Steve Bailey's Blog

Hats off to D.J. Mathews and her article of April 26 ("Public school teachers deserve credit for what they do") on the value of teachers. The subtext concerning standardization vs. encouraging individual students' development reminded me of something I experienced while teaching in an international school in China.

There were no SOLs at that school. I happily returned to some of the teaching methods I had used in Virginia before such examinations intruded on my professional life. In the Chinese school next door, education remained focused on rote memorization. But interest was growing to change that, to find out how Americans are so innovative. And how we educate our young appeared to be one of the keys.

An instructor from that national school visited us and observed several different classes. He remarked that he was astonished to see so many of our students raising their hands with their own observations and questions. This Chinese teacher further noticed that some discussions prompted the teacher to make students think about something only remotely connected to the lesson. The reply from the American teachers was, yes; we are big on the thinking thing.

Americans are good at innovation and bold ideas because we have teachers who encourage thinking and instill self-esteem in their students.

The irony here is that while Chinese educators were beginning to explore the American way of teaching, back in Virginia, the trend continued to move the state's education system closer to China's.

Mathews is right. Teachers deserve recognition for what they do. They do make a significant contribution to the nation. But what I love about American educators is they do what they do regardless of the lack of recognition from the rest of the world. The success of each child in the classroom is the goal. All else is just noise.

Steve Bailey,

Richmond

BOOK REVIEW

History has not paid much attention to first ladies and Jefferson Davis’ wife, Varina, less than most. The Civil War itself took up most of that space. Still, the woman's story in Charles Frazier’s book Varina is of a woman who married a man much older than herself and did not share in his political philosophy. This mother lost all but one of her children before they had grown up and lived out her life with the legacy of the failed Confederacy that she neither sought nor wholly accepted. This is a framed story, that is, a story within a story. Varina Davis, the only first lady of the Confederacy, tells her life story in a disconnected fashion to a young black man, James Blake, who begins visiting the eighty-year-old widow in a sanitorium where she is trying to recover from drug addiction. Blake wants to understand his own identity as Jimmie Limber, the black child whom Mrs. Davis rescued from a savage beating on a city street in Richmond, Virginia, and took in to be raised among her children. In response to Blake’s questions, Varina starts her story with her escape from Richmond, as this capital of the Confederacy fell to Union troops in the final stages of the American Civil War. She and her husband travel separately from each other physically and in the goals they have in mind for their respective journeys. She wants to escape and not return. Jefferson Davis, on the other hand, delusional that the confederacy had not been thoroughly defeated, wanted to head west toward Texas, where there was a small pocket of resistance, and keep up the fight, a fight that had already cost the American people over 600,000 lives. A climax to this part of the story is reached when Jefferson Davis reunites with his wife in Georgia and, in doing so, brings on the wrath of the Federal troops who were pursuing him. He is arrested, and during this period, Jimmie Limber is separated from the Davises. Varina, whom Frazier refers to as V throughout the book, was convinced that had her husband left her alone, she would have made it to Cuba. Varina Howell was a young woman with no dowry when she met Jefferson Davis at a party in 1843. She was seventeen, and he was thirty-five. For her, it was not about love as much as her need for security. She was more interested in his property and material wealth than his political career or ideology. And yet she stood by him throughout his ill-fated venture as the one and only president of the Confederate States of America and campaigned to have her husband freed from incarceration in Fort Monroe, Virginia, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain, about the journey home of a Confederate deserter in the closing days of the war, came out in 1997 and was a runaway bestseller. It was made into a movie starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. He uses a lyrical style, his descriptions are deep, and he puts a lot of meaning in a few words. Varina is Fraizer’s only other book with a Civil War setting. A phraseological slip-up appears when one character uses the expression “no worries,” an Australian phrase that was not part of the parlance of the nineteenth-century American language. Nevertheless, this is an engaging story about a woman few people know much about, probably because she was an outlier in the Civil War drama.

Steve Bailey's Blog

Menu

Translate

About Me