A short story
My Other Life in the Fiction section.

I have finally returned to telling the story of my cruise to the Caribbean. Day 7 was a momentous day in my long life - I achieved a life-long goal.

You can find my new writing under Non-Fiction/Memoirs/Cruise-Log 2023/Cruise Log - Day 07

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Dr. P-J
5/11/23

​This article is misleading.

The children were NOT employees.
"Officials said the children were not paid . . . the children were visiting their parent" and therefore, were NOT employed by McDonalds.

You can question the parent's judgement, if you wish, but putting McDonalds in the headline and using their corporate logo is irresponsible click bait. Next up - parent forces child to clean her room! Illegal exploitation of child labor? Or good parenting? 

It's as I see it, this McDonald's problem, it's a parenting problem. And I wouldn't judge the parent without knowing more about their situation.

But I'm also wondering where the line is.

We can thank labor unions for ending the child labor practices illustrated in the following slide show.

​I have a huge conflict about parents employing their children. Is it exploitation? Or is it teaching them life skills, keeping them close, perhaps the only way they can spend time with their kids what with working three jobs?​

But when the Instacart delivery person has their 8 year old helping carry the groceries, is it cute or is it illegal?

There has always been an exception for farm kids, for example, who, on private property, operate machinery and sometimes get permanent injuries. Working in the family business is legal in many situations.

When I lived in Orange, CA (the last time, hopefully) I had a guy turn up at my door with a lawn mower and offer to mow the lawns for $30. Mike was working more than full time in the waspy airy ancient garage and I couldn't push the lawn mower anymore after the time the lady tried to kill us with her car (metaphorically speaking).

The lawn wanted mowing so I said yes.

Flash forward - it's a few months later and he's mowing the lawns regularly for cheap - with just the lawn mower that he pushes around, and one day he shows up with a kid, about 8, who has a broom. He mows, the kid sweeps . . . something like that. Anyhow, I was very uncomfortable when I paid the guy - knowing that I was paying for child labor. So I told him I wasn't going to need his services anymore, that I was going to do it myself. Which was a lie. I got someone else. Someone with a business license. DOH.
​
So was I doing good, not being an illegal child labor employer? Or was I depriving that kid of a meal?

by Shelley Pineo-Jensen, Ph.D.

People sure take offense easily regarding this meme, speaking with bitterness about being treated poorly at work . . . confounding “job” with “career.” Example – a job is teaching fifth grade at Plumas Elementary School. A career is teaching in public school.

The idea seems pretty straight forward - my career choice never stopped loving me. I might have stopped loving it and changed careers (small business owner, warehouse manager, grade school teacher, perpetual graduate student/teaching assistant, union activist, social justice activist, Dr. P-J, lazy dilettante . . . )
. . . but a man stopping loving me? - Well that is a different story. I had a "starter" marriage, once upon a time . . . that ended badly when he started loving the prospect of wealth more than whatever feelings he originally had for me . . . back in the day, by cracky.

The women who attack this post (insensitive post? really?) would seem to be taking the position that "following" your man is a good life choice. Lady Gaga and I would argue otherwise. THAT is what the post is about - follow your OWN dreams, not your man's dreams . . .

I like men. I have a life partner (18 months until the 50th anniversary of our union - we kissed on the dock in Santa Cruz in December of 1974 with Orion's belt blazing and the Ferris Wheel spinning, across the water on the brightly lit colorful Santa Cruz Boardwalk, with the roller coaster screaming in the background . . . the stuff dreams are made of) but I don't FOLLOW my man. He is my life partner. And we support each other in reaching our personal goals EVERY DAY . . . for all these years . . .

So one of the comments included the phrase “the devil doesn't really need an advocate,” which I totally love. I’m smirking about it as I type this . . . so that gives rise to the rest of this article.

When I was in high school, I had many conversations with my father in which he played devil's advocate and gently probed my arguments in support of many different issues - women's rights, the war in Vietnam, racism, the dress code at the high school . . . he never told me what arguments would serve me well - he showed me what arguments I would face and I devised the arguments that best supported my claims.

He was a wily debater too. Way smarter than those dumbass Republicans with their fallacious argumentation. He subscribed to a wide range of magazines and journals and some racist screed provided fodder at the Pineo house . . . he told us he didn't want Big Brother to identify his leftist leanings through his subscriptions, so he brought a variety of texts into the house . . .

My mother might have seemed like she was following his dreams - she was a stay-home mother until I, the eldest of six children, was in college, but having a family WAS her dream. Then when the youngest of my siblings started school, my mother went back to college (Cal State Fullerton, University of California at Irvine), became a teacher, and eventually took a Ph.D. and finished off her second career as a well-respected professor at Fullerton Community College.

She served the large Vietnamese demographic at FCC so well that one man, a former general in the South Vietnamese Army, gave her a wall clock in the shape of Vietnam, made of beautiful burlwood. The Vietnamese students who came into her office and saw that clock and felt safer, and they were.

And this was not a safe time for Vietnamese immigrants in Southern California. I was taking two classes at Santiago Community College (formerly Santa Ana Junior College) where my dad was teaching. I was taking Fortran and Basic at the same time – which is like learning two different foreign languages at the same time – very tricky. Anyhow, the Fortran teacher was a nasty racist who called out and openly criticized the group of Vietnamese men in the back of the room, for whom one was serving as a translator. The teacher basically told that ringleader to STFU in HIS classroom and made some disparaging remarks about their kind not belonging in a United States college class if they couldn’t speak English. What a dick. But I digress? And I’m using vulgar language?

So, in conclusion, the devil doesn't really need an advocate . . . LMAO

​In the early 60s, Mike was the president of his classmates at Holy Family Church School on Glassell in Orange.

One day, the principal sent him out to deal with a group of about eight boys were setting fire to the benches and the trash cans at the outdoor student lunch area.

When he got there, he asked the boys what was going on. He thought he was going to encounter a bunch of dumbos who just like to see things burn, but nothing could be further from the truth.

The boys were angry at the oppression of the institution, in particular the corporal punishment which included children in first grade being beaten with a wire coat hanger and other children being tied up to their chairs. Mike actually had been a teacher’s assistant in helping to tie students to chairs, but he usually didn’t really tie them up. Just pretended to.

This was not an anomaly of Holy Family, because Mike also attended a Catholic school in the Ojai area in which children were tied to chairs.

Mike told the boys that he agreed with them, but that the solution wasn’t to burn the benches where the children eat lunch. He took them up to the principals’ office and told the principal that the boys should be allowed to return to their classrooms without any kind of punishment. And that is what happened.

For Mike, it was a startling revelation to know that there were revolutionaries at his school, that he was not the only one who found the school’s culture of disturbing.

Mike had bought that whole Catholic dogma, hook line and sinker, and had been taught to believe that it was God who was beating those children, hitting their hand with a ruler, and not your flimsy, modern ruler, no, this was a real piece of wood and they would hit the hand many times, also throwing chalk and erasers at their heads, hitting kids with the pointer as they were running away.

They scared the hell out of the little children, especially the first graders. The first grade teacher at Holy Family Church School was a senile 80 year old nun who was really mean, cruel really.

Mike cooperated with his own oppression, but also became subversive. One thing he did was form a band called The Rebels and he talked Holy Family into having dances.
If you lived in Orange California and graduated from high school in 1969, then you probably went to the Holy Family dances, which became a huge attraction with lots of bad behavior in the parking lot. So that was something that my husband, Mike Jensen, founded, back in the day.

So he and his band of rebels were having a practice in the auditorium and Mike locked the doors and turned the volume up as loud as it would go.

He could hear Sister Mary Madaleva banging like all that is holy on the doors of the auditorium screaming at the top of her lungs. Mike thought, “Possession is 9/10 of law.”

There was way more abuse in Catholic Church schools than just the well-known horrible molestations by the priests. The whole thing was an abusive oppressive environment.

One time Mike was in a classroom with a brand new nun with 110 students; they tore down the wall between two classes, one of third graders and one of fourth graders, and combined it into one giant class. She didn’t have a clue what she was doing and there was no order and there was no direction. It was just chaos where the students formed into little faction groups. But the church was making money, selling the seats in those classes to parents who wanted their kids to have a fine religious education, or at least to learn how to spell really well.

The Catholic Church has been a force for evil since its inception of exploiting Jesus‘s message for profit. When you look at that expense that goes into a Catholic Church, often in a sea of poverty, you know that their mission is not to serve. Their mission is to take. Their mission is to oppress. Their mission is to reify the patriarchy.

Mike says maybe we should look to our neighbors for help and not the sky.

I say tax the Catholic Church.
Tax all of the churches.
Property tax in income tax, just like a business.

Churches are a business and what they sell is hot air, and what they do is abuse and sometimes molest the children and the women.

If your church is a good church, then you should get your good church to start paying taxes.

If your church is a bad church, then you’re gonna burn in hell, if there if there was a hell, which there isn’t.

But don’t be like Mike’s classmates and try to burn it down . . .

I taught in public schools for ten years. Eventually the standards-based movement, particularly No Child Left Behind, drove me out of teaching kids into graduate school. Eventually, I took a Ph.D. from the Education Department of University of Oregon.

But I did not learn anything about how to teach kids to read at UO. I learned how to do statistics. What I learned about teaching reading to kids who are no longer of an age to be given basic reading instruction (i.e. fifth grade) even though they are still reading at a second grade level . . . This I learned from other teachers and from my sister Jayne.

I had a nightmare about being perceived as a member of the  educational industrial complex by disrespectful teachers at an in-service I was conducting . . . hence this article:
​LINK to "How To and How NOT To Teach Reading in Non-Fiction/Memoirs/A Teacher's Lot

Did you ever hear the joke about the teacher who died and went to heaven? So she's driving around heaven in a golf cart with Saint Peter at the wheel, taking a tour. They get to a giant mansion with a shady lawn and cocktail bar and comfortable chairs under big umbrellas and the teacher says, "Oh this looks wonderful. Is there were I will be staying?"
But Saint Peter says, "No, this is where the doctors and nurses stay."
They drive down the shady quiet road a little further and arrive at another mansion with a huge swimming pool right out in front with dozens of happy people swimming, diving, and splashing in the pool. "Oh this looks so fun. Is there where I'll be staying?" says the teacher.
But Saint Peter again says "No." He adds, "This is where the firefighters and EMTs stay. Your place is just a bit further."
Finally they get to the place where school teachers stay in heaven, but much to the teacher's surprise there is no one there at the magnificent stately mansion. "Where IS everyone?" she inquires. 
​"Oh don't worry, they'll be back later. Right now they're down in hell at an in-service."

This is one of the only times of the year that the weather suits my clothes . . . Mike and Javy and I took a walk around the block. The daffodils are gone, but the tulips are going strong. The trees are partying hearty. I love Baltimore and I love living in Charles Village. We are a lucky family.

If you read Day 05 you know about the fall I took in a cruise ship bathroom. That is why I had to change some of the excursions I had planned for this that had less walking. Sadly, I felt that walking on sand at the beach with a walking stick for support might be problematic.

That is how I ended up on a tour of Saint Lucia in a small van with long drives between two short stops . . . were I didn't see a "demonstration" of batik but I did see some panoramic views, including the causeway to Pigeon Point (née Pigeon Island) where I stood between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean and filmed a little video. 

The weather was perfect but they drive on the wrong side of the road . . .
​
You can find my new writing under Non-Fiction/Memoirs/Cruise-Log 2023/Cruise Log - Day 06

If you enjoy this article, please leave a comment (click  above) or a thumbs up (click below) or both.
More encouragement from readers means more writing from the author.
Dr. P-J
3/31/23

Day five of my cruise brought action, adventure, history, and some really nice slide shows, according to my editor, and love of my life, Mike Jensen.

The desiccated flower is something I found in my jacket pocket after I got home - it is the national flower of Saint Croix and was blooming everywhere during my brief time on the island. The fresh blooms picture below are just a quick grab from the internet.
​
You can find my new writing under Non-Fiction/Memoirs/Cruise-Log 2023/Cruise Log - Day 05

If you enjoy this article, please leave a comment (click  above) or a thumbs up, click below, or both.
More encouragement from readers means more writing from the author.
Dr. P-J
3/22/23

by Shelley Pineo-Jensen, Ph.D.
​​
I woke up immersed in an intense dream about teaching. I was back at Nelson, teaching eight grade again. There was a mandatory assembly coming up about structural changes in the school environment. There were two children who were visitors to the class, forced into the situation as kids who were “shopping” the school to see if they wanted to switch schools and potentially join my classroom.

Classroom management was more challenging than it should have been. There was electricity in the air about the assembly and the visitors had no buy-in to our classroom norms.

Eventually, I had to move the students out of the room towards the assembly. I stopped them on a field of grass to try to pull them together after our disfunction back in the classroom. Outside, my vocal power was diminished; I was having to speak much louder to be heard. There was much commotion around us. Some of my students were talking loudly, not listening, not behaving well.

The principal came up and in an aggressive voice, she told one of the potential students that the child would not be allowed to join our school because of the behavior the principal had observed. She made bellicose remarks to my class and then swaggered away.

One of the new kids had complained twice that something was unfair, so I finally stopped what I was doing, got close to her, and asked, “What is unfair?” She told me that she had been charged $75 to come visit our school. I was visibly angered by this and said that it was, indeed, unfair. “This is a public school. They cannot charge you money to come here,” I said. The look in her eyes was very satisfying. Her demeanor changed and I knew that she had been heard, given the feedback that she was correct.

Near the end of the dream, I could not bring my class close enough to me that they would be able to hear what I said. Other students were moving past us; there was commotion all around us. What I was telling them was this: Tell me what you need to be successful in school. Tell me what you want to be successful in school. Write it down, or make sure that I write it down when you tell me. It is too important to leave it to my memory. I want to know. I want to act on what you tell me.”

Then I woke up, exhausted, first thing in the morning, from a typical day of teaching.

And that is why I am retired.