these are great stories. at that time, there were thousands of them in the NYC Board of Ed. in the fifties, when I was in elementary school, I had several genius teachers. this was especially true of my fifth-grade teacher, who made it his business to "deal with" my stammer and to involve me in projects with other kids to bring my grade …
these are great stories. at that time, there were thousands of them in the NYC Board of Ed. in the fifties, when I was in elementary school, I had several genius teachers. this was especially true of my fifth-grade teacher, who made it his business to "deal with" my stammer and to involve me in projects with other kids to bring my grade in "Works and plays well with others" from an "Unsatisfactory" to an "Outstanding." these were absolutely brilliant, dedicated people, who were making enough as teachers to be able to live reasonably well, especially when two teachers were married. at no point when I was growing up were teachers considered anything less than bright, dedicated professionals.
obviously, as all of that stopped being true, the quality of teachers began to diminish. there are still some great ones out there, but the best ones can't wait to become administrators (oy).
the human qualities of new recruits to public school teaching is, of course, only one of many reasons why a NYC public school education is now the occasion for an eyeroll.
it's one of the many reasons NYC is no longer a wonderful place to live. but it's definitely one of the saddest.
Back in the mid-90s, when I hit the "age barrier" in upper-level Hollywood, I briefly considered the option of doing some substitute teaching in LAUSD (a fate I was eventually saved from by being monolingual), but I took the C-BEST exam, the California state teacher's competency exam (in which you demonstrate a 9th grade level of knowledge). Unlike everyone else who took it that day, I did not take any cram courses, and the last time I had done "story problems" was in 1958. We had three hours to take the test. I finished in about an hour and 15 minutes and got many surprised looks when I turned it in and left, the first one to do so. Two weeks later I got my result - 94th percentile! At least a third of the test-takers - and most looked to be recent college graduates - failed it.
it's funny...when it looked as if I wouldn't get any social work positions in the NYCBE, I took the equivalent test ("general knowledge"). I was genuinely bugged by how easy it was, and I made sure in the "writing sample") that I used a lot of complicated sentences (which is to say, lots of dashes and semicolons). it turned out I'd gotten two wrong answers (one relating to books I hadn't read and the other had two perfectly good answers, but I probably picked the wrong one--and I still maintain I was right). in the essay, my score was perfect.
and I was still angry because I didn't feel like I'd be comfortable with any kid of mine (theoretical kids, of course) being taught by someone who'd need a cram course to pass THAT test.
This is interesting. I don't know anything about my grandparents as teachers, but if they were anything like what you're describing, they must have been terrific. So I'm very grateful for your account, which with your permission I will forward to my siblings and my cousins.
also interestingly, back when I was in school (and a long time before it), it was not at all unusual for two married teachers to work in the same school. whenever this was the case, it seemed to be a really good thing for both teachers.
I also remember that when I first started working at the NYCBE, the tests were all devised by the Board itself and were considerably more difficult than the state exams. and at the Placement Department (where a friend's mother worked after she retired), you could mention a teacher ANYWHERE in the whole huge system, and someone in that office could give you a capsule bio of that teacher. it was pretty remarkable. and, of course, it was trashed.
NYC Board of Education, which was taken over and re-named as The NYC Department of Education (suddenly under complete mayoral control) by Bloomberg who, whatever one might otherwise think about him, was a chaotic force in NYC public education (as well as being in the oversized pockets of the very wealthy Charter School people).
that this chaos was real (and this is literally true) became obvious within about a week of Bloomberg taking his oath.
I'll grant that in a few other ways, Bloomberg might have been a more or less decent mayor; god knows, he was a mountain of likeability and decency compared with the scumbag he replaced. and Bloomberg wasn't especially likable or decent. sort of like Al Franken on Ted Cruz ("I like Ted Cruz more than anyone else in the Senate does, and I HATE Ted Cruz")
based on what you've said about the teachers in your family (especially your mother, who was obviously very special as a teacher and a parent), your grandparents were the best of the old-time NYC teachers I'm talking about. that kind of integrity is ALWAYS generational, especially among teachers.
My mother grew up in Denver. They met at Harvard. My mother came from an amazing family. Her mother was probably the first female Coloradan to get a PhD. Unfortunately the MS took her down, and then out. Her brother--my mother's uncle--ran the Colorado democratic party for the first half of the last century--he gave the speech advocating ending prohibition at the '32 convention. But this guy, both a second and a third cousin, was probably the most amazing of all, https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/climbing/remembering-tom-hornbein-everest-pioneer
although there was another cousin, a woman--who became a major figure in Buffalo (If you can get into the obit pls copy and paste it in for me. I got into it once, and havne't been able to get into it again and I have no need to subscribe to the buffalo news
it's a pretty aggressive paywall, but I managed to have a copy sent to my Kindle. I'm not sure how to get this to YOU. but yeah, your relatives were quite a bunch. how did those Jews get to Colorado? probably not all that different from how my Russian great-grandfather ended up settling in Little Rock.
I'm not sure. That's a good quesstion. I think they came in the 1850s or 1860s. Actually, by then there were trains probably to Illinois from the east coast, but nothing x-country yet.
so it sounds like you're from German (as opposed to Pale of Settlement) stock. same folks, just different places.
when I was growing up, however, the general understanding we had (as kids) was that the German Jews were stuck up in all kinds of ways ( to some of them, Yiddish was an embarrassment, even if it was the Jewish lingua franca and based mostly on German). actually, the Germans are the ones who created the world of Kosher delis, to help give the Russian/Polish Jews a way to make a living. things like Pastrami sandwiches didn't exist outside of Germany and related Western European countries before the early twentieth century. but when I was a kid, every reasonably Jewish neighborhood had its own Jewish deli...AND an Appetizing store.
NOW, alas, it's very difficult to find a good Pastrami Sandwich in NYC. another clear sign that the place has been horribly diminished in every way.
Unlike Carnegie Deli in the Beverly Hills "golden triangle," which made Pastrami sandwiches so good that Billy Wilder told me he wouldn't buy them elsewhere. Last I heard they're still doing that.
no doubt in my mind that this is the case. several of those LA delis are absolutely legendary. at one of them --possibly the Carnegie--my old friend Harvey Lembeck had a standing weekend deli group that met every Saturday for decades. one of the members of that group was Peter Finch (Harvey: "Believe it or not, the guy's favorite thing in the world was Jewish food and sometimes Hank Fonda stopped by"). I'd gone to elementary school with Michael when the family lived around the corner from us in Queens. I loved to run lines with Harvey because it made me feel unbelievably glamorous and show-bizzie. during the summer of '77, in the wake of my disastrous trip there to be around the mixing of the second album. I ended up crashing at the Lembecks' and Harvey took me everywhere to get my mind off the crazy music business shit (coupled with a very precipitous fall off the wagon on my part) that was going on. I'll always be grateful, although Harvey himself didn't last more than a few years after that.
I'm not even sure if the old NYC Carnegie Deli is still open. Katz's will obviously always be there, but the place is always mobbed enough that you often have to wait for seats, which is another way of saying it's become kind of a tourist trap. the food is still as good as it was, although I preferred the pastrami at the Second Avenue Deli, which had become unpleasant in the wake of its owner's murder. I think it still exists, but nowhere near Second Avenue. I DID recently download a NY Magazine story which names the 15 best pastrami sandwiches in NYC, but I had problems with at least half their choices...one could say the same kind of thing about the magazine itself.
and it just occurred to me that Harvey had one of his best roles in "Stalag 17," which is, of course, a Billy Wilder movie.
I'll always remember Harvey for playing the "heavy" opposite Bob Cummings in one of those Beach Blanket Bimbo movies - he w as so obviously having fun caricaturing the role. But yeah, he was very good in Stalag-17. That was, BTW, based on real events - the playwrights were a pair of B-17 pilots who spent time as POWs (writers write best what they know).
I think our ancestry is mostly pale of settlement. The last name is only one of 16 ancestors going back to when most of us came. Although like Holzman, Hornbein may be German. My mother's father's lineage was definitely pale of settlement (Shevetevsky). My paternal grandmother's maiden name was Mandell (not sure how many l's.
I don't think either Boston or Seattle had enough Jews to provide ample pastrami, at least in the neighborhoods where we lived. Of course, we did have my second grade best friend, Ralph Siegel, maybe two stones throws from us. His grandfather was a founder of Nordstrom's, which began in Seattle, and which ws the location of one of my earliest remembered dreams (sliding down the bannister and getting butterflies in the stomach). Ralph's mother--daughter of NOrdstrom cofounder, was interior decorator to Seattle's elite, including John Ehrlichman, probably long before he became a Nixon aide. And I did go to a Jewish nursery school which was very close by, although I have absolutely no recollection of how I got there. And I met my nursery school teacher again when we came back the year I was in second grade. The following summer, she was associated (can't remember how) with the JCC day camp I went to. So maybe there was pastrami in that neighborhood. But there were plenty of people in that neighborhood who weren't Jewish--the Dibleys, the Kanyers, the Petersens, the Morehouses. I really have no idea what the proportion of Jews was. And when I say "neighborhood," I'm thinking within two blocks of us, but the nursery school was not in wht I'm referring to as neighborhood, athough I think it was just across the main street from that neighborhood. All these questions and no parents to ask. (If it hadn't been for the MS I think there's a good chance my mother would still be alive, even though she'd be 100. Between the cousin who made it to 104 ,her couch potato sister with the terrible diet making it to 90 (my mother was athletic and ate according to what was considered good nutrition at the time, and adjusted to new knowledge, which is how her three kids learned to do likewise).
MY query elicited one very interesting response about my grandfather and grandmother:
Grandpa Abe taught some very smart kids and I believe one or more received Nobel prizes. An interesting story is that he never forgot a student. He’d be walking along and see someone and go over and greet them. They might not remember him but he remembered them. Grandma Molly taught in the afternoon (the English portion) at a very religious boys yeshiva. She loved the kids. She taught second grade and I remember her bringing me to work one day.
my Southern family members all did the entirely typical-unto-cliche thing and went into "dry goods" (department stores). one of my great-grandfather's brothers ended up pretty much owning everything in Dermot, Arkansas. I remember visiting him once when I was about three and having him greet me with a roomful of white pigeons (I remember pigeons, although they might have been something else). I also remember not liking the whole thing very much...it seemed too chaotic.
Thnks to your comment about Brooklyn teachers, I mentioned this stuff to my siblings and some cousins, and I've now learned some interesting stuff from a cousin about my grandfather, the Manual Training HS physics teacher. Among other things, he never forgot a student. He would greet them on the street years later. And my grandmother reportedly LOVED her second grade students. Good stuff to hear.
This 2nd and third cousin, who died at 92 on May 6, was my most illustrious relative (maternal side). I'd finally read his book so that I could discuss with him intelligently what he'd done. One of the family names identifies a feature close to Everest's summit.
There's nothing like good teachers, and I was mostly fortunate there, although my first grade teacher was terrible, and my third grade teacher was stuck with a lousy curriculum and too many kids in the class (30-plus). (second grade was a good private school on the other side of the country.)
I have two teachers I can remember - one (still a friend) who "opened the door to my life" for me - and one who was the stupidest fuckhead I ever met in 12 years of that. The rest are a grey mass of also-rans.
I had a second-grade teacher who was very, very twisted. she was a knockout redhead with a pornographic body who actually seemed to like hitting kids. she's put a passage on the board, tell us to copy it three times, while she opened her wardrobe and--I swear to god--did all kinds of twisty, sexy things while she kept reapplying herlipstick. it was so weird, no one in class mentioned it for several months.
since my second grade was housed in a junior high school (long, boring story here) I'd copy the passage once and sneak out the back door. she'd send big kids to find and return me.
one day, she sent me to the vice-principal's office, where I started to read one of the books on his desk...a book for tenth graders. he noticed and had me read for him, at which point, he told me that whenever I was bored, I was free to visit his office and read with him. that first visit was my first encounter with one of the magnificent teachers I'm talking about, and it was the first game-changer.
Amazing stories! And what a weird teacher. I mean, those behaviors might have a place between consenting adults, but in a second grade class?!!! That is effin weird.
these are great stories. at that time, there were thousands of them in the NYC Board of Ed. in the fifties, when I was in elementary school, I had several genius teachers. this was especially true of my fifth-grade teacher, who made it his business to "deal with" my stammer and to involve me in projects with other kids to bring my grade in "Works and plays well with others" from an "Unsatisfactory" to an "Outstanding." these were absolutely brilliant, dedicated people, who were making enough as teachers to be able to live reasonably well, especially when two teachers were married. at no point when I was growing up were teachers considered anything less than bright, dedicated professionals.
obviously, as all of that stopped being true, the quality of teachers began to diminish. there are still some great ones out there, but the best ones can't wait to become administrators (oy).
the human qualities of new recruits to public school teaching is, of course, only one of many reasons why a NYC public school education is now the occasion for an eyeroll.
it's one of the many reasons NYC is no longer a wonderful place to live. but it's definitely one of the saddest.
Back in the mid-90s, when I hit the "age barrier" in upper-level Hollywood, I briefly considered the option of doing some substitute teaching in LAUSD (a fate I was eventually saved from by being monolingual), but I took the C-BEST exam, the California state teacher's competency exam (in which you demonstrate a 9th grade level of knowledge). Unlike everyone else who took it that day, I did not take any cram courses, and the last time I had done "story problems" was in 1958. We had three hours to take the test. I finished in about an hour and 15 minutes and got many surprised looks when I turned it in and left, the first one to do so. Two weeks later I got my result - 94th percentile! At least a third of the test-takers - and most looked to be recent college graduates - failed it.
now THAT is actually pretty shocking. FAILED IT??
maybe that's why every friend I ever had from that part of the world would begin to shake whenever they mentioned the possibility of working in LAUSD.
it's funny...when it looked as if I wouldn't get any social work positions in the NYCBE, I took the equivalent test ("general knowledge"). I was genuinely bugged by how easy it was, and I made sure in the "writing sample") that I used a lot of complicated sentences (which is to say, lots of dashes and semicolons). it turned out I'd gotten two wrong answers (one relating to books I hadn't read and the other had two perfectly good answers, but I probably picked the wrong one--and I still maintain I was right). in the essay, my score was perfect.
and I was still angry because I didn't feel like I'd be comfortable with any kid of mine (theoretical kids, of course) being taught by someone who'd need a cram course to pass THAT test.
This is interesting. I don't know anything about my grandparents as teachers, but if they were anything like what you're describing, they must have been terrific. So I'm very grateful for your account, which with your permission I will forward to my siblings and my cousins.
also interestingly, back when I was in school (and a long time before it), it was not at all unusual for two married teachers to work in the same school. whenever this was the case, it seemed to be a really good thing for both teachers.
I also remember that when I first started working at the NYCBE, the tests were all devised by the Board itself and were considerably more difficult than the state exams. and at the Placement Department (where a friend's mother worked after she retired), you could mention a teacher ANYWHERE in the whole huge system, and someone in that office could give you a capsule bio of that teacher. it was pretty remarkable. and, of course, it was trashed.
Wow! (What's the NYCBE?)
NYC Board of Education, which was taken over and re-named as The NYC Department of Education (suddenly under complete mayoral control) by Bloomberg who, whatever one might otherwise think about him, was a chaotic force in NYC public education (as well as being in the oversized pockets of the very wealthy Charter School people).
that this chaos was real (and this is literally true) became obvious within about a week of Bloomberg taking his oath.
I'll grant that in a few other ways, Bloomberg might have been a more or less decent mayor; god knows, he was a mountain of likeability and decency compared with the scumbag he replaced. and Bloomberg wasn't especially likable or decent. sort of like Al Franken on Ted Cruz ("I like Ted Cruz more than anyone else in the Senate does, and I HATE Ted Cruz")
based on what you've said about the teachers in your family (especially your mother, who was obviously very special as a teacher and a parent), your grandparents were the best of the old-time NYC teachers I'm talking about. that kind of integrity is ALWAYS generational, especially among teachers.
My mother grew up in Denver. They met at Harvard. My mother came from an amazing family. Her mother was probably the first female Coloradan to get a PhD. Unfortunately the MS took her down, and then out. Her brother--my mother's uncle--ran the Colorado democratic party for the first half of the last century--he gave the speech advocating ending prohibition at the '32 convention. But this guy, both a second and a third cousin, was probably the most amazing of all, https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/climbing/remembering-tom-hornbein-everest-pioneer
although there was another cousin, a woman--who became a major figure in Buffalo (If you can get into the obit pls copy and paste it in for me. I got into it once, and havne't been able to get into it again and I have no need to subscribe to the buffalo news
https://buffalonews.com/obituaries/ruth-kahn-stovroff-104-volunteer-and-leader-in-jewish-community/article_f64cc69b-3f85-542d-beeb-039f4314f870.html
it's a pretty aggressive paywall, but I managed to have a copy sent to my Kindle. I'm not sure how to get this to YOU. but yeah, your relatives were quite a bunch. how did those Jews get to Colorado? probably not all that different from how my Russian great-grandfather ended up settling in Little Rock.
I'm not sure. That's a good quesstion. I think they came in the 1850s or 1860s. Actually, by then there were trains probably to Illinois from the east coast, but nothing x-country yet.
so it sounds like you're from German (as opposed to Pale of Settlement) stock. same folks, just different places.
when I was growing up, however, the general understanding we had (as kids) was that the German Jews were stuck up in all kinds of ways ( to some of them, Yiddish was an embarrassment, even if it was the Jewish lingua franca and based mostly on German). actually, the Germans are the ones who created the world of Kosher delis, to help give the Russian/Polish Jews a way to make a living. things like Pastrami sandwiches didn't exist outside of Germany and related Western European countries before the early twentieth century. but when I was a kid, every reasonably Jewish neighborhood had its own Jewish deli...AND an Appetizing store.
NOW, alas, it's very difficult to find a good Pastrami Sandwich in NYC. another clear sign that the place has been horribly diminished in every way.
Unlike Carnegie Deli in the Beverly Hills "golden triangle," which made Pastrami sandwiches so good that Billy Wilder told me he wouldn't buy them elsewhere. Last I heard they're still doing that.
no doubt in my mind that this is the case. several of those LA delis are absolutely legendary. at one of them --possibly the Carnegie--my old friend Harvey Lembeck had a standing weekend deli group that met every Saturday for decades. one of the members of that group was Peter Finch (Harvey: "Believe it or not, the guy's favorite thing in the world was Jewish food and sometimes Hank Fonda stopped by"). I'd gone to elementary school with Michael when the family lived around the corner from us in Queens. I loved to run lines with Harvey because it made me feel unbelievably glamorous and show-bizzie. during the summer of '77, in the wake of my disastrous trip there to be around the mixing of the second album. I ended up crashing at the Lembecks' and Harvey took me everywhere to get my mind off the crazy music business shit (coupled with a very precipitous fall off the wagon on my part) that was going on. I'll always be grateful, although Harvey himself didn't last more than a few years after that.
I'm not even sure if the old NYC Carnegie Deli is still open. Katz's will obviously always be there, but the place is always mobbed enough that you often have to wait for seats, which is another way of saying it's become kind of a tourist trap. the food is still as good as it was, although I preferred the pastrami at the Second Avenue Deli, which had become unpleasant in the wake of its owner's murder. I think it still exists, but nowhere near Second Avenue. I DID recently download a NY Magazine story which names the 15 best pastrami sandwiches in NYC, but I had problems with at least half their choices...one could say the same kind of thing about the magazine itself.
and it just occurred to me that Harvey had one of his best roles in "Stalag 17," which is, of course, a Billy Wilder movie.
I'll always remember Harvey for playing the "heavy" opposite Bob Cummings in one of those Beach Blanket Bimbo movies - he w as so obviously having fun caricaturing the role. But yeah, he was very good in Stalag-17. That was, BTW, based on real events - the playwrights were a pair of B-17 pilots who spent time as POWs (writers write best what they know).
I think our ancestry is mostly pale of settlement. The last name is only one of 16 ancestors going back to when most of us came. Although like Holzman, Hornbein may be German. My mother's father's lineage was definitely pale of settlement (Shevetevsky). My paternal grandmother's maiden name was Mandell (not sure how many l's.
I don't think either Boston or Seattle had enough Jews to provide ample pastrami, at least in the neighborhoods where we lived. Of course, we did have my second grade best friend, Ralph Siegel, maybe two stones throws from us. His grandfather was a founder of Nordstrom's, which began in Seattle, and which ws the location of one of my earliest remembered dreams (sliding down the bannister and getting butterflies in the stomach). Ralph's mother--daughter of NOrdstrom cofounder, was interior decorator to Seattle's elite, including John Ehrlichman, probably long before he became a Nixon aide. And I did go to a Jewish nursery school which was very close by, although I have absolutely no recollection of how I got there. And I met my nursery school teacher again when we came back the year I was in second grade. The following summer, she was associated (can't remember how) with the JCC day camp I went to. So maybe there was pastrami in that neighborhood. But there were plenty of people in that neighborhood who weren't Jewish--the Dibleys, the Kanyers, the Petersens, the Morehouses. I really have no idea what the proportion of Jews was. And when I say "neighborhood," I'm thinking within two blocks of us, but the nursery school was not in wht I'm referring to as neighborhood, athough I think it was just across the main street from that neighborhood. All these questions and no parents to ask. (If it hadn't been for the MS I think there's a good chance my mother would still be alive, even though she'd be 100. Between the cousin who made it to 104 ,her couch potato sister with the terrible diet making it to 90 (my mother was athletic and ate according to what was considered good nutrition at the time, and adjusted to new knowledge, which is how her three kids learned to do likewise).
That would be great if you can get me that obit. She was my mother's first cousin, about ten years older.
MY query elicited one very interesting response about my grandfather and grandmother:
Grandpa Abe taught some very smart kids and I believe one or more received Nobel prizes. An interesting story is that he never forgot a student. He’d be walking along and see someone and go over and greet them. They might not remember him but he remembered them. Grandma Molly taught in the afternoon (the English portion) at a very religious boys yeshiva. She loved the kids. She taught second grade and I remember her bringing me to work one day.
The NObel winners were I.I. Rabi (nuclear magnetic resonance, making MRIs possible) and George Wald.
impressive, impressive.
my Southern family members all did the entirely typical-unto-cliche thing and went into "dry goods" (department stores). one of my great-grandfather's brothers ended up pretty much owning everything in Dermot, Arkansas. I remember visiting him once when I was about three and having him greet me with a roomful of white pigeons (I remember pigeons, although they might have been something else). I also remember not liking the whole thing very much...it seemed too chaotic.
Thnks to your comment about Brooklyn teachers, I mentioned this stuff to my siblings and some cousins, and I've now learned some interesting stuff from a cousin about my grandfather, the Manual Training HS physics teacher. Among other things, he never forgot a student. He would greet them on the street years later. And my grandmother reportedly LOVED her second grade students. Good stuff to hear.
This 2nd and third cousin, who died at 92 on May 6, was my most illustrious relative (maternal side). I'd finally read his book so that I could discuss with him intelligently what he'd done. One of the family names identifies a feature close to Everest's summit.
https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/climbing/remembering-tom-hornbein-everest-pioneer/
of course, David...forward away!
Thanks!
There's nothing like good teachers, and I was mostly fortunate there, although my first grade teacher was terrible, and my third grade teacher was stuck with a lousy curriculum and too many kids in the class (30-plus). (second grade was a good private school on the other side of the country.)
I have two teachers I can remember - one (still a friend) who "opened the door to my life" for me - and one who was the stupidest fuckhead I ever met in 12 years of that. The rest are a grey mass of also-rans.
I had a second-grade teacher who was very, very twisted. she was a knockout redhead with a pornographic body who actually seemed to like hitting kids. she's put a passage on the board, tell us to copy it three times, while she opened her wardrobe and--I swear to god--did all kinds of twisty, sexy things while she kept reapplying herlipstick. it was so weird, no one in class mentioned it for several months.
since my second grade was housed in a junior high school (long, boring story here) I'd copy the passage once and sneak out the back door. she'd send big kids to find and return me.
one day, she sent me to the vice-principal's office, where I started to read one of the books on his desk...a book for tenth graders. he noticed and had me read for him, at which point, he told me that whenever I was bored, I was free to visit his office and read with him. that first visit was my first encounter with one of the magnificent teachers I'm talking about, and it was the first game-changer.
Amazing stories! And what a weird teacher. I mean, those behaviors might have a place between consenting adults, but in a second grade class?!!! That is effin weird.