An Education in the Constitution

Did you remember to celebrate last Friday? It was Constitution Day and in schools across America from Lexington, Kentucky to Concord, California the Constitution was the star of the day.

I bet it would make our founding fathers proud to know that the document they signed on September 17, 1787 is still alive and kicking. Several notable dads were present that day, including, George Washington, John Adams, and James Madison, the only future presidents who penned their names. Thomas Jefferson was off in France, probably laying the necessary ground work for swindling the French out of the Louisiana territory.

Ben Franklin was in very poor health, and he signed with tears streaming down his face. Madison is known as the Father of the Constitution and he is the only convention member to attend all 100 sessions. It must have been arduous work, forming a country, until I read that the delegates only worked from 10:00 – 3:00. Got to love that five-hour work day. No wonder it took 100 days. But to their credit, they did have meetings on Saturdays.

The constitution was “penned” by a man named Jacob Shallus for $30.00. It was printed by John Dunlap and David Claypoole in Philadelphia. There appear to be quite a few spelling errors in our grand document. Apparently, Noah Webster wasn’t there to proofread. And Dunlap and Claypoole were probably running Window’s Vista on their printing press.

The most obvious is Pennsylvania written with only one “N” in the list of signatories. Actually, it was a common spelling at the time, for example, the Liberty Bell is etched with the one-N spelling. However, the constitution also uses the two-N spelling in other locations.

Other spelling issues are the words “choose” and “choosing” spelled as “chuse” and chusing”. But this too was a common alternate spelling at the time. Additionally, several words were inked using their British spelling counterparts: defence, controul, and labour.

To celebrate Constitution Day, I decided to write a constitution for my classroom. I began with a preamble: “We the students of room 32, in order to form a more perfect classroom, establish learning, insure a caring classroom environment, provide for the common understanding, promote the general friendship, and secure the blessings of education to ourselves and our teacher, do ordain and establish this constitution for the 2010-11 school year.”

My constitution mirrors our national document in several areas:

The right to bear arms (and clean hands) – (1) Every student has the ability to raise his or her hand instead of blurting out questions or calling my name over and over. (2) All students are capable of washing their hands after using the restroom, eating, or playing on the yard.

Free speech – (1) Every student is permitted to quietly ask questions to their neighbors before asking me. Especially if it’s about something I’ve already explained. (2) All students are expected to write and speak in complete sentences. This includes the written response section on the daily math homework. (3) All students are mature enough to read quietly in the library, pay attention in the auditorium, and save conversations to the lunch benches and playground.

Assembly – (1) See article 3 above. (2) Each student is expected to line up silently and walk swiftly to the destination in a quiet, timely manner. This does not mean lollygagging, hopping, twirling, and meandering in serious conversation on the way to lunch.

A classroom constitution needs to differ from one designed to oversee a country. Therefore, I had to establish a few other “rights.” Such as:

Freedom to organize: (1) Every student is expected to take excellent care of their materials and belongings, as well, as keep the tops and insides of their desks neatly arranged. (2) Each student is adept enough to take home their returned paper and tests, including the ones with non-passing grades.

Freedom to think: (1) Each student is allowed to think for themselves instead of waiting for me to give them the answer.

Freedom to be responsible: (1) All students are skilled enough to remember to take home their homework, complete it at home without complaining, and bring it back to school on time.

Freedom to read: (1) All students are free to read for pleasure or to learn. However, this does not mean wasting time by going back to the bookshelves over and over in a three-minute period.

Freedom to pee and to hold it: (1) Each student is capable of remembering to use the restroom before school, during recess, and at lunch. (2) All students are able to wait at least an hour at the beginning of the day or upon returning from both recess and lunch.

John Adams was a grammar school teacher before becoming a lawyer and a statesman. I found a quote of his interesting, “My little school, like a great world, is made up of kings, politicians, divines, fops (a vain person), buffoons, fiddlers, fools, coxcombs (a conceited pretentious person), sycophants (a self-seeking parasite), chimney sweeps, and every other character I see in the world. I would rather sit in school and consider which of my pupils will turn out to be a hero, and which a rake (an immoral person), which a philosopher, and which a parasite, than to have an income of a 1,000 pounds a year.”

I love it. My little classroom is my little world. But a democracy it isn’t. It’s my little monocracy. It’s an exhausting but wonderful job. I have the honor of trying to give them not just an education but also a little guidance to help them grow up and be thoughtful, caring, productive members of their communities, under the freedoms and protections that our grand Constitution provides.

Public education has quickly become all about test scores. Teachers and students are being judged not on a whole body of work but on few dozen math and reading questions. My job is to not only get children to pass the test but to also make sure they passed with a higher score than the previous year. I don’t take that responsibility lightly. But I’d rather my students be dependable, responsible, and compassionate adults than coxcombs and sycophants, regardless of their test score.

So, I hope my classroom constitution is helpful this year for both building knowledge and character. We’ll know in about 10 years when my students have to chuse what they want to do with their lives. Err ... I mean … choose. Thank God for spell checkers.

Life as a Lions "Fan"

My hometown of Detroit and my current home city of Los Angeles are about as similar as Aretha Franklin and Lady Gaga. There is one similarity in that both cities don’t have professional football teams. Ok, ok, I know the Lions “play” in Detroit, but they haven’t been relevant since the Eisenhower administration.

As summer slides into fall and football season starts up, my childhood pigskin memories come floating back to me like a Tom Brady pass to the corner of the end zone. There were the countless back yard, front yard, and school yard football games. There were sunny Saturdays listening to Michigan football announcer Bob Ufer. And there were frigid Sundays watching the NFL on the couch with my dad, a bowl of popcorn, sodas, and needlepoint.
Yes, needlepoint.

You see, my mother was more into pyramids than King Tut. If it could be sold with a pyramid-marketing scheme, she tried it. Tuperware? Totally. Avon? Always. She tried a powdered milk product called Meadowfresh. My sister and I called it Meadowbarf. She got into a clothing line called Queensway that had our living room looking MGM’s costume department. She eventually worked in computers and banking for a number of years, but she could never shake a good sales plan. She even sold May Kay cosmetics in her retirement years.

Ah, but the best one of all was a needlepoint company called Creative Expressions because she had cheap labor. If it could be made with a needle and thread, Creative Expressions sold it. Pillows, wall hangings, and coasters come readily to my mind. She needed a full supply of finished products before heading off to some neighbor’s house for a sales party. So, my dad and I were coerced into using our Sunday afternoons as a yarn-based work camp.

But we got to watch football, and lots of it. Da Bears, the Giants, the 49ers, and the Redskins were the power teams back then. So, while watching Lawrence Taylor, Walter Payton, Joe Montana, or John Riggins, I’d be working my fingers to the bone making coasters.

A young football fan in Detroit has to become a frontrunner at an early age. A frontrunner is a fan who roots for first-place teams. It’s an allowable act for a child, but not for an adult, because it’s, well, childish. I discovered the NFL in the late 70s when the Steelers and the Cowboys ruled the gridiron. Friends on my block were fans of one or the other. Allegiances were forged in iron, like auto parts built in a downriver factory.

I sided with the Steelers, and with hands as soft as feathers I could catch any Nerf ball thrown my way while dodging trees in Danny Emmons’ front yard or using Alec Rogers’ swing set as my end zone marker. I dreamt of catching balls like Lynn Swan or John Stallworth, tossed through blizzard-like conditions by quarterback Terry Bradshaw at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium. I knew the Steelers’ starting roster by heart, but even to this day I can’t name one player from the Lion teams of the same era.

I’ve been to two Lions games total, both against the Bears. My dad had a friend in Chicago who would come to see the Bears play in the Pontiac Silverdome. He would load up one of those giant 70s vans with his buddies and enough beer to stock a college dormitory. My dad took me along and I got to play football with other kids on the grass surrounding the stadium before the game. My dad’s only rule: Don’t tell your mother anything. Apparently, what happens in Pontiac stays in Pontiac.

Detroiters have to view the NFL differently than other sports such as baseball or basketball. The Lions don’t have any rivals, because they lose to everyone. Without a rival, I don’t have a team to dislike. But Lions “fans” also have to live without the hope and anticipation that each new season brings. It’s a benign existence. We don’t have any thrilling playoff wins to recollect. But neither are there any heart-breaking losses to haunt our football-watching history. We live with disclaimers and sympathy. Whenever I meet a new acquaintance and the chatting turns to football, I have to sheepishly say, “I’m from Detroit,” when asked which team I follow. The person will always say that they’re sorry, as is I’ve lost a loved one.

So I watch the NFL almost as an alien in a foreign land. I am unable to give my heart to a team with which I don’t have a geographical connection. I grew out of my childhood crush of the Steelers. I didn’t fall in love with the Rams before they left LA. Who in their right mind wants to be associated with the Raiders? I don’t front-run and claim allegiance with the Colts or the Saints.

How bad are the Lions? Since 1930, that’s 79 years of football, they’ve won 46 percent of their games. They’ve appeared in only 17 playoff games. They are one of only four teams to NOT play in a Super Bowl. Since 1978 when the NFL went to its current 16-game schedule the Lions have had only seven winning seasons. They won 42 games in the 2000s. The Colts won 115.

I feel sorry for the players the Lions draft. They’ve had the first or second draft choice in three of the last four years. Reciever Calvin Johnson, quarterback Matthew Stafford, and defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh would probably be standout performers if they were on better teams.

True to form the Lions lost to the Bears yesterday. Stafford got sent to the locker room with a bum shoulder. Johnson almost made a game-winning catch but had his touchdown taken away by a weird rule. Suh had a sack. But a loss is a loss.

Living in LA gives me plenty of things to do on a Sunday. Sometimes I’ll do something outside, or I can stay in and watch football. Mercifully, the Lions aren’t on TV in LA. Maybe someday, in the distant future, they will win a Super Bowl. If so, I’ll be ready to needlepoint a set of championship coasters.

Pearl Harbor and the Ground Zero Mosque

My alarm clock was set to an all-news station and I woke to the report that an airplane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers. The story was still sketchy and sleepily I pictured a small private aircraft bouncing off of the indestructible building like a rubber ball against a brick wall. Yet, I was intrigued enough to flip on the TV in time to see the impact of plane No. 2.

A modern times Day of Infamy.

Last week I went to the U.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The starch white memorial stretches like a floating band-aid over the sunken battleship. Plans for the memorial began in 1943. Initial recognition came in 1950 when Admiral Arthur Radford, Commander in Chief, Pacific ordered that a flagpole be erected over the Arizona’s remains and on the ninth anniversary of the attack, a commemorative plaque was placed at the base of the flagpole. The memorial was finally dedicated in 1962, 21 years after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Nine years after 9/11, construction of an Islamic mosque and community center two blocks from Ground Zero is making more news than the building of the memorial to the World Trade Center victims. While at Pearl Harbor, I failed to notice a Japanese garden or temple. Not even a Benihana.

Initially, I found the plans to build the mosque insensitive and inappropriate. Sure, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf is legally and religiously free to build there. Personally, I don’t want to see a mosque casting a shadow over Ground Zero. And I’m not alone. A recent New York Times poll showed that two-thirds of New Yorkers think the mosque should be built elsewhere. I think Ground Zero is hallowed territory and the 9/11 memorial to the victims needs to be completed soon. It better not take 21 years. Those people need to be honored. As September 11th approaches, I suggest you take a look at the website for the memorial … national911memorial.org … because it looks like it’ll be pretty amazing.


But, what is the radius on insensitivity? Three blocks away from Ground Zero? Four? Ten? This question alone causes me to pause and rethink the building of the mosque. Religion is a very hot topic now-a-days and the controversy of the mosque ignited Time Magazine to ask if America is Islamaphobic.
I am not Islamaphobic, but I’ll tell you what I am: terroristaphobic! I don’t believe that all Muslims are terrorists. But, there is a fanatical group of Muslims that want to see America destroyed like those ships at Pearl Harbor. There’s an email circulating these days comparing radical Islam to Nazi Germany. The email is a text from a 2007 Op-ed column from Israelnationalnews.com written by Paul Marek of Saskatoon, Canada whose grandparents fled Czechoslovakia before the Nazi invasion.

In the article, Marek explains that like most Germans in the 1930s, most Muslims today are fine peace-loving folks. He says that the German people were enjoying the return of national pride under Hitler and were too busy to care about how Germany was being restored. The majority sat back and let things just happen. Before long the people had lost the power.

Marek says the fact that most Muslims are peace-loving is irrelevant because it is the radicals who rule Islam at this moment. “It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.”

In his view, peaceful-majority equals silent-majority.

The Nazis were not history’s only fanatical killing machine. Europe and Asia certainly were not fun places to live in the years leading up to World War II. Those killed by the Russian (20 million) and Chinese (70 million) Communists dwarf the number of people Hitler murdered. And don’t leave out the Japanese who killed upwards of 12 million Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Indonesian, and Indochinese civilians as they romped through Southeast Asia. If you want an exercise that’ll have you thinking about sticking your head in the oven, try spending a few minutes researching this stuff on the Internet. Marek doesn’t even mention the atrocities committed by such sweethearts as Pol Pot and Idi Amin. He does bring up Rwanda. “Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were ‘peace-loving’?”

The gist of Marek’s column is that the peace-loving Muslims will one day be our enemy if they stay as silent as the peace-loving Russians, Chinese, Japanese, and Rwandans were. He ends by saying, “We must pay attention to the only group that counts – the fanatics who threaten our way of life.”

Now, if you don’t think that Radical Islam wants to destroy America, look no further than the words of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who has vowed to annihilate the United States. He has given speeches in which he’s asked, “Is it possible for us to witness a world without America?” He continued, “You had best know that this slogan and this goal are attainable, and surely can be achieved.”

In his 2002 State of the Union speech, President Bush delivered his famous “Axis of Evil” line in regard to Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and their terrorist allies. In the speech he talks about the potential attacks on America or our allies if these nations put nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists. “In any of these cases,” he said, “the price of indifference would be catastrophic.”

Presumably, the indifference Bush referred to was America’s response to the 9/11 attacks. But, just maybe, the indifference, nine years later, is better applied to the peaceful majority of Muslims worldwide. Is it their indifference that would be catastrophic? Would allowing the Ground Zero mosque or others like it enable Islamic-Americans to passionately plea for peace from their radical brethren?

I pray it will. If not, there are going to be a lot more Ground Zeroes in our future.