A couple updates on last week’s post:

First, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign graduate students (members of the Graduate Employees Organization) stayed on strike long enough to end up getting what looks to be a fair deal for themselves. Hats off to them and their supporters, which included their undergraduate students and their counterparts up here at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Last week’s post also referenced those Parkland, Florida kids from Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School. They’re punching way beyond their age in pressuring lawmakers to do something about access to guns. Here’s just one impressive example:

Parkland high schoolers like Delaney Tarr, the speaker in the video, have been so polished that people have suggested that they are “crisis actors” hired by political operatives.

But this article at The Washington Monthly suggests another factor: Why are Parkland Students So Articulate? Because They Were Taught Civics in Middle School.

For those of us of a certain age, taking civics class was a staple of public education. Somehow, civics classes and requirements faded over the years. I don’t know if it was the product of the countless flavor-of-the-day education movements, or that the idea was that civics would be blended into other classes.

Whatever, tests have proven that people’s basic civic knowledge has waned, and in Florida, about a decade ago, a couple of legislators from both sides of the aisle took note. From the article:

The roots of this effort go back to 2007, when former Senator Bob Graham (D) and former Congressman Lou Frey (R) realized that adults in the state of Florida scored at or near the bottom of surveys that measure civic health and engagement. The two joined forces and formed the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship to get civics education legislation passed. After a few failed attempts, in 2010 the Florida legislature finally approved, and then-Governor Charlie Christ signed, the Sandra Day O’Connor Civic Education Act, named for the former Supreme Court justice who has had made civic learning and engagement her post-SCOTUS life’s work.

The law became practice starting in 2011. By all accounts, it resembles what I remember from civics:

It mandates a civics course in 7th grade and the incorporation of civic education content into the K-12 reading language arts curriculum. Second, while most states require that students be tested only in reading and math, the O’Connor Act mandates a comprehensive civics test at the end of 7th grade. That sends a message to teachers, administrators, and parents that civics is a core subject that needs to be taken seriously.

One thing that sounds better about the modern day civics class—it’s less lecture, more discussion of issues in context, and more participation in school governance. On that note, please do read the Washington Monthly piece—it includes a nifty online civics quiz (I dare you to take it) and some nifty little online exercises.

Efforts to bring back or augment civics programs have been implemented or are being considered in other states, including here in Illinois.

It’s not a quaint idea—it’s a pretty big deal. The founders of the United States envisioned a vast public education system with, in large part, the mission of equipping citizens to participate in our democracy. And it can only make discourse more constructive and civil.

So, I’ll say something I never thought I’d say: Here’s to Florida.

That’s the title of the talk I’ll be giving for the Vivette R. Rifkin Seminar this Thursday, March 15, 2018 at 12:30 p.m. at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). The event is free, and the public is invited. Come on over! I’ll give more details below, but first, some background about the woman the seminar is named for.

Thanks to Vivette Rifkin and other readers, students with visual impairments got their textbooks in audio on a timely basis.

Vivette R. Rifkin (1911 – 2007) founded Educational Tape Recording for the Blind in the 1960s to help her daughter Jill and countless other people with visual impairments succeed at school. Jill was born prematurely and was left with badly impaired vision. In her younger years Jill attended a special school for children who had disabilities, and when she expressed a desire to attend her neighborhood high school and go on to college, her mother helped by recording textbooks for her. When her daughter started at University of Missouri, Mrs. Rifkin and her team started recording textbooks for students all over the country. From the Chicago Tribune:

What made Mrs. Rifkin’s firm especially valuable was its quick turn-around on book orders. Employing a team of volunteers, and recording for five hours a day herself, Mrs. Rifkin would get students and others the books they needed, even lengthy tomes on science and other subjects, in a matter of days.

Vivette Rifkin herself never had the chance to go to college, but in 1999 the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) awarded her an honorary doctorate of humane letters. After Mrs. Rifkin’s death in 2007, her family established the Vivette R. Rifkin Seminar at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Late last year I was contacted by Keenan Cutsforth, Assistant Dean for Advancement at the UIC College of Applied Health Sciences, to invite me to meet with him and Dovie Horvitz, another of Vivette Rifkin’s daughters, to talk about the 2018 Vivette R. Rifkin Seminar. Over lunch, Dovie told us that her mother had been recording textbooks well into her 90s. “The University of Illinois was right to give her that degree,” Dovie said with a shrug and a smile. “After reading thousands and thousands of college textbooks, she could have been hired to teach classes there!”

Dovie and I really hit it off over lunch that day — how could you not love a woman named Dovie? After lunch she accompanied me to an elementary school in Deerfield to hear me talk with the kids there, and now I’m looking forward to being with her again at the seminar this Thursday. Here are the details :

The 2018 Vivette R. Rifkin Seminar presented by Beth Finke

Blind in the City: Not as Dark as it Sounds

In her presentation, Beth will outline her decision to move from a small community to a large city after losing her sight at age 26. Through her talk, Finke will examine cultural attitudes about disability, reasonable accommodation issues, and the role disability arts and culture movements play in urban life.

Thursday, March 15
12:30 – 1:45 p.m.

UIC Lecture Center Building F, F006
807 S. Morgan St.

It is an honor to be asked to give a talk for the 2018 Vivette R. Rifkin Seminar. I hope I do it justice. For more information about this event, directions or other inquiries, contact Keenan Cutsforth, Assistant Dean for Advancement at the UIC College of Applied Health Sciences, at keenanc@uic.edu or 312-966-1339.

Beth, Justin, and Bob at the studio. (Photo by Peter Zimmerman, producer.)

…don’t despair! our interview with Justin Kaufmann on The Download is already available online. Just link here to the WGN Radio site and hit the button marked “play.”

I’m about to do that myself right now to see how we sound — the interview went by so quickly it’s all a blur! I’ll say goodbye here and leave you with the description from that WGN Radio site. Happy listening!

Award-winning author, teacher, journalist and NPR commentator Beth Finke joins Justin to discuss her work teaching people how to write their memoir. Beth talks about why she decided to teach a memoir writing class, how her students have to read their words and how that is different from just writing them, the challenge of drawing out the stories from her students and her upcoming event at UIC. Beth is joined by one of her students Bob Eisenberg who tells us about why he chose to take Beth’s class, the challenge of writing his story and his life growing up on Maxwell Street.

The Download with Justin Kaufmann airs Monday through Friday from 7 pm. to 11 pm on WGNRadio.

PS: Towards the end of the interview, Bob tells listeners about his own web site, blissbob.com, where you can see his artwork. He’ll soon be publishing his essays from class on that site, too. Check it out.

A few years ago, an architect acquaintance and I were talking about the younger people in our lives. She described some interns she’d employed, their advanced knowledge of technological stuff she and I no longer cared about, and their youthful eccentricities. She wasn’t angry or put out, really, it was a pretty clinical description. And she ended with this simple phrase: “It’s their world now.”

I’ll always remember that. Neither she nor I have one foot in the grave. But we are, as a golfer would say, on the back nine. It’s not all bad being there. I don’t have the visceral desire to keep up with everything technological like I used to, and that’s fine. I’m not as twitchy. I do, however, still try to live up to my responsibility as a citizen—to stay informed, vote (and act if I can figure out a way to do so)—in the interest of what I judge to be in the interest of the nation.

That’s a Russian samovar, which is an ornate tea urn.

I think often about my father and his three brothers, who all served during WWII. They were not in unison in their political beliefs, but I’m afraid they are all rolling in their graves at what’s going on now. I think about my mother, a public school teacher who taught me about what “public” means. It means acknowledging common interests and doing something about it. And her father, a Pennsylvania coal miner who did his part to unionize. It was risky, but if he and others hadn’t, I might not be here right now. He ended up with black lung disease, but likely would have fared even worse without protections negotiated by his union and accompanying safety regulation.

And so, in what I consider to be a dark hour in our country’s history, those kids in Florida and across the country who have more sense than their elders are floating my boat.

So are some young’uns right here in Illinois. When I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), tuition was around $400 a semester. You could reasonably expect all expenses, including a triple dorm room and bad food, to cost you just over $10,000 a year.

Today, you can reasonably argue that UIUC (and many other state schools) are only nominally public institutions. State support has dwindled to less than 20 percent of expenses. Higher Ed inflation over the years is rivaled only by health care costs. There are a lot of reasons, but having been in and around a university for years, I agree with the premise of this Washington Monthly article titled “Administrators Ate My Tuition.”

That aside, my $400 a semester back in the late 1970s bought me a great education and a great time. It introduced me to lifelong friends from around Illinois and around the country. In my basic reporting class, I met this girl, Beth, who always looked like she’d just gotten out of bed. It introduced me to big ideas. I had some great tenured professors. But I also had graduate student teaching assistants who made an enormous impact.

One of those graduate students was my Russian teacher, Phil Cooper, who had been to the Soviet Union on multiple occasions—that was really exotic back then. He had stories—of trading Levis jeans for priceless samovars (I didn’t know what a samovar was until he showed it to me), of rural people who refused to have their photos taken because it would steal their souls, of being shadowed by security. It made the U.S.S.R real flesh and blood. And a woman named Carolyn Marvin who taught the ambitiously titled “History of Communications.” The course was a marvel, starting with cave paintings and tracing not just communications but also the intertwined business history. (Western Union didn’t believe the telephone would amount to much. Oops.) At the time, she alerted us that we were at the precipice of a great revolution, moving from an analog to digital world. This was 1978. I was still using a typewriter.

When Beth and I lived in Urbana as townies, not students, we befriended lots of folks who had come from New York, Virginia, California, Europe, South America, Asia—all over the world—to get their graduate degrees. They came because of the combination of academic quality and a good deal—their education was essentially free and they made a pittance if they agreed to teach all of the snot-nosed undergraduates.

It’s really easy to piss on educators, but I was raised by a public school teacher, so don’t do it around me. Teachers at all levels work hard. And they put up with and have to manage the full gamut of bad human behavior. Those teaching assistants have teenagers on one end, and grizzled university administrators on the other.

So, I’m proud of and fully support the graduate students at my alma mater who are on strike right now. They’re in their second week, and they show no signs of backing down. There are the usual number-based beefs—percentage increases, etc. But the crux is what has, in my mind, been the backbone of a vital system: that free ride in exchange for teaching. The University wants to have discretion about whether these grad students get that waiver.

I love Champaign-Urbana. I love the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with all its warts. To a great extent, the place and the institution made me me. But I can tell you, it wouldn’t be the rich, quirky place I grew to love without drawing fresh, ambitious minds from around the country and the world. And, sorry, but the Urbana Sweet Corn Festival isn’t enough to bring folks to the cornfields the way tuition waivers have.

So, you go all you high schoolers and University of Illinois Graduate Employees’ Union members.

It’s your world now, and from what I can tell, the world’s in good hands.

When Regan Burke and I were on WGN radio in January touting the benefits of memoir-writing, Justin Kaufmann, host of The Download, said over the air that “Stories by seniors make for great radio,” and that they should “have Beth on again with more writers from the memoir classes.” I contacted Justin and his producer Pete after the show, and guess what? He really meant it!

This Wednesday, March 7, another writer will be joining me for an interview with Justin Kaufmann on The Download on WGN Radio 720. If you caught the January show with Regan Burke, you heard how much fun we had. I’m expecting that again this Wednesday with Bob Eisenberg at my side – he and Regan are two of the writers from my memoir-writing classes whose stories intertwine with mine in my latest book, Writing Out Loud.

Bob Eisenberg

Bob shares stories in class of escapades growing up in Chicago’s Maxwell Street neighborhood with his buddies Squeaky LaPort, Da Da Hernandez, and Mario DeSandro. His nickname then was Bobby Butts Eisenberg, and together, they were the Pranksters. He describes Maxwell Street in the 1940s as a neighborhood full of Jews, Italians, and Mexicans.

When I assigned the prompt “What Are You Afraid Of?” we learned more of his story. “My mother died right after I was born,” he wrote. “I moved in with my mother’s mother until I was six. Then she died, too.” His answer to the prompt? He’s afraid to travel. “I don’t like leaving home.”

After finishing the school year in his grandmother’s neighborhood, tiny seven-year-old Bob was sent to military school. Sundry other relatives took him in after that, including his Uncle Morrie, who was a juggler/clown at Chicago’s Riverview Amusement Park.

“As I look back into my past I count six different grammar schools I attended and seven different families I lived with.”

Bob’s upbringing must have been tough, but when he writes about the people who took him in, he does so with a sense of joy and appreciation. He spent three years in the U. S.Army after graduating from Sullivan High School. Back in Chicago, he started styling and cutting hair, opened his own salon, and then studied with Vidal Sassoon to learn new methods. When asked how he ended up cutting hair for a living, Bob explains that it all started when he was six years old.

Bob is left-handed, and his stern first-grade teacher insisted he write with his right hand. Only problem? He couldn’t. He was simply incapable. And that meant he couldn’t write, do arithmetic, spell. With nothing to do, Bob was bored in school and was labeled a behavior problem. Whenever possible, he’d sneak the pencil into his left hand and draw the faces of his friends and teachers on his school papers.

“Cutting hair is just like drawing pictures of faces,” he tells me with a shrug. “All you have to do is add the hair.” After 60 years in the business, Bob has cut back to part-time and takes an afternoon off every week to join our Monday class. The ladies in that class tell me Bob wears his long white hair in a ponytail. Sure isn’t how I picture an 80+-year-old man who still makes his living cutting and styling hair! Bob married his wife Linda 30+ years ago , and their blended family of six children and numerous grandchildren provide him with plenty of other material for stories he’ll include in his memoir collection.

No doubt he’ll be sharing some of these stories on WGN Radio this Wednesday night , March 7 at 9 pm central. If you live far away and are one of those lucky people who received an Echo Dot or a Google Home Mini for a holiday gift, just say “Alexa” or “Hey Google” and ask them to play WGN. Or stream it on your computer or mobile device at http://wgnradio.com.