Sharron Burnett

The Honor of Work

Published on April 4, 2017March 28, 2017 by Sharron BurnettLeave a comment

Mexican_Fruit_Pickers_(7618119180).jpg When I work in my yard I go all in. I usually end up with dirt smeared on my face and caked under my fingernails. Sweat runs downs my neck and my hair sticks up in all directions. There is nothing pretty about me in those times. The work is hard and often leaves my muscles aching and my back shouting at me in pain. The truth is that I overlook all of those things because I love being a weekend gardner so much. I can feel bursts of serotonin taking me to a happy place in my brain. Still, I think of my grandparents who themselves worked on farms day after back breaking day. I imagine how difficult it must have been for them to rise early and routinely toil in the sun. For me the labor is a hobby, one that I have the power to ignore anytime that I tire of the effort. For them it was the means of earning money to pay for a place to live and food on the table.

My grandparents’ descendants have done well. We generally have professional occupations that allow us to work in air conditioned buildings and bring home salaries good enough to pay others to do most of the back breaking work that we require if we so wish. We purchase our fruits and vegetables from Sprouts and have enough income for luxuries that they never even dreamed of owning. I feel their spirits when I am on my hands and knees caring for my plants while the sun beats down on my head. I frequently stop to savor a cold drink when I grow weary. I survey land that is my own, not the property of someone else. I remember and appreciate all of the things that they did so that one day all of us who came from their blood, sweat and tears would have a far better existence than they had.

I see beauty in the tomatoes, oranges and other produce that lines the bins at HEB. I don’t take such delights for granted because I understand the drudgery that people endured to bring those items to the markets where I shop. There were individuals who picked the fruits and vegetables hour after hour, day after day as long as the sun was shining. They were paid little and only received monetary rewards for full bushel baskets and bins. Their work was routine and tough on both body and soul. They are the nameless men and women whose plight has almost always been ignored throughout history. At one time they may have been slaves or indentured servants. In other eras they were the poor like my grandparents. Today they are mostly immigrants who toil from farm to farm, season to season in search of jobs that few of us would want.

I once traveled to a small town school to work with teachers who were struggling with the Hispanic children in their classrooms. They complained that the sons and daughters of migrant workers were skewing the test scores used to appraise their effectiveness as educators. They referred to the parents “the tree cutters” and insisted that these uneducated people didn’t care enough about their kids to realize the importance of schooling. It didn’t seem to occur to the baffled teachers that the mothers and fathers who worked so hard were in fact incredibly dedicated to their children, so much so that they were willing to do even the dirtiest of jobs. I was saddened by the ignorance of people who should have known better than to treat a significant portion of their student body as stereotypes. Even after my partner and I had shown them how to reach their charges they appeared to be as adamant as ever that the children of these hard working people were an inconvenience that would have preferred to simply wish away.

Most of us who live in the United States of America enjoy a level of plenty that might have made our ancestors feel wealthy. We are provided educational opportunities that were not afforded them. It was not uncommon in my grandparents’ day for youngsters to rarely attend school after the third or fourth grade. Sadly in many parts of the world even today people struggle to meet their most basic needs and even to feel safe. They are chronically hungry and suffer from health problems that are rarely addressed. We on the other hand are a nation that has mostly forgotten what it is like to live the way so many of our grandparents and great grandparents actually did. The conditions under which they labored are now mostly deemed illegal.

I watched a group of students perform in the one act play, Gut Girls, not long ago. It addressed the working poor at the beginning of the twentieth century. It featured young women who worked in meat packing plants where the conditions were deplorable. I found myself imagining my grandfather who did a similar job for all of his working days. His legs became riddled with varicose veins and more often than not he was in pain but he never missed a single day of work. He boasted to his children that he had managed to feed them all the way through the Great Depression and keep a roof over their heads when others became homeless. He was proud to have regular work no matter how difficult it may have been and his children do not recall a single time when he complained. He endured his aches stoically.

There is great honor in hard work. We should celebrate anyone who is willing to devote time and effort to making an honest living. The person who collects our garbage is important just as the clerk behind the counter of a fast food restaurant is. The janitor is as indispensable as the manager, maybe even more so. We need our engineers and our electricians, our professors and our plumbers. The yard man who sculpts my lawn each weekend is always reliable and willing to do whatever is needed to make my home a lovely place to be. I truly don’t know what I would do without him.

After a day of manicuring my plants, my hands are shouting at me with the sting of cuts and scrapes and bruises. They remind me to be thankful for what I have. They tell me to appreciate all good people everywhere. They urge me to be more generous and kind. But for the grace of God I might just as well have been born in another place or time that would have demanded more of me than I have ever had to expend.

Science or Art?

Published on April 3, 2017March 27, 2017 by Sharron BurnettLeave a comment

When my grandson runs the 1600 meter race only time determines the winner. It is a feat that is as objective as any measure might possibly be. Unless there is a photo finish or one of the time keepers doesn’t do his/her job properly there is no doubt about the victor. When another grandson performs in a one act play and a panel of judges decide who the best actors were and which troupe gave the finest overall impression, the yardstick is far more subjective. Hundreds of people seeing exactly the same thing will rate it differently depending on the background that they bring to the theater. There will be questions as to the authenticity and fairness of the evaluations, thus leaving the final votes open for criticism. Most of life is more like the later, subject to preferences rather than a set of hard and fast rules.

Each year when the Oscars are awarded I find myself scratching my head in dismay. I truly wonder how it is possible that Casey Affleck won the best acting prize when Denzel Washington was in the same category. I rail at the television and ask no one in particular if he/she was blind. Of course all such determinations are just a matter of opinion rather than fact. So it is with evaluating a teacher, a student or a school.

There are certain guidelines that are universal aspects of a well run classroom but we have not yet even agreed on whether teaching is an art or a science. There are those who maintain that if an individual understands and uses certain best practices, the results will be quite grand. Such beliefs rely on the idea that there is truly a science that leads to being an effective teacher, and there is something to be said for knowledge of pedagogy. Still, after spending decades inside classrooms both as a teacher and an administrator I have learned that there is something quite artistic about the process that elevates an educator to a magical level. Two people using the exact same methods often achieve very different results that can only be explained by noting that one is unimaginative while the other is an artist.

We attempt to measure educational success with numbers found in the scores of students on standardized exams. Of course we intuitively know that hundreds of factors affect the final outcomes of such attempts to quantify the teaching process. The list is so huge that it would be impossible to name all of the possibilities but a few examples might be the health of each student, the amount of rest each has had, the home environment, the presence of testing fears, hunger and so forth. None of these things can be totally controlled by the teacher and when a preponderance of them are affecting the child negatively the test score may be less than stellar. Somehow our society ignores such things in judging the value of our educational system. The numbers are king and yet they only tell a small part of the story and because of this they have a negative impact on everyone in the classroom.

Our present system of testing students at virtually every turn has created a totally unnecessary level of stress. We decide the futures of our children and their teachers even as we understand that those exam scores do not tell the whole story. Study after study has shown that most standardized tests favor middle class white males. For whatever reason all other groups do not do as well. It would be a stretch to assume that this is because the middle class white males are more intelligent. In fact, they are not, but they respond to the questions and answers differently because of their life experiences. The test items that are supposed to be neutral are far from that. They are often subject to interpretations that result in responses deemed to be incorrect. When students are given the opportunity to explain their reasons for selecting certain answers, interesting trends appear, including the fact that the questions are often more subjective than the creators imagined they would be. Given the importance that test scores are given in today’s world, it is quite distressing to realize that the element of subjectivity is often present.

As we learn these things it seems logical that we would begin to admit that our efforts to judge our students by the numbers is still rather ineffective, but in truth we appear to be relying on such evaluative measures even more than ever. The three ring circus created by this situation is disturbing to everyone involved including students, teachers and parents and yet it continues unabated. I suspect it has to do with our human tendency to desire easy answers for complex problems. Once we suggest a solution it is often impossible to rid ourselves of it even when it is obviously a mistake. Other than the realization that Prohibition was a stupid idea, we rarely turn back once we have chosen to pursue a certain path. Sadly I think that we will remain hell bent on using tests to quantify progress until we finally realize the magnitude of the damage that is being done to our educational processes.

The acquisition of knowledge should be an adventure and there are certainly gifted teachers who manage to achieve that even with the specter of testing hovering over their heads. Unfortunately far too many educators struggle under the pressure to perform. They are more like drones laboring away in a massive hive of routine. They use the prescribed methods but don’t quite know how to elevate them beyond the ordinary. They may even reach very satisfactory results but the love of learning is missing and their students feel the loss.

We have turned education into a political football. How we design curriculum and provide resources tends to depend more on which ideology is victorious in elections rather than a reasoned appraisal of student needs. If we test children it should not be to determine how rewards and punishments should be meted out but rather what educational designs are needed for each individual situation. Testing should be a positive experience rather than one that strikes fear and loathing into everyone concerned. It should be much like a physical exam at a doctor’s office, providing information on the educational health of each child and then determining what measures are needed to insure growth. We need to halt the practice of using exams as evaluative clubs to beat our children and teachers down.

I return to this topic again and again because it is so important. As citizens we have the power to demand that something be done to change the present system into one that generates a positive experience rather than a negative one. We have to admit that the way we evaluate is all too often flawed. There is a better way to determine how well our students are doing and what the results mean. If we return to the original intent of such tests we will do everyone a service. They were never meant to grade schools or teachers but rather to determine how much progress a student has made from one school year to the next and then to devise a learning plan that best suits each individual. If we manage to do this, we won’t need vouchers or children moving from one school to another. We will finally begin to do the work of educating as it should be done. We will finally enhance classrooms with both science and art.

East Meets West

Published on March 31, 2017March 26, 2017 by Sharron BurnettLeave a comment

east-west Years ago one of my grandson’s was building a family tree at school. He reported to his class that he was half Chinese. Since he had blonde hair and blue eyes his teacher was somewhat confused about his claim. She hesitated to accuse him of making up a tale, but found it difficult to believe that he had even a smidgen of Asian heritage in his DNA. She emailed my daughter to determine why he might think such a thing. That only seemed to confound the puzzlement, so my daughter went to the source and asked her little boy why he felt that he was half Chinese. He innocently asserted that he had come to that conclusion because half of the people at our family parties were Chinese, and he knew them as relatives, so he had come to the conclusion that he must indeed be of Asian decent as well. The mystery was solved.

One of my brothers married a lovely woman from Taiwan many years ago. He was working for a NASA contractor and so was she when he met her at a meeting. He was immediately taken by her beauty, intellect and personality and in a fashion that was totally uncharacteristic of him, he set out to find her and ask her for a date. He learned that her last name was Liu, and he began calling all of the people in the phone book who shared that same name. Eventually he got lucky and actually reached her when she was visiting a friend who was also named Liu. He was smitten from the beginning and it wasn’t long before they were both in love.

Becky has brought so much wonder to our family. Aside from introducing us to the the history and exquisiteness of her culture, she has shared her family members who melded with us as though we had all been born to be together. It is little wonder that my grandson believed that he was related to her parents and siblings by blood. They have faithfully stood by our sides through celebrations and tragedies. All the while they have taught us extraordinary lessons about generosity and determination.

Becky was born in mainland China before it was taken over by Mao and the communists. Her father had been a professor of physics and an officer in the army. He was from a family of intellectuals that included a newspaper editor who had spoken out against the revolutionaries. When the political takeover of the country came, Becky’s parents knew that they must flee with their children. Her older sisters recall being dressed in many layers of clothing into which their mother had sewn money and valuables to use as barter for their safe passage our of the country. At the time they did not fully understand what was happening, but they sensed that it was something dangerous and frightening as they made the long journey of escape.

Becky grew up in Taiwan with two sisters and two brothers. All of them were studious and worked hard to earn the opportunity to travel to American universities to earn degrees in sciences, engineering, and computers. Eventually they became citizens and brought their parents to live with them. They emphasized hard work and academics with their children who grew up as peers of my own girls. In reality all of the kids thought of themselves as cousins and were as close as they might have been if their bloodlines had been from the same tree.

We found ways to get together as a family on birthdays, for Thanksgiving and at Christmas and Easter. We celebrated births and milestones, like graduations and marriages. They introduced us to the Chinese opera and dim sum. We sat around a hot pot and laughed and told stories while sharing feasts. We marveled at the many successes of the youngsters who grew up to become doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses, business men and women. My grandchildren played with theirs and the extended family grew and grew.

My mother thought of Becky’s mother as her very best friend. The two of them often sat together smiling and holding hands. They accompanied my brother and Becky on trips all over the United States and never exchanged a cross word. Becky honored my mom as is customary in Asian culture, opening her heart and her home to Mama without reservation and with the deepest regard and respect. I often felt humbled by the love that Becky and her siblings gave so unconditionally to our clan, even when my mother’s bipolar disorder made her less than congenial.

We have all been blessed and enriched by our association with Becky. She has given us a great gift that has made us better than we might have been. She has quietly taught us how to embrace differences and the importance of allowing our adventurous spirits to soar freely. I suspect that if we were to be honest we would have to agree with my grandson that through our many interactions we have all become part Chinese. Our eyes have been opened to the wondrous history and contributions of the east where there was a highly advanced culture long before our western civilization began to form. We have learned just how much more beautiful life is when we see the world through the viewpoints of the people of many different nations and races. Becky was the catalyst for our transformation from the ordinary.

To this very day Becky is extraordinary. She looks like a gorgeous movie or rock star in her Facebook profile photo. She spent decades doing incredible things at NASA, contributing to the betterment of science and space exploration. She excels at virtually everything that she attempts. Most recently she has taken up painting and quilting with the most incredible results. I have to say that I have been somewhat in awe of her for most of my adult life, but now the two of us are able to just sit together quietly like her mother and my mother once did. We are bound by our roles as wives, mothers, grandmothers and sisters. Family has become our most important pursuit and we find ourselves quite happy that we are in the same one. I hope that just maybe Becky has enjoyed learning about us as much we have been about getting to know her. It has been remarkable experiencing our moments of east meeting west.

Electronic Amusement Park

Published on March 30, 2017March 24, 2017 by Sharron BurnettLeave a comment

electronic_devices We clutch our phones tightly, ready to snap a photo if something interesting comes along, waiting to hear the pings that alert us to reminders, messages, news. We carry a library in our pockets, a world of information which may or may not be entirely accurate. At home our DVRs faithfully record the programs that we will watch at our leisure, after we have culled through our email and deleted all of the recordings from solicitors on our answering machines. It is quite a task keeping up with the demands of living in an electronic amusement park. We want to insist that the children join us in conversation after dinner but allowing them to be entertained with the latest computer games provides us with just a bit more time to carry out our own duties. Keeping them mesmerized by millions of pixels flashing on a screen surely can’t be as bad as we imagine. We shrug and tell ourselves that such pursuits are quite harmless, an opportunity to develop hand/eye coordination. Surely the electric world that surrounds us is a good thing, a sign of mankind’s inventiveness, a form of major progress in the grand scheme of human history.

Still there is a little itch in the far reaches of our brains that worries us. We wonder if all of our modern inventions have filled our world with unintended consequences. We know how wonderful it is to have a smartphone that guides us as we drive to places that we have never been. We feel so much more secure knowing that in an emergency we have a means of summoning help. The reminders and alarms keep us on task. Our dinner slowly cooks at home while we go about our work far away from our kitchens. The Roomba cleans the floor whether we are present or not. The Echo Dot turns on lights and monitors cameras that send images to our phones assuring us that all is well back in our little castles. The irrigation pipes care for our plants, the many different security systems warn us if there is trouble. Our lives are more carefree, less subject to worries…and yet…

We have a president who reacts to incidents without much forethought, tweeting comments that might better have been left unsaid. If we are honest we have to admit that many of us are not much better. We become embroiled in Facebook rants, Twitter trolls, email disagreements. We find ourselves wanting to take back comments that linger forever in the universe of the great social network. We cringe at the ugliness of the words that are so blithely typed in a moment of indiscretion. Our actions put us into camps of “them versus us.” It unnerves us and yet like our president we find ourselves taking argumentative bait as we tell ourselves that such habits must surely stop. Even when we attempt to serve as peacemakers we are often misunderstood. We know better and yet we try again and again to set things right in an electronic world that appears to have gone mad.

There are so many posers who want us to believe that they are keepers of the truth, fonts of wisdom. We have to be careful of the sources that we use to make decisions. Facts are twisted into opinions quite cleverly. Comments are taken out of context. Information is contorted to support ideologies. Finding out what is real is a confounding proposition, and we worry lest we become a world of lemmings blindly following clever power brokers who prey on our emotions and fears. We must look beyond the sound bites and edited images to know what is really happening. Ironically it is far more difficult to ferret out the truth in the present state of proliferated information that it has ever been before.

We see our children languishing in almost zombie like states as they spend hours upon hours in front of screens filled with games that appear to lead nowhere. They play long distance matches with people that we do not know. It all appears harmless until we realize that so many of them have lost the art of conversation and creative play. We know that there are youngsters in our neighborhoods but we rarely see them. The days of impromptu ballgames or fort building or gazing at the world from the branches of trees appear to be of a bygone era, replaced by playdates and organized outings. It is eerily quiet in the great outdoors.

I have a good friend who has rebelled. She owns the least expensive phone that Walmart provides. She eschews cable television in favor of a seven dollars and change subscription to Netflix. She doesn’t have a gaming system in her home, nor any kind of alarm other than one to warn of fire. She recycles and finds ways to make do. She enjoys the freedom that comes from turning off the madness. It gives her time to take walks or just sit outside waving at her neighbors. She reads from books that she finds at thrift stores and then passes them on to friends. She has rid herself of excesses of any kind. She only keeps what she needs and her wants are minimal. She has found a kind of peace and happiness that is all too often absent for so many of us even with all of our devices that were supposed to make our lives better.

I suspect that we are still attempting to understand how to find balance in the wondrous electronic playground that surrounds us. We have not yet learned how to keep the best aspects of our inventiveness while avoiding the unexpected pitfalls of our modern ways. We allow our machines to become more important than our humanity. We are sometimes so addicted to our devices that they become the focus of our daily routines. They make demands on our time, our talents and our personalities and sometimes imprison us in a vacuous wasteland if we are not careful. We have to learn how to take back control and impose limits on how much we allow ourselves to be negatively affected by the very devices that should be making us happier and more free to experience the delights of the world around us. We must begin to wean ourselves away from our dependence on machines rather than people, easy answers rather than careful thoughts.

Our world is wondrous and I would never suggest that we go back in time. There is still so much that we have yet to discover. The possibilities and dreams are exciting, and the tools that we have will surely move us closer and closer to better lifestyles for everyone. We simply have to pause long enough now and again to assess the ways in which we interact with people around us and to consider whether or not we are using our tools for betterment or out of boredom. Our phones, computers, televisions, and other machines need to know who is in charge. It’s time that we begin the process of reflecting on how we might use them more wisely.

Remembering

Published on March 29, 2017March 22, 2017 by Sharron BurnettLeave a comment

grief Death is inevitable, or so the saying goes. We all know that there is no such thing as immortality. Sooner or later everyone of us will die. I tend to believe that it is more difficult for the living to accept death than the person whose life has ended. Whether one believes as I do that eternal life waits on the other side, or that the whole adventure simply ends, doesn’t make the pain of losing someone much better. Laying a loved one to rest is one of the most horrific aspects of living. The process rents our hearts in two, and often to our surprise the feelings of utter sadness remain firmly lodged inside our souls just waiting to be tickled back to life when we least expect them.

Death is a cruel mistress who sometimes strikes with discordant surprise. It hits us especially hard when the person taken from us is young, in the prime of life. There is an unfinished feeling about such tragedies. We are left thinking of all of the potential that will never be realized, the life events that will not be experienced. There is an unfairness about untimely deaths that especially angers us. They shock and frighten us. We wonder what we might have done to prevent them, even as we understand that they are simply the way things are.

March reminds me of a particular year when I seemed to encounter death everywhere I turned. It was a month of unimaginable horror. A beautiful and lively young woman who was in the process of planning her wedding was laughing with friends one moment and lying dead in her car the next, a victim of a drunk driver. As I attended her memorials and wrote of her spirit I thought that I had surely experienced the depths of grief but I was in for a gigantic shock.

Only days later a beautiful young mother that I knew was murdered, found by a passing stranger who heard the cries of her tiny baby. Those of us who had loved her life were stunned. Her life had been coming together so beautifully. She had been so happy. We wondered how it was possible that someone had been monstrous enough to kill her while her tiny child sat nearby. She had so loved her little girl and had already planned out the child’s life just as mothers often do. Her death was unfathomable.

In the very same month of the same year yet another young friend of mine died in a car crash. He had been studying at college and looking forward to a glorious future. He was a likable fellow with so many friends, known for his engaging smile and optimistic nature. Those who cared about him filled a huge auditorium. All of us were in shock. It hardly seemed possible that someone so full of life could be gone.

There is great pain associated with death. It eventually eases but always leaves scars on those left behind. Somehow we move through the days, the months, the years, growing ever older and farther and farther away from the grief but always conscious that we have lost a part of ourselves. My father will have been gone for sixty years come this May. I have moved forward without him but I never really forget him. I wonder what he might have thought of the adults that my brothers and I have become. I wish that our children and grandchildren had an opportunity to meet him. Just talking about him doesn’t seem to be enough to share his incredible essence.

I am familiar with the stories of so many others who died far too young. I think of the brave college student who lost his life defending a woman who was being beaten by her irate boyfriend. He was such a good soul, exceedingly kind and oh so loved. I watch his family continue to grieve and I understand their pain.

There is the mother who left this earth just as her daughter was about to graduate from college, fulfilling a dream that they both had shared. I have watched as her child has struggled to deal with the emotions that such a tragic loss engenders. I have carried thoughts of her in my heart as I saw those who miss her experiencing sadness, anger and the first stirrings of resignation.

I know of a man who died on his vacation, a woman whose cancer could not be controlled. I remember a friend who went to war and never came back, another who lost hope and pulled the plug on his own life. All of them had family and friends who have yet to come completely to grips with their losses. They certainly seem to have carried on, but those of us who know them well realize that life is never quite the same after such horrific surprises.

We struggle to know how to deal with such tragedies. We want to find a correct way of doing so but our humanity doesn’t provide easy answers. We find it hard to determine what to say or do, sometimes falling back on platitudes to explain our feelings. We are uncomfortable with comforting those who are in such despair. Sometimes we wrongly stay away, afraid that our humble efforts will not be worthy of the occasion.

I often pray for the wisdom of Solomon. I want to be a font of tranquility for the suffering and the broken hearted. I don’t feel that I always help as much as I should but I believe that I understand their agony for I too have been where they are. I have walked through the valley of death and felt the despair that comes from realizing the brutal finality that comes with loss.

We tell ourselves again and again that we should express our feelings for the people that we love while we have the opportunity, and yet we get busy and miss those all important chances. We consider making that phone call but never quite get around to it. We neglect to reach out to those closest to the deceased. We send sympathy cards and flowers in the beginning but allow time to get away from us after the memorials and funerals are over. Just when the lonely most need us we have all too often turned our attention to other things. In truth it is when time has passed that they may need our condolences the most.

Death can be a lonely experience but it shouldn’t be. Think of someone who has lost someone special and let them know how much you care. Even the smallest gesture has the power to go a long, long way.