I'm glad you are bringing up education. I have just three questions right now.
1. why do you want to hire an army of new teachers? it's not hiring the new teachers that is so difficult. it's keeping them, as you yourself have said in the past. what are you going to do to make teaching a truly sustainable career? financial "rewards" don't count. most of the teachers I know who left did so because they were fed up, worn out, and disillusioned.
2. how are you going to pay teachers more? the federal government doesn't determine teachers' salaries. more importantly, how are you going to make sure that disparities in teacher payscales are lessened, so that teachers aren't leaving the inner city for a $20k raise in the suburbs? (good luck with that one. sounds politically impossible to me.)
3. if you mean it when you say that you are going to improve assessments and get rid of the kinds of tests that require filling in bubbles... can I help?
in all seriousness,
rabi
[ 28 August 2008] · [ ]
apparently this summer is the time for breaking things. not just hearts and promises, but tangible, physical things like windows and refrigerators and computers.
in march, two months before my applecare warranty was due to expire, I took my powerbook to the genius bar for a checkup. one of the usb ports was acting a bit weird, but mostly I wanted to make sure there weren't any serious issues waiting to be discovered. the genius (that title is supposed to be ironic, right?) ran a hard drive diagnostic and said my computer was doing fine.
in may my computer was three years old and therefore no longer under warranty. the power cord seemed like it wasn't making a particularly tight connection anymore.
on august sixth, the power cord stopped working completely. I fretted over it a little but just started using one of the extras I had hanging around. three weeks later -- of course when I was five hours north of new york city and nowhere near anything except for a lake and some farms -- it shorted out my third and final adapter. when I got back to the city I took it to tekserve, after a futile second visit to the genius bar, where the genius said, 'yup, it's broken, but we would charge you a thousand dollars to fix it so you should probably try somewhere else first.' so at somewhere else, it will be $250 to replace the dc-in thinger, but they have to keep my computer all week. also they checked out my hard drive again and now, of course, it comes back with some serious errors.
it's really a little too convenient that my computer goes from fine-and-dandy to will-inevitably-crash just as soon as it stops being free to repair it, don't you think? and the apple business model is clearly to make things so expensive to fix that you just decide to buy a new laptop instead. (would it be nice to have a new laptop? of course -- but 'nice' is not a reason to buy something that costs more than a month's worth of rent. plus I love my little twelve-inch and I'm not really looking for anything bigger. on top of that, the end of 2008 is when apple claims they will have phased out some of the more toxic stuff -- arsenic, pvc, bfrs -- from their products, so 2009 is the earliest I want to give them more money.)
so, that's eleven days without access to my own computer. right before the start of school and right when I claimed I would (no, for serious, really and truly this time,) have those first four dissertation chapters drafted and submitted. instead I am drafting yet another 'so here's what went wrong with my life' email to my committee. I did grab all my dissy documents so hopefully I can get something done on a borrowed computer, but still.
meanwhile, I will spare you the whole timeline on this one, but I am currently living without a refrigerator. this was even more inevitable than the computer's power failure, due to the landlord's insistence that as long as things were staying somewhat cold, it didn't really matter that the fridge regularly leaked giant puddles of water all over the floor. I know there are plenty of people in the world who live without electricity, much less refrigeration, and with two 24-hour supermarkets in walking distance and a drawer full of takeout menus, I'm in no danger of starving. I just feel like everything is going increasingly off-kilter at a time when I could use a little solace and stability. (let's not talk about the fact that I still don't even know where, or with whom, I will be living at the end of the year.)
I don't believe in jinxes or hexes, but if you do, you might want to stay away from me for a while.
[ 25 August 2008] · [ ]
I'm having back-to-school dreams. Anyone else?
[ 23 August 2008] · [ ]
for whatever reason, this last full week in august is when most teachers seem to go on vacation. including me, now that I'm a teacher again. I brought work with me, including my first two unit plans (mostly finished) and my first four dissertation chapters (mostly unfinished), in the hopes that I'll be better at writing after a morning swim in sunset lake than I was after a morning spent watching the olympics. we'll see.
I did just come in from swimming -- and trying in vain to coax my neurotic dog to dive in with me, but apparently she will only go in the water when there are no humans in the way -- but instead of working I'm busy being annoyed with john hildebrand and his stupid, stupid newsday article about how easy the regents exams are. (for those of you who are neither in education nor in new york state, the regents are our high-stakes, subject-based standardized tests for high school students. you have to pass a bunch of them before you're allowed to graduate.)
a quick recap for those of you who don't feel like clicking over: in the course of doing a story on how some people think the regents are getting too easy, hildebrand accepted a challenge from the state education commissioner to take a test himself and see just how difficult (or not) they are. he chose to take the united states history exam -- "one of the few subjects I felt pretty sure of passing," like, way to push yourself -- and wound up with a score of 97. (scores are out of 100, but do not represent a percent correct.) all that is fine. what's annoying is that, after his morning pretending to be an eleventh-grader, he returned to his job as a 47-year-old, college educated, upper middle class, white male journalist and wrote this incredibly self-satisfied story about how the test was so easy because it was full of "questions that seemed virtually to answer themselves."
'One item on my test, administered to last year's high school graduates, showed a news photo of a demonstrator holding a "BURN ALL REDS" sign. Who was the object of the demonstrator's wrath? the test wanted to know. One choice provided was "communists."
Duh.'
so, here's the thing. I hate the regents. like many educators, I think they measure the wrong things -- in particular, vocabulary and reading comprehension rather than real content knowledge, and superficial fact recognition rather than true understanding -- and I am all in favor of articles that are critical of the tests. but the message should be, "wow, this is what we're using to determine whether kids know what the history of their country is all about?" NOT "dude, this test was soooo easy, you have to be a total moron to fail it!" the latter statement is offensive, obnoxious, and demonstrates a complete lack of self awareness. don't you think, for example, that a cartoon about "REDS" might have a different meaning to an american who lived through the cold war than it does to a sixteen-year-old kid who moved here from the dominican republic when she was in middle school? and don't you think that writing an essay might be a smidge easier for a professional journalist than it is for your average high school junior?
if you want to see the exam for yourself, it's archived on the state education department website along with all the other recent regents. hildebrand apparently took the june 2006 test. here's a sample question from that test, chosen at random. do you know the answer? do you think someone who doesn't is a moron who doesn't deserve a high school diploma?
The Panamanian revolt, the Russo-Japanese war, and the creation of the national parks system occurred during the presidency of:
(1) William McKinley
(2) Woodrow Wilson
(3) Herbert Hoover
(4) Theodore Roosevelt
in spite of my general cultural illiteracy, I was able to answer this question correctly, mostly because I know who was responsible for the national parks system. honestly, though, who cares?! this is a question for trivial pursuit or jeopardy. it is not a question for measuring whether someone understands how anything in the world actually works. what we need isn't harder tests. it's better tests -- or better assessments, if you think 'test' is a dirty word. there's an enormous difference. somehow mister I-got-a-97 seems to have missed that.
[via gothamschools.]
[ 18 August 2008] · [ ]
wow. it's hard to find something to say when all you can think about is something you don't want to write about. this situation is bad for blogs and worse for dissertations. not so great for emails either.
here's a small thing that happened today. I was walking to the gym when I crossed paths with two men who were unloading crates of watermelons from a delivery truck. they were parked around the corner from their destination, a grocery store on a busy stretch of flatbush avenue, so they had to maneuver the crates around a bevy of parked cars and through a small crowd of strollers on the sidewalk outside a coffee shop. on one trip, as they hoisted their load over the curb, a single melon toppled from the crate and smashed on the concrete, splitting open to reveal its seedless red innards.
it had broken open at the feet of a father who was leaning against a nearby parking meter, with one hand holding an iced coffee and the other resting on the handle of his daughter's maclaren. he looked down at the watermelon, balanced his cup in the folds of the stroller's collapsed canopy, and reached down to grab a fistful of fruit. right out of the rind, just scooped it out with his fingers, as if he were a monkey gathering lunch from the forest floor.
it's the first time the concept of the urban jungle has seemed tangible to me.
[ 14 August 2008] · [ ]
okay, here we go, in reverse chronological order.
my first and last lesson in the language of aliens (goodbye)
it was late in the year at the height
of the slow motion collision between summer and fall
when she took my hand for the last time
the trees were shrouded in tent caterpillar gauze, almost glowing
in the orange light of waning day
I was surprised; I was not used to having
my hand trapped by another
but there it was and I was being led
down a familiar path of pebbles and dust clouds
I was watching her while pretending
to stare straight ahead
her eyes were empty green and lips
parted in the manner of a sleeping child
pale and clammish like a dying feral thallid
what singular visual dysfunction could have led anyone
to believe we looked alike?
we stopped at a wide open field
there was no wind but my hair was somehow
caught in my mouth anyway
I found myself breathless and wordless
(that at least was familiar)
but there were tears in her eyes
tears! from my stoic paragon of empty
drug-induced happiness
nonono, I'm the crybaby here
something muddy and vaguely
beautiful
happened inside my head then
you were never meant to know
but I did, and I hated her for it
always running away from me, and
this time forever
you're so naive!
I was never good at being still
but I stayed flat-backed on that field
watching her star through the haze of my
dew-soaked eyelashes
until the spinning of my wretched little planet
carried it out of sight
we woke up thirty thousand lightyears and two
worlds apart
[this poem is about a recurring fantasy I had as a teenager, in which I had this soulmate/sister/caretaker who loved and understood everything about me. but she was actually an alien, and when it turned out that I somehow had the ability to read her alien thoughts (which of course no human had been able to do before), she had to leave and go back to her home in some other part of the galaxy.
in other words, "I'm so different and exceptional that no mere human could understand me, and now I'm being punished for my specialness by being left utterly alone."
a feral thallid, by the way, is a creature from magic: the gathering. just in case the whole "I wish E.T. had happened to me" vibe wasn't geeky enough.]
reflections in a black and white photograph
he sits in my mirror seat across the room
disappearing behind his curls and amulets
through the lemonscented dust and pigeonshadows
we can feel the mournful throbbing
of lost esp messages
in a dying storm of poems and notes slyly slipped
myriad scraps I kept
hidden inside a hollowed out book
we fall apart together
smothered in tranquil obscurity
in the corner, underneath her rocket cone hat
peering out with that surreptitious halfsmile
greta garbo
looks better with a mustache
[an entirely literal description of me sitting in my ninth grade english class. our desks were arranged in a big circle and a boy who was one of my closest friends from middle school tended to sit across from me. in sixth and seventh grades we'd spent a lot of classtime passing notes to each other, the best of which I had saved, and hidden inside an old trixie belden book. once we got to high school our lives and personalities diverged a bit, and I would often wonder what was going on with him.
as for greta garbo: that classroom was covered in posters, including this one of greta wearing an elaborate headpiece. someone had, at some point, pasted a handlebar mustache onto her upper lip. our teacher said she left it on because she thought greta garbo looked better in the mustache. so that's what that whole last stanza is about. when I was fourteen I thought it was freaking brilliant.]
skyrhyme
bleeding mindbeat burns and melts
an empty void of feeling, thought
a puzzle scattered on the stairs
hides how to find what I am not
it always seems to drift apart
before the chance to see is gone
escapes the grasp of trembling rhythms
ever pulsing through my palm
time eats stars that falling scream
the sky gets blacker by the day
in the sky I once had something
but in the end it sailed away
[bad rhymes; tortured syntax; mashed-up words; references to pain, blood, and loss. all that and I still have no idea what I was trying to say! do you?]
[finally, in the true spirit of the day, let's end with what I think is the Worst Poem I Ever Wrote. the other ones make me laugh at myself, but this one just makes me cringe. leave a comment if you make it to the end without gagging, unless you've gone blind from your eyeballs rolling out of your head. didn't I tell you it would be awesome?]
revelation in soap
I washed my hair
and started to cry
and I could not brush my tears away
because there were dizzysweet shampoo bubbles
all over my fingers
so they fell in miniature rain
and I could not deny them
But!
I killed the soap
It met a most satisfying demise
squashed and branded with my angry fingermarks
broken into incompletepieces
small enough to disappear into the whirlpool
under my still-dirty feet
I did not know I was so strong.
[ 12 August 2008] · [ ]
here's something that could turn out to be awesome: bad teenage poetry blogging day. personally, I have enough bad teenage poetry for a whole month, although a quick survey of my oeuvre reveals that, as a poet anyway, I transitioned from bad to merely middling somewhere around the age of nineteen. (thanks, poetry workshop? or maybe just the end of adolescence.)
according to the official compendium, bad teenage poetry comes in a number of common subgenres. here are the most popular:
I have definitely written at least a few of each, and way more than a few of some. but I think my bad teenage poetry comes in a few other flavors, especially my imagination is so much more interesting than reality and this imagery is more profound if I don't explain what it means.
so, what do you want to see?
[ 11 August 2008] · [ ]
I'm ashamed to admit that I have no idea why russia and georgia would go to war, and that reading the news hasn't made it much clearer to me. something to do with a territory dispute, I suppose, but it must be more than that for a country as big as russia to care about, right?
you know how a lot of people claim to hate science or math, but it turns out that what they actually hate is the way they learned science or math in school? I think that's what happened to me with social studies. when I was in elementary school I liked learning about other cultures, and in sixth and seventh grade we did ancient history and I thought it was fascinating. but then between eighth grade and my junior year of high school, I took three years of american history, looked at an endless number of textbook illustrations of men in white wigs, and decided I hated the entire discipline. in twelfth grade, when most of my friends were taking AP world history, I got my social science credit from a psychobiology class. when I got to college I cashed in my AP credits from US history and psychology and never looked back. I haven't studied modern global events since I was fourteen years old.
frankly I think it has had a pretty detrimental effect on my cultural literacy. I read the newspaper, and of course I do my best to understand the issues that are directly related to my voting habits. but I think I might be closer to that stereotype of the myopic, ignorant american than I want to admit. I know where to find a lot of countries on map, but that's because I like maps, not because I have any real knowledge of the countries themselves. just now I needed wikipedia to tell me that the current president of russia is dmitry medvedev. I know more about china's gymnastics teams than I do about its government.
I mean, really, I'm not sure I can pretend to be a well-informed citizen when I don't have a damn clue about the headline at the top of the website of record. it's shameful.
[ 09 August 2008] · [ ]
suddenly, I'm twenty-seven years old, and not where I expected to be. but here I am.
[ 04 August 2008] · [ ]
well, this is a tiny bit embarrassing, because I truly did not write that last post to make everyone think I was going to quit the internet. it was supposed to be more of a "so what should I be writing about?" post than a "please tell me how much you love me" post. I do appreciate the response though.
so let me tell you another little brooklyn story. on the days when I work in crown heights, I walk north on from eastern parkway after getting off at kingston avenue. as you go farther up, you start to see buildings that are burned out or boarded up, adorned with the strangely elegant remains of shredded awnings and broken neon signs. on one corner there's a big brick apartment building, four lots big I think, with an abandoned nightclub on the ground floor. on one side, the second-story windows are wide open, with no glass or plastic or plywood to stop you from looking in on someone's left-behind life.
one window has a blackened curtain dangling from a corner. if you look past it you can see the opposite wall: a closet door; a wrinkled nba poster; two pieces of faded construction paper, which once upon a time might have been blue, each cut along the traced outline of a small hand. above them, the ceiling is a like a cave full of stalactites, a mess of peeling paint.
this could be a metaphor for any number of things -- windows are, after all, for seeing through -- but this time I think I'll leave that decision up to you. I'm just fascinated by that room, by its hints of children, by how it is so throughly open but reveals nothing more than a mystery.
[ 02 August 2008] · [ ]