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]  ·  [ ]