​Here in the Epicenter, I could bitch. And I could cry. And I do. But there’s something else going on, and I want to name it.
 
Back in March (long ago, in another galaxy), I got called out by an editor for using the phrase ‘silver linings’ when discussing what we might learn from our virtual schooling experiment. “You can’t say that when people are dying,” she messaged me.
 
Really? I kinda think a crisis like this is when those silver linings are most important.
 
Here are some of mine:
 
I love hearing birds and wind and a dog barking over on the next block, without the NYC traffic, the horns, the choppers overhead, the many voices, the street drills, the building construction. The soundtrack is peaceful (okay, absent the ambulance sirens). With the windows wide open and my eyes closed, there’s a peculiar kind of tranquility that I’ve never heard in six decades in my beloved home town.
 
In a funny way, I’m in better touch with my family, though I miss their offline faces keenly. We talk every day. I feel their support, and know they feel mine. In the middle of a pandemic, there’s something unconditional about it.
 
My apartment is comfortable and full of light, and perhaps I’m inventing this, but I could swear that just a few months ago, I was looking at my bookshelves and fantasizing out loud to the boyfriend about some catastrophe where I was stuck inside rereading all those greatest hits. And if that’s not enough, there are the abundant digital stacks at the New York Public Library that I’m getting acquainted with. (Yeah, there’s the little inconvenience of not being able to concentrate on anything but the deluge of bleak medical and political news, but hey, we’re in for awhile, and I feel the reading bug coming back.)
 
I haven’t bought anything in seven weeks, except groceries and some quality booze. And man does this feel good.
 
I’ve barely looked in the mirror, either. Released! Age does this to a gal, but social distancing frosts that cake nicely.
 
And then... there are the hours of unconstructed, unhurried time. It’s possible that I’ve dreamed of this every day of my adult life. My deteriorated cooking skills are returning. I’m writing this and that in my notebook--not with any goal or imperative, but just because. I slalomed my way through the crowds in Central Park on this lovely Saturday, keeping my distance, until I found my own slab of rock in a copse of trees, where I could take off my mask and do... nothing. Lining? Let’s call it a whole, shiny silver cloud.
 
What are your silver linings?

​​This awning of blossoming cherry trees in Central Park is a few blocks from my apartment. We don’t have back yards or hiking trails here in the Epicenter, but the park is stunning at this time of year. There are carpets of tiny blue and white flowers edging mossy rocks, trees hung with huge magenta blooms, like tropical fruit, buttery yellow daffodils, tulips--tiny orange ones with petals gathered tightly, generous purple-black globes, ruffled ones, striped ones. There are waterfalls and lakes and winding dirt paths. There are wooded areas and brightly colored birds.
 
There are also lots of people.
 
This has kept me away, during the pandemic. There are plenty of grassy fields where it’s easy to have space. But if you want to take a long walk (I do), there are also lots of fences, where access to clearings is impossible, and unavoidable stretches of road or path, shared with others. And every time I’ve tried to circle the park, during the Time of Distancing, some of those others have gotten too close. The ones with the most entitlement are the runners without masks; there are lots of them, huffing and puffing and sometimes spitting on the ground. Some of the cyclists are maskless, too. These are the folks who need masks the most. They’re breathing hard; their breath travels farthest. Yeah, it sucks to exercise in a mask. It also sucks to kill your neighbors.
 
Today, it was pouring. So, I figured maybe it was a good time to try to get in a cherry tree viewing, before the blossoms were gone. Maybe the rain would keep folks inside. It did. And the park was glorious. There were people with their dogs, a few other walkers, and some runners and cyclists--but not many. Guess which group was largely unmasked?
 
I wasn’t rude. I said please. And besides, it’s mandated in New York State now, dude. Your exercise is not more important than our health. “Fuck you, bitch?” Really??
 
To you, I say, “Go back to whatever state you came from, where you can join the Open America people, and get a haircut and eat a burger in a restaurant and run without a mask.” Because you’re not one of us. We may be in bad shape here, right now, but we’re doing our best to take care of each other. To thank our essential workers adequately. To demand protection for them. To stay the fuck away from each other physically, and to reach out virtually. To ask, what can I do? What do you need? How are you doing? Maskless man, you probably also order delivery every night, and give a non-pandemic tip to the guy who is risking his life to bring you those Thai fried wings. That’s not who we are, in New York. Andrew Cuomo says we’re New York tough. We are. But we’re also New York caring. Get with the plan, or get lost.

Dear Outer Cape friends (and the rest of yooz who live where city folk have country homes),
 
I’m a New Yorker, who has spent part of every summer in Wellfleet since 1965, and lived there for an all too brief year in the early 90s. It’s my favorite spot on the planet (and I’ve traveled far and wide). When I’m sad or anxious and need to picture my happy place, I’m swimming across Slough Pond. I’m a teacher, so a house of my own in your lovely town has always been out of my range; I’m a perpetual renter. But Wellfleet is as close as it gets to a home away from home, for me.
 
I’ve been following the charge by full-time residents that non-resident homeowners stay away during this pandemic. I've been following the angry comments on social media. And I understand. NYers escaping to their second homes are spreading the virus. Buying up precious food and supplies. And soon, taking hospital beds and ventilators from locals who have nowhere else to go. I get it. But. Hear me out.
 
I need to backtrack for a second. New York City is like a giant a cruise ship. We live on top of one another, and we can’t get away from each other. Buying groceries or descending to the communal laundry room requires pushing elevator buttons or working door handles touched by many. It’s abnormally quiet, here, without honking horns or the cacophony of voices that normally drifts up to our windows. But the silence is constantly punctured by ambulance sirens. We're indoors, in small apartments with no outdoor space. (A fire escape puts you in the one percent, these days.) We're allowed to go out for a little air and exercise, but the parks are often too crowded to practice safe social distancing. Those asshats on fancy bikes in spandex shorts who race up and down the back route from Wellfleet to Truro in August? Their exercise is more important than staying six feet away from you in Central Park. And our essential workers--the supermarket clerks and handymen and other heros--are riding public transportation to work. We’re infecting each other. We’re getting sick. And there are long lines outside every hospital to get into the ER. Once inside, there are no beds or life-saving equipment left. Our doctors and nurses have no protective gear. I’m scared to dea--well, maybe that’s not the best turn of phrase to use, right now.
 
So, I can also understand why second home owners are leaving town. I might do the same, in their pretty shoes.
 
What about making some new rules that work for everyone?

1. If coming from ‘away,’ you bring enough supplies for 14 days, go straight to your house, and quarantine. Religiously. Lucky you, you’ve got a huge yard and stars and wind in the trees. (Oh, wait, your governor just made this law.)
2. After 14 days, if you don’t fall ill, you can go to the supermarket once a week. Whatever you buy, you buy two of. One for you, and one for a full-time resident who isn’t in your second homeowner tax bracket. Share the wealth. And canned beans.
3. If triage becomes necessary at the Cape hospitals, as it is in NY, full-time residents always get priority. No exceptions. Perhaps this rule sounds Draconian. But our medical resources are running out in NY, and someone like me--I’m 62--isn’t going to get that last ventilator, anyway.

 
Full-timers and summer people working together (social distancing style) to keep everyone fed, sheltered and healthy, might even help shake off some of the town-gown tension that simmers beneath the surface of those gorgeous summer days.
 
And yes, I know this is simplistic. And idealistic. Downright dumb. Irresponsible. And it wouldn't work. (Even in Wellfleet, where I’ve watched the community model how to take care of its own.) I know any movement spreads the disease. And in the real world, we all need to stay the fuck home.
 
So. Maybe I wouldn’t decamp to my second house, after all. Maybe I’d be an upstander and stay put. Close the bridges, if you must. But please understand that we're terrified, and do it without rancor.
 
Stay well, friends in my little Paradise. I hope we’ll see each other this summer, if it’s safe enough to cross the bridge.

March 18th, 2020 (week two, here in NYC)
​
A week ago (which of course feels like a month ago), I interviewed an American tech integrator at a K-12 international school in China, where they have been teaching virtually for more than six weeks. As I listened to her experiences and suggestions, I was struck by how her school’s experiment amplifies the most critical issues in education today: equity, teacher agency, student voice, parent involvement, social-emotional wellbeing, accountability and authentic assessment. I started writing up our conversation, one part how-to, one part editorial, a weird piece for a weird time. (Rough draft linked here, if you care to read it.)
 
But a peculiar thing happened as I was writing. Passionate educator though I am, I started to feel that perhaps it isn't critical, in the larger scheme of things, to teach online for the next few months.  I teach because I fully believe in the power of education to build community, grow thoughtful, active citizens, and promote solutions to the profound issues of our time. I love my work. But if we close our schools down entirely during these difficult months—offline and on—for the greater good, or because online options aren’t working for everyone, it will be alright. Students will learn, as will we, from Italians singing on their balconies. From a parent helping an elderly neighbor. From the ways, both positive and negative, that we respond to this crisis. Some of the learning will be heartbreaking. Some of it will be a light coming through a crack.

And then again... maybe the connections we are facilitating, and the tiny semblance of normalcy are our contribution during this time. Maybe they're consequential. I keep vacillating.
 
Are you teaching online? Please weigh in.

Dear NYT,
 
I am grateful to live so close to Central Park. I don’t know what time Steven Speranza took this photo, showing the park empty because of the crisis, but I am not alone in seeking a little respite there, these days. In fact, every time I've been there this week, the place has been packed. Walking and riding my bike while social distancing has been an exercise (so to speak) in weaving and dodging.
 
To the spandex ball-sack cyclist who gave me the finger for suggesting he was a little too close, slow the fuck down. It won’t kill you to brake a little, if it helps maintain a neighborly distance. We don’t need to see the Manhattan spike driven by a bunch of dudes on fancy bikes. (And yes, the spandex offenders I’ve encountered have been exclusively male, and there have been lots of them.)
 
To the woman yelling into her phone about the virus as she cycled, keeping pace with me no matter how hard I tried to get ahead of her or drop behind, please be considerate; we’re in the park to try to get a little breather—literally—from this thing.

​To the scooter ride whom I cut off accidentally, I'm so sorry.
 
To the Parks Department, thank you for maintaining our green spaces. Always, but especially now.
 
Best,
Eve

​I'm headed to SXSWEdu in Austin, next week. And I’m nervous that I’ll feel like an interloper at a banquet for the educational industrial complex. I’ve been the lucky teacher who has always had the lead role in the design of my classroom—the curriculum, materials, pedagogy, methods, relationships, values, norms, and expectations. In recent years, however, it’s felt more and more like a radical act, to be the master of my own domain. In an era where the phrase “education reform” has been co-opted by market-forces—testing companies, data collectors, producers of packaged curricula, programs and materials—it feels like everybody who has ever gone to school wants to instruct teachers on their instruction. Some mean well. Some are in it for the money. Some both.
 
I’ve got a different idea. And maybe it sounds simplistic or idealistic. Compensate teachers like other professionals, like dentists and insurance agents and scientists. Choose the best, brightest and most creative for this critically important job. Pay for it with budgets now used to support top-down, administration-heavy systems, budgets now used to pay for the huge costs associated with standardized testing, budgets now used to purchase packaged, scripted curricula and programs selected by those outside the classroom. Create lots of time and space for national networks of teachers to share best practices, observations, lessons and materials. Put teacher voices first, in every discussion of education reform. Treat us like the professionals and experts we are.
 
It’s this revolutionary idea that makes me wary about attending South by Southwest’s education conference, where entrepreneurship rules. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been getting messages from attendees who want to meet up and chat about their company’s scalable learning program, or digital solution. SXSWEdu’s homepage says that it “cultivates and empowers a community of engaged stakeholders to advance teaching and learning.” Them’s a lot of buzzwords. And the phrase ‘engaged stakeholders’ tastes like it came out of a neoliberal cookbook. Fewer than 16% of the attendees are actually K-12 teachers, and of those, the majority are locals, with easy access to conference fun, and eligible for the continuing education credits—necessary to maintain certification—that the conference proffers.
 
On the other hand, the website also states that “SXSWEdu extends SXSW’s support for the art of engagement to include society’s true rock stars: educators!” Allow me to poke gentle fun of the italics and exclamation point, as if this statement is a huge, big-hearted, enlightened surprise. I certainly think it’s the truth. And I’m delighted to have SXSWEdu acknowledge it. I hope I’ll have meaningful conversations about education, and edifying take-aways. I’ve been curious about this conference for a long time. Every year, I attend the annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and occasionally the annual conference for the Association of Writers and Writing Program (AWP), both well within my teacher-writer wheelhouse. Maybe this conference, where I feel like the outsider, will bring fresh ideas and perspectives.
 
Conference attendees, please talk to me about how you support teacher agency. And student agency. About equitable and culturally relevant reading and writing classrooms. About authentic writing instruction. About creating joy in teaching and learning. About growing great teachers. Ask me about my scalable learning program, where scale means knowing the individual approach that each kid needs. Ask me about the digital solutions I’ve crafted with basic, free apps, to foster a reading and writing community that centers student voices. Tell me how you support engaged, happy students and teachers. Listen to the 15.84% of attendees who are the experts. I’m going to come with an open mind. And my best rock star attitude.
 
[image = Jeb Feldman’s UnSmoke, a former schoolhouse in Braddock, PA that he converted to an art space and home.]

Thank you for reading. By the way, the Weebly 'like' button doesn't show who has clicked. If you care to identify yourself, please leave a quick comment. Thx. 

Dear Fellow Teachers,
 
This week, I’m heading to NCTE, the annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of English. (#NCTE19 is in Baltimore, this year, so send your local eating and touristing recommendations.)
 
One of my presentations at NCTE will share some research on what happens when teachers write. I plan on discussing the top two or three themes that came out of my research. I thought I’d use my blog to post the full top ten I worked with, for anyone who’s interested. I’m hoping it will spark some discussion, so please comment at the bottom of this post.

Best,
Eve

What the heck. If I'm going to move my blog over here, I may as well include the feather in my cap. When I was notified (by email!) that I'd won a Pushcart, I thought one of my students was playing a trick on me. I hadn't even known I'd been nominated.

Published in The Gettysburg Review, Autumn 2010
Reprinted in 2012 Pushcart Prize XXXVI: Best of the Small Presses

My father sits at the edge of his bed, insisting on his shiny concert shoes. Their lack of traction on a polished floor is treacherous for a man who can no longer stand up on his own, a man who has seized and used every moment of living left to him. But the shoes are not negotiable, nor are the button-down shirt or the pants that need to be safety pinned to secure them to his wasted frame. In an hour or so, my father will find the weight of his clothes unbearable. In a few hours, my father will be dead. But first there is a final concert to play, and there is the proper attire in which to play it. I watch as my mother helps my father get into his clothing for the last time.

Earlier in the day, I held my father’s mottled hand, the baggy skin flaking away, but the grip still sturdy from a lifetime of scaling the strings of his viola. For much of his career, my father was the assistant principal violist of the New York Philharmonic. “You have to know when he’s going to start,” my father whispered from his pillow. He took a noisy, shallow breath in, and released a long, rattling exhale. “You have to know when he wants you to play the beats.”

Well, of course! I thought. Not a black-hooded hooded figure with a scythe, but a conductor with a baton. “You know when to play the beats, Dad-ling,” I said gently, though I hadn’t been a gentle daughter.

“But you don’t!” he said, with more strength than I thought he had left. He hadn’t been a gentle father.

“Well, I’m not the musician,” I said evenly.

He took several percussive but unhurried breaths. “It’s deceptive. It begins with a rest.”

“Oh. A rest.” I pronounced the word lingeringly, softly. “That sounds like a good

​Re: Brief Encounters with White Men ​by Claudia Rankine, NYT magazine, 7/21/19
 
Dear Ms. Rankine,

I don’t have enough fingers to count the diversity events I’ve participated in over the last decade where a White person, struggling to understand their privilege says, “But I grew up dirt poor,” or “But I’m a wheelchair-user,” or “But I’m gay.” The word “privilege” in White Privilege is so easy to conflate with social privilege, economic privilege and other forms of benefits and opportunities. The word “privilege” often puts one more hurdle in the way of White people understanding our White Privilege. I agree with you that the term “White Dominance” might have been a better choice than “White Privilege” for engaging White people in our critical examination--and self-examination--of systemic racism in this country.

In nearly every diversity event I’ve attended, facilitators anticipate the issue of White people who don’t feel privileged. They frequently use as an example Italians or sometimes Irish to address pushback from White Ethnics to acknowledging and understanding our White Privilege. “Your ancestors might have been impoverished, but you still…” or “They may have fled famine…” they begin. But in exactly zero diversity events I’ve attended has any facilitator ever used Jews as an example. Several articles I read recently, while attending a conference at Teachers College, Columbia University on equity, race and pedagogical practices, similarly used examples of Irish, Italians and Slavs, but skipped the Jews. And yet White Ethnic pushback at the events I’ve attended is nearly always from people who, like me, are Jewish. I’ve heard an Irish person cite their White Ethnicity once in a diversity session, while struggling to understand White Privilege. And I haven’t heard a word about it from an Italian.

Not so we Jews. As victims of White Supremacy and hate crimes ourselves, more newly White in this country than many other White Ethnics, Jews who are new to doing work on race and equity are sometimes the folks who have the hardest time understanding that we are both marginalized and reviled, and fully possessed of White Privilege. That they’re not mutually exclusive. And that they intertwine in complex ways.

Blacks and Jews in this country have a complicated history. No more so than now, when being an American Jew is dangerously and erroneously conflated with the Israeli government’s human rights abuses against Palestinians and Israeli PoCs (there, I said it), and when Trump and company use Jews as a battle tool for their reactionary positions without our participation. It feels like we are now as hated by some on the left as we’ve long been by the extremist right. Yet Black universities gave sanctuary and jobs to Jewish professors escaping the Holocaust. We founded the NAACP together. We marched together in Selma. Our allyship has deep roots. But that allyship deteriorates further, each time we leave the messy relationship in the closet.

Every time I hear facilitators talking about Italians, or read scholars on White Supremacy citing the same, I find myself thinking, “Oh, they’re talking about Jews again, but are afraid to name it.”

Why? Are we too much of hotbutton topic? Do we hijack the podium too often? (Talking is in our blood.) Is the subject too incendiary? Just too complicated? It certainly is that. Various politicians and public intellectuals of color have recently cited fear of reprisal from American Jews and their allies for their silence on Israeli foreign policy. But leaving Jews out of the discussion on White Ethnicity is—dare I coopt this term?—a kind of fragility.

I get it it, though. I used to speak up about the particular issues of my dual identity as a Jew and a White. These days, when doing work on race, I often, like you, don’t mention it at all. I’m afraid to. Afraid of being seen as the Jew. Afraid of muddying the waters in an acute discussion. And it makes me ashamed. And less of an ally. I’m remembering a professional development session at my school, where I listened to a White-Jewish colleague protest that he was not from a privileged group. And I listened to the facilitator respond by talking about Italians. And I said nothing.

Ms. Rankine, you are one of my literary luminaries. I’ve read work by you with students, and discussed work by you with friends and colleagues. You’re a stunning writer. And brilliant. And deeply important.

So it was with a certain element of disappointment that I read your essential piece. Published in a periodical read by some of the same White guys who skip you in the airport line. And some of the same White friends of mine, authentically trying to look within, who still speak of being “color blind.” And I got to the line asking, “How did Italians, Irish and Slavic peoples become white?” and then, quoting Matthew Frye Jacobson, “…Celts, Slavs, Hebrews and Mediterraneans.” Hebrew? I’m not Hebrew. And I thought, “Et tu, Claudia Rankine?”

I have a shameful confession to make. When Jews were murdered at The Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, I was grieved and outraged, like so many people across racial and ethnic and socio-political lines. I tabled my day’s lesson plan for my 7th grade ELA classes, and worked with the Social Studies teacher to quickly create an interactive, culturally responsive lesson on hate crimes. I was deeply grateful that I work in a field where I had a productive outlet for my anger and fear, and where I like to think I make a difference. But there was a little part of me—and I’ve never said this to anyone before—that thought, “Oh, good. Now the country will actually believe that we are victims of White Supremacists, too.”

Because of our White Privilege, we aren’t afraid, when we leave the house, of being stopped and frisked, stopped and shot. Unlike you, we can choose to reveal our identities or not. Step into the exhausting Work or step out. That’s why we had to wear yellow stars on our clothing. To identify ourselves. That’s why most of the hate crimes against us take the form of graffitied swastikas, instead of injury to our bodies. (The exception being observant Jews in religious dress.) But our role in The Work is informed by our hyphenated identities.

I’d like to end this letter by quoting the last lines of your article. Because you said it better than I possibly can. “I was pleased that he could carry the disturbance of my reality. And just like that, we broke open our conversation—random, ordinary, exhausting and full of a shared longing to exist in less segregated spaces.”

​When discussing White Ethnicity in Whiteness work, please let’s not erase the Jews.
 
Yours in Allyship,
Eve Becker

Painting: The Beggar of Prachatice by Conrad Felixmüller (1924)

P.S. Please read Greg Thrasher's comment, below. I don't know the guy, or how he found this post, but he calls me out for using Jew to mean White, American Jew. And he's right--that's exactly what I did. I stand corrected for normalizing whiteness. Most Jews are white, with the issues of hyphenated identity I discussed above. But we are, as he notes, a diaspora community and come in different shades and nationalities. I still have work to do and always will. 

Teacher Appreciation​

Teacher appreciation week
With donuts
Can’t thank you
Enough
A roost of confidence
A welcoming pheasance
In the early warning
When you put your chairs
In a circle
Everything you touch
You change.
 
You open the shades
Sunshine shimmies in
 
The child in the clock
Talks
For the burst time
Moved
By a book that you
Read out cloud.
My own mother, he says
Gave me away
In the dropsicle
And
 
And
 
You speck in
Half a screp
Because he can’t
Finish
 
But you can’t
Fuse the word
Abandoned
A slice of a knife
In a stace with
His peers
 
So you say
The sense
Of being left.
 
(You think bereft.)
 
There’s a hot of love in this kreese
But the writer
Feels
And you feel
Left.
 
Yes
He says.
 
His classmates
Nod. Hold
The moment
Before
Venturing and adventuring
Breaking and entering.
 
At the end of the day
The custodians
Put the desks
In rows
That never were
 
Pull the shades down.
As if overnight
Someone from a laboring building
Might sprook into your classroom
And speal some knowledge
Or your weft
Or donuts
 
On off hours.