Doing the Right Thing Because It Is Right, Not Expedient

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I usually write about education but this post will not be about that.

It will be about courage, morality, fear and self-interest.

I was born in New York City.

For most of my life I have lived in New York City and I work there now.

No matter where I go or where I live, New York City is home.

I don’t know about people in the rest of the country or the rest of the world, but every single New Yorker knows precisely what he or she was doing when airplanes flew into the towers of the World Trade Center.

And every single New Yorker knows what he or she was doing when the towers fell.

And every single New Yorker is grateful beyond measure that there are people in this city who daily put their lives at risk protecting us.

Thousands were killed on September 11, 2001, but they were not the only victims.

Image via Wikipedia

Among the thousands of dead were fearless men and women of the fire department and police departments who we had relied on to protect us.

Despite the courage they showed, they could not protect us from those planes and the results of their criminal impact though they gave their lives trying to.

It was a horrible crime and watching the towers fall was a horrible and sickening sight.

Image by Coast Guard News via Flickr

Fear is a debilitating thing. More on that in a moment.

After the towers fell hundreds, perhaps thousands of men and women: police officers, fire fighters, ambulance workers, sanitation workers, and construction workers from the city and many elsewheres near and far worked long hours searching for possible survivors.

When it was clear that there were no survivors left they searched for remains so that they could later be identified and buried.

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They moved tons of rubble, breathed tons of what turned out to be highly toxic dust that hung in the air for weeks.

These men and women showed courage, too. Disaster sites are dangerous in ways those of us who have not worked in them cannot fully grasp.

These men and women worked for weeks, breathing that toxic air daily.

Now, nearly ten years after that date that will echo for decades, these men and women are getting sick.

They are suffering unusual rates and forms of lung disease, heart disease and nerve damage that did not show up immediately.

There is little doubt that these diseases are the result of their work at what quickly became known as Ground Zero.

Survivors of those who died in the attack have received monetary compensation for their losses of income, companionship and parenting from those who died in the immediacy of the attack.

Those people who rushed in afterward to search for survivors, remains or relics of the lives that were have losses, too. They have lost their health. Many have been told their lives will be truncated by the diseases they now have.

Morality demands that the rest of us take care of those who take care of us.

That same morality demands that we take care of the health needs of those who searched through the destruction at Ground Zero.

This does not seem to be a difficult concept to understand yet Congress doesn’t seem to get it.

Morality demands that one do the right thing even when it is not convenient or easy.

ESPECIALLY when it is not convenient or easy.

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Congress has put politics ahead of morality, ahead of doing the right thing for those men and women who sacrificed so much so willingly.

Congress has refused to pass the bill that, if enacted, would pay the health care costs of those men and women.

We are not talking really big numbers here. The costs of this health care would not approach the billions of dollars given to banks or the billions of dollars given to automobile manufacturers.

But it should not matter if it would be that expensive. Taking care of these people is merely the right thing to do.

Congress should be ashamed but they are not.

Congress does not have morals. Congress members operate on the basis of self-interest and on their fears of not being re-elected.

If you are a teacher, teach your Congress member how to recognize moral obligation and what to do about it.

If you are not a teacher write a letter or make a phone call.

Write lots of letters.

Make lots of phone calls.

Get Congress to act now.

Echoes of the Ancient and Tomorrow

Image by Daniel Greene via Flickr

It’s been this way for years

Monday night I’m participating in a Seder at my best friend’s apartment and the following night he and his wife will do the same at my house.

My first Seder was 40 years ago when a group of socially aware and politically active teenagers gather to celebrate the “Freedom Seder.”

Although my grand parents were all Jewish, I was not raised in the Jewish tradition.

Image by PaperNest via Flickr

My family did not celebrate the rites of any religion, but we adopted the symbols of many.

At this time of year we would dye Easter eggs that my parents would put into little baskets along with fake grass, jelly beans, a chocolate bunny and, often, a dreidel. There would be a box of matzah in the house.

My maternal grandmother would come over to cook a meal featuring homemade gefilte fish, and chicken (bones and all) in a soup filled with carrots, celery and onion. She would also make a peppery, oniony potato kugel so dense it did not dissolve even when Grandma served it sitting in the middle of the soup bowl. (I have never found anyone else whose relatives put the kugel in the soup. If yours did please let me know)

Image by PlaysWithFood via Flickr

While my father was still living with us we’d also have a happy Buddha or two somewhere nearby.

My parents had largely rejected the religion of their parents. That’s why we annually had a beautiful Christmas tree with hand-blown glass ornaments from in front of which we open presents before eating our Chanukah gelt, chocolate coins with Hebrew lettering on them.

There were symbols all over the place, but no one ever told us what they meant or connected them to any particular religion. If we wanted to know we were directed to several of the hundreds of books in living room.

Instead of deities, doctrine, ritual, and the other accoutrements of religions, we saw models of compassion, sharing, brotherhood, acceptance, and what I have come to identify as an echo of the ancient Hebrew sense of tikkun olam, acting to heal the world.

Image by Satoru Kikuchi via Flickr

Despite the lack of notions of God or Gods of any kind in our upbringing, our home rituals, such as they were, carried echoes of their ancient origins even if they lacked their rigor.

What we do as parents and teachers also echoes through generations.

When we teach our children, as parents and in our work in schools, our actions carry more weight than our words.

The same applies to our learning as adults. We act the ways we see modeled by others.

Collaborative principals create collaborative teachers.

School leaders who rule by coercion and threat get teachers who do the same.

Tomorrow night, and for the following eight days, I will celebrate freedom even more than I do on all days. Others will celebrate the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

When I return to work I will model leadership, collaboration, trust, ethics, taking responsibility for my actions and responsibility to heal the world.

I wish I could be around to see how that echoes through my students’ lives.

An Ethical Dilemma

This past week I attended an institute run by the Center for Social and Emotional Education. The best part of the three days was a workshop on using socio-moral dilemma discussions to improve engagement and the school climate.

I define ethics as the subjective application of morality in situations where there is no clear course of action, as when two courses that seem right are in conflict with each other. It is different from morality in that morals tend to be more absolute.

Ethics come into play when there are conflicts between:

Truth vs. Loyalty

Short Term vs. Long Term

Individual vs. Community

Justice vs. Mercy

All four factors came into play during a discussion among my colleagues a couple of months ago. The principal invited the teachers to join him for lunch and discussion. The question he posed was, “When you give a grade, what does that grade mean?”

To most people the grades that students get seem pretty straightforward. A, B, C, D, F; what can be simpler than that?

But what exactly do those grades tell another teacher or, perhaps more important, a parent?

There were about two-dozen teachers in the room. One was a rookie and another had over two decades of experience; the rest of us fell along a normal bell curve between those extremes. There were English teachers, math teachers, a science teacher or two, some 6th grade common branch teachers and a couple of social studies teachers. Five of us teach special education students and the rest don’t.

Discussion was spirited as we attempted to define what a grade of B means. Each of the ethical paradigms came into play.

Truth vs. Loyalty General education teachers argue that grades for all students should follow the same scale because, after all, a B is a B and its meaning should be clear. Special education teachers use different criteria because those students have different annual performance goals.

Short term vs. Long term Each B being equal serves the short term goals of standardizing criteria for sorting students academically. Students who never earn high grades despite considerable effort often suffer feelings of inadequacy and failure which over the long term reduce effort and chances for success in non-academic areas.

Self vs. Community Which should take precedence: the need for standardized criteria facilitating clear communication between teacher and parent regarding academic accomplishment; or the need to acknowledge and communicate the work of individual students who make herculean efforts to pull a standardized criteria grade up from a D- to a C- ?

Justice vs. Mercy Some teachers believe that grades should be based on academic achievement only but others think that grades should be based on efforts made no matter the academic result. Trying to solve this dilemma some proposed grading on a combination of effort and achievement, how much weight teachers should give each factor was not settled.

We didn’t come up with generally satisfactory solutions for any of those paradigms. It became clear that despite efforts to teach to standards and standardize assessment, each teachers had his or her own definition of what each letter grade means and what a students need to do to earn them.

So here’s an ethical conundrum for you to work on in your spare moments at work, at home or lounging near water with beverage in hand:

Is it ethical to give parents report cards with grades that don’t mean anything in particular?

Let me know what you come up with because I know this is going to be the topic of the principal’s first luncheon in September.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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