Behind Books and Bricks

by Raymond Pultinas

ORDERS

Witness something at our school

New heights of frightening disregard

(hatred of one’s neighbor as one’s self)

         not everywhere, not everyone

         But you who are impressionable

Speak about the depths of poverty

Violence is only physical

Food insecurity only a symptom

Diabetes only a disease

Obesity only a problem

of few resources and the desire for more…

Change the dialogue

Do now

Write about a time

when you witnessed your own or someone else’s

Blindness

Remain truthful

Reorient my identity

Be stalwart

amidst the torrent of rushing bodies

Step up

Four thousand students or more

         are sinking

What can teaching become?

Start with a poem I wrote that I recited when recently awarded the first “Creating Readers for Life Award” from Behind the Book, a non-profit organization that I’ve collaborated with to bring writers into my classrooms since 2005.  The benefit was held at the William Bennett Gallery in SoHo on October 27, 2010.  Ben Greenman was a delightful and amusing host and Randy Cohen, New York Times magazine’s “The Ethicist” shared a long piece on the joys of reading, riffing off of Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader.  There was a silent auction in the gallery whose walls were covered in bizarre Salvatore Dali drawings. It was a wonderful experience for me to be in such presence and among so many passionate readers and supporters of books and young readers. For more on the event, please go to Behind the Book’s blog.

The mission of Behind the Book and its founder Jo Umans is to promote book literacy in public schools by facilitating author visits.  It has been joyful for me to work with this program, deciding what books and authors to read and teach, preparing my students and planning and awaiting the arrival of the authors.  Over the past eight years, Behind the Book has provided my students with thousands of books.  Writers like Francine Prose, Colson Whitehead, Russell Banks, Marion Nestle, Katha Pollit, Suheir Hammad and Martha Southgate (just to name a few) have all come to my classes.  They might appear to my students (and to me) as strange travelers from the outside world suddenly here to help guide us to deeper and greater literary experiences.  First imagine believing, as I do, that reading and discussing literature creates opportunities to practice empathy, critical thinking, reflection, judgment and moral reasoning.  Then imagine having the author of a book we've just read on hand to discuss the work.  Shouldn't every teacher have such opportunity?  The authors come in to my classes to participate in ongoing discussions about their work, their characters, and themes that they’ve captured in literature that we've all brought back live to the discussion. They sign the books that students get to keep, perhaps forever.  There has always been a magic to this transaction, it is truly transformative, what I often call an "out of school" experience. 

At first, I was afraid that the poem would be unsettling to some, I was apprehensive about whether to share the poem.  Such a positive evening, such high notes of excitement amidst pleasant talk - why read something that might bring people down?  Here I was again being the downer public school teacher poet.


It's been a most distressing year so far.  Many of the twenty or so year veterans like myself have never seen it so bad.  The local papers, like the Norwood News have covered the scene but no one seems to have captured the disappointment many of us feel to be in an environment that we have seen grow steadily worse over the last several years. Our school has been overcrowded now for almost ten years.  The recession has only made it worse - after school programs are the rare exception not the rule since faculty advisors are no longer compensated for time spent after school.  Copy machines are lacking or in poor condition.  As teachers we seldom have one classroom to teach in and wander around an enormous school with our overstuffed bags as if we carried our offices on our backs.  We have been under-funded and over stressed in so many more ways.  

Over the last several years, as a school, we have been forced to take on populations of students who do not qualify or are displaced from smaller schools.   The steady increase of more needy and less prepared students has coincided with an increase of security that is often perceived by students and staff at odds with the values of education.  Our school often feels like a police state.  Uniformed officers, entrance security, metal detectors, scanners, captive lunch - students are routinely objectified.    Teaching and learning should not be held in the context of fighting and violence and spectatorship but each hall passing holds the threat.  Almost 5,000 students moving from one class to another at the same time.  We go to our posts to maintain our presence in the halls, to help tame the beast that might at any time swell up and battle in the halls.  We have long been aware of a hall culture or culture of the hall, there has always been a temptation for students to cut and roam.  Now instead of loner strangers roaming the halls, there are loosely allied bands of youth sharing a willingness to lash out at all of this.  Rudeness, cursing, vulgarity and intolerance seem to rule the halls.


Earlier in the day, I had read a draft of the poem to my literary criticism students.  An earlier version of the poem was more specifically aimed at impressionable students, especially freshmen, who I knew had been swept up as spectators of the fighting, bullying and intolerant behavior that seemed to have reached a high point at our school during the month of October.  In my revising of the poem, I wanted to simultaneously address an audience of devoted readers, lovers of books, of the arts, of children, who I knew would be gathered that evening.  I wanted to impress upon all my concern for the future of our school, the future of my students and all students who attend neglected overcrowded schools.  Whether we like it or not, the many students who have taken so easily to violence and spectatorship this year are the future citizens of this city.  Over 4,000 students can't be swept under a rug.  I assume that we all want the citizens of the future to be adept and perceptive readers.   Isn’t this what public education is all about?  I wanted the Behind the Book audience to be aware of the conditions that have been created in one of our city's most famous and now last remaining large public high schools and how these conditions threaten to jeopardize a dream I think we all have of an educated and responsible citizenry. There was a time when a certain population of DeWitt Clinton was considered at risk.  Under these conditions, every student is at risk, not to mention every teacher, dean, aide, or security officer (SSA or NYPD).

Perhaps what bothers me the most about what has been happening in our school is not knowing what will happen next.   The fact is that the students in my classes are as motivated and excited about learning and as deserving as any I have ever taught.  I know that good things happen in this school and I feel as if I'm part of what is positive here.  I don't want the positive opportunities to end for my students or for me. 

The culture of the halls has not seeped into my literary criticism classes though we might hear it at times banging at the doors.  Just last week, my students engaged with Marina Budhos over the nuances of the characters drawn in her latest novel, Tell Us We’re Home.  Students could readily identify with the hopes, dreams, and desires of daughters of nannies and housekeepers, immigrants, outsiders with insight.  Our session with Marina was dynamic and intimate as students shared their own poetry and insights as "give backs" to an author who intellectually and physically entered their lives.  On November November 4, Bill Telepan, the celebrated chef and restaurateur who consulted with Michelle Obama about the Chefs Move to School program cooked our harvest dinner made from eggplant, basil, turnips, acorn squash, jalapeno and habanero peppers and oregano grown in our newly established school garden.  Students were inspired by witnessing this superb chef in action and I never thought I'd hear some of my students say "I love turnips!"  Read an article from the Riverdale Press and see more pictures in the Riverdale Press.  Alissa Quart visited the Witt Seminar twice to help students write convincing and powerful persuasive essays on issues that matter to them.  We had read and discussed her book Branded:The Buying and Selling of Teenagers and Alissa shared with us some of her life as a journalist but we also strategized together about how we might use writing to inform the outside world of our plight and help bring about change in our school.  In a couple of weeks, Mark Kurlansky, the author of the bestselling histories Salt and Cod will be visiting my literary criticism classes.  Students debated which of his books to read and then voted to read Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea.  As a setting for our discussions of the book, we've constructed what we've called "Walls of Hope" in our classroom .  I imagine our class as having become a kind of "thinktank" to generate ideas about how to actively oppose the violence we've been witnessing on a regular basis.  Behind the Book has helped keep our hope alive.

Eating Healthy Food is Difficult for Teenagers, Not Impossible

by Arva Pierce

In today’s society, it is very difficult for teenagers, as well as adults, to eat healthy. I personally think it is not fair that we as consumers have to pay more to get healthy food. We turn to fast food corporations like McDonald’s and Burger King because they make it very convenient to eat out. We, as teenagers, in some sense are not given a choice of what we want to eat. It is so much easier to just go to McDonald’s then it is to go to an organic market to buy fresh and healthy food. What can be done about this unfair situation? If there were more places where healthy food could be bought at an affordable price, like farmer’s markets, we would be able to purchase healthy food without burning a hole through our pockets.



Generally everyone likes to complain, but only a few would step up and deal with their problem or concern head on. Others want to confront their problem, but do not know how to do so. I believe most people are aware of what kind of food they are putting into their bodies and how food affects them. However, in today’s economy, many of us are concerned about having enough money to feed our families not whether it is healthy for us or not. Consequently we are starving ourselves. Our bodies aren’t receiving the vitamins and nutrients provided naturally from plant based foods. As a result, many people today suffer from a kind of malnutrition.


Most people who suffer from malnutrition are portrayed as excessively thin and on the verge of being anorexic. However, those who are the most malnourished are obese and eat fast food and processed foods habitually. “When most people think of hunger in America the images that leap to mind are of ragged toddlers in Appalachia or rail thin children in dingy apartments reaching for empty bottles of milk” (“The Obesity – Hunger Paradox,” New York Times, March 12, 2010). Hunger and obesity are often indicators of undernourishment. The Bronx has the city’s highest rate of obesity, and yet it is almost guaranteed that you will see at least one McDonald’s or Burger King on your way to work or school. The Bronx also faces stubborn hunger problems. According to the survey by the Food Research and Action Center, many people lack money to buy food at some point in the past year. When these people who live in areas such as the South Bronx get their hands on small amounts of money, they instantly turn to the fast food corporations to satisfy their hunger.


When people are not indulging themselves on greasy burgers, they are most likely standing in line at a local supermarket. Full-service reasonably priced supermarkets are not as common in poorer neighborhoods. The grocery stores in poorer neighborhoods tend to provide more processed foods than seasonal fruits and vegetables. I witness this first-hand. I am currently a cashier in a supermarket and I see how and where people spend their money. Of course there will always be that big family with two shopping carts filled with processed foods such as ground beef chuck and high content sugar items such as cupcakes and cookies. Most of these people receive a month’s supply of food stamps worth about two hundred dollars. To get the most out of the money they are given they either buy in bulk or buy what is on sale which is almost all the time highly processed foods. Then there are the rare few who spend their hard-earned cash on healthy and organic foods such as the “Nature’s Promise” brand. Fortunately, the City of New York offers a Health Bucks Program that encourages people to spend their food stamps at farmer’s markets by giving them an extra two dollar coupon for every five dollars they spend there. I think this is a great idea and it helps persuade people to purchase healthier food. But, how can they do so if the availability of farmers’ markets in the city are so limited?


Teenagers are among the people who suffer from malnutrition. It is too common to witness a teenager eating at a fast food establishment after school because they have to return to school for team practice. We become so accustomed to this lifestyle that we essentially don’t care about what we put into our mouths and what it is doing to our bodies. “Eating healthy is an important part of a healthy lifestyle and is something that should be taught at a young age” (Healthy Eating for Teens). Since most children today, as well as teenagers now, are or were introduced to the “Happy Meal” as young as two year’s old, they have conformed to poor eating habits. Good eating habits include: eating three meals a day with healthy snacks, drinking a lot of water, eating balanced meals, baking more and frying less, eating fruits and vegetables for a snack, decreasing the use of butter and heavy gravies, and eating more chicken and fish.


As we all know, eating poorly can lead to serious health problems. These problems include obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Eating healthy is important during adolescence because body changes that take place during this time affect an individual’s nutritional and dietary needs. Adolescence is about growing, maturing, and making decisions without the direct influence from parent figures. Many adolescents experience a growth spurt and an increase in appetite and need healthy foods to meet their specific growth needs. Adolescents often eat more meals away from home than younger children. We are also influenced by our peers which results in eating too many of the wrong kinds of foods: soft-drinks, fast-food, and processed foods.


Farmers’ Markets in New York City are not very common, but if determined anyone could make use of the ones that are available. Of course, the obvious reason why people, including myself, don’t eat healthy is because we can’t afford to. Personally, eating healthy for me is extremely difficult. I wake up every morning at about six o’clock to leave my house before seven. I almost never eat anything before I leave so by the time I get off the train by my school I’m starving. I usually run to McDonald’s for breakfast or buy a buttered bagel at the deli. That lasts me for about four periods and by twelve noon I’m hungry all over again. By this time I find myself on my school’s cafeteria snack line buying snacks such as baked chips or chocolate chip cookies. This holds me off until I get out of school at three in the afternoon. Most of the time I go straight to work from school and I have no time to have a nutritious balanced meal. If I have a few dollars to spare, I spend it on a slice of pizza or worse: I end up back on the line at McDonald’s. Honestly, I hate it. I can’t stand eating fast food. I think, “Wow I’m killing myself. I don’t even want this junk, but I’m hungry and I have to eat before I go to work so…”


I realize that my situation and that of every other person struggling to eat healthy is very difficult. However, there are several options available for those who feel that eating healthy is close to impossible. Although the availability of farmer’s markets in the city is limited, there are some available. In the Bronx, you can locate The Hunt’s Point Farmer’s Market, Harvest Home Co-op City Market, and the Poe Park Greenmarket. At these markets you can purchase fresh fruits and vegetables that were grown right here in New York. We can also substitute fruits and vegetables for those sweets we love so much such as: cake, cookies, candy, etc. The amount of nutrition we obtain from the food we eat is essential because we need certain vitamins and minerals for our bodies to run efficiently. Most of the time we attain protein from the meats: chicken, fish and red meat. Instead of eating these all the time, we can also substitute beans, rice, and peanut butter for the meat protein. Drinking more water would benefit us as it is also proven to allay hunger. Then there is also the option of making your own lunch at home so you won’t be tempted to buy fast food. There are many ways for us to incorporate these healthier choices into our daily diets. With sources such as the internet and the media the possibilities of the different recipes and dishes that can be made are endless. We just need to be determined to change how we eat.


Eating healthier should be a goal that everyone should want to achieve. But this won’t be possible if people are ignorant or choose to ignore the facts. Eating fast foods and highly processed foods harm our bodies. We only get one voice, one body, and one chance to decide to live our lives as healthy and safe as possible. Shouldn’t we take advantage of this opportunity?

The Impact of Urban Farming on our World

by Karissa Francis

The Clinton Garden on September 8, 2010 - the first day of school.

       As the Grow Your Own Food Movement continues to grow, I wonder what impact urban farming will have on our culture and the future of our planet. Urban farming and gardening can be found in the most inconspicuous places. Lush, colorful vegetable gardens in between buildings with peeling paint, fruit trees and tomato vines stretching high to reach the sky as bodegas and tenement buildings watch the miracle of nature. You may have walked right past a whole system of fruits, vegetables, and flowers thriving through the concrete and hardly noticed. In our dense city, this is understandable; you hardly notice the sidewalk when you’re trying to get somewhere quickly, as most New Yorkers always seem to be doing. However, when you look closely you’ll see the window box disguised as simple flowers and greens are secretly a plentiful herb garden for a mother’s kitchen. Urban farming is making our city even more beautiful and it’s making our environment healthier.

To understand the effect of urban farming, first you have to understand what it is. The Grow Your Own Food Movement and urban farming are about taking back the food we eat and becoming self sufficient. Today we have little control over where our food comes from and what goes into producing it. Farming can hardly be called farming anymore; everything is over processed and industrialized. Machines and engineers have taken the place of farmers who know the earth and what’s best for the soil. Now “Food” is produced in labs and factories to be made more cost efficient. Migrant workers are taken advantage of; they are paid the very minimum, sometimes less, and work in harsh conditions. Neither human beings nor animals are taken into consideration in the production of food. Food is a business; in business, profit is the bottom line and everything else is given little thought. The food we eat directly affects our health and when profit is the most important thing to a company, the health of the consumers is the least important. Animals and people aren’t the only things exploited by the food industry; the earth is overworked as well. The way farming is done today strips the soil of vital nutrients to continue growing food. Diversity is what sustains our world and keeps systems in constant motion. The form of farming done by big companies doesn’t allow biodiversity. Instead, one type of crop is planted at a time. The soil is overworked and eventually becomes dead. Traditional farming thrived on diversity, if one crop didn’t survive, another would be readily available for distribution; a concept big company farms can’t seem to grasp.

 Animals are brutalized and put in the worst conditions possible. Cows are the new Ford T model, on assembly lines to their death. Chickens are pumped with hormones to fatten them up quicker, their breasts become so large they can’t walk. Pigs are put in tiny crates, where they can’t even turn around. The environments the animals are put in causes them distress. They suffer before they’re packaged, shipped, bought, and cooked. By starting a small garden or urban farm, we can lessen; maybe even reverse the harm done to our bodies and earth by the food that seems to do more harm than good. Urban farming gives you a sense of accomplishment and who wouldn’t want farm fresh fruits and vegetables in every meal?

The thought of growing your own food may sound a little ridiculous at first. You can hardly finish your “to do list” everyday, how will there ever be enough hours in the day to tend to a farm? The sound of a farm may sound foreign to someone who lives in the city, but farming isn’t defined as a large mass of land in NoWheresville with creepy cornstalks and the thick smell of animal. Anyone can be a farmer. Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City, had a farm in a ghetto of Oakland, California. In addition to growing everything from tomatoes to pumpkins, she was also a beekeeper and raised chickens, turkeys, and even pigs. The Edible Schoolyard program, an organization that builds urban farms in schools, has made its way to P.S 216 in Brooklyn, where a garden is being built. A solar powered building, complete with a kitchen classroom, a chicken coop, a composting system, an outdoor pizza oven, a cistern to collect rainwater, and a movable greenhouse will make the garden more than a garden, but a place where children can discover that vegetables can be delicious and nutritious.

 You may not have the time to raise and kill livestock or have $1.6 million on hand to build a fantastic backyard utopia, but there are much simpler ways to start growing your own meals. A great way to start off an urban garden is a small window box. It doesn’t cost much or take too much tending to grow an herb garden for fresh seasonings. You can go to Home Depot’s gardening section, Loews, or any hardware store near you. If you don’t like the idea of dirt in your house, you could always start hydroponic window garden. A hydroponic garden is a garden that only uses water to grow plants.  For fewer than 30 dollars, you can turn any window in your apartment into a garden. Hydroponic gardening is perfect for small spaces and those who don’t want anything to do with dirt. Another option is a rooftop garden where you could grow anything from small potatoes to broccoli. Like anything in life, tending to a garden or urban farm takes work. However, the hard work will pay off when you and your family are healthier. You’ll be proud to show off your rooftop beehive and lettuce heads. You’ll feel accomplished when you and your loved ones enjoy fresh garden salads and mushroom burgers.

With every innovative idea, there will be skeptics. Urban Gardening is not an exception. There are people who don’t agree with gardening being taught in schools and being encouraged. The argument is that it is taking away from conventional topics like reading and math. However, learning about something new can never take away from what you learn in Geometry or English class. In fact, learning about how to better yourself and help save the environment can only add to what you learn in History or Science.  So, whether you grow herbs in your hydroponic window farm or fruit trees in your front yard, you’ll be contributing to preserving mother earth. Every time you don’t fund corporate farming’s gradual destruction of the earth, nature rewards you in small ways; with the sweetest peach, the crunchiest lettuce, or the leafiest greens. 

Finding a place for a garden at DeWitt Clinton

Background

This past school year, the Witt Seminar has succeeded at one of its most ambitious and visionary projects to date: the creation and establishment of a vegetable garden on the beautifully verdant campus of DeWitt Clinton High School. The garden was conceived as one component in a much larger effort to raise awareness especially among students in the Clinton community about food.

Inspired by films like Food, Inc. and Supersize Me, we wanted to engage our fellow students with some of the issues related to food production and consumption in our country and help expose them to the dangers and consequences of accepting and participating in a food industry that privileges profit over the health. In other words, we wanted students to be aware that much of the food they normally eat, even in our school cafeteria, is unhealthy. While there is much to criticize about fast food corporations and their ability to manipulate consumers into unhealthy eating habits, we felt it equally vital to provide and promote healthy slow food alternatives. What better way than to grow our own. Therefore, our main goal for last year's class was to start a garden.

We should mention at the outset that our plan to start a garden was enthusiastically embraced by the late Megan Charlop who served as Director of the Division of Community Health at Montefiore's School Health Program and envisioned an edible school garden in each of the 16 Bronx schools that house school-based health centers. With Megan’s encouragement, the Witt Seminar decided to devote the entire 2009/2010 school year to promoting healthy school food and eating habits among our students rather than holding what had become our annual Witt Seminar Conference on Activism, a conference that Megan along with numerous community activists participated in from 2005 through 2009. In subsequent blogs, we will outline our considerable success thus far in helping to raise food awareness at DeWitt Clinton.

Why not the courtyards?

Ours was not the first recent attempt to start a garden at DeWitt Clinton and like others before us we were first drawn to the school’s inner courtyards. After all, the courtyards can easily be perceived as the two-chambered heart of our school and therefore an enviable location for a school garden. Imagine our building: a large hollow rectangle, three stories of classrooms high that face into two large courtyards on either side of the central auditorium/library building. The two courtyards are a splash of green at the very center of the school building in a space shared only by structures that gather and house large numbers of students in assembly, study, or research. Perhaps in its original intention, the courtyards were envisioned to be a space where students in a school garden could be captivated by the working of sunlight and rain on growing plants. Just as the auditorium was designed to nourish our social being and the library designed to enrich our minds in culture and knowledge from books, the garden would sustain and nourish our bodies. Imagine the possibilities of an education in such a space!

The north courtyard already has splendid trees, especially an immense flowering dogwood. Just as students are about to graduate in the spring, the tree explodes in color. This courtyard is also home to the school’s only livestock: a lonely chicken that was allegedly rescued from the front of the building by one of the custodians. Who knows from whose dinner table or rooftop it escaped? There is also a greenhouse, no longer in use. When Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City, visited our Witt Seminar, we dreamed of creating a "chicken run" in this courtyard. Perhaps this still could become a reality someday.

The south courtyard, by contrast is almost completely empty except for a collection of dwarf evergreens that were planted by Clinton students who participated in the One Million Trees project. It is still, by most accounts, a neglected space often littered with paper, pens, abandoned notebooks and discarded textbooks. What a perfect space to reclaim!

Initially, it was our hope to place our garden in either or both of these courtyards and so we spent considerable time measuring and dreaming of how we might work to transform these spaces into their full potential. Just being within these enclosed environments was both thrilling and empowering. There is an eerie hush as sounds of students and teachers carrying on their business could be only faintly heard. When in the courtyards we are essentially inside the school but we are also outside as well, under the sun and sky.

The problem with the courtyards, however, resides in their accessibility. In order to access the north courtyard, a custodian must lead us down the circular stairs of the records office and through the custodian’s locker room. Perhaps there is a way to avoid the records office, but not the custodian’s space. At least this courtyard had a door. The south courtyard is presently accessible only through a supply room window. A ramp has been built to accommodate the opening, but it would not be a place to bring any large group of students on a regular basis.

We still feel that the courtyards are ideal places in our school to garden, but until major structural changes are made to allow access from, say the cafeteria, or at the very least through available and accessible doors, the spaces are too cumbersome to reach.

Discovering the ideal location to get our garden started

It is unusual for teachers or students to have much interaction with custodians and groundkeepers but from the moment we started planning the garden we have had to rely upon the custodians to open doors, turn on the water, and provide keys. Not only have the custodians helped us with whatever we have needed, they have also expressed a great deal of support for what we are doing. We have learned that the custodians of DeWitt Clinton are the greatest and, in the near future, we will dedicate an entire posting to sing their praises.

Jim Rafferty, the head custodian, first suggested the location for what we think is the perfect garden spot. A narrow bit of lawn, 96’ x 10’ that runs along the south side of the gym building. There is almost full sunlight except for the morning before the sun rises over the building. Beside the four evenly spaced ornamental cherry trees the spot is empty. The best part of the emptiness is that there is room for the garden to grow. Beside the lawn itself there is a wide sidewalk (for potted plants, tables, benches?) and a twenty foot fence separating the space on the south side from the faculty parking lot and on the west side from the track and football field. We envision the possibility of potted vines that will reach to the top of the fences to provide not only shade but some sense of privacy and enclosure for the garden.

On June 18 and 21 2010, the very last two days of school, Witt Seminar students Jorge, Gabriel, Karissa and Elizabeth along with Community Health Organizer for Montefiore Medical Center Jessica Moorman, student teacher Caroline Shephard and Witt Seminar teacher Ray Pultinas were able to plant the garden. Montefiore Hospital generously donated soil, raised beds, bags of peat and manure but it took time for the supplies to be delivered and the garden boxes to be built. Nonetheless we used the lasagna method of layering to prepare our garden beds.

Throughout this summer, Ray Pultinas, with help from his family, have been watering and tending the garden. It is presently abundant with squash, tomato, eggplant, cucumbers, onions, basil, and peppers and we expect a plentiful harvest by the time students return for the fall semester.

Bronx Talk

On April 20, 2010, our students were fortunate to be able to make a music video called "Make it Better" with the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus.  While filming the video, we were spotted by Bronx Talk host Gary Axelbank who then invited us to be on the show.   Here is the live broadcast: