("new york city's big donors find new cause: public schools." from yesterday's times.)
I realize that I am going to sound hideously ungrateful for saying things, but I have to say it: public education should never be allowed to become the pet project of the ultra-rich. I appreciate the importance mayor bloomberg has placed upon improving new york city's public schools; he's made more changes than anyone else in recent history, and I think the creation of small high schools is one of the best ways municipal money could be spent. but if he turns what should be the responsibility of the government into a trendy philanthropy target, he will ultimately do much more harm than good.
the benefactors described in the times article compare their donations to the school systems with similar gifts made to museums or public media. on the surface maybe they do seem similar; all are institutions ostensibly dedicated to the enrichment of public knowledge. but they're not the same at all. museums are a (wonderful) privilege. education is not only a right, but a requirement.
the federal government requires children to be schooled in some way, and it claims to offer every american child a free public education. that means it is the government's responsibility to fund public schools. period. the more schools rely on donations -- whether they are huge checks written by fabulously wealthy people or twenty-dollar projects funded by well-meaning sponsors through donors choose -- the less pressure there is on the department of education to write money that schools need into its budget. if we believe in education enough to make it mandatory, we must demand that it belongs to everyone. the only way that can happen is if all schools, in all parts of the country, have their financial needs met by the only source that operates independently of individuals' whims. that source is our government.
the culture of charity has already created a society in which needs are met according to how charming, endearing, or compelling a cause appears. that's possibly okay when you're talking about pediatric medicine or rainforest conservation. but we can't let public schools be run that way. as soon as the private sector -- a.k.a. individual people -- becomes a significant source of money for a government institution, that same private sector might start believing it has some power to decide what is taught inside that government institution. intelligent design, for instance, or even that a science classroom needs a (cute) pet gecko before it needs a (not at all cute) working sink.
no one can claim that the government is doing well at setting priorities for public schools, or that it has put enough money into schools to ensure that all its citizens receive an adequate, let alone good, education. but that's no reason to let it off the hook. instead we should be asking for more -- more money, more equality, more attention paid to education research, more adherance to actual standards rather than fudgeable standardized test results. there are ways for socially powerful people to help public education without turning our school system into some kind of adopt-a-thon. instead of doing the government's job for it, make the government do its job. please.
[ 31.12.05] · [ ]
lucie opens a present while I attempt to take a photograph from a rocking chair
her gift was a lint roller with a paw-shaped handle. sometimes it's hard to believe lucie has any fur left on her body, since there's such an abundance of black and white hair everyplace else in her vicinity. she also helped unwrap a package that held a pair of slippers for my mom. otherwise she was fairly self-contained, all things (including the biscuit-stuffed bone she got after her frozen breakfast kong) considered.
recently I have seen two movies about gay-boys-in-denial that included cameos by dogs of the lucie ilk. in brokeback mountain, a blue heeler ran up and down the mountain with the cowboys, herding the sheep and looking generally bucolic. we were in a packed chelsea theater so I couldn't squeal my delight too loudly, but the dog was definitely one of the brightest spots of the movie. then today, in heights, the dragon-wizard fringefest actor lived with the mottled black-and-white coat of a cattle dog mongrel. couch-bound with tom in our quiet apartment, I not only squealed but ran the dvd backwards to watch the lucie-dog trot through an apartment lobby again.
there were no dogs in king kong. the giant gorilla was impressive, but I think some dogs would have helped.
[ 28.12.05] · [ ]
as promised, I'm back in massachusetts. the train trip was quiet and placid, the ghosts of penn station's transit strike chaos were long gone, and we arrived in sunny copley square nearly twenty minutes ahead of schedule. the layers I'd warn to keep warm at our pre-dawn departure -- flannel pajamas under my knee-length circle skirt -- made me sweaty as I walked along commonwealth ave, so I stopped at the foot of the BU bridge and stripped off my pants before crossing the melting charles. the temperature discontinuity where the cool river air hit my bare legs felt like a sweet kiss from winter.
so begin the holidays. and they are, in truth, the holidays: christmas tomorrow plus the start of chanukah, for which my brother has already received (and lucie has already tried to steal) his first bag of gelt; boxing day on monday, this year including presents, the best of which (for me) will certainly be tom's arrival from new jersey; his birthday a few days later; and then it will be new year's eve. this vacation is about the chaos of celebration, not serenity.
if the so-called war on christmas does lead, as some have worried, to other religious traditions becoming more inclusive or losing their hold on the law, I say bring it on. happy holidays, joyous toking, peace on abortion clinics, and a very merry gay marriage to everyone. let's all gather round the pagan tree and have a happy christmas, too.
[ 24.12.05] · [ ]
for those of us who are secular christians at best, christmas needn't be tied to a particular date, right? I know december 25th is christmas day, but if we're not truly celebrating the (approximate, anyway) birthday of jesus so much as we are gathering our family together, does it matter which date we pick to do it?
in other words, I am already trying to come up with a plan in which we can see our three families (one's mine, two are tom's) for christmas next year without traveling away from each other barely twelve hours after the start of our vacation, and then spending christmas day in separate states. it seems sadly improbable that I'll be able to build a wormhole between new jersey and massachusets before the end of 2006, so I guess I'm stuck with the calendar-revision scheme.
I'll be in cambridge by noon tomorrow. possibly without any bags except the ones bearing gifts, seeing as I have to be on the subway in less than five hours, and I haven't even thought about packing yet.
· [ ]
strike strike strike strike
in case you were wondering what life is like in new york right now, that pretty much sums it up.
my parents got married a day early because of the 1980 transit strike. a small 24-hour difference that meant they got married in march, not april, when my mother was twenty-three years old instead of twenty-four. the numbers imply something bigger than what actually happened to my family -- since the marriage involved only a justice of the peace plus a witness, I guess it was easy enough to adjust -- but of course they are just one of a billion stories from that strike twenty-five years ago.
I, of course, was not yet born, nor even conceived. the only memory I have about that strike is the small hint of regret on my father's face when he told us that he'd thought it would be fun to be married on april fool's day.
today I stayed in bed an extra forty minutes and then rode tom's salvaged bicycle to work, where I was an hour early. (schools are delayed two hours for the duration of the strike; between the empty classrooms and the shortened periods it barely felt like I had to work at all.) it was kind of fun, even on the way home when I started to feel the bike falling apart beneath me, but I'm sure it will become less so as the week wears on. it's been two years since I abandoned my own bicycle in a midwood garage, but an entire adolescence spent commuting by pedal-power instills you with permanent muscle memory for how to fly through the city on a simple machine. this spring I will find the money for a new one of my own.
I'm somewhat weary of defending the workers to the people who are vocally annoyed about the inconvenience (and yes, that word is something of a massive understatement, but we're hardly in the realm of catastrophe here) caused by the transit strike. those people are the same ones who were complaining on friday that their wishes for a strike -- and an effective day off -- did not come true. what do you want, exactly? never to work again but to have trains stopping underneath your window whenever you need to travel? that would be nice, wouldn't it?
anyway, here is my bullet-points position:
1. unions, strikes, and workers' rights are important. always.
2. but I think the twu board was wrong in going ahead with this strike right now.
3. it is unfair to the workers who are now losing double-pay as a result, and instead are standing in protest and picket lines while angry new yorkers malign them as selfish, demanding, spoiled recipients of taxpayer money.
4. it is unfair to the people who can't get to the jobs they need to pay rent and feed families. I don't mean the wall street executives, I mean the housecleaners who commute between outerboroughs and don't have the option of working from home.
5. I also think the mta was wrong for offering so little in pay and health care. these are people who work in conditions that are by definition unsafe and health-threatening to keep an absolutely vital part of the city running. if anyone deserves free health care and a living wage, they do. it doesn't matter if they have a college education or not. they should be given what they're worth.
in short: the politicians are wrong, selfish, and shortsighted. what else is new?
(but you know what else is starting to bug me? all the people who are proud of themselves for circumventing the carpooling rules. it's supposed to be that major thoroughfares in, out, and through manhattan are restricted to cars carrying a minimum of four people. so... these midtown office workers are driving to work with their pajama-clad kids in the backseat to count as extra bodies. way to miss the fucking point.)
[ 20.12.05] · [ ]
here's a funny thing that I recently thought about for the first time in years. it's also a really embarassing thing, but the reason it's embarassing is also the reason I can tell it in a public forum at all.
at some point during our weekend of shopping (7th avenue boutiques, oh my god) we were browsing in a used bookstore. tom was looking at some saltwater almanac while I got bored with books on poodles and started wandering. I wandered right into this barbie-pink book called a piece of cake, which claims to be a recipe for female sexual pleasure, but seemed mostly to be a very-pleased-with-itself explanation of how nowadays, girls can have orgasms too. (without veering too far into the realm of things that I can't tell in a public forum, I'll just say that if there's any problem with this in modern-liberal sexual society, it's that boys think sex should be all female orgasms, all the time. because they are sensitive and giving.) one of the first pages I read told the story of how girls discover masturbation: "you're no more than eleven years old, lying in bed, and you start rocking against your comforter.." etc.
well. I am one of those girls who has known the difference between a vulva and a vagina since I was in pre-school, but I never found myself "rocking against my comforter."
in fact (here is the funny/embarassing thing I was trying to get to all along), when I was about seven years old, I read deenie (the most-banned judy blume book) for the first time. for those of you who were never into that whole pre-teen literary scene, deenie is a junior high school student with scoliosis. she's also on some masturbatory path of self-discovery. literally. throughout the book deenie thinks about how she likes to touch her "special place" when she's in bed at night. she even writes a note to her health teacher asking if it's normal to have a "special place."
and I, at age seven, always imagined that special place to be somewhere above her right hip. when I was lying in bed at night sometimes I would slide my fingers along my skin there to see if I felt anything good. I was completely familiar with the concept of zones of high nerve-ending density, but judy blume's euphemisms went so far over my second-grade head that I didn't know "feeling good" had anything to do with sex. I tried and tried to find the exact right spot on my side, the spot that would take me to some higher plane of happiness, but it never worked. I figured my special place was somewhere else, but it probably wasn't worth the trouble of finding it, especially if it turned out to be some hard-to-reach spot like the back of my heel.
(years later I read an article about how school libraries tear the offending pages out of some books that deal with stuff like wet dreams and teen sex, and I realized that deenie's special place shared its longitude, not its latitude, with her navel. there are lots of problems you can run into when you read books for older audiences. another one I ran into is that I didn't learn the correct way to pronounce "masochist" until I was in high school. being "smart" can make you feel quite stupid sometimes.)
[ 19.12.05] · [ ]
the cockatiel came first
overwhelmingly, my students think that there was an egg before there was a chicken. they also seem to think that the creature who laid that egg was some kind of pterodactyl -- not an unreasonable assumption, given the bullet points contained in a typical biology curriculum -- and that the flying reptile in question was utterly nonplussed about hatching a feathered bird. prehistoric earthlings were apparently much more tolerant of mutants than we are. there's not enough time in any earthsci class to address all their charming misconceptions about other fields of science (though I did point out that dactyls aren't dinos and evolution usually proceeds somewhat more gradually), but in this case that wasn't the point to begin with.
based on the chicken and the egg, we decided that:
1) a cyclical pattern implies (inter)relationship
2) every cycle has a starting point (even if you're not sure what it is)
also, I draw good chicken. and much to my surprise, not one person asked, "miss, what does this have to do with rocks?" (we're in the midst of geology.) instead, the kids gamely agreed that the rock cycle started on earth with magma and lava, and fewer than a dozen arrows (a complicated tangle in contrast with our neat dairy diagram, but still impressive considering the diversity at hand) could form an endless connection between all the world's rocks. then they set about drawing those connections and some of them ended up with closer to thirty lines snaking between terms, but as long as it gets us from igneous to sedimentary to metamorphic and back again (and five other ways besides), who cares?
I had a minor epiphany at the end of last week, when one of my students told me that lasagna is like a rock because it has layers that are put down one at a time and combine into one solid(ish) object. I've always thought privately that my propensity for seeing the world as a series of metaphors made manifest -- everything is related; anything can be viewed in another thing's context -- is the most valuable aspect of my natural intelligence. reading really fast is useful and everything, but that sense of connectedness is what lets me actually understand some measure of the world. but I never thought of it as much of an asset for my students, except in letting me create three binders' worth of dollar-store experiments (really, you can see how the tides work with half a latex balloon and a penny). sometimes I was even a bit embarassed about how silly it all seemed compared with the "real" science of my undergraduate pedigree.
but: duh! if they can say, "a chocolate chip cookie is like a rock," it means they know something about a rock. (something more than common rock-sense; when you see a cookie you don't think immediately of sediments, do you?) and if they can look at a line-drawing of a chicken on the blackboard without thinking they've walked into the wrong class, it means either that they trust me to lead them along the right threads of our interconnected web of existance, or they really want to know if the chicken came first, both of which seem like good options to me. and if they are seeing and thinking of relationships between these seemingly unrelated bits of the universe, fantastic. maybe I am teaching them science after all.
when I burrowed back under the blankets morning to prod tom into wakefulness, I informed him that his bird was stalking me. "she's sitting on the floor of her cage," I said, "staring out between the bars like this:" and I made a fierce, glowery face that no one could see, since my whole head was beneath the bedsheets.
but it turned out, once we turned the lights on and peered into sugah's cage, that she was actually protecting her very first egg. she squawked at us for coming too close and then fluffed her white bellyfeathers over the egg, which sat atop a haphazard pile of shredded newspaper. I guess when your egg is unfertilized you don't need to build it a proper nest.
sugah defended the egg valiantly all day, even without a mate to come and feed her during her vigil, but she finally left it for a few minutes this evening, during which tom stole it from her cage. she seems no worse for the loss, but we've been warned that she is likely to lay again, now that she's begun. I think she was inspired by the presence of my oh-so-charming and virile lovebird. when I get home from school in the afternoon, they always seem to be in the midst of some deep, twittery conversation.
so the egg has been removed and... disappeared. but we are on the lookout for more. if a chicken pops out of one, my students will certainly be the first to know.
[ 13.12.05] · [ ]
I miss red hook sometimes.
[ 11.12.05] · [ ]
for the first time in my so-far-five semesters of teaching, I have a class in a room that remains empty after my students leave at the 2:01 bell. (in our overcrowded school, classrooms do not belong to individual teachers, but are filled with a rotation of sections and subjects throughout the day so that no space is wasted during our preparatory or lunch periods. I teach five classes in four different rooms each day.) normally, one class clears out and the next pours in while I stack materials in bins, collect work, and corrall all the junk I'm required to tote with me everywhere -- late book, hall pass, bathroom log, attendance records -- into a haphazard pile. since instruction is (rightfully, with our blink-of-an-eye periods, just 45 minutes each) supposed to be bell-to-bell, we have just the four minutes between classes to break down one class, switch rooms, and get set up for the next one. it's chaotic.
so now, one of the most reliable small pleasures of my teaching day is that empty classroom. I can chat with the kids who want to stay a few minutes extra to ask for help or talk about their birthday parties (this was not the case in my cohort, but apparently when you are a girl your sixteenth birthday is a huge deal. like it might as well be your wedding). I can stare out the window if I want to. every day I savor the process of cleaning up the front desk, washing out beakers or peeling apart bits of different-colored clay, separating homework and classwork into neat piles secured with copper paper clips, packing my bins neatly so that everything is in its place. sometimes I sit on top of the slate lab table and just admire the classroom in its state of quiet, half-ordered exhalation.
sanity comes in small helpings, I guess.
[ 10.12.05] · [ ]
because I am a hyperanalytical, obsessive introvert, I have a reasonably well-developed philosophy for pretty much anything I do, including teaching, consumption of all kinds, transportation, and of course webjournalling.
for my own benefit as much as yours, or at least in the interests of transparency, here is the wockerjabby posting doctrine:
1. posts should not include information that would be harmful or hurtful to individuals in the private sector. that means my family, my friends, my students, and easily-identifiable non-celebrity strangers & acquaintances. generally, proper names are not used unless the person in question has a public internet identity.
2. always assume that anyone could and will read a post, even though it is probably not the case (and it's easy enough to see who has been here in reality). my parents will read it. my colleagues and employers will read it. my students will read it. my nonexistant children will read it, many years from now.
3. storytelling is based on, but not indebted to, objective truth.
that's pretty much it, but those three little things lead to a lot of self-censorship around here. for obvious reasons I don't write about specific students, nor have I ever mentioned my school or administrators by name. I'm relatively vague about most relationshippy things and I rarely write about sexuality, much less sex itself. I keep my family's secrets, I leave the details of my internal organs (juicy though they may be) to my doctors, and I protect my inner psychopath from becoming too vulnerably exposed.
it's frustrating sometimes, which is why I disabled the front page of this site for a few days. I can feel like I'm just avoiding my life by writing here. I'm not so big on avoidance; I prefer to wallow in my problems and preoccupations. wallowing and not being able to holler from my mudpit can make the world feel dirtier than ever. but I do like having a place to keep all this -- whatever it is -- and I'm not ready to give up on that yet, as much as the consideration keeps returning to my mind.
I ask you to keep a few things in mind, though:
you may think that I am foolish, naive, or reckless for saying certain things, and you could be right. but don't think that I haven't considered every aspect of the risk I take by making anything public, googleable, and attached to my name. I've been online for more than half of my life, and self-publishing on the web for almost nine years. I was there (as david byrne says) when "dooced" got its meaning, when kaycee nicole lived and died, when blogger was still in beta. I am more than familiar with the deceptive power of the internet.
you may also think that I am wrong for feeling a certain way. but please, don't tell me how I should be feeling. I am very, very in touch with emotions -- I practically have my fingers wrapped around my own bleeding heart -- and I will be the judge of their legitimacy. as for hatred, I don't hate many things, and I certainly don't hate individuals (george w bush and some others excluded, perhaps, but I mostly despise what they do and what they stand for; I have similar feelings about certain kinds of motor vehicles and the laws that let corporations control genes). for most of my post-adolescent life, any deep and serious hatred I felt was immediately redirected towards myself, because it wasn't in my constitution to sustain that much animosity for another creature for very long. I have been disrespectful, disdainful, and dismissive, but rarely hateful, except to hate the things within me that I believed were wrong or bad.
adulthood has given me equal measures of angsty frustration and happy revelations, and one of the most welcome of those is that I have finally gained enough maturity (or something) to stop blaming myself for all my bad feelings. sometimes anger has a purpose, and other times it is only destructive, and I am not zen enough to always be able to ignore it. but I can stop beating myself up about it. please, if you care about me, don't you do it for me. (and if you don't care about me, why are you here?)
why am I here? I guess it's because I still care about something.
[ 3.12.05] · [ ]
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