Dear Ms. Hockemeyer: First, please accept my sincere apologies
for misspelling your name. It was careless of me. Thank you for
drawing it to my attention.
Dear Ms. Hockemeyer: First, please accept my sincere apologies for misspelling your name. It was careless of me. Thank you for drawing it to my attention.
Second, I am delighted to accept your kind invitation to visit your classroom. How about in October? Your classes and my schedule will have settled down by then.
I haven’t visited any GHS classrooms in years, not since the science department invited me to see that GHS was not a jail. We didn’t come to any agreement on that issue, but the visit was very informative. I quote from my article of that week:
“A few aspects were shocking: graffiti on the interior window frames. Kids passing around and eating candy in class. And in every class there was an ubiquitous murmur of chat, punctuated by the teacher’s sh! sh! In AP classes, the chat was mostly on topic. In the other classes, it mostly was not.
“Only one class suffered outright disruptions. Even there, that teacher acted as though throwing spitwads and bopping classmates on the back of the head with a pencil was acceptable behavior. Zen question: are spitwads disruptive if nobody minds?”
To be sure, I don’t expect to learn anything about your normal teaching style from a half-day visit. Any adult can adopt company manners for a few hours. I do expect to learn something unexpected; such is life.
Reading your letter of June 27th, I find we have a point of agreement, as well as the inevitable several points of disagreement. One of the latter is your assertion that I know nothing about you. As you live in Santa Cruz, it may have escaped your attention that Gilroy is a small and insular community. I know some of your students and some of their parents; thus I know that you have called the president a war-monger.
Moreover, and more intimately, I know you from your writings in The Dispatch. One’s writing is always so revealing.
For instance, you reveal a lot about yourself in your letter of June 27th, when you take my statement out of context. I had said, “If there is a causal relationship between school spending and crime …” then went on to explain that I didn’t think the relationship was necessarily causal. You, madam, took the sentence, stripped it of its qualifying supportive sentence, and argued against causation. Do you do that to your poor defenseless students?
Next, you quibble with my assertion that one of the biggest contributing factors to criminal behavior is growing up in a single-parent home. You prefer to blame poverty, but surely you must be aware that 80 percent of long-term child poverty occurs in never-married or broken families.
Moreover, as Barbara Dafoe Whitehead noted: “The relationship [between single-parent families and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature.”
One study found that, holding other variables constant, black children from single-parent households are twice as likely to commit crimes as black children from a family where the father is present. Another demonstrated that nearly 70 percent of juveniles in state reform institutions come from fatherless homes, as do 43 percent of prison inmates. Research also indicates a direct correlation between crime rates and the number of single-parent families in a neighborhood.
Next, madam, you respond to my statement that teachers should promote chastity by stating that teachers do promote responsible sexual behavior. Fallacy of ambiguity, ma’am; chastity is responsible, but using a condom is not chastity. Please do tell us in more detail exactly how you advise your students to be responsible in their sexual relationships. I think the parents of your students will find that just as revealing as your closing paragraph, wherein you assert that “going to war in Iraq was immoral.”
Lastly: our sole point of agreement: it is our duty to speak against, to write against, and if need be, to remove from power any government destructive of our rights to life, liberty, and property. (I trust you were equally vocal about Bill Clinton’s abuses of power?) That is precisely why I criticize the schools.
