Abstraction

  When I worked at Nortel, I had just come from working for government agencies with the developmentally handicapped.  I had already got a snootfull of euphemisms and indirect talk.  Now, my own heritage is that I come from unPC, blunt, socially awkward stock, people who don't know how to say things gently.  That being said, I resented what was being done to language (and, by proxy, thinking) in those kinds of jobs.

  All of my managers were women.  And the sorts of women who got positions of power were women who cared more how things looked or seemed than how they were.  It was important to them that they seemed successful and in control at all times.  This meant that noticing any problem or inconsistency was a way to get unpopular fast.  Even if you were drawing attention to it only by starting to fix it.  Well I have a bit of a knack for seeing just those things.  It's built into my basic design.  It certainly can be useful, especially to people in groups, where things can get missed so easily, but that stuff's seldom welcomed.

  In these jobs, I'd say something like "This has been going on.  It is a problem. I think we should fix it."  Right away, the women (they were not only always women, they were always of a very specific type) would get pained expressions on their faces liked I'd sworn or farted or something, and they'd say things like "Well, I'm sure you feel that there's an issue, but..." and then they'd make it go away, with language.  It wouldn't be a fact anymore. It would become merely something I felt, because I was whacky, and that they in turn felt they weren't going to discuss, and in fact felt resentful about having any attention drawn to. And I realized "My language is being corrected.  These ladies with very little education, or a bit of training in accounting or management or business administration are correcting my language.  And I just got a degree in English Literature.  The word "problem" isn't allowed.  They want me to say 'issue' and they don't want me leaping on 'issues' to point them out and fix them.  They want them to disappear without being fixed, because each one makes them feel less successful.  There aren't any problems.  There aren't even any issues.  If I speak of any, or try to fix any, they will have concerns, and nobody wants concerns."

  Also, you didn't say things like "embarrassing, bad, wrong, mistake, screwup, ineffective, broken, damaged, layoffs, disappointing, unworkable," or "silly." No, all of those words, those intellectual and emotional labels, those judgments or reactions, had to simply be replaced with the term "negative."  (If you were talking about plural nouns, they could be called "negatives.")  In fact, if you were really on your game, you'd say something more like "not the most positive."  So, you wouldn't say "Bob got laid off.  That sucks."  You'd say "Bob was surplussed.  That's not the most positive, I guess."  It was about abstraction.  I was simply not made for that.  I was all about using language to accurately convey problematic stuff so we could look at improving it. I wasn't ready for a place where, if one person said something that wasn't true, and another person said something true, but unwelcome (because it didn't help the Success Story we were all required to be telling) nothing would be said at all, ever about the untrue statement, so long as it was "positive."  Immediately, however, the unwelcome, off-point commenter would be reprimanded with a "That's actually pretty negative." I realized I was part of a big game of Let's Pretend.  That stuff actually scares me.  When you're dealing with people's lives and time and money, there is no room for anything but dealing in reality and truth.
  If I as an individual screwed up, I'd get a talking to alright, with a bunch of "feelings" talk tossed in, all of which always made me feel worse rather than better.  It often didn't matter what had happened, we were to take extremely seriously people's impression of what happened, with whatever had actually happened being completely irrelevant, and there was no focus on fixing anything, only on deciding whose feelings were to be focused on and dwelling in those feelings.  Invariably, the person with the upset feelings.  The more abstracted, vague, uprooted from facts, and euphemistic the talk got, the more I felt uncomfortable with it.  And frequently, I got in trouble for seeing problems, mentioning them, and then having them happen.  It was like they thought if I'd simply not thought about them, they wouldn't have happened.  Nortel was run on blind optimism.  (well, all optimism is blind, just like all pessimism is.  I tried to explain that to a girl recently but she killed herself before we could pick that conversation back up again.)

  I work in schools now.  The corporate crap-talk is catching up to me here too.  Increasingly, the people with any power in education are not educators or even behaviourists, but rather management, marketing, accounting, planning and public relations people.  Principals become less educators and more those other things.  The principals become less and less concerned with (and competent to discuss) what sorts of things are teaching kids stuff, and what sorts of things actually prove kids have learned stuff, and become more and more concerned only with whether parents and the community are all clearly getting the message that our school is providing world class educational opportunities in a variety of flexible learning environments for the broad cross-section of society represented in all of our diverse learners, each with their own attributes, aptitudes and attitudes, which we, as a school, value, foster, model, facilitate, scaffold and nurture daily with design-down, forward-focussed, centre-motivated, upwardly-aspiring, rollout methodology, pedagogy and ideation.  Policy and decision-making are driven by what can be claimed (and neat acronyms made), not what needs to actually be workable, actually achieved.
  Teachers have to sit through interminable meetings in which Mission Statements and new Vision Initiatives are unrolled, ramped up, rolled out, tabled, implemented, launched and spoken to.  (I'm surprised, given the passion which which they are often presented, that they are not simply ejaculated.)  Normally we are pulled in to admire these rhetorical, semantic trainwrecks when we've got report cards waiting for us to complete.  I've seen this stuff before, too.  All of this shit comes from the contrived corporate crapfactories that are seeking government bailouts because they are such houses of cards.  Why are economies and corporations alike foundering so much lately?  Because of what is at the heart and the foundation of them.  You can't build a kingdom on optimism and greed.  (if it's a church you're thinking of, rather than a corporation or other empire, instead of greed for sales, think greed for converts.  Instead of greed for as many facilities and buildings, think the same thing, but in terms of church buildings.  Instead of greed for as many new employees as possible, to meet the need of how much work they're getting, think greed for new members, and committees, initiatives, projects and missions. The blind need to simply be doing big things, not to achieve great good, but to be the big people who are doing the big things.)

  My principals have performed well to varying degrees whenever I've fallen afoul of the usual "one or two parents in every year's worth of kids" who is going to come in and raise as much shit in the school as they can if their completely helpless, surly, coddled juvenile delinquent isn't being given solid passing grades and being made to feel special despite how many classes they've skipped, assignments they've not attempted, and teachers they've called fags and then told to fuck off.  Many administrators just start with "You've got a parent pissed off?  Why'd you do that?  I don't really care what they did, or what the kid did or didn't do, nor even what you did or didn't do, nor indeed what happened here, but the fact is, they're pissed off.  I certainly do not have the time to get into the details with you.  They accused you of all sorts of things.  How are you going to do your job here and not get accused of these things?  We can't have this sort of thing as a school.  We have to make sure that parents are all getting the right message.  And by "we" I mean you.  Fix this for me and make sure it doesn't happen again."  Often it's more of the "The facts don't matter. What you said doesn't matter. What happened?  Irrelevant.  This is about what impression Mrs. Surly says she took away from the conversation I made you have with her, once she'd had a couple of days to think about it and rewrite most of it."
  Some are a bit better.  But each one has increasingly felt the pull to be more of a marketing agency for the school, with "the customer is always right" approach to parents who are very angry that in high school, suddenly real failure starts to become possible in certain classrooms, of which mine is a proud example.  I do not believe success means anything if it was impossible to fail.  I don't believe you can teach kids to take risks if you make sure there aren't any.  I don't believe that the less the kids do, the more the teacher should do.

  The language gets farther and farther from talking about anything that's actually happening or not happening.  The people who write policy for our school board, who show up with glossy pamphlets and booklets and even glossier patter and smiles get farther and farther removed from being recognizable as knowing anything about how to handle a classroom.
  The other day I thought to myself "I am going to imagine that, for some reason, some day, a specific administrator who I'm imagining, for some reason had to come in and teach my classes.  The ones she normally interrupts continually, using phone, intercom and knocking on my door when I'm teaching.  I sat in a staff meeting and just imagined that she had to make them treat her with respect.  That she had to make them leave each other alone.  That she had to make them believe she knew what she was talking about, knew what was going on, knew what she was doing.  That once she'd taken attendance to her own satisfaction, she'd have to actually get them to understand and do things and that she'd have to deal with one half to a third of them trying like hell not to do them and claiming ignorance of and surly disinterest in those things."
  Well I simply couldn't imagine her being able to even start doing my job.  The very thought was amusing.  I can't imagine she was ever able to do my job.  Because she clearly can't deal with more than one kid at a time on the best of days.  That's why she has the job she does.  She can't make twenty kids shut and listen to her with any seriousness. She just wouldn't be able to do the job she constantly interrupts my doing.  Couldn't.  Not even without her interrupting by classroom phone and in person, as often as three times in one hour, to pester herself with questions or information about kids who aren't there, haven't been there and aren't going to be there, who haven't done work, aren't doing work and aren't going to do work, but for some reason need me to stop doing my job in that room right now, all to provide information to all and sundry regarding what they haven't done and what they will, in future, also be choosing not to do, and which I will then have recorded in great detail their not doing and not having been there to do, but must then justify how I failed to engage and promote their success through student-centred pedagogy while working in an administration-centered school board.
  Because you don't get kids to do things they don't feel like doing because you're a good manager of people, a good administrator, a good scheduler. You get them to do those things because you build a relationship with them based upon being convincingly genuine as a human being they can relate to.

  This week two people I cared about died.  Also, there was a Remembrance Day Assembly today.  (Outside of Canada, Remembrance Day is called things like Veteran's Day or ANZAC Day.)  So one person died of old age, and the other committed suicide, though no one's really told me about it. (The "remembered" soldiers from the wars, of course, were killed and died.)  But do you want to see a partial list of words which were never used in any of the talking and electronic communications regarding all of this death?  Here it is: death, dead, killed, died, grave, suicide, funeral, loss, sad, alone, miss, never.  How do you even have a conversation about those things without mentioning those words?  Well, you say things like:

-gone to be with her Lord, now she's finally in the Loving Arms of her Dear Savior, on the Other Side

-these men paid the highest price, making the ultimate sacrifice

-she succumbed after a long, brave struggle with depression

-passed away, passed on, is no longer with us

-the celebration of life/visitation will be on Sunday

   I asked a class "Why did we read those men's names?"  The answer was "Because they passed away."  I have to tell you: death is tough to deal with emotionally. For me.  This week.  And for me, when we're not allowed to say what happened, it is that much harder.  At high school Remembrance Day Assemblies, kids have to be forcibly made to go sit in the chairs, because the favourite place of many of them is to stand at the back of the room, leaning on something, wearing their hats, watching the more compliant kids sitting in chairs watching a young soldier put up happily posed pictures of various whacky shenanigans by other soldiers when he was stationed in Afghanistan, without really mentioning the fact that Remembrance Day is anything to do with death in any form. Death was not mentioned.  Call of Duty was.  And some of the kids texted what was happening to other people who weren't in the room.  Telecommunications is a technology used to put as many buffers between us and real-life experience as we can. Kids watching kids watch a soldier putting up pictures of other soldiers playing military shooting games on XBOX360 in which they play idealized soldier characters who get shot and "go hide in bushes and their life comes back" to quote the inarguably highly-trained, intelligent, charming young man who spoke to us.  He at least said "It doesn't work like that."  But he was so charming and funny and "Aw shuck!" that no one got a sense of loss or risk or death or anything unpleasant for a moment.
  A girl in my class scoffed afterward that "this other girl" didn't even know what a poppy means.  I asked her what it meant.  She said it was a peace symbol.  It was an anti-war thing. When I told her it meant blood, death and a way of easing the pain of the wounded and dying, it flew so counter to her expectations, to the message she'd been getting, that she couldn't really believe me.  Couldn't believe the simple facts.  Poppies mean peace.  They represent there being no war.

  It is my birthday this weekend.  I don't know if I'll see any friends or relatives.  I have two funerals to go to, neither of which is really being called a funeral, and I don't want to go to both.  In fact, I don't feel able to handle both.  At all.  I might cry or something.  I think I'll skip the "old lady who stopped writing to me once I really wasn't coming back to church again" one.  It will be a big party with people being Christian at each other, and people who are shunning me for life asking me how I'm doing. I don't think I could keep from punching Christians there.
  The other is the girl I was hoping to hang out with last weekend but who is dead.  No doubt there will be many Christians acting punchworthy at her "celebration of life."  Fact is, she's dead.  No one celebrated her life until she ended it.
  I found out from a Facebook status saying "Katie I will always love you."  I knew that this wouldn't be the status if things were ok. If things were ok, the status would be more mundane, or only kinda roughly affectionate.  I sort of knew right then.
  When I checked her Facebook page and people had posted "too many" pictures of her at different ages, I had to "just know" but not really know.  I've been stuck like that all week.  I have chatted with the bereaved, dealing boyfriend about it, on Facebook, though he's a couple of blocks away.  None of it was really directly about her.  It was about "arrangements."  It was about "dealing."  It was about feeling numb, which is to say being in shock.  There were pretty much no facts of any kind in the mix.  No real mention of her.  I have no idea what happened.  And no voices. No faces.  He LOLed occasionally.  This is all a little too surreal for me.