. They are, after all, wild, although from one perspective it is difficult to regard as wildlife anything that can be made into hamburger. But they are reputedly unpredictable and are certainly large enough that one would not want to upsdet them.

Yellowstone was our final, scenic destination, although we did have two more nights on the road, one in Salt Lake City and one in the Nevada boom town of Winnemucca. I must say I liked Salt Lake, which has, at least publicly, shed some of its Mormon asceticism so that there are now bars, clubs and brewpubs in the center of the city. Architecturally, it appears to be a city on the rise, with skyscrapers now ascending to heights once only achieved by angels. It is still, in many ways, a city dominated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, however, and its defining feature is still the prim, gothic temple and the lovely buildings and gardens of Temple Square. Mormons, who renounced polygamy in order to gain statehood in the late 19th century appear to have embraced mass monogamy. On that Saturday morning in Temple Square, young brides in whipped cream white dresses were as thick as wildflowers in a Rocky Mountain meadow.  It was, from there, a dreary drive across the northern Nevada high desert, but we found a comfortable motel that welcomed pets in the little casino town--they're all casino towns in Nevada--of Winnemucca, where there was also a lovely little Basque restaurant that served us plenty of plain, hearty food and a carafe of sweet, red wine. On Sunday, more endless Nevada rangeland, a lunch stop in Reno and a look at that city's lovely river-walk, then on home to Davis.

My Mother's Shells

My mother died in February and I have yet to write about it. That says something.

While I never quite came to terms with my mother as a human being during her lifetime, perhaps it will be possible now.

 It was a long, dreamy death that led through  progressive dementia and, at its closure, finally brought together that which had been shattered many years ago. My sisters and I, her survivors, may never be understand everything about our mother's life, and the lives we shared with her, but I hope that each of us can ultimately understand the part of her that is in us. This is the beginning of my attempt.

Mother suffered from severe mental illness all of her adult life. We came eventually to call it bipolar disorder, although the euphemism everyone used though much of my childhood was that it was a "nervous" condition. The depressive phase was dominant and included prolonged paranoid delusions. These episodes were periodic and whereas there were periods when the illness appeared to be under control, these never lasted more than a half a year before the beast broke free and circled around us like an avenging dragon for a few weeks or months.

 The illness began, from what  I have been able to gather from older family members, in my mother's adolescence and may be connected to her having been sexually molested by a family friend. I do not know the exact nature of the incident, or how long it lasted, but it appears the perpetrator's name was Cunningham, a name she frequently mentioned during her paranoid ravings but never, to my knowledge, utterred during her stable periods. I also do not know how the family dealt with the matter. Her mother and siblings knew of it, but I do not know whether it was ever brought fully to light. It may be that the family knew of it only through the manifestations of my mother's illness. I do know that my mother absorbed an indelible sense of guilt and unworthiness which, whether or not it caused the mental illness, certainly provided much of its virulent energy.

The other event that wounded her youthful psyche was her parents' separation. I'm a bit fuzzy as to when it actually occurred, but she was both young enough and old enough to be deeply affected by it. Her father was the radiologist-turned novelist Jose Geraldo Vieira and as he became more and more involved in Rio de Janiero's bohemiam artistic community he and my grandmother became estranged. My mother did not speak much about it although once, when she was in one of her deep depressions she drew me a simple picture of a flowing stream that divided into two branches. "And I was stuck in the middle," I remember she said. I believe I was about 12 when she told me that. I do not recall what I made of it at the time, but it clearly made an impression on me. My father once told me that my grandfather, who was by then a famous writer, nearly missed their wedding , arriving just in time, rumpled and unshaven, to give away the bride.

My father told me that he knew of my mother's history of mental illness when he married her. I do not know how accurate an account he received from my grandmother, or how severe the illness had seemed up to that point. He said he thought he could make her well, or at least cope with whatever demons haunted her. I suspect that the immensity of his love for her simply made such things seem small. It was, of course, no small thing, and during my childhood that illness seemed at times to be the largest single subject in our lives. I begin to question now, in retrospect, whether it was the defining element in my parents' long marriage. 

It was, I have come to accept, a deeply loving marriage, although it did not often seem so when I was growing up. It did not seem to me to be a relationship between  equals, but I now realize that this kind of judgment is tricky. My mother was frequently off riding emotional chimeras, whereas my father was a rationalist and an intellectual. The connections between men and women are complicated, however, and as I evaluate my parents' past I realize that it contained a shared vocabulary regarding what was good, and decent, and valuable in life. There was certainly a good deal of shared experience, much of it difficult and painful, but some of it thrilling and adventurous. They had embarked from Rio de Janeiro, a tropical city my mother had barely ever left in her 24 years of life, in August of 1952, on a mixed cargo and passenger ship bound or New York. On the advice of a friend, who told them it was the best way to see America, they boarded a Greyhound bus for the trip half way across the country to Fargo, North Dakota, where my father was to go to graduate school. I was 10 months old and know nothing of the trip other than a story my mother told me about the time their luggage, containing all of my diapers, went astray in Chicago. My parents then became familiar with a hitherto unknown product and I became, temporarily, a disposable diaper baby.

I have some memories of North Dakota, where we lived until I was nearly four years old. Mostly they concern the names of people, a boy named Rossie and a girl named Sheila, and the luminous blue color of daylight, although that may be more the product of old photographs than of memory. I have no direct recollection of larger events, such as a trip to Winnipeg on which I'm told we and our friend Manny Carneri were very nearly stranded in an early-season blizzard while driving back to Fargo. Smaller, less significant things, on the other hand, remain quite sharp in my memory. I remember feeling great excitement over the anticipated installation of a screen door at our house in the student family complex at North Dakota State University, which then I believe was still called North Dakota Agricultural College. I remember my father working at a gas station, which I am told came about because the Brazilian government reduced funding for its overseas graduate students. Ido not, oddly enough, have any distinct memories of snow, although it was plentiful, and there are pictures of it in the photo album my mother kept of that time in our lives. Nor do I remember being affected by my mother's mental illness, although my father once mentioned to me an episode in which she tried to throw stones at the neighbors, no doubt in some sort of paranoid rage. I can not imagine how that incident affected our lives, or whether there were others like it. The reverberations of those disturbances are somewhere in deep space, beyond our capacity to detect or interpret them.

The illness does not become a distinct entity for me until much later, after we had moved briefly to Northern Virginia just outside Washington D.C. following the completion of my father's studies, returned to Brazil for some months in 1956 and then come back to the U.S. and settled in Bethesda, Maryland. My sister Edla had been born in the summer of 1955, shortly before we left Fargo and Claudia was born in the spring of 1958, while we lived in the white-painted brick house on Elm Street. We were then a fully developed nuclear family according to the typical post-World War II model. My father worked as a research chemist for a small firm in Bethesda and my mother occupied herself with her three children. The normal structures of 1950s childhood were all strongly present: friends, family meals, tree-climbing and the free roaming from backyard to backyard and street to street that has all but disappeared from modern childhood. My mother was a benign, though foreign presence, still firmly rooted in her Brazilian culture. I remember my friend Jeannie once laughed when my mother was giving me some medicine because when she said, "Open your mouth," the way she pronounced "mouth" made it sound like "mouse."  Mother taught all three of us to swim in the big, above-ground pool that my father assembled one summer in the backyard. She served as a den mother when I was in the Cub Scouts. She was not, overall, dysfunctional, or at least did not seem to be. The times when she became irrational and paranoid, or was dragged screaming to he hospital seem isolated, like icebergs in an otherwise hospitable sea. That was to change later on when, as my mind reconstructs it, normality became the exception. Stability became discontinuous and the experience of disorder stemming from my mother's unpredictable illness a constant, looming threat.

Young people in adolescence begin to establish a sense of the future, and mine was distorted to a certain extent by the always impending disruption of my mother's lunatic spells. As I have no alternate reality with which I can realistically compare my upbringing, I cannot gauge the effect that this sense of uncertainty had on me. I thought about it often in subsequent years and at one time or another have attributed to it any number of neuroses. I did not spend much time trying to understand what that fragmented reality looked like through my mother's eyes.

They were lovely blue eyes that, when focused on normative reality, as they were in those periods between spells of insanity, seemed to define life in terms of its small, pretty things. It was a child's view of the world, or so it seemed to us, her grown children. When we were planning my mother's funeral, my sister Claudia remembered times, sitting at my parents' kitchen table looking out at their woodsy backyard, when she would try to engage my mother in adult conversation. The older woman was constantly distracted by squirrels, or birds flitting about among the trees.

She was inordinately fond of seashells, and often used them to create little ocean scenes, with slivers of shells for seagull wings and sailboats constructed of larger fragments. Thus she recreated a simple, childish vision dominated by sea and sky and sunshine, no doubt inspired by her early youth in Leblon, a seaside neighborhood in Rio. Was she trying to reassemble something that had been broken apart for her?

During her dark times she focused on larger, more sweeping realities, sinister conspiracies of neighbors and relatives to force her back into a past she feared and yet fiercely confronted. She raved and raged until the ghosts and hurricanes of a disordered world receded like a malevolent tide that had peaked and ebbed but would rise again. And when the tsunami of guilt and remembrance had dissipated, she would begin again the task of assembling the tiny pieces into pretty little pictures.

I do not know what her inner world looked like to her in her final years. She had become mostly blind and unable to walk or care for her physical needs. Dementia had begun to flood her being like a fog, though it lifted occasionally. I know from things my sisters told me that echoes of guilt from her past still reverberated and haunted her to the very end. She had, in those last few years, lost her ability to make her little shell pictures. I hope they remained with her in some way. It is romantic to think that those innocent little seaside visions withstood the ferocious demons that regularly attacked them. I don't entirely believe that they did, though I want to. But there they are, still sharp while all the harder realities of my mother's life have faded into blurs.

It's an Old World, Golda

Perhaps we shall be colorful immigrants one day.

 Emigrants first, I suppose, wearing the shabby coats of our once proud land, traveling steerage in a giant Airbus airliner, making quaint, ethnic music with our Ipods to while away the hours on our voyage to the lands of our ancestors, who probably should have stuck it out until the advent of socialized health care and the Euro.

Then newly arrived immigrants, screened for consumption and mad cow disease, stripped of any irradiated or bio-engineered seeds or produce and sent with our bundles to the ghettos where brothers and cousins and children have arrived before us to set up shabby little fast-food restaurants, cellular phone shops and tatoo parlors, but also carefully tended organic gardens and compost piles among the tenements alive with the lilting rhythms of Californian English.

It is not for us, the old ones, that we go. It is for the young ones. We do not want them to live in a state that cannot govern itself, where the schools and roads and bridges crumble and we lack the will to raise the money to repair them. No tears, please, though we leave part of our souls in the land of warm, rosemary-scented breezes, where the sweet wine flows down from the foothills and and the shouts of Saturday soccer children echo through the greenbelts.

The Decorative Importance of Books

I just dispatched three boxes of books to my daughter in Wyoming. These are not books that she uses for monetary gain, like medical books or law books. Just books. Novels, mainly, but also essays, philosophy, that sort of thing. The kind of books one wants to live with. Or, at least she does. And I do. We read them, of course, but there is more to it than that, something weirder.

 There are several highly literate members of the extended family who do not accumulate books. They check them out from the public library, read them and then return them. That is very rational, but it does not seem to work for me, or for my daughter. WE want to be surrounded by them in our homes. Why is that? Is it some sort of fetish? Or are books simply a valid decorating concept to which she and I subscribe? Maybe they're like an edible garden. People like to have edible gardens for their utiltarian value, but I don't think they'd have them if edible plants were ugly. Fruits and vegetables are pretty, so the utilitarian is married to the aesthetic.

 I may be stretching the analogy to say that books make a similar decorative statement. Taken individually, they're actually kind of funny looking. Sandwiches of cloth and paper and animal hide. But in flocks they do have a certain grandeur and beauty. I like having walls that buzz with stories, poems and information. A small space can have portals to a vast number of times and places. True, an electronic device can provide the same function, but I find I crave the physical intimacy. I am not yet capable of virtual literature. I need to be in the matrix, not just linked to it.

In the Moment

Getting off the merry-go-round is not as easy as it looks. And I have more than two months to do it. Most in this country have far less time away from the cycles of time and expectation. Yet I find it takes some mental effort to disconnect the wires that link me to the network of ongoing concerns and listen to the acoustic rhythm of the larger thing, the thing which produces green and blue and twirling and buzzing and the comforting, repetitive chatter in the trees. I have to say it to myself over and over again. I am glad there are trees whose small, oblong leaves react so intimately to the touch of the air and that that same air makes the flower banner hanging from my front porch wave in inumerable positions as if experimenting with ways to caress it and the hanging, spiral copper ornament takes that moving air and converts it to a dance and the wind chimes turn it into sound. That is evidence enough that something is going on that has nothing to do with what I will do tomorrow.

The Sweetness of Ephemerality

Apricots are a poetic thing. They come like a tidal wave of honey and leave us drenched and sticky so that for a moment we think there is nothing else, no other reality but the consuming sweetness, no other message than that subliminal vision, yellow flakes of sunlight in a luminous green sea.

I do not want to live forever. There is no sweetness that does not turn to mush. Give me short bursts of ecstacy that pierce the soul like arrows of energy, let me delight in the echoes, and then let me go.I will not fear the forgetfulness of winter, for the momentary joys are the only ones that stay.

Reflections III

Adhering to strict standards of academic advancement will not, by itself, improve the way we administer learning opportunities to California students. Like our system of financial governance, our educational system is in grave need of restructuring. In the case of education, the restructuring needs to be aimed at integrating the learning experience so that the various channels of educational inquiry flow in the same direction and thereby reinforce one another.

Secondary education today, especially at the high school level, consists largely of a collection of unrelated courses cobbled together for the sake of scheduling expediency without regard for coherency. Students are thereby given the false impression that education is a matter of numerical accumulation rather than a systematic framework for understanding the world and one's place in it.  Many come to regard knowledge as a series of discreet compartments unrelated to one another, whereas nothing could be further from the truth. Education should consist of a network of mutually reinforcing coursework aimed at the exploration of a broad field of endeavor that corresponds to the student's interests and inclinations.

There has been some--though not nearly enough-- movement in this direction in California through the establishment of so-called partnership academies at some schools. Students who are placed in academies--which function essentially as schools within schools--meet the same standards as students in traditional high schools, but focus on them through the wide-angle lens of a broad area of endeavor such as business, agriculture, communications, science and technology or performing arts. The way it works, ideally, is that, for example, a student interested in automotive technology learns history through a curriculum that emphasizes human technological development. The teacher of literature demonstrates how developments in technology over the centuries coincide with developments in other areas of human thought as reflected in the writings of novelists, poets and essayists. Teachers of government, psychology and economics relate human material progress to the ways human beings govern themselves, distribute resources and understand the workings of their brains. The science teacher, while demonstrating the principles of physical and biological science provides the framework for learning how these scientific developments have affected material, spiritual and artistic culture.

If every minute of a student's education reinforces the concept of of an integrated network of human knowledge, that student is more likely to see the value of a broadly based effort to succeed. Moreover, if a student can be convinced that the entirety of his or her academic effort is geared toward the advancement of his or her own chosen interest, motivation ceases to be an issue. It becomes intrinsic to the process. And what if a student, at some point, changes interests and wants to change direction? That will not be a problem if programs are carefully designed so as to instill appropriate skills in conmmunications, the gathering and analysis of information and critical thinking.

In order to accomplish such restructuring, state education officials would need to declare a period of free innovation and inquiry. School districts would need to be freed from the fear of standardized test results and their misguided attempts to quantify education.  Administrators would thus be free to try bold new approaches to integrated education. Teachers would be free to develop assessments based on integrated, practical applications geared to the demonstrated needs of the industries, professions and skilled trades of this nation. Students would be free to learn.

Reflections II

What would it look like if students were only to  advance to the next grade level when they had mastered the standards of their current levels?

 The fear, of course, is that there would be logjams at various levels if  too many students failed to progress. I believe that this issue, if it is indeed an issue, might correct itself, however. High school students place a great deal of importance on heirarchical status. Freshmen are eager to ascend from the cellar and each succeeding class looks forward to seniorhood, not only because of its proximity to the privileges of adulthood but also because it represents the highest level in a social caste system that has dominated most of their lives.

 I suspect, therefore, that establishing an achievement-based system of academic advancement would provide an added incentive for students to do the work necessary to demonstrate mastery of skills required at their respective grade levels. In short, it may well be that a freshman or a sophomore would be less likely to shirk assignments if doing so meant that he or she would fail to advance to the next class level the following year. There would be no more seniors who can barely read, who cannot write a coherent essay or who have never done a research paper.

We already have in place at  our high school a system designed to nurture students through the mastery of required skills. Known as "essential assignments," this system is designed to hold students accountable for skill mastery assignment by assignment. If administered properly, it could the support necessary for achievement-based advancement. There is a serious flaw in the system's present form, however. It makes no distinction between students who faithfully attempt assignments but fail to demonstrate mastery and those who simply do not do them. Those who have failed to do the assignment are given the same opportunity to make it up at our tutorial center as those who tried it but had difficulty.

The result is that students are trained to believe that assignment deadlines do not really exist. I have seen the cumulative effect of this training. Seniors who fail to turn in major assignments do not expect to face the consequences. Instead, they ask for and feel entitled to opportunities to make up assignments when they realize they will fail the class, and therefore fail to graduate, without them.This is a very unproductive frame of mind, both for the individual student and for society as a whole.  If, instead, we were to combine strong support for students who make an effort to learn with complete intolerance for those who do not, we could deploy our scarce educational resources in a much moreefficient manner. Let those who have, though their own volition, failed to board the streetcar named desire for learning wait for the next one--in summer school--or else enter the work force as pedestrians and experience what is is like to be hobbled by ignorance. 

Reflections from the Flower Garden

The school year ended two weeks ago and I have retired for the summer to work in my garden, to read and to think. Perhaps it is true of all professions; it is particularly true of this profession that reflection is essential to progress. That is one reason I love summers, a chance not only to unwind, but to rewind.

As in previous years, a lot of students failed my senior English class. A lot more almost failed it, and probably would have if I had been as rigid about assignment deadlines as I claimed I would be at the beginning of the year. I had a conversation about this with my principal during which I pointed out that teachers of seniors often find themselves at the delta of a river of academic laxity that stretches back into junior high and elementary school. The simple fact is that too many students are promoted year after year without having mastered the skills necessary to move on to the next level. The results are senior classes consisting of students whose skills at language manipulation and critical thinking range from grade-appropriate to five to seven years below grade level.

 At several points in the conversation, my principal injected the term differentiated instruction, which is a euphemism for simplifying grade-level material so that it can be taught to students who are not at grade level. Any true teacher does a certain amount of this automatically, of course, by basing instruction on the results of informal and formal assessments. We must base instruction on reality, not on assumption.

 What concerns me, however, is that the institutionalization of this so-called differentiation may be viewed as a solution to the systemic problem of inadequate preparation. What I would prefer to see is a system in which every student placed in a 12th-grade English class has proven mastery of the skills taught in 11th-grade English, and so on down the ranks. It makes no sense, it seems to me, to have numerical distinctions between grade levels, when those grade levels have no basis in academic reality.

Walking in Los Angeles

It is neither entirely accurate nor entirely inacurate to say that L.A. is a walkable town. It is not the sort of place an ambitious walker could, or would ever want to, explore from cover to cover on foot. This is the city that invented sprawl, a grotesque agglomeration of conjoined siblings whose shared arteries are freeways and whose lifeblood is automobile exhaust. On the other hand, there are parts of it that defy the anti-pedestrian stereotype. Having spent the past four days walking in the city's downtown financial district and environs, I am happy to concede that this part of the city, at least, is eminently walkable.

First, a few jots of perspective. I like cities, even horridly flawed ones such as Los Angeles. We are a deeply flawed species, we human beings, and L.A. is, in some ways, one of our weirdest creations. It is, at the same time, one of the world's great cities, a place upon whose small sucesses and monumental failures, the future of urban life on this planet will in part be based. It is a place that looks absolutely awful from afar. From outer space it resembles some sort of cancerous cloud on the brain of the earth. From some points within, however, it actually looks quite beautiful. I will now describe a few of those.

I should begin by saying that I am junketing in L.A., courtesy of my wife, Mooch, who is attending a conference at the Westin Bonaventure. Because I am not attending a conference, nor am I responsible for any actual work on this trip, it has been my fate to walk the streets in order to stay out of trouble. This I have done with great diligence.

The first place I found myself wandering into was the magnificent central library, which is at Fifth and Flower streets about a block from the hotel. This art-deco building, built in 1925, looks the way I imagine a Mesopotamian mausoleum would look if it were carved out of ivory soap and capped with a multicolored pyramid. Austere and exotic at the same time, perfect for a library. Inside it's absolutely lovely. In addition to its vast book collections, data bases and many computer stations, the library offers a gorgeous visual experience, from its intricately painted rotunda to the seven-story vaulted hall hung with large, playful, brightly colored sculptures and supported by massive green columns. One of the most beautiful spaces in the library is the children's literature room, with its elegant, wooden book shelves and high, ornate ceiling. There are also several art galleries in the building which, when I visited, featured color photographs by Paul Outerbridge, a collection of movie posters magazine covers and photographs celebrating early Hollywood, and a very interesting exhibit of sketches, drawings and watercolors by the architect Richard Neutra.

A stroll down Fifth Street and then to the left up Bunker Hill is the Music Center, whose latest addition is the strangely attractive Disney Concert Hall. It is difficult to describe this fantasmic stainless steel structure. Imagine a set of metal blocks on hallucinagens, or an enormous metal Rubiks Cube blown apart by a large improvised explosive device. What does not appear to make much sense from the outside makes a great deal of sense on the inside, however, where carefully designed acoustical concrete softened by the generous use of polished redwood create a fine balance of form and function. There is a sweeping "Cinderella" staircase leading from the second level to a small space used for lectures and chamber music. Large windows and skylights hidden in the folds of the building's whimsically curved stainless steel shell allow copious amounts of natural light to flow in. The main concert space has been photographed many times and appears annually at the Oscars, so I knew what it looked like. It is awfully pretty when seen in the flesh, though. The massive house organ shoots up the back wall like a dancing woodpile, its brass pipes encased in light brown wood to match the walls. The upholstry on the seats is done in a floral pattern chosen by Mrs. Disney. A docent said some people don't like it, but I do. The splash of color blends well with the wood and lends inimacy to the hall, which is grand without being cold or intimidating.

One of my favorite features of the Disney Hall is the hidden garden that hugs one side of the building, hidden within the billowing stainless steel of the building's outer shell. This serene little park brims with flowering California native and Mediterranean plants. The garden is accessible from outside the building as well as from within, via the outdoor walkway. This kind of elevated public garden is typical of downtown L.A., which lacks the kind of grand public spaces notable in cities such as Paris and London, but makes up for it in part with a multitude of more intimate, privately maintained but publicly accessible gardens and plazas nestled against the towering office buildings. A person can spend a very pleasant afternoon walking around the financial district and discovering these lovely green spaces which, in L.A.'s subtropical climate are pleasant at almost any time of year.

There are, of course, public parks in downtown, the largest of which is Pershing Square, a large, airy space with, it seems to me, insufficient greenery. The square is dominated by an odd-looking purple tower and an elevated aqueduct that sends a stream of water cascading into a large pool at one end of the park. The person who selected the park's architectural color scheme thought that washed-out purple, yellow and orange were the proper choices, a decision with which I tend to disagree. Nevertheless, the square's striking setting amid a towering range of skyscrapers does make it an interesting place to cross on a downtown walk. A prettier, and somewhat smaller park can be found adjacent to the public library. Known as McGuire Garden, this park radiates coolness, serenity and the sound of rushing water.

Surrounding the skyscrapers of the financial district is another, more plainly dressed and, in many ways, more interesting downtown. The grid of avenues including Broadway, Spring and the lower-numbered streets is lined with shopworn but still functional early 20th-century buildings, many of them ornately decorated and quite a few bearing signs advertising newly refurbished lofts and condos for the hip and affluent. This is L.A.'s lower Manhattan, an ethnically diverse cacophony of shops selling everything from cheap clothing to Mexican herbal remedies and potions. Along Broadway a network of jewelry shops conjures up images of New York's Diamond District and old marquees announce art-deco theaters, many no longer in the entertainment buisness but a few, such as the Orpheum, still hosting crowds for contemporary performers. I strolled through this district for a couple of hours one day, delighting in the grittiness and the bustle. I followed Fourth Street all the way down past City Hall where, in the adjacent park, a farmers' market served a lunchtime crowd a variety of prepared ethnic food, fresh produce and gentle jolt of jazz music purveyed by a very competent trio playing on the grass under the trees. Beyond City Hall I passed the federal courthouse, where I encountered a crowd of reporters that had gathered to interview Charlie Lynch, the Morro Bay medicinal marijuana distributor who had just been sentenced to a year in prison for what, although legal under California state law, remains a federal crime.

Past the courthouse I crossed the street to the state historic park where the city's original buildings still stand and Olvera Street, a Mexican-style market attracts souvenir shoppers. In this tourist enclave, as with any historic "old town," tradition wrestles with contrivance. And whereas those who have strolled through historic districts in real Latin American cities will find nothing new at Olvera Street, I have to say that the atmosphere successfully evokes the city's Mexican roots. The buildings, the oldest of which is the 1818 Avila Adobe, are either still in commercial use or, in the case of the Avila, set up as well-appointed free museums. A public plaza adjacent adjacent to Olvera street provides a pleasant contrast to the densely packed market.

One other place in this part of town that is worth at least a short visit is the gorgeous Union Station railway depot across the street from the historic park. This large meticulously refurbished station serves as a hub for the city's growing metro rail system as well as Amtrack passenger service to other California cities and points east. The white-tablecloth Traxx restaurant appears to attract a decent lunchtime crowd as does the nearby Traxx bar and cocktail lounge.

June, which tends to be cool and gray in L.A., is the perfect time to discover downtown on foot. After a couple of days I was giving enthusiastic advice to random people I met at the hotel's concierge desk about where to go and what to see. A couple more days and I could have been conducting tours. No charge, tips accepted.