Imperial Schooling

One of the original sins of imperial schooling is to ignore native talent.

Or, think of an old Western movie: “There’s a new sheriff in town.” Great, but how many sheriffs did it take before they found John Wayne? What happened to the last sheriff? And, most importantly, why does the town need a sheriff in the first place?

In westerns, the answer to this last question is usually that the townsfolk are a bunch of lawless lowlifes. Fortunately, this is not the way we answer the question in urban education.

Beware of What Comes Easy

Teachers, recognize the risk that you run whenever you treat something you teach as if it were easy to learn. Rather than making it easy for the students, you are making it easy for them to ignore you. This dictum becomes more true the more basic the knowledge you are trying to impart. For it is upon the basics that we build our overtly and admittedly complicated schemes. When students ignore the basics, therefore, they are also turning their backs on the complexity that springs from a foundation of simplicity.

All new knowledge has its consequent ignorance, a special ignorance that can only be achieved through learning something new. The better and longer we know something, the more thoroughly we forget what it was like not to know. Eventually, our very bodies forget how to fall off a bike. For most people, this process of learning and forgetting works perfectly well, because all we forget is what we didn’t know. Teachers, however, are paid to remember what it was like to be ignorant.

When teachers treat their subject as if it were easy, they are forgetting the first thing they needed to remember: It is always difficult to go from not knowing to knowing, no matter how basic the knowledge. Or, more simply, beware of what comes easy.

Appropriate Developmental Education

What does it mean that human beings grow from divine sparks of pure energy to full-fledged identity in less than ten years? What does it mean that it is a public school’s job to nurture this transformation? These questions have not been effectively engaged in our schools. Our hazy, general understanding of developmental education is not fit to join the conversation. Our understanding, as far as I can tell, goes little further than worried quibbling over the age-appropriateness of various influences. These are appropriate concerns, insofar as influences are precisely that which shape identity. However, I think this discussion tends to distract us from a more useful and energetic heuristic for human growth.

First of all, what is a human being? Let me be both fervently faithful and ruthlessly secular: Human beings are pure energy. For now, I insist upon this fact because it is a much more realistic way to think of people than people tend to think of themselves. Human beings are so self-centric that their very language describes differences among humans as if they were greater than the differences between all humans and everything else. The divine spark ignites a flame that burns upon the earth, and must take its place on the earth, on peak or valley, and burn like only fire burns until it is quenched and evaporates into the universe. We should realize that we never dreamed of a king or a queen so great that they couldn’t be every child.

What Adult’s Mean When They Say, “That’s Life.”

When we tell kids “that’s life,” we are avoiding an embarrassing conversation. Whatever the particular embarrassment, there is always the added shame that we have nothing better to say about it than, “That’s life.” Most likely, this is the way it should be. Whatever the truth is, it’s probably not suitable for children. And, surely, it is not worthy of the adults who have so little to say about it.

Introducing Mr. Chocintok, a Straw Man

Mr. Chocintok is a bad teacher. It doesn’t take much to be a bad teacher, and for Mr. Chocintok, it only takes two things. The first is what he does for the students, the second is what he gives the students to do. Despite his universal badness, Mr. Chocintok has been teaching for a very long time. In fact, some people say that’s the whole problem.

These days, teachers know better than Mr. Chocintok. While he will often spend entire lessons lecturing his students—who must take notes and remain silent unless called upon to answer one of his mechanical queries—we know that students must be more actively engaged in the learning process, and that they are not merely vessels to be filled by the bucket of Mr. Chocintok’s arbitrary knowledge.

When he does give the students something to do, Mr. Chocintok always assigns worksheets. Some of the worksheets are so old, Mr. Chocintok has made changes on them in pen and then copied them again: “Rockin’ in the U.S.S.R. Russia” and “God Superman Bless Us, Everyone!” are among his more venerable titles. Mr. Chocintok likes his fill-in-the-blank worksheets because all 120 of them can be scored by his wife during a single episode of primetime television.

Thank goodness the rest of us know better than Mr. Chocintok. We know that students must be constructively engaged in an activity, if the process of knowledge building is every going to amount to any kind of edifice at all. We know that we must ask them to do more than fill in worksheets, we must provide them with the strategies to make meaning of the things they read, and ultimately, strategies that to help them become lifelong learners.

Maybe Mr. Chocintok is just too old-fashioned to understand things like strategies. Strategies are things you use in your brain, where no one can see them. Nevertheless, they are there, or if they’re not, you’re not reading these words, anyway. To help you read them, I could show you some of the strategies I use as a certified proficient reader myself. To show you, we’ll need something to write on, like a big piece of chart paper or an overhead projector. Then, I’ll demonstrate something strategic, and provide you with a visual-tactile-kinesthetic manipulative by which you can experiment with the same strategy.

It’s that simple, and yet still Mr. Chocintok can be heard to complain: “The only difference between a worksheet and a graphic organizer is how big the blanks are.”

First Notes on Literacy in the Matrix

Mr. C. R. Gollum’s comments on yesterday’s post have me thinking about post-industrial education again. He was correct in pointing out that public education works to maximize the efficiency of the industrial system and prescient, I’m sure, in claiming that 100% efficiency will never be reached. The reasons for this are many, but the most important reason is that the question of industrial efficiency is historically moot. Industrial capacity no longer represents the pinnacle of wealth and well-being, though it is certainly still a constituent. It is beyond a cliché, however, to point out that this is the information age, and that purely industrial priorities are no longer enough to drive the machine. Nevertheless, Mr. Gollum’s theme still stands: We are approaching the needs of our time in typical, front-loaded, stampede and cattle-grate fashion. “We need a lot more people that are patient, unhurried, and elegant in their approach to problems,” says C. R. Gollum, and he’s right. Why don’t we have them? Because we are mesmerized, sterilized and, ultimately, terrified by what has become of our world since it went online.

A cliché is often wisdom that you hear so many times that you’ve stopped listening to it. Sometime in the 1990s, a tidbit about computers entered my conscious, downloaded from the mainstream. Something about processor speeds doubling every 18 months. Every two pregnancies, the world is painstakingly recreated, twice as big. Recreated across this microcosm of 18 years—the horizon of adulthood and threshold of generations.

The initial context of this concept involved the rapidly approaching theoretical and technical limits of computer processing speeds. But the limits of computing are not practical concerns of the mainstream, and do not explain the general diffusion of this technological anecdote. As Mr. Gollum also observes, we’re past the point where we know what to do with the things we’ve already automated. That’s a scary thought, and the sublimation of it may lie near the foundation of contemporary existential fear. It is almost comforting to imagine that one of these iterations of 18 months will finally bring a halt to this exponential profusion of computation. At the same time, it is frightening to imagine the sudden cessation of ever-new gadgets, treatments, improvements, extensions, applications, attachments, versions and options that we have not only grown accustomed to, but also expect of the future.

Now that time has allowed me a little distance from its computational context, I am beginning to see the other things that hold this cliché in place in our culture. The periodic doubling of processing speeds is a compelling analogy for our own sense of historical acceleration. The last five old-fashioned, organic generations have each had to live with the hyper-reality of technological reinvention. So much so that our idea of generations describes both family succession and historical epochs.

Part of us still knows that in the middle ages, just like all places before and outside modernity, a generation merely made a mark of slight incline or decline across the recurrent cycle of time. In those days, only gods or conquerors could change the world as it turned.

Our modern generations, however, have had to live with a world that grows up with the kids and yet answers to no king or deity. Generations now find themselves not just at different ages, but on different planes, looking back across the chasm at worlds as different as children and adults. We find ourselves calculating an exchange rate between generations, so that we can evaluate who is too old to keep up, too young to control, too vulgar, not cool, a dinosaur, up to date, obsolete.

It has been established at least as long as the anecdote of 18 months that computer literacy is the baseline measure of contemporary competence. Today’s oldest grandparents are the last generations grandfathered out of the computer literacy requirement. Computer literacy is the litmus of their children’s world, the boomer generation, the generation where everyone had to learn to read again, as adults. Their children, Mr. Stickfigure among them, were the first generation to become computer literate as children. As nominal adults now, ourselves, we take a certain native pride in this, in having been the original ten-year-olds tinkering with this device our parents couldn’t understand.

We’re the ones who are supposed to have learned something from the story about doubling processor speeds. In the information age, we don’t even have to wait for the next organic generation for the world to change. The computer literacy of my childhood is precisely as outdated as a Commodore 64. At that time, computer literacy and computer programming where almost identical. My young compatriots were the last people to know everything there is to know about their desktop computers.

Since then, in less time that it has taken for us to raise our own children, computer literacy has become both more and less like general literacy. Computer literacy is more like general literacy because the changes in computer interface have increasingly allowed us to interact with our computers as readers and writers. To be considered computer literate, in other words, you no longer need to be a programmer. However, my generation—or at least its educators—must face a challenge analogous to the one our parents faced while we were commandeering their computers as children. We must begin to understand something that is foreign to us, even though we think of ourselves as owning it.

I wonder, for instance, what it’s like to grow up in a world of hypertexts. When I sat on the couch and read books as a kid, I was partaking of the same literacy that my parents and grandparents had experienced. Even to those of us with computers, reading texts off the screen was merely a change of medium, a shift in the place of literacy, but not its range or function. It wasn’t until we were teenagers that we began to experience the possibilities of hypertext and came to know computer literacy as a different kind of reading and writing. We were the first generation to master this literacy, but we were not the first generation born into it. That is the generation we are currently teaching, the generation with not experiential reason to believe that the hypertext didn’t always exist right alongside ink and paper texts.

This generation has absolutely no basis for bookish nostalgia, and they never will. They will never know about all the human ages when reading meant looking at ink on paper and could only be read one page at a time, from beginning to end. As teachers of literacy, even the youngest and hippest of my generation have more in common with our parents and grandparents when it comes to the shared experience of learning to read and write. Before our time, we find ourselves dinosaurs of education, unwilling or unable to consider how the basic shape of literacy must follow the changing shape of texts. When we were kids, we never saw anything that looked like the hypertext, so we shouldn’t pretend that we know what it’s like to grow up with that monster in the room. Probably, we should recognize what our parents had to recognize when we started tinkering with their Commodores: If we don’t get hip to this, we’re not going to have anything to teach the kids.

I’d Rather Be Teaching

As you can imagine, Mr. Stickfigure’s abrasively insightful commentary is not palatable to all. I find eighth graders much more receptive to radical education than adults. It’s easier to persuade them of their destiny and divinity than it is to convince their teachers.

A teacher needs to know how the deserts miss the rain. A teacher must bring the oasis.

Rule of Thumb Number One

If you think their parents didn’t teach them any manners, you’re wrong.

On Radical Education

I am a radical not because I choose to be, but because I must admit what I am. If I was a radical by choice, a free radical, I would not be radical enough to suit my nature. I am the metastasis of the progressive spirit—insistent, insatiable, irreversible. In education, it is a good thing that more satisfied minds prevail.

Nevertheless, I offer radical education. Radical education consists in taking things a step further. It begins, however, by accepting responsibility for all of the steps that lead up to that last, radical leap. Those precursor steps will always be necessary, but never sufficient to effect the changes demanded by radical education.

Three year ago, I might have allowed myself to be drawn into an argument about the historicity of progressivism and the worship of newness. But I’m not looking for something new, I am looking for something old that has been lost or taken away, something simple and local and traditional. I’m looking for schools that come from inside the community, that answer to the community, that grow from it.

The idea that schools should be as one with the communities they serve should be self-evident, but in New York it is the exception. Many of this city’s communities are occupied by a school system that functions as an external imposition. Never mind that thousands of people from within these communities also staff the schools, and that they operate as though they are both a part of and at the service of their community.

Part of the problem is that a school cannot server two masters. To be part of the public education system is to partake of the techniques and discipline of a certain kind of schooling. Those techniques were not developed a priori. Rather, they grew in response to the educational needs of a community, and that community is well served by such techniques. In other communities, however, the discipline of public education must be received like the revealed word, only with much less persuasive force. In such a case, a public school is in a difficult spot: Its mandate is to enforce techniques created for a given community upon any community.

Very quickly, however, such a school will discover that the educational techniques of one community are not enough to meet the needs of another. Worse, transplanted techniques do not fail to carry with them other trappings of culture, so that they are not only insufficient, but antagonistic, as well. Put another way, who wants the French to lecture us on how to raise our kids? Or rather, who wants France to run our schools . . . from France?

It is a radical project to make New York City Public Schools into what schools should be. In too many cases, history has ensured that there is nothing for some communities to go back to when it comes to the warm embrace of a public education. The only place to find it, then, is in the future, and it will require radical education to get there.

Mark My Words:

A school that is no place for adults

is a bad place for children.

What’s Wrong with Urban Education?—or—Notes on the Masthead

I purposefully avoided the term “urban education” in the description of The Brooklyn Educrat, though it would have been the simplest way to refer to the titular locale. There is something about describing a form of education as “urban” that smacks of the same euphemistic obscurantism employed by record stores when they arrange their Hip-Hop/R&B/Soul/Jazz/Reggae/Blues section under the same label. In fact, the term is such pliable code that it can be found standing in for everything from “inner-city” to “ghetto” to—I’m sure some would argue—the N word itself.

Of course, they do offer graduate degrees in urban education, as well they should. I’m not so naïve as to think that the code doesn’t work both ways. For a professor of urban education, the discipline of “urban education” allows her to say: “We need to specialize in the techniques necessary to advance the academic achievement of precisely those Americans who have the greatest need. They are highly concentrated in poor, urban areas.” And, yes, it turns out that they are predominantly black and brown students.

I sympathize whole-heartedly with such professors. The discourse of identity must be elusive in an age that considers the Civil Rights Movement to be over and done with. In exchange for certain civil rights, certain people took the right to be done with black and white, as well. Hence, the government can no longer do anything for black people that isn’t classified as an entitlement, having already given them equal rights (please imagine your own scare quotes). Professors, whose disciplines are ensconced in the university, find themselves close enough to government that they must learn to watch their mouths. Hence, degrees in “urban education.” In this context, I can accept a strategic deployment of the euphemism.

For my part, however, I want to avoid the term. I am concerned about the education of our black and brown children—both urban and rural and in between. I am concerned that some of us are willing to work so hard to convert poverty into the currency of all misery. Poverty is certainly an index of misery, but we strain when we try to consume the world of color with this medium of exchange.

That being said, I will be guilty of confusing all of these terms many times before I’m done with them. And yes, I am particularly concerned with the education in this particular urban area. I just thought I would leave the word off the masthead.

Technical Notes for Imaginary Friends

The mysterious Cathode Ray Gollum has indirectly reminded me that I don't want interested, if hypothetical, readers to have to register a Blogger account merely to comment upon the posts. You should now be able to comment without registering. Also, Mr. Stickfigure's email address is available in my profile. . . . Anyone? . . . Anyone?

From Mr. Stickfigure's Archive of the Unpublished

Dear Reader(s?)--Despite the fact that the following post is essay-length, it only functions as an introduction. If this were a boxing match, you would be seeing a lot of dancing and manuevering that ends with the fight's first jab. So if you can wait that long, I tried to make it sting.
--Mr. Stickfigure

Forty Acres and a School:
Meeting the Needs of Universal Education

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the most significant change in American education has been that every child must go to school. Universal compulsory education is both our legal obligation and the ultimate justification for what our schools have become in the century since it was instituted. It is a noble goal and it is noble, perhaps, that we have spent a hundred years grappling with the concrete consequences of instituting such a demanding ideal. Of course, there are practical reasons for mandatory education as well, and those are the reasons that have kept the institution funded when our high-mindedness has waned. By the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, it was becoming clear that a rapidly expanding industrial economy demanded a literate population with a functional command of basic mathematics. Everything about an expanding industrial economy, from the basic signage of transportation, to the linguistic flexibility of advertising, to the legal and scientific apparatus that provided the matrix for it all, everything called for universal literacy and mathematics. Today, at the beginning of a new century, in the midst of a global information age, we expect even more of our citizens by way of reading, writing and ‘rithmetic. And yet, still, some of our schools succeed in meeting the mandate of our time, while others fail. If this is the state of things, then we have not yet realized the ideal of universal compulsory education. We have nearly universal attendance, perhaps, and some schools provide a good education. What will it take to make the schools that are still failing successful, so that our compulsory education can finally mean an education for everyone?

It’s a big enough question that it deserves to be parsed before it is answered. The determination of what it will take to make all schools successful depends upon what is making them fail. Is this failure one for which we have a remedy, if properly diagnosed? Or are we failing to recognize the problem itself, quite apart from whether we know how to solve it? In short, do we even know how to teach all of our children? Or are there some children who are still inscrutable to our methods? Fortunately for my purposes, there is already an extensive body of literature and tradition of professional development dedicated to answering these questions more thoroughly than I can here. Broadly, the term “best practices” applies to this field of publishing and professional exchange. Best practices represent the experiential wisdom of thousands of successful teachers and administrators throughout the country and the world. While specific theories, techniques and products vary as much as the teachers and students who produce them, best practices offer a unified theme when taken as a whole. That theme is also the beginning of an answer to the question of universal education: With the guidance of the right teachers, any child can be a successful student.

We know what to do to make schools successful, but we are not doing it. Consequently, if true, my question has become a charge. Because if we have the knowledge, we must account for why that knowledge has not been made universally manifest in all of our schools. Our habit of looking at particular schools, either successful or failing ones, as discrete and independent artifacts has helped to obscure from us the broad causes of both success and failure. This atomized analysis is, by definition, ill-suited for examination of a universal compulsory education system. Each school in the country--public, private and parochial--participates in the system of universal education. That a significant portion of these schools are failing represents a failing of that system to fulfill its founding purpose.

But what is failing? Where is the system breaking down? Again, there is no particular cog or wheel that we do not know how to fix. There is no social or economic condition that renders children incapable of being educated, and there is no class or culture that has not been served by at least a few successful schools. Thus, the system is not failing for lack of knowledge of how its parts work. Rather, it is failing because there have not been enough operational resources provided to run the entire system. Failing schools are schools which do not have adequate resources to meet the educational needs of their students. This paucity is, ultimately, part of the responsibility of our system of universal education. Failing schools are where our students slip through the crack for lack of ground to stand on.

But who is slipping through the cracks in our institution? This question has been answered clearly enough by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Educational Statistics in its annual survey, The Condition of Education:

Certain subgroups outperformed others in reading in 2003. . . . White and Asian/Pacific Islander students had higher average scores than American Indian, Hispanic, and Black students in grades 4 and 8. Additionally, in grade 4, White students outperformed Asian/Pacific Islander students and Hispanic students outperformed Black students. . . .The level of poverty in the school . . . was negatively associated with student achievement in both grades in 2003.[1]

In the event that the connection between race, poverty and test results is not explicit enough, the National Center for Educational Statistics also reports:

Certain characteristics of the highest poverty schools (more than 75 percent of students eligible for subsidized lunch) are evident. Relative to the total 4th-grade population, there was a lower percentage of White students and a higher percentage of Black and Hispanic students in the highest poverty schools in 2000.[2]

Students of color are disproportionately low performing and disproportionately poor. Students of color are slipping through the cracks. These are the cracks left unfilled by adequate resources, the spaces where pedagogical best practices should be operating but are not.

It follows the logic of universal compulsory education that the students with the most needs will require the most educational resources. To follow that logic, however, is to collide with an individualist culture that aspires to be a meritocracy. Here is the dialectic underbelly of universal compulsory education—its constitutional cognitive dissonance. On some level, it’s a fairly simple operation: assess the needs of all of our students and send our best teachers to teach the neediest ones first. But the closer such an idea gets to reality, the more laughable it seems. We are not inclined to shift valuable resources based solely on need; we want to know why resources are deserved, how they are earned, what you have done to merit them. Perhaps this is when it is useful to remember that universal compulsory education is, after all, a subordinate necessity, dependent upon our economic and cultural need for the continuous production of literate citizens.

Maybe we have enough literate citizens to fuel the techo-industrial machine. Maybe the term “universal” is merely a useful heuristic to help us conceive and operate an institution that is not universal, but just very, very large. But as the U.S. Department of Education reminds us, we can never say that we don’t know who is left out of our universe. By definition, they are our neediest students, but American history has made them black. Indeed, the institution of universal education has played a major role in that history, and it has been characterized, mainly, by having insufficient resources to meet the needs of its students.

But what, even in the broadest sense, would it take to meet the needs of our students of color? To the extent that these students are also disproportionately likely to be in poverty, it will take schools with educational resources that, for wealthier students, are provided by the community. These include many things that do not impact the budget of schools in wealthier communities, such as specialized academic intervention, individualized music training, club sports, and other resources paid for privately but which have a positive influence on academic success. High-poverty communities, however, are also more likely to send students to schools with mental and physical health needs, needs that must be met in addition to academic intervention and enrichment, sports and art and community service. In short, there is every reason to believe that it takes more educational resources to make a high-poverty school successful than a school in a wealthy community.

In the end, educational resources boil down to the same thing as everything else: money. Money is not to say cash, however, and the answer is not merely bigger discretionary budgets. Yet the fact that there is so much controversy over public school funding and teacher pay does not bode well for a discussion of the full range of economic restructuring required to make our failing schools successful. If we rule out redistributing resources from successful schools to failing ones, we are left looking at an enormous up-front investment, indeed. The fact that the investment would be made, primarily, in the education of our students of color, leaves only one question remaining: Why don’t we want to make the investment and thereby fulfill the mandate of universal education?

Because the cost would amount to paying reparations, which is a price America has never been willing to pay.

---

[1] National Center for Education Statistics, “Indicator 9 (2005): Reading Performance of Students in Grades 4 and 8.” The Condition of Education. 2005. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2005/section2/indicator09.asp (accessed March 5, 2006).

[2] National Center for Education Statistics. “Indicator 12 (2003): Poverty and Student Mathematics Achievement.” The Condition of Education. 2005. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2003/section2/indicator12.asp (accessed March 5, 2006).

Note: Since accessed, the above links no longer point to the right sections, so I have disabled them. It is not impossible that I get around to updating them, someday.

Rumble in the Tunnel

Huge rumble on the train home today. Twenty, thirty teenage boys and girls variously involved in keeping two or three young men from beating the shit out of each other. Numbers do not fairly describe my perception of the scene, being far too definite. Impressionism is more realistic: There was the initial core of two fast-grappling bodies. There was the thrilled, frightened rush of the score or more partisans, instigators and peace-keepers. There were the double tag-teams of girls and boys trying to pull the fighters apart, constantly shifting and being shaken-off.

There were two other grown men on my end of the train, and our eyes might have met once. Then, two impressively inertial young women dragged one of the fighters past us to the end of the car. Speaking as one of the (nominally) grown men, it was an uncomfortable situation. One the one hand, there were certainly plenty of hands already on deck, decking the shit out of each other. (I see a young man swinging sucker punches around a young woman who is blocking the target with her body. His forearm is rebounding off the back of her head.) On the other hand, there’s no point in distinguishing yourself as a grown man if you can’t get a trainload of scrapping minors to take it outside.

In New York City, though, the space between subways stops is about as far away as you can be from anywhere. I sat and watched and—depending on the ebb and flow of the scuffle—stood and watched the fight. Most of the kinetic energy seemed to be spent on restraining the main combatants. The consequence, however, was an imbalance of strategic intents that prolonged the battle. There were only a few head-to-head fighters, and these were wasting their energy trying to get through the throngs of youths working, with no less vigor, to hold them back. This contingent had strength and numbers, but couldn’t end the fight because they weren’t fighting against anyone.

We came out of the wilderness as the train pulled up to the next station, and the cops showed up as the door opened like they were filming a commercial. Two officers stepped onto the car, but the kids where hip enough to have stopped fighting. The alphas’ whiff was still in the air, though, and the cops were able to pick out the instigators. One, because his girl was hustling him out the door between the cars, and the other because he was sitting on the seat with blood on his shirt and thirteen henchmen and henchwomen surrounding him. If I had to call it, I’d say he lost. This was when I recognized one of my eighth graders from three or four years ago. She was beside the young man, and followed when the cops took him off the train.

People milled around for a while, on and off the train. One of the other grown men took the opportunity to slip into the next car, the other stayed put. I asked my student if she was all right and she nodded. I asked her what happened and she said something quick that I didn’t understand. Stupid question. A few minutes later, most of the kids were back on the train, including the bloody-shirted fighter and my student. An officer tried half-heartedly to get the fighter to tell them his name, indicating that he planned to take the drastic action of writing it on his pad. The fighter made a show of refusing and my student made a show of telling him to just make up a name to tell the cop. Soon enough, the cops had left and we were on our way again, sans fight.

Big ups to three of NYPD’s finest today for not escalating a situation that, were I to be honest, had me plenty worried there for a minute. I also appreciate the timing, but the precincts around here deploy so many cops that the next prowler couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds from the station. But let me bolster this faint praise by saying that today’s officers certainly assessed what was going on better than this eye witness. Thirty nearly-grown boys and girls duking it out under ground, and no-one is shot, stabbed or otherwise seriously injured? A cop’s got worse things to worry about, I’m sure.