The Aftermath: More Photos

The Aftermath

School reopened today as scheduled. Students were dressed up according to different genres of music as part of Spirit Week. The neighborhood shooting and the death of Officer Randal Simmons was on everyone's mind.

The streets surrounding the home are still closed. Department of Transportation units are allowing in vehicles with media placards and residents. Otherwise, no one else is admitted. While walking around and taking photographs, I observed a verbal disagreement between a CBS Channel 2 news crew and a resident. Evidently, they had parked in his driveway without permission. The LAPD officers guarding the scene intervened and had the crew move the van. As you can see there is still a large police and fire department presence in the neighborhood as they are still working it as a crime scene.

The Incident

Of all the square miles of Los Angeles and its suburbs, I awoke today to find the location of ground zero for a police shootout and my place of employment to be identical. The TV in my bedroom popped on as it usually does at five a.m., and through the haze of sleepiness, I heard the words “Oakdale and Vanowen.” I sat up and stared at the dark and shadowy figures on the screen. All the streets surrounding that intersection were blocked off. Police cars and unmarked vehicles, fire department apparatus and trucks, and several large trailers marked “Command Post” lined the streets.

At five a.m., the details were sketchy: a man barricaded inside his house called 911 last night about nine to say he had killed three members of his own family. Police responded, and when the LAPD SWAT team attempted to gain entrance, two officers were shot. One died at a local hospital; the other was critically wounded. The suspect was still barricaded, and a tactical alert had been called by the police.

I called the vice-principal at home. She in turn called the principal, and we all went into standby mode, waiting to see if we would be allowed onto campus. I began calling fellow teachers to tell them to turn on the news. Clearly from the news helicopter shots, I could see our school. One of the command post trailers was sitting in the intersection right outside the school fence. Los Angeles Department of Transportation units permitted no traffic into the area.

Two hours later, and after a number of phone calls, police and administration officials closed school for today.

By eight a.m., the situation had become clearer. LAPD identified the deceased officer as Randal Simmons, 51, a veteran with twenty-seven years on the force. He had been shot in the neck upon gaining entry to the home in the 19800 block of Welby Way and died at Northridge Hospital about one a.m. this morning.

The second officer was James Veenstra, also 51 and with a similar history in the department as Simmons. He had been shot in the face and was in critical condition but expected to survive.

Two other officers suffered minor wounds.

Police identified the shooter as Edwin Rivera, age twenty. According to police sources he had a rap sheet and some history of mental illness. Neighbors also reported that he was in a gang. His family denied all of this, those that were still living, that is. Rivera killed his father and two brothers in the initial attack that instigated the 911 call. His stepmother made it out alive when police fired tear gas into the home.

Simmons was the first SWAT officer to be killed in the line of duty since the unit’s inception in 1967.

By nine o’clock in the morning, the incident was over. Fire crews battled the flames inside the home ignited by the tear gas canisters. Rivera lay dead in the front yard, shot by an LAPD marksman. Police commandeered our school auditorium to use, according to the Los Angeles Daily News, as a place to question surviving family members of the shooter. The school business manager said that because the neighborhood was evacuated, residents also camped out inside the auditorium.

I know we have a plan in place should something like this occur during school hours. After 9/11, those kinds of plans became commonplace in every workplace, building, school, and high rise. We did not have a solid plan for the timing we were faced with today. We needed a phone tree. Also, the school business manager did not have accurate email addresses for some parents. However, we adapted. The word got out, and for those that did not hear about it, I am sure the police barricades stopped them.

I spent the rest of the day watching news reports and getting caught up on work at home.

The school will reopen tomorrow. Meanwhile, flags will be flown at half-staff for Randal Simmons. This evening, several families are grieving the loss of loved ones, and they are in our thoughts and prayers.

Hungry?

Hungry: Lessons Learned On The Journey From Fat To Thin
By Allen Zadoff
Da Capo Press, $19.95 cloth
ISBN 0-7382-1105-2

Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have mentioned it as part of their health care reform packages. Nary a newscast can pass without at least one story about it. HMOs around the country are preoccupied with treating or better yet, preventing it. Obesity is the new priority for the medical community in the United States. With the increasing girth of Americans we also have the peripheral diseases: hypertension and diabetes.

Diet books are a staple of the publishing industry. They come in all shapes and sizes, and offer everything from ways to increase willpower to specific foods to eat to lose weight. The grapefruit diet, anyone? And the writers of these books often become rich and famous, appearing on talk shows and on magazine pages touting their solution to the fat problem.

Allen Zadoff takes a different approach. In his book, Hungry: Lessons Learned on the Journey From Fat To Thin, Zadoff tells us that it was when he stopped dieting and let go of the pursuit to drop pounds and tried a different approach that he actually lost weight.

“From the time I was a young boy, I loved to eat,” Zadoff begins the book. He loves Devil Dogs, Doritos, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Drakes Coffee Cake; the list is endless.

He divides the book into four parts. The first, “What I Believed on the Way Up the Scale,” details some of the dead ends, missteps, and false ideas Zadoff encountered on his way to more than 300 pounds. “I went on plenty of diets in my life: Weight Watchers, Scarsdale, Slim Fast, Diet Center, Jenny Craig, Medifast. They all worked for a while, but then my willpower failed me.”

His acting teacher later tells him, “You have to find out why you’re eating so much. If you find out why you’re eating, you’ll be able to stop.” So he launches into a search for the root cause of his obseity. That search lasted thirteen years. At the end, he is no closer to a solution. “Through it all,” Zadoff writes, “I clung to my teacher’s idea that knowing why I overeat would set me free.”

For twenty-eight years, Zadoff searches for a cure for his obesity. He characterizes himself as a junkie, like someone stuck in the clutches of heroin. He is an addict.

The breakthrough comes in the third section, but it may not be what the reader expects. Zadoff tells us that there are no magic diets. “You probably want me to give you a diet. More than a diet. You want a magic formula that will solve your problem forever. That’s not what I have to give.” And he is right. This is not your usual diet book.

He uses a stoplight as a food model. He wants readers to write down the foods they cannot handle. These must be foods over which the reader has no control. If she opens the box or bag, she eats the whole thing. There is no possibility of self-control. These are the red light foods. “Now make a list of behaviors around the foods that you can’t handle,” he tells us. This list is labeled Red Behaviors. Next comes a list of foods that sometimes cause problems—yellow light foods. And then there are the foods you can eat, and stop eating, without a hitch—you guessed it, the green light foods.

The red foods are the triggers—therefore you most avoid them. They are the smack to the overeater’s junkie personality. So these red foods are off the table. Period.

Zadoff goes on to say that he eats only three meals a day without snacks. He plans the meals with foods he knows he can handle, and then he sticks to the plan. He also throws away his scale. “When I began my journey toward thin, I bid adieu to the scale. I did not weigh myself before or after I lost weight.” He does not place importance on weigh-ins; a scale is just a tool for him to use, or not use on his journey.

He ends the book by discussing what he knows now, present tense, and what it is like to live this way day to day. I think the most important note about this book is that what Allen Zadoff says is not earth shaking or new. It is a simple equation: an obese person is a food addict and therefore must change his behaviors. An addict cannot continue to take even a little heroin. So a food addict cannot take even a little cake. As someone once told me, it is eat to live not live to eat. Food is fuel, nothing more, and we must maximize the quality of the food to get the most bang for the calorie.

Ultimately, that would be my assessment of this book: he tells us what is common sense, or what we should already know. If you need a reminder, if you need the reaffirmation, then read the book.

To understand why Americans are obese and why this is such a powerful issue, we need to delve into the psyche of the country.

Americans are fat because they have always gotten whatever they wanted. We don’t like to be frustrated in our quest for the perfect life. And what does that perfect life look like: the large, palatial house in the suburbs, the two or three cars in the garage, the big screen TV and surround sound system, the overstocked refrigerator, the bathroom that is the size of a basketball court, the matching walk-in closet, the endless shopping and eating and consuming. Again, I think of Henry David Thoreau: “Simplify, simplify.”

We call the generation that lived during and after the Second World War the “greatest generation,” a phrase that became the title of Tom Brokaw’s book about them. They are considered the greatest generation because they fought tyranny and evil and won. They survived. But they also survived shortages and empty store shelves, depressed economic conditions, and, intensely real hardships. Today’s Americans could not survive under such conditions. The scary thing is, with the way the economy is going, they may be facing such conditions in the near future.

We are fat because our lives, in some ways, are too easy. There are too many luxuries, too much excess, too much fat in nearly every corner of American society. We need to readjust our priorities. We need to rethink the things that make our lives complete. It is not the number of things we own, or the amount of food we stuff in our mouths. We do not need huge portions at our restaurants to make us feel as if we got our money’s worth.

If you want to blame it on the war on terror, or the natural course of things, the United States is still suffering. There is a leadership vacuum. The days of the empire may be numbered. We need to realize we are like everybody else. We are no different. We have lived telling ourselves we are the most important people, living in the most important nation, and that we wield the most power. We are the anointed ones in a gilded age. But the woods are burning and it’s time to wake up and smell the smoke.

Here is the reality: human beings all look the same naked. You can tell the American, though. He’ll be the fat one. It is time for us to behave like reasonable human beings instead of mindless, hyperactive consumers of anything and everything we touch.

I agree with Allen Zadoff when he emphasizes that it is not really a diet an obese person embarks upon, but a way of life. There is no going back to the way we were. Let’s introduce a new paradigm in America. Feed the mind instead of the body. Let’s go back to the spiritual, the intellectual, the deeper resonance of home and family, hard work and discipline. Let’s lose some pounds, refocus our lives, and prepare for what’s to come. Let’s be hungry once again.

Some Things I Might Have Touched On Before

Some random thoughts to clear the decks in this new year:

New Hampshire, Iowa, presidential candidates, endorsements, the war in Iraq, the latest statements of idiocy by our fearless and witless leader all crowd onto the front page demanding my attention, but I am brought up short by one story. A father tosses his four children to their deaths from a bridge in Bayou La Batre, Alabama. It seems the father, Lam Luong, age 37, was bickering with his wife over his extra curricular activities with a mistress. To get back at her, he threw the children to their deaths.

Parents killing their own children is nothing new, but I cannot help being devastated every time it happens. What did those kids do to deserve this fate? What level of evil does one inhabit to resort to such acts of depravity? I cannot comprehend this act.

Thrown to their deaths from the highest point of the Dauphin Island bridge on Monday were four month old Danny Luong; one year old Lindsey Luong; two year old Hannah Luong; and three year old Ryan Phan, the only child not fathered by Mr. Luong.

That Brea junior high school teacher I wrote about previously will not be charged with threatening to kill one of his seventh grade students. The Los Angeles Times quoted a spokeswoman for the Orange County district attorney’s office as saying “We reviewed the evidence that was presented and determined that there wasn’t enough to go forward.”

Bryan Christopher Wilcher’s statement, as I wrote in the earlier essay, was most likely said in the heat of the moment. Wrong thing to say, but should he be charged with a felony? It sounds like cooler heads prevailed on this one.

In another issue I wrote about early on in this blog (student use and misuse of the Internet), it seems MySpace will be subpoenaed in the case of the thirteen year old Missouri girl who committed suicide after neighbors posed as a teenage boy and sent her mean-spirited messages. Local authorities failed to charge the perpetrators after a year of investigation. The United States attorney stepped in, according to the Los Angeles Times citing unnamed sources, and will determine if the creation of the fake identity to dupe the girl constitutes Internet fraud under federal statutes.

Finally, common sense comes to cyberspace. One cannot yell “fire” in a crowded theater, and one cannot harm another over the Internet using fraudulent means and fake identities. Sure the girl took her own life; these idiots just gave her the push she needed.

In a story out of Reading, Pennsylvania this week, a group of students subdued another student when he went on the attack at the local high school. The thirteen year old assailant was armed with a propane torch and two bags of equipment, including “knives, firecrackers, a small can of gasoline, and a water bottle filled with torch fluid,” according to The New York Times. The school principal and a few teachers assisted in the capture.

Does anyone remember when school shootings and attacks would shock the nation? This one appeared in a small article on page A19. I could not find a report on the cable or national news channels. The aberrant has become commonplace.

The holidays are over now. It is a new year. We still have a good six months of school left. In a few weeks, we will close out the first semester of the 2007-2008 school year.

It is time to get back to work.

Adventures In The AP Audit

In a letter dated December 4, 2007, I was informed that my second AP class, formally AP Literature and Composition, had been “authorized to us the AP® designation for the 2007-08 academic year.”

That Santa Ana wind you hear is my sigh of relief.

“The AP Course Audit was created at the request of secondary school and college members of the College Board who sought a means for the College Board to: 1. provide teachers and administrators with clear guidelines on curricular and resource requirements that must be in place for AP courses; and 2. help colleges and universities better interpret secondary school courses marked ‘AP’ on student transcripts.” (from the AP Audit website)

I did not buy this for one minute. The AP Audit was instituted to try to control and prevent teachers from teaching to the test rather than offering a truly challenging college-level course. Students were doing well on the exam, so well that many colleges were no longer taking the passing score of three for course credit. Once they hit the actual college classroom, the deficiencies in their training became evident. A student could do well on the test because that was what he had been trained to do. But when it came time to demonstrate wide and deep reading, superior process writing and editing skills, the façade crumbled.

The College Board does not change its procedures easily. Just a few years ago, when the University of California system announced they were considering dropping the SAT test, a benchmark for college admission for decades, the College Board promptly rewrote the test to UC specifications. The UC system has decided to continue to use the test after all.

The real joke in all of this is under the website section labeled “Benefits of the AP Course Audit for Teachers.” These benefits include “A clear definition of elements required in a college-level course; support materials for developing or refining a college course syllabus, such as sample syllabi that illustrate the variety of ways a course can meet the curricular requirements of your course; validation of curriculum through external review by college faculty; a means for AP teachers to receive updates, new materials, and the latest information about course/exam updates; leverage to ensure students have the resources, such as college-level textbooks, that the course requires; defense of college/university admissions benefits for AP students.” Some of these items are clear; others are meaningless jargon.

If the goal of the AP Audit was to ensure a measure of quality control in the classroom, examining what is on paper can differ from the reality of day-to-day instruction. The only way to know what is going on in the classroom and ensure a college-level educational experience for students is to be in the classroom for several days, or maybe even every day, and observe the class in action. Reviewing a syllabus means little. Without being present in the room, how do they know that what is on paper is what happens in the class?

The College Board has added simply more paperwork to an already bureaucratic situation. When we should be prepping to teach, we are instead typing up syllabi to fit a uniform standard that has only marginal application. My school already demands a certain syllabi format, so now I am writing up two documents instead of just one.

I spent six months, from January to June of this year, writing and revising my syllabi to follow the suggested format provided to me by the College Board. My actual course syllabi did not have the required information included on it because students need just the facts: what do they do when absent? How is their grade determined? What is my policy for late work? The AP Audit wanted so much more.

By June 1, 2007, the College Board’s deadline, I submitted two course syllabi over the Internet to the College Board. By the end of June, my AP Language and Composition course (Grade 11) had been approved.

At the end of August, I received an email announcing that my second course, AP Literature and Composition (Grade 12) had not been approved. Evidently, there was not enough evidence presented. I needed to show exactly how the students learned what I said they were learning. I also neglected to show how the writing process was utilized on every assignment. How did students learn from their mistakes? In addition, there were not enough American authors included on the reading list.

The whole evidence issue was not clear. They read a book, they took a test or wrote a paper, and then possibly did a project or some activity to extend the learning. That was the lesson plan. I was not sure what else to add.

As for the writing process, the test in May does not allow them to use the writing process. They go in blind to an empty classroom, receive a topic and passage, and create an analytical essay of some detail in forty minutes. There was no time for drafting or revision. I utilized those skills when students wrote papers in my class. I taught them how to reduce the process down to one step for AP writing.

Finally, the American authors were part of the eleventh grade course. Twelfth grade focused on British and world writers.

I made what I thought were the required revisions and resubmitted the syllabus. Sometime in October, I received another missive, this time from a live person. My draft had yet again been rejected, but now he would help me. I sent my information to Paul by email, and he contacted me back by email within twenty-four hours.

“You need to include more American authors,” he wrote.

“But Americans are covered in the eleventh grade course.”

“Well that needs to be mentioned somewhere on the syllabus.”

“Let me get this straight,” I wrote him. “You want me to add the eleventh grade reading list to the twelfth grade syllabus?

“Yes.”

“And then it will pass?”

“Yes.”

So right there in the course description, without any rhyme or reason, I have listed the books students read in eleventh grade. I have also listed the required reading for twelfth graders. All of this on the twelfth grade syllabus. Within the month, the class was approved.

The students who pass the AP exams in English almost always top out at 50-75 percent of my class. It is not a great average, but for a class with almost 100 percent English-as-a-second language learners, I feel this is a solid achievement. Considering this is a private school that draws from a small community in a Los Angeles suburb, I feel the passing rate is even more impressive.

I do not think the AP Audit will make a difference in my passing rate. It has not made a difference in the way I conduct my classes. It just required more paperwork.

Are my classes college-level courses? I model them after my undergraduate courses in English, so I would say yes. But the skills required on the AP exam in May are not what was required of me in those classes all those years ago. So I recognize the inconsistencies. In a sense, a teacher has to teach a little of the test. That is the benchmark.

I applaud the College Board for trying to introduce some consistency in the coursework from school to school, but if they were trying to introduce some uniformity into what the grades in an AP course mean, I believe they have largely failed. The only way to know for sure what is happening in the classroom is to be in the classroom and keep your eyes open. Every teacher is unique, therefore the meaning of the grades will vary, maybe even dramatically.

If the College Board was simply trying to keep the AP exam viable and please their college and university constituents, then my work on the syllabi was an exercise in futility. The work has not led to better instruction. The AP Audit was simply much ado about nothing.

Words Like Feathers In The Air

Once words are out there, it is very difficult to gather them all back, as Brian Christopher Wilcher, age 38 discovered recently. According to the Los Angeles Times, Wilcher, a teacher at Brea Junior High School, told a twelve year old student in his class that “next semester you’d better find another teacher because if you’re in my class I’m going to kill you.” Easy there, Tiger. We have all been there.

More and more, in this age of cell phone cameras and tiny digital recorders, teachers and students need a list of words and phrases that are appropriate and acceptable for classroom interaction.

The first thing that happened once I had been hired by the Archdiocese way back when was that I had to attend a workshop on proper classroom etiquette according to the law. We were instructed that a teacher never told a parent “your child is lazy.” He is “unmotivated.” A teacher never threatened a student with bodily injury or death. Detention or time out after school, or a face-to-face meeting with parents were the most potent threats a law-abiding teacher could make.

Still, words slipped out. During a parent meeting I was involved in at one school, the father turned to me and said, “If my kid gets out of line again, just beat him. You have my permission.” When I insisted that no one would be beaten, and that to raise a hand was against the law, the parent reiterated that it was okay. “Everyone needs a good smack now and then, and you got my permission to just lay into him. I don’t care if you leave him black and blue!” The principal and I spent the rest of the lengthy meeting trying to convince the parent that if we saw any “black and blue” marks on the child, the police would be called. I am still not sure he got the message.

Years ago, I made the comment to a high school class I was teaching that a certain student was absent “every other day.” It was only a slight exaggeration. For months, the student had attended school barely three out of the five days each week. Within twenty-four hours, I had the parent in the office telling me that it was just such comments that made his son stay home all the time. This discrimination had become unbearable. He never denied that his son missed at least one day per week. He was upset because I had verbalized it in the classroom.

In the course of heated exchanges in the crucible of the classroom, things can often be misconstrued and misinterpreted. I do not know if that is the case with Wilcher and his student, but a misunderstanding is possible. Still, a death threat is serious stuff in this day and age. People threatening to kill others can’t be taken lightly. The news footage of Columbine haunts our dreams. How many times have such incidents been repeated. Just yesterday, the shooting at the mall in Nebraska became a perfect example. By killing a number of people, the shooter thought that at least he would have some notoriety. As one of my students reminded me, the situation was similar to Meursault’s, the main character in Albert Camus’ The Stranger. After he murders the Arab man, he feels his life has meaning. Why else would so many people hate him?

What I am most concerned about is that there is equality of punishment for teachers and students when they make dangerous threats in the classroom. Students are often given more leeway than teachers when making statements. Would a student who threatened Mr. Wilcher be thrown in jail for a felony? I would hope so. I know that the one time a student threatened my life, it was a far different story.

I had handed back some papers to a junior class. The bell rang, and one student who was upset with his grade walked passed me at my podium and said “I’m going to get a gun and come back and shoot you.” He was staring right into my eyes. The comment and to whom it was intended were very clear.

Since I met this particular class twice each day, and this threat was made in the morning class, I went to the dean of students and the principal and demanded that action be taken immediately. I wanted the kid suspended from my class pending possible termination, as the school rule stated. The principal told me that the student did not mean the threat as stated. “So what does ‘I’m going to get a gun and come back and shoot you’ actually mean?” I demanded to know. He did not have an answer.

We called the student into the office where he promptly admitted making the threat in exactly the words I related. “I’m sorry,” he said to me, not making eye contact. “You made me mad with the grade.” That was his defense. His punishment? He was removed from the afternoon session of the class, but the next morning, he was back in his seat. I was not satisfied, but I had no other recourse. I did, however, drop in to see the principal.

“In the future, if that student, or any other makes a threat against me,” I told him, “neither you nor anyone else will stop me from going down to the police station four blocks away and filing a police report. This might be a private school, and you may control this world, but even on this patch of ground, no one gets away with making death threats.”

I consider it my “Clint Eastwood” moment, probably overheated and overblown in my assessment all these years later. At the time, I was very emotional about it.

What I have come to realize is that language is a weapon. It is sharp and dangerous. Just like a firearm, if its use is not controlled, it can lead to disaster. Once the words are out there, like the ruptured feather pillow, one cannot put the words back where they came from, and the only recourse is to deal with what was said. Wilcher now faces such a situation.

The pen and language itself, is mightier than the sword. Words can be hurtful. Words can introduce fear and intimidation into a situation. That whole thing about sticks and stones breaking bones, but words are harmless has been refuted. Words are dangerous.