In which the kids are fine, shut up

On December 31, 2014January 1, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching187 Comments

A note, before I start: I had to do research and learn what the hell the difference is between Holland, the Netherlands and Denmark before writing this post. So obviously I am supposed to be writing right now.

Anyway. This picture’s making the rounds:

Here’s what you’re supposed to do: you’re supposed to look at this picture and go arr wharglebargle kids these days yarr, and be all mad. In case you don’t recognize it, that painting on the wall back there is Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, which isn’t actually called that officially but whatever. The idea is that these kids– who look, to my eyes, to be maybe eighth- or ninth-graders, are in the presence of Priceless! Artwork! and instead of reverently gazing upon it they are daring to look at their phones. Horror! Terror! Decline of society! Wharrgarbl! Facebook is so angry about this, guys.

tl;dr version of this post: Oh shut up.

Longer version: Have you ever been in an art museum? I have. I’m terribly fond of the Art Institute of Chicago, for starters, and have been in several others. Do you happen to know what art museums are? They’re exhausting. Even if you’re grown, and you’re interested in art, they’re exhausting. It is entirely possible– I have done this!– to be a grown, educated adult who is interested in art and accidentally walk right past, oh, incredibly famous works of pointillist art that you’ve seen in a million places before and not even realize it because that is what art museums do to your brain. I have done this! It had to be pointed out to me that I was in the same room as that painting. And that painting is huge! It’s literally ten goddamn feet wide and I missed it.

So, yeah. First thing, then: Art museums are exhausting and those seats are there for a reason. So shut up. They are more exhausting when you’re fourteen.

Second thing: These kids are already almost certainly European– the museum is, after all, in Amsterdam– which means, as I consult my list of stereotypes, that they’re already smarter and more educated and Worldly than American kids anyway, and using a picture of some European kids to go arr wharglebargle blarg America RUINT!!!1!11!! is an especially obnoxiously American way to look at a picture. I guarantee a good 2/3 of the people complaining are convinced they’re looking at American kids.

Third thing: Here’s the room this painting is in at the Rijksmuseum:

You will note that they have provided quite a lot of seating space in this room. It’s almost as if you’re expected to want to sit down at some point. Here’s the same room from a slightly different angle, with people in it:

Note the old man on the right, sitting in nearly the same place the kids are and– argbjarglewharkleflarken!– checking his phone!

To continue the theme of Pictures, here’s a floor plan of the Rijksmuseum:

You can click on this to make it larger if you want; just know that the Night Watch is in the circled part at the top– and that the entrance to the museum is at the bottom. In other words, the painting is specifically and deliberately put in a place where you have to walk through most of the museum to get to it. So unless you proceed directly there immediately, you will have already Seen a Lot of Art by the time you get to the Night Watch room.

Here’s the thing: I have, on numerous occasions, taken fairly large groups of 7th and 8th graders on field trips to cultural destinations. Long field trips. Four day field trips. So I have a passing acquaintance with how kids behave on these types of things. Now, it is most likely that these particular kids are Hollish teenagers on a day trip of some sort, but it’s entirely possible that they’re from somewhere else and on a longer trip– and that, in other words, they’re probably exhausted by now. Even if this museum is ten minutes from their homes, they’re still probably tired by now.

Do you know what you do when you’re taking students to a museum? You let them go, and you tell them “We’re meeting in XXX place at XXX time.” You do not try and keep a big group of kids together for the entire time you’re in the museum. It doesn’t work. If possible, you break them into smaller groups and put each of them with a chaperone, but there’s generally nothing wrong with just letting them go. I’ve been doing this for years, literally, and have never had my kids get into any sort of bullshit while out in public. Sometimes they get a little loud. That’s it.

In other words: 1) There’s nothing wrong with sitting down in a museum; that museums, in fact, provide furniture for sitting, even in rooms with priceless works of art that one is expected to gaze reverently at for some length of time that an otherwise uninvolved denizen of the interwebs might deem appropriate; 2) It’s entirely possible that they’re sitting down because this is where they’re meeting everyone; 3) It’s also entirely possible– in fact, likely– that what a bunch of them are doing is showing each other pictures that they’ve taken during the trip, because not all of the museum is going to be a no-photography zone, and 4) stop being so judgy, asshole.

Lecture ends. I should probably do some work now.

I’ve gotten a heads-up that this post is about to get a bit more attention than usual, so forgive me for this, but: Hi! I’m Luther Siler. There is a lot more blog where this post came from, and you can find me on Twitter at @nfinitefreetime. I also write books about space gnomes and voyages to Mars that people have claimed to find amusing. You might too! Thanks for reading!

In which I hope this is funny

On December 18, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized8 Comments

ku-medium I don’t know how to write this post. I’ve been working on it in my head for over a week now, and in none of the versions in my head have I hit the tone I like, but this story is either funny enough or weird enough to deserve telling– I just don’t know how to do it right.

Also, here’s a phrase I’ve never used on the blog before, but this is important: Consider this your trigger warning, if you’re partial to such things. This will end well, but it will not start well.

I was out of the office for a good chunk of last Tuesday. When I got back the guy who had been acting as our principal designee (because the principal and AP were both also out of the office) said that there had been a really weird spike in sexual harassment issues during the time we’d been gone. These things happen in middle school, but they’re not super common, so for multiple things to happen in the same day is odd. I’m not around for the explanation or the ensuing phone calls; I just know Stuff has Happened.

The next day, I walk into a parent conference with the designee and the assistant principal because I need to talk to my boss for a few minutes, and end up sitting down and being part of the meeting. Mom is the parent of a fifth grade boy, and he appears to be in grave trouble. She is expressing two emotions: the first is horror and the second is an almost craven sense of apologeticness, if that’s a word. She’s so sorry for what he did that it almost hurts me to listen to the conversation.

She keeps saying that when he used “the word” or “that word” that he didn’t really mean what the word actually meant, that they are immigrants and “that word” is used differently in their country. She looks Hispanic, and so does the boy, and he has a unique first name that really doesn’t scan to any particular ethnic group or nationality that I’m aware of, so I assume “their country” is somewhere in South America. Then I hear her speak to her son in whatever language they speak at home and it’s clearly not Spanish, but she doesn’t talk long enough for me to get past hey wait that isn’t Spanish and start listening for whatever the language actually is. The general mood in the room is solemn; I consider leaving but she begins addressing her remarks to me as well as the other two as if I belong there so I don’t.

Eventually, she leaves, insisting that not only will she tell her son to stop using “the word” but that she will stop using “the word” herself, because she knows that the reason this happened is that she’s been setting a terrible example for their son and that she realizes that this is not how things are done in America.

One guess on what I think the word is, right? There’s only one word in the English language– well, two, maybe— with enough power that someone would refuse to even say it while talking about it. So he’s called someone the N-word, right? But that’s not sexual harassment. It’s a lot of things but it’s not sexual harassment. So… huh? Weirdly, though, there’s talk about how she’s pretty sure her son likes the girl he used “the word” around, and… huh.

They leave. The AP and the other guy exchange a look, both take a deep breath, and then crack up laughing.

“What the hell happened?” I ask. “What was the deal?”

“He threatened to rape a fifth grade girl,” the AP says, practically wiping tears from her eyes. The boy, remember, was also a fifth grader.

My eyes widen. What the fuck are you assholes laughing about? This is, as you might imagine, a big deal. I’ve literally never had to deal with a rape threat in a school before. That’s major.

I express that sentiment. They laugh harder.

“They’re German,” the AP says, as if that explains it. I give her a yeah, so the hell what? sort of gesture.

Apparently there is, and if you are German or speak German better than I do please feel free to enlighten me here, some sort of German proverb, or slang expression, or figure of speech, or something, that basically means “stop bugging me” or “leave me alone,” meaning mild, possibly even affectionate harassment– that, when translated into English, comes out as rape.

This woman has been using this phrase, translated, around her son, for years. She has apparently, and at this point my AP does a picture-perfect impression of this lady, one that causes me to lose it and crack up out of sheer disbelief, on multiple occasions said the phrase “I’m busy, go rape your father” to her son.

Her son, in saying “I’m going to rape you,” to a little girl in his class, meant “I’m gonna get on your nerves.”

And, understandably, this has caused all sorts of merry hell to break loose. Apparently Mom is fully aware of the word’s connotations in English– how could she not be?– but hasn’t managed to purge the word from her vocabulary, to the point where American friends of hers have actually called her out on it and asked her to stop using it. You can imagine how this would go, right? You don’t just drop a loaded term like rape into a conversation without causing a little bit of a hitch here and there. And, god, if she’s seriously said “Go rape your father” to her son while on the phone with someone else? What the fuck I don’t even.

This all sounded deeply weird to me, of course, even a little unbelievable, until it hit me that I use the phrases “Are you fucking with me?” and “Are you shitting me?” on a fairly regular basis, and in very much the same way those phrases would be hugely opaque to anyone with no understanding of colloquial English. This is, presumably, more or less the same phenomenon, only through another filter where it’s been translated.

So… yeah. I have no idea if anyone reading this is laughing right now, or if you just think that’s an insanely weird conversation to have to have. I hope you at least understand why I felt like I had to post it. 🙂

On appropriateness in public places

On January 29, 2014January 29, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Teaching7 Comments

19dy59dmoqh07jpg This story has been making the rounds lately; I saw it first on Gawker and it’s popped up on Facebook and Twitter a couple of times since then too. To nutshell: little kid crawls all over multi-million-dollar art installation in museum, horrified onlooker scolds parent, but not until after taking a picture and putting it on Twitter, Internet falls on heads of everyone involved.

Put a pin in that. Lemme tell you a story. It’s 2012 and I am in Washington, D.C. with thirty-some-odd adolescents. It is the first day of the trip, meaning that we’ve spent the entire night on the bus getting to Washington, D.C. and then went directly into touring with no chance to shower or rest in between. We are at the American Holocaust Museum, surely one of the most emotionally draining spaces in North America. I am ushering a small group of my kids through the museum.

In case you’ve never been there before: the whole museum is damned upsetting, as you can probably imagine it is. But there are parts of it that are decidedly more upsetting than others. These tend to be set off with little walls, so that you have to deliberately walk up to them and lean over to see whatever they’re showing you, so that really little kids and people who just can’t handle any more evil don’t get accidentally exposed to whatever soul-shattering horror they’re letting you bear witness to.

The first of these is in one of the first relatively wide-open spaces in the entire museum. As a rule, the museum is cramped and narrow, and never much more than the first floor after you get off the elevators, which I swear is trying to give everyone claustrophobia. The weird thing is, even though there are always millions of packed people in those first few halls (and I’ve gotten to the point where I just tell my kids to ignore the first few exhibits and just push through the crowds until they get somewhere where we can breathe) it generally isn’t as bad for the rest of it.

Anyway, yeah: first wide-open space, claustrophobia, no sleep, kinda smelly, exhibit where you have to deliberately view it that I’ve seen three times before. I wave the kids over to it if they want to see it and then lean back against a bench set into the wall. I set my elbow on the bench and kinda lay my face into my hand a little bit.

And then catch the look on someone’s face, who is glaring at me. And I notice what I’m actually leaning against: actual goddamn barracks from an actual goddamn concentration camp that somebody probably starved to death on. There’s a teeny tiny plaque a few feet from my head suggesting that maybe it might be kinda nice if you didn’t touch them. And I’m practically taking a nap on the thing.

I was horrified, of course, and I yanked myself away from the thing like it was electrified and shot the lady who’d caught me an apologetic look, which didn’t seem to mollify her too much. But here’s my point: in my current not-entirely-attentive state, those barracks really looked like something I should be leaning on, so I did.

And damn if that multimillion-dollar art installation doesn’t look a lot like a bunk bed, or a ladder.

As an educator I find myself constantly having to think about space and how to use it, and about classroom policy and how it will actually work in the context of having dozens of potentially argumentative and/or apathetic and/or actively destructive teenagers exposed to it. In some cases, spaces themselves sorta set the agenda. You know why kids tend to run in hallways and wide open spaces? It’s because the wide open spaces themselves scream “Run!”. And when you’re dealing with tired people or little kids who can’t be expected to know any better, sometimes shit happens, and if you can anticipate shit happening, which you ought to be able to do, it’s sorta on you to set up your art installation or classroom or museum in such a way that it minimizes the chance of inattentive or young people being able to misuse and/or destroy either millions of dollars of art or priceless historical artifacts. You don’t want anyone groping the brass boobies or the protruding nose on the priceless African brass statue? Maybe you don’t put it where we can reach it, then. People grabbing boobies is kinda predictable, y’know?

None of this justifies the mother’s reaction. Civilized people teach their kids not to do shit like this, or correct them when they do, or when they transgress on their own they’re apologetic and not argumentative about it. But I can’t pretend I don’t get the “You don’t get kids” response on some level or another, even if I do think saying it out loud kinda makes Mom an asshole.

Because, seriously: that thing begs to be climbed on. And the museum should have been smart enough to have anticipated that.