flummoxed:confused, perplexed, flustered

I went this week for a massage on my arthritic neck at one of the Massage Envy locations in Edina. I found myself flummoxed by a young person who greeted me at the reception desk as I entered. I smiled and looked into the most beautiful eyes and perfectly arched eyebrows one could imagine. The receptionist’s hair was auburn, cut in a Mohawk style with blue highlights. The clothing worn by this attractive young person gave no clue as to gender, and neither did the voice nor the mannerisms, which were a mix of masculine and feminine. I chatted with this person, whose name tag said Cody, for several minutes as he/she helped me fill out a form for the massage therapist.

It was a most unusual experience! I suddenly confronted the fact that so much of the way I relate to people depends upon gender. I was uncomfortable but intrigued. After a few minutes I decided just to put aside needing to decipher this person and chose to focus on enjoying the delightful personality instead.

I told Cody I had been subbing this year at the St. Louis Park and Edina High Schools. Cody told me he/she was a recent graduate of St. Louis Park High School and went on to tell me effusively how the school was a fantastic place and how much he/she missed the teachers there. Cody’s comment made me remember how much I hated high school, and I couldn’t imagine how a young person like Cody would have such good memories of the high-school experience.

I was something of a loner in high school. High school felt like being forced to attend club meetings for a club that never issued me a membership card. The club members were the cheerleaders and the football players. Over the years I have known people who say the best years of their lives were spent in high school. I always figured such statements came from former cheerleaders and football players. Now in front of me sat a person who, in my day, would have had a hell of a time in high school, singing the praises of an alma mater.

My high school, Edison, was very different from Cody’s. Edison was an all-white city high school in northeast Minneapolis. There had been one black student in my class but his house was fire bombed in my sophomore year, so his family moved out of the neighborhood. Looking back with hindsight, I realize some of the kids I knew in high school were undoubtedly gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender; but in those days gay meant happy and I would never have known the meaning of the other words.

My high school teachers were sub-par at best. I fondly remember only one English teacher, Miss Sandquist, who took a group of us on a trip to New York City, where we saw four Broadway shows including the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which included a nude scene. Our parents thought she was scandalous! My Spanish teacher for three years had us sing along in Spanish to Eydie Gormet records, forgetting to teach us how to conjugate verbs. One of my history teachers would regularly fall asleep at his desk while reading the newspaper as we read our textbooks. Now that should have been scandalous.

I know from subbing that high school today has changed in some ways and in other ways hasn’t changed at all. For sure there is more technology, but the structure of the school day has remained virtually the same for over 100 years. The days I sub at Edina and St. Louis Park High Schools are parceled up into several different academic periods, and students move around the building on a strict schedule just as I did back in the late sixties. Students still take tests, write in notebooks, listen to teachers and read textbooks. They try to hide the fact that they are texting or sneaking I-Pod earphones into their ears during class just as we used to hide the fact we were chewing gum or passing notes.

The most fundamental change in education today, I think, is the fact that the inner-ring suburbs are beginning to look as city schools have looked for decades. Even the predominately white suburb of Edina currently struggles to deal with an ever-growing percentage of non-white students. This is in part due to the open enrollment policies of the last decade, but also to a growing immigrant population that has made the limited number of apartment buildings in this suburb their homes.

Needless to say, these demographic changes have school administrators and teachers in Edina flummoxed. The rhetoric of educational equity for all has become the district mantra as they struggle to educate a different kind of student clientele. The underlying fear, of course, is that students of color will dilute the pure waters of educational excellence in Edina. The reality of educational equity for those who come to school in Edina but live in Minneapolis is not yet a reality. The immigrants from places like Somalia, too, struggle in the Edina culture. The equity rhetoric is easy, but providing equity to those who are culturally different is much more complex and difficult than people want to admit.

St. Louis Park, Edina’s next-door inner-ring suburban neighbor, is a horse of a different color when it comes to demographics. The high school is and has been for many years a hodgepodge of ethnic and religious groups. In St. Louis Park, no one group dominates the mix of of blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims, Jews, whites, and immigrants from Africa and other countries that populates the schools. The diversity is due in part to the fact that St. Louis Park is chock full of apartments and has neighborhoods consisting of smaller, cheaper houses affordable to a wider variety of people.

St. Louis Park High School has struggled longer with educating a diverse population than Edina, and undoubtedly has more success stories. The school district has received national recognition over the years for excellence in providing education to all its students. St. Louis Park also attempts to tackle the needs of GLBT students by offering support group meetings. Signs in the high school hallways give the date and times of these gatherings.

Edina school hallways are full of anti-bullying slogans. Bullies have always been part of school life but now we teach kids to call a spade a spade. Back in the 1980s and 90s, there was the “good touch, bad touch” campaign to teach kids about sexual predators (this focus has sort of gone by the wayside as recent events at Penn State have shown us).

Students laugh and joke about bullying in Edina classrooms, but at least on the surface, there seems to be a growing awareness that racist, sexist and homophobic jokes are not appropriate.

It’s true, standardized test scores are not going up in this country. The Chinese and other nations outshine and out-test our students in math and science. Few of our students want to become scientists or engineers. It is just too hard!!! Our high school graduation rate is nothing to brag about either. These are only some of the long list of educational negatives that characterize American education in the media and press today.

I think, however, that we forget to praise ourselves for what we at least attempt to accomplish with our children in this country. We try to do what other countries in the world do not even attempt. We try to educate everyone: the poor, the disenfranchised, the immigrants, and the physically and mentally handicapped; and we naively believe this is possible. We even try to create school environments where kids are not bullied because they are “different.”

Anyone who has walked the hallways and sat in the classrooms of an inner-city school, a rural school, a school on an Indian reservation, or a school in a wealthy suburban district like Edina knows this to be true. Educational equity does not yet exist in America, but achieving such a goal with such a diverse society is not easy, and may even be impossible. We are indeed flummoxed, but we keep trying to improve anyway.

But, then you run across a kid named Cody, and you think: "Damn, schools are not doing such a bad job after all."