In my fist hotel job at the Sheraton On The Square in Cleveland I was the broiler cook for the Falstaff Room, the hotel’s restaurant and cocktail lounge. I’ve written about this hotel before, about the fund raiser banquet we did for Spiro Agnew in the early 1970s, a 5000-plate ballroom banquet complete with Secret Service and machine guns and snipers and all that. I had a good job there. It was easy since generally the restaurant outlet was not too busy. We had little real set up and preparation work and the cocktail waitresses, who were also the food servers, wore French Maid outfits that were more than overtly suggestive, something not unpleasant for a young cook in his early twenties to look at. I worked with Jimmy G. His aunt worked in the pantry, located in its own space behind the open hearth Jimmy and I worked in. Jimmy’s brother was the banquet chef for the hotel.
One of the prep things I had to do was make fresh Hollandaise Sauce every day since it went with one of the vegetables on the menu. I had never made it before this job and Jimmy taught me how to do it, or so I thought. Physically, this work was done in a bain-marie in the main kitchen where I went every day with a cart to pick up all the food needed for the Falstaff Room. Almost everything was made for us in the main kitchen, so I made the Hollandaise, picked up everything we needed and went off the restaurant outlet.
There I was making the sauce. I took the butter, unwrapped it and put it into a bain-marie then set the bain-marie into the steam tank so the butter would melt. While the butter melted I cracked the eggs and separated the yolks from the whites, putting the yolks into the large mixing bowl which, set in the water in the steam tank, was where I would actually make the sauce by whipping in the butter. Voila! Hollandaise Sauce after the lemon juice and the little bit of seasoning was added.
Butter melted and cream separated out of it, yolks ready, I went to work slowly pouring in the butter. As I did this, as he did almost every day, the head chef came by and watched me for a moment. He never said a word. He just watched me as I made the sauce, stood a moment and walked on to do whatever he was about.
Sometimes the sauce broke when I made it, which means that it didn’t thicken or it thickened but then actually separated or thinned; it broke. I didn’t know why, didn’t know what happened. I had to start all over again.
Here’s the point. Jimmy did not teach me the correct way to make the sauce. I doubt he knew the correct way himself. Worse, the head chef, who watched me maybe a few hundred times at different stages of making the sauce, must have known the correct way to make it, but he never took the time to teach me and never even told me I wasn’t doing it right. So what did I think? I thought I was doing it the right way. That chef was either indifferent toward me or simply didn’t care about his kitchen enough to correct me. What he did do, though, was set me up for the failure and embarrassment I was to have later in my cooking career. That was the result of his not taking the appropriate corrective actions for the methodology I was using.
Later on, at the St. Regis Hotel, the head chef told me to make Hollandaise Sauce as part of my tryout for the job. When he saw how I was going about it, he stopped me, told me I didn’t know how to cook, and only by his niceness and because I had been sent to him by someone he knew (that’s another story in itself) did he give me a job, but it was a starting-at-the-bottom-job as a roundsman, a relief cook, where I didn’t actually have to cook anything.
That chef in Cleveland set me up for failure by not teaching me properly, and fail I did, almost not getting the job I so desperately needed at the time. The school in Stevenson (entry just before this), the NYCDOE and our liberal, politically correct, you-can-do-what-you-want leaders did the same thing to that boy with the 7 bags of pot, and I fear his consequences one day will be a lot worse than mine were.
We are letting our society go to hell in a hand basket. Political correctness and fear of hurting people’s feelings be damned. It is time to simply do the right things and teach the right things when we know what they are.
Watch for I See My Light, my new novel coming soon on Amazon. Read some about the inner workings of kitchens and much, much more than that!
Stevenson Campus made the TV news a few weeks ago. The story is an interesting one for many reasons. Apparently a young male student was found to have seven bags of marijuana in his book bag. He was issued a warning card which he was to bring home and show to his parents that suggested his parents discuss this matter with him. NY Post Article
The TV show that discussed this issue brought up some points which really need to be considered. First, seven bags of pot is not what you would have for personal consumption and infers intent to sell. Selling is a lot more serious an offense than personal use, though kids using marijuana is bad enough. No matter what the liberal and free-rights advocates claim, drug use is not something good or that should in any way be encouraged. In fact, quite the opposite is true.
Encouraged, here, is the salient word. The net effect of not appropriately disciplining this child is encouraging this child to continue such behavior, and the ramifications of coddling in this issue (and the many more issues like this one) are a thousand times more serious than the actual offense itself. The conclusion that was stated on the TV show was that the system simply does not care about the kids. If it did, it would do its part to teach the child that such behavior is not tolerated inside school or out and that continued behavior would very likely lead to incarceration or worse.
I taught at Stevenson for more than sixteen years. Do I need to tell the story about the student of mine who was shot point blank in the back of the head behind the apartment building across the street from the school because of “a beef?”
This kid could run into rival drug dealers. Consequences from them would be a lot worse than anything the school people or even the police could inflict. This kid could have been robbed, encountered a disgruntled client, you name it, you follow the thread to the end results of any ideas that might pop into your mind for what might happen to this child if efforts are not made to discourage him from continuing in his drug-dealing enterprise.
Clearly several factors are at work here for why the child was not disciplined. One factor is the over-reach of liberalism and the misguided notion that we are all entitled to do whatever we want, the Occupy Wall Street stuff, which when examined for what really occurred gets pretty ugly. A second factor is political correctness, these days in large part illustrated by Eric Holder’s lack-of-Justice Department’s purposefully not enforcing laws against minorities. Follow this thread to its conclusion. Not doing anything in this case is tantamount to not caring about this child and minorities in general, for what is really being done to this child is setting him up for future problems that will affect his life much more negatively than this incident, and that is putting it so mildly that it approaches understatement.
Somewhere down the line everyone has to pay the piper, or we all have to learn that you can’t really do whatever you want to do with disregard for the rules of society. If we aren’t properly taught these lessons in school, what is the purpose of education? Isn’t education supposed to be about preparing us to be productive people who can fare well in our society?
Perhaps, in this particular case, the school, which is not identified, the parents and the police should have had a conference regarding the consequences of such actions in real life, not school life, and surely the student should have been made to do community service. Perhaps he should have been made to do that service in a hospital treating drug addicts.
I know some people will read the title from this and from the first part as a recrimination of sorts toward a group of people. Not at all and not so. For those of you who must know, it is poetic license or “the catch phrase” or the “hook.” In advertising, it would be the “come on.” So let’s debunk any negative connotations and let’s go back some 25 years to when I first started at AES. I loved all my students there, each and every one of them. I didn’t like them all, by any means, but I loved them all. Even as a Dean, where I met the kids who did bad things, I loved those kids too, each and every one of them.
Now let’s clear up bad things. By bad things I don’t mean cut Keller’s class because he was too tough, and I don’t mean cut class at all, even though I don’t advocate or condone cutting classes. By bad things I mean bully, demean, take advantage of other students, smoke dope, drink, you know, and even these things are on the not-so-bad side of the bad range. By bad I mean more like rob, rob with a gun, beat up wantonly, beat up wantonly as part of a gang, etc. etc. etc., the things we all know are bad and criminal.
Many stories like that latter definition of bad come to mind, but those are for another time, maybe. For now I want to relate a story about our Senior Trip in 1997 when we went to Universal Studios, Daytona and Sea World by bus from the Bronx, a group of all African American and Latino kids. The first night in the motel some of the kids wanted to go to the pool so a few of the chaperones went with the group of kids, maybe thirty of them.
Throughout my whole teaching career in the Bronx, I went on countless trips with our kids, many of them overnights and many of them not. One thing I noted early on that remained a constant was that our kids became demure and shy when taken outside their everyday surroundings and into new places. Even a trip from the Bronx to somewhere in Manhattan changed their individual and group personalities from mostly unabashed to mostly shy. Of course this does not speak to individuals per se, but as a group, and this was a truism for most of the kids over the years.
At the pool was another group of kids, not of our demographics and I won’t say more than that. This group was wild and crazy and disturbing the guests of the motel, the families who had come with their children and were at the pool. They threw their things everywhere, made a mess everywhere, dominated the pool and the lounge chairs, were loud and cursed up a storm in front of the little children. The big boys scared the little children, messed with the girls in their group in ways that shouldn’t happen in public and did much more.
All the guests that were the families seemed to think this was kind of okay, just kids having fun. I had come to the pool a little after my group of kids and sat quietly in a lounge and watched all this. I also watched my kids, who were quiet and laid back, as they swam and had fun as a group in the pool and out, away from the families and particularly away from the other group. Because I had come a little after my kids and I am not their color, the guests couldn’t know I was with them. Consequently, I was privy to some nasty remarks made about them simply because of their demographics. They were actually being very good and by comparison to that other group they were being angels, yet they were disparaged, the subjects of finger-pointing scrutiny.
This entry is about context, to put context to many things at work in our society and to put context to the title of this entry and the one before it. Bad kids? No. Kids.
I saw this phenomenon once before at Ohio State University, go Bucks! One of the years I was there they beat Michigan for the Rose Bowl, and the fans, the kids, if you will, had a loud drunken party on High Street (that really is the name of the street that borders the campus on the north side and runs through Columbus as a main street), doing more than ten thousand dollars worth of damage to police cruisers and store windows. Even the cops stood on top of their cruisers and shot their guns in the air. The next morning, the mayor, ME Sensenbrenner, commented for the news and newspapers that it was just all American kids having fun. But when civil rights/anti-war protests took place, with no real rowdiness and no real damage (this before the famous riot where martial law had to be put in place), the same kids were animals, wild beasts, and the finger-pointing was rampant. Same thing different time.
My “bad kids” were great kids. And by the way, the FBI and undercover cops started that famous anti-war riot that led to the Kent State Shootings. Check it out in the old newspapers if you don’t want to believe someone who saw it firsthand.
One Thanksgiving I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the NYC Thanksgiving Day Parade and sit in the VIP grandstand to watch the floats go by. As we were moving through the barricades to our seats, I heard a voice repeatedly call out my name from one of the NYC Parks Department trucks. I saw that it was a former student of mine at Adlai Stevenson High School (AES) in the Bronx. I’ve talked about AES here before. Its population was 99.5% Black and Latino and it serviced some of the poorest zip codes in America. In our brief moment of chat, this former student told me he worked for the Parks Department, was doing great and making a sh..t load of money. Triple time today, he told me. Then he thanked me for helping him get through high school.
Early on I had a tall, lanky kid in my Freshman English class who was a musician and pretty talented since he was taken into the school orchestra immediately after the music teacher heard him play just one time. He was so tall I asked him if he played basketball—you could see him a full head above any crowd—but he told me it wasn’t his thing, that music was. This was all well and good except the young man decided he’d rather spend his time with the music teacher in the music room than attend my class. Even though he did his work (except for class work) and turned in all papers and was quite proficient in ELA, much more so than most of the others in his class, after repeated warnings and even conversations with his parents about his attendance, he ended up failing.
Exactly nine years later, this same young man reappeared. He came into the school wearing a fine-tailored business suit and when he found me, he told me he had specifically come to seek me out. I remembered him not by name but by height, and damned if he wasn’t a strapping young man in his young twenties. He told me he was a doctor now, that he had graduated medical school and was interning in one of the Bronx hospitals. He wanted to thank me for failing him, he said, because it taught him to show up.
We’ll call her Lori here. When Lori was my student, she couldn’t write a complete sentence and both wrote and spoke in vernacular. But Lori was smart, very smart. Problem was, she was too pretty and the bad boys loved her. Worse, she loved the bad boys, though eventually I would find out from some of her friends that a lot of how she acted with the bad boys was for show and went no further. Thank God! I had Lori as a formal student twice and by the end of her freshman year she had mastered writing enough to be ready to move forward. I didn’t see her at all in her tenth grade year, but in eleventh grade, she sought me out and insisted upon joining the Debate Team. The team was already set for that year, so she worked in the background helping the team members research and prepare their constructives.
As a senior, Lori was a debate star and constructive-writing pro, hell-bent upon going to law school, which she did as I discovered a few years later when I received a note from her with her business card. The note said she’d gone to Harvard Law and upon graduation had scored a position in one of the law firms in Manhattan. The note was signed “From the kid who couldn’t write a sentence.”
Lori, by the way, is just one of many of my students who made it through law school and these are just a few of my memories. My colleagues, the ones I actually respected and befriended, all have their own and together we account for many bad kids gone good. I say bad kids because some of them were bad kids. Most of them, however, just needed to be socialized (sometimes much more than needing to be taught high school curriculum). I say bad kids because sometimes society looks at them that way. In reality, they were just kids who needed to be guided constantly until they could guide themselves.
I don’t much talk about my Doctorate but my dissertation deals with “these kids” and what determines whether or not the ones who are in jeopardy make it through high school. Unlike what the grubby, greedy little curriculum-peddling, book-selling, upwardly-mobile professional pedants would have you believe, it’s really quite simple: one single adult who guides, pushes and stands by them no matter what. That’s basically the crux of what it takes to get “these kids” through high school. The problem is that society is not willing to walk that walk.
We were on our way to Virginia Beach during the Easter break. The senior advisor had organized and set in motion a fabulous senior trip this year and we’d taken a short stopover in Washington DC which had left us with a few hours to roam around. I had decided I wanted to see the Capitol building given that we were limited to walking distance from where the bus was parked, and some of the seniors, mostly thinking they could mess around, had decided to go with me and my wife who was also one of the chaperones for this trip. Mess around meant they wanted to get high and they thought they could sneak off long enough to do so. They didn’t get the chance actually, not then, but if you’ve ever dealt with high school seniors, you know that nothing deters them from what they want to do and by the time we were back on the bus they’d hooked up with their friends to accomplish their real mission.
Good thing they didn’t get the chance on our little side excursion, too. It was quite by happenstance that we actually met up with Senator Moynihan as we approached the Capitol building. I don’t think that the good Senator from New York would have liked to have encountered a group of students all bleary-eyed and smelling from marijuana. Perhaps, if some in my group had wandered off to get high we might not have met the senator at all, but then you never know.
It was a truly beautiful day in DC. We had all had lunch at Union Station where the bus had parked, and after a bathroom break and a careful counting so that the senior adviser and the chaperons knew who was where, my wife and I and eight students set off for the Capital. Now seniors on senior break when put together in a group on holiday for four days, no matter how academically rigorous they are individually, like to let loose. Two students with me were on my debate team, very smart and extremely sharp-witted, savvy arguers, but they had already shed their professional, braniac demeanors and deferred to their boyfriends’ wild and rowdy ways. Three of the boys were wearing their baseball caps (at least they were Yankee caps) brims off to the side and at various angles, and they all had shirts out, name-brand shoes on and jeans down to…you know where. One pair of students were lovers and no matter where we went, they were always lingering behind, hand in hand or arm in arm, twinkle-eyed without any enhancement inducements, the perfect commercial for the “I Only Have Eyes for You” song. Ah, to be young!
So there we were. We had just crossed the street and started on our way up to the Capitol steps only to see that there was a long line of tourists waiting to get in and that we had no chance of ever making it inside the building given our time restraints. However, outside the tourist barricades a group of men were descending the stairs from inside. One of those men was Daniel Patrick Moynihan. No one in my group recognized him, but I did, and in what ended up being perhaps the most memorable and wonderful moment of my whole teaching career, I led my group up toward the senator. Almost instantaneously, Secret Service agents who had been at his Suburban at the curb and those surrounding him on the stairs descended upon us, but the senator quite coolly waved them off because he must have heard me calling out “Mr. Senator, Mr. Senator.”
Regardless of politics or anything else, the Senator did something so absolutely fantastic it warmed my heart and warms my heart still as I think of it. He let us approach and I was able to introduce the group of students with me as his up-and-coming constituents, a group of high school seniors from the Bronx. He was kind enough to shake hands with each and every one of my students, but when he got to the first boy who was wearing his hat, before he shook hands he said “Take off your hat when you speak to me, son.” The boy was so taken aback that he whipped that hat off his head without even thinking and so did the other boys. They looked like their wings had been clipped, meek and actually respectful. Good thing their shirts were out and the Senator couldn’t see how low they were wearing their pants.
He went on his way and we went on ours, but it was nice to see that my kids were as awed as I was. I don’t know what they say about this event, even if they remember it at all, but I do know that it was the single most fabulous moment of my career as a teacher, and Senator Moynihan, may he rest in peace, did one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen by simply teaching my kids to respect their elders and their leaders.
