Change Is Bad; Staying Where the Heart Is

Today's NYTimes mag has an interesting last page article by a teacher in a Tamaqua, PA, community college. (That's a forbidding area that I've traversed for almost 40 years via I-81 to and from DC. The area's not fit for farming, all the vegetation is long dead and compressed as coal.)

Coal Miner's Granddaughter:

"The fact is that I come from a long line of people who pick up and leave when things stop working out. My grandfather migrated from Poland to Hazelton, Pa., to mine coal, and when the mines closed, my father hitchhiked two hours south to Bethlehem to roll steel, and when the furnaces shut down, my brother moved to Nigeria, where he drills for oil. It seems natural, American really, to move on. Aren't most of us descended from people who did just that?

I ask the class to write what they hope to learn from me on index cards I give out, and they hand the cards to me as they file out. How to write a bid proposal. How to create a technical manual. No one, it seems, wants to learn how to escape."