Thanks to "Seedy Pete" at Worldwide Hippies

I loved this response to a "Gawker" column at Worldwide Hippies: President Orders College Kids To Do Something. 

Here's the deal, Mr. President. 

I am going to vote Democrat in the midterms. Not because I believe you or your party will accomplish a single goddamned thing that I care about; they are clearly inept to the point of ridiculousness and your fetish for compromise would be laudable if the other party shared it but since they have openly stated they are unwilling to negotiate on anything it's an enormous handicap. But I will vote Democrat, because the alternative is actually horrifying. 

I am disappointed that the public option was dropped without a fight in favor of drug price fixing deals with Big Pharma and a mandate to purchase insurance from the same handful of companies whose monopoly on insurance is why we have a WHO score on par with a third world country in the first place. I am disappointed that your party has rolled over on fighting the crooked Bush tax cuts, or extending health benefits for 9/11 first responders, or repealing DADT. Want to know what those four things have in common? They were all overwhemingly popular with the public during a period when your party had a majority (briefly even a supermajority) and yet without exception the Democrats in Congress either traded away core parts of their party platform in exchange for absofuckinglutely nothing or just completely bobbled the ball and let the GOP control the debate. You people are sexually attracted to failure. 

Just a few years ago the GOP passed spectacularly unpopular legislation with considerably less votes in Congress...granted, unlike you they were able to count on the fact that the opposition party was so spineless they'd vote for things they claimed to oppose out of fear of being painted as unpatriotic. But the Democrats don't have the advantage of getting to fight against Democrats, so at some point you people are going to have to grow a goddamned backbone. 

So why vote Democrat at all, if your party is determined to fail at everything you try? Because at least you're trying, and the opposition party is a veritable death cult with no plan beyond getting back into power so that they can do the exact same things that ran the country off the rails in the first place. 

But don't expect me to get excited about it. Don't expect me to volunteer my time and money to help Democrats get elected the way I did in 2008. You squandered every opportunity we gave you, ignored your professed values, punted on the first down at every opportunity, and ignored your base in order to court the votes of people who wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire. Then election season rolls back around and suddenly you remember to pay lip service to our values? Piss off. You don't get another dime from me until I see you people care about progress sometime other than election season. And stop mistaking my disgust for apathy, or my expectation that Democrats in Congress do their goddamned jobsfor unrealistic magical thinking. No one expected a magic wand to be waved and the trainwreck the GOP spent 8 years created to be undone in 2, but what we did expect was that you would at least make an effort. Your party has failed to meet the already exceedingly low expectations I set for it. 

Stop mistaking my disgust for apathy … Do I have an AMEN?

Why I didn't go to the Obama rally …

President Obama spoke in my hometown yesterday, and I had a hard time mustering much enthusiasm for him. I made some comments on Facebook to that effect, and a friend of a friend commented that liberals shouldn't be blaming him for his failure to right the wrongs of the Bush administration's 8 years in just 20 months -- something which I have heard often. It led me to want to clarify why I am so disappointed in the Obama presidency, to find a way to put it into words so I don't just sound like a disenchanted liberal who feels that Obama has failed to deliver the goods fast enough.

The essence of it is this: Aside from the backpedaling on campaign promises (which I consider to be standard political fare,) I resent that the Obama White House treats people on the progressive left (like me) as part of the problem instead of part of the solution. Because the ideas that we champion -- ideas such as universal single payer health care, a WPA-style employment recovery plan, removing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan -- are common sense, good for the country, and tried and true. We are not obstructionists, nor are we naysayers. We are the yea-sayers, the ones who would happily pick up the mops and get to work, as Obama exhorted his critics to do last year.

We are the ones who got to work to elect this guy.

And they treat us as if we are, at best, inconsequential. Irrelevant. Then we are chastised for not wanting to come to the rallies to hear the pretty words. And it disturbs me greatly that so many who do the chastising are other progressives.

Obama is charasmatic. He is smart, and a good speaker. However I am wary of the cult of personality that continues to surround him. I want action in the right direction on his administration's part. I want acknowledgement and respect.

BTW, this doesn't mean that I am not voting in November. I am quite aware that people in other places die for the right to vote. But let me remind other liberals who might criticize my stance, questioning my government is also a right we hold dear -- or used to.

Oh Dear Blog, Do You Still Love Me?

Blogging hasn't been happening much lately. Blame it on grad school, blame it on Facebook, blame it on the Bossa Nova. But I can at least manage book reviews, can't I? Oh yeah, I've been reading. A little of this, a little of that. And always something by Terry Pratchett to break up the monotony. I spent this past week in self-imposed exile (a.k.a. vacation) on a nearly deserted island, which seemed like a good time to reread Pratchett's most recent children's book Nation. Nation is a departure from Pratchett's other books, maybe even something of a disappointment for die-hard Pratchett fans. It isn't set on Discworld; instead Pratchett plays fast and loose with some of the history and geography of Earth to create a parallel world. It was also the first book he wrote after the sad revelation that he has a rare form of early onset Alzheimer's disease. (His disease has most noticeably affected his motor abilities; he can no longer type and must dictate his stories to a typist.)

Nation opens in a time of upheaval in the mid-nineteenth century. There has been a flu epidemic in Britain which has claimed the King and a great number of his heirs, and a ship has been dispatched to one of the furthest outposts of the British empire to fetch the next living heir. Meanwhile in the great Pelagic Ocean there has been a massive tsunami that brought death and destruction to the many island nations there.

Mau is an inhabitant of one of the islands, his people known simply as "the Nation." No longer a boy and not yet a man, Mau was returning from his initiation into adulthood on a distant island when the wave struck. He returns to his home island to find that he is the only survivor.

Daphne is a well brought up British girl, who was sailing out to join her father in Port Mercia in the Pelagic Ocean. The Sweet Judy, the ship on which she travels, has already withstood an attempted mutiny when the tsunami hits. The captain and remaining crew are drowned in the wave and the ship is driven to Mau's island. Daphne and a foul-mouthed parrot have survived.

Inevitably Mau and Daphne meet. They form a bond based on mutual survival, that grows into a friendship over time. As time goes on, more survivors of the tsunami find their way to the Nation, and Mau -- lost in his grief, in limbo between childhood and manhood, and questioning the gods of his people who would take so many innocent lives -- must act as the chief of the Nation.

In some ways Nation is less satirical than Pratchett's other books, but many of the themes are familiar. As always he raises questions about government and organized religion, and also white supremacy, class, and empire. Because it was written for a younger audience, at times the narrative seems too simple, but ultimately Nation is a very wise and thought-provoking book. I recommend it, and if you can read it while marooned on an island, so much the better.

What's Up With All the Teacher Bashing?

Excellent article from the editors of an excellent publication, Rethinking Schools. 

Teachers have always been devalued in the United States, but in the past months the pace and intensity of the attacks have escalated sharply. Spurred by the June 2 deadline for the second round of Race to the Top, states have raced to fire more teachers, tie pay and evaluation to student test scores, close or reconstitute more schools, and disempower teachers' unions and teaching as a profession-trampling teachers, students, and communities in the process.

What lies behind this unprecedented assault on teachers? And, even more important, what can we do about it? We believe that these attacks are part of an effort to dismantle public education and that we need an effective, collaborative strategy to combat it.

I was teaching first grade at a high poverty school back in the mid-nineties, when a lot of these so-called reforms started coming down the pike. The changes we were being asked to make at that time were distressing. We were being told to give up what I considered to be developmentally appropriate practices in the name of meeting the "standards and benchmarks." It was so distressing that I fled first grade for a Pre-K program, and even considered leaving teaching altogether.


That was 15 years ago. Since then I have taught both first grade and kindergarten (sometimes both at the same time, which is just crazy-making.) And while I am still very concerned about teaching in a developmentally appropriate way, I have also made my peace with the increased emphasis on academic achievement -- as long as it is done effectively. Over the last couple of years my district, and particularly my school, has been looking very closely at targeted interventions to give kids the basic skills they need, and I think we are slowly seeing what is known as "the achievement gap" close. And I feel good about it because  it is good for the kids and their families. I understand that some of my teaching practices from the past were good for the kids that were going to succeed anyway, but less so for the kids that struggled.


How does this relate to teacher bashing? Every teacher I know who is working in so-called failing schools is committed to seeing all of their students succeed. We work hard and are willing to partner with parents to see our schools become the best that they can be for all students. Oh yeah, and we are the teachers' union.


I would like to see the people who bash teachers, who want to weaken the unions that represent us (and tangentially the students and families) spend a week doing my job. Just one week. I'll bet they couldn't even finish it out, much less actually teach anything. The article is correct to point out that it is patently unfair to single out teachers.

It would be nice if Newsweek were suddenly worried about how race and class affect student success. But these diatribes against teachers are not based in a commitment to equity.

No, if closing the achievement gap were the goal, we would see demands for adequate, equitable resources and funding for every student in every school-demands, for example, for quality early childhood education programs, full-time librarians, robust arts and physical education programs, mandated caps on class size, and enough time for teachers to prepare and collaborate. We would also see a renewed commitment to affirmative action in university admissions; a drive to recruit and nurture teachers of color; a commitment to ensure that students come to school ready to learn because their families have housing, food, medical care, and jobs; and an end to zero tolerance discipline policies that criminalize youth.  

But if these attacks on teachers aren't about ending the systemic racism that continues to undermine our education system, what is the goal?  With forces as seemingly disparate as the Obama administration, the Walton Foundation, the late Milton Friedman, and the New York Times all pushing the same ideas, this is a complicated question, but there are at least two major goals: destroy the power of the teachers' unions, and turn the public school system from a public trust into a new market for corporate development. From the time of Reagan, who used his "welfare queen" stories to scapegoat the poor as a basis on which to destroy the welfare system, this has been a tried-and-true approach to privatization: use visceral anecdotes to whip up hysteria that a system is "broken," argue that only market competition can fix the situation, and then sell off pieces of the public sector to private corporations. This time, teachers are the scapegoats.

What can you do? It is as easy as speaking up the next time your co-worker or ill-informed brother-in-law starts bashing teachers and public education. Ask them if maybe they'd like companies like BP, Blackwater, or Halliburton to be running their children's schools.


Read the article in its entirety here.

Large Print Edition of my blog …

 … courtesy of Daisy. >^..^< (She stepped on something behind the monitor.)

Left Behind?

I have been exceedingly disappointed with the Obama Administration's stance on education. Rather than reaffirming support for public education, this president -- with former "CEO" of Chicago schools Arne Duncan at his side -- has been pushing harder for so-called "school choice" and reinforcing the more punitive pieces of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, formerly No Child Left Behind.) As an educator this upsets me so much, but it is difficult to articulate all of the ways in which I find it abhorrent.

I subscribe to a listserv called Public Education Network (PEN) but I rarely make the time to look at it. Sneaking a peek this morning, I was reminded why I should be paying attention. There was a link to the Washington Post's education column "The Answer Sheet", with the headline Christian Churches Oppose Race To The Top, Obama Blueprint: 

Here is an extraordinary letter that should erase any doubt that opposition to the Obama administration's $4 billion Race to the Top is wide and deep.

Sent recently to President Obama and U.S. lawmakers by the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, a community of 36 communions with a combined membership of 45 million people, this letter expresses deep concern about the education priorities of Race to the Top and of Obama's “blueprint” for education reform.

It criticizes the administration's effort to push states to increase the number of charter schools, its plan to turn some of the federal money used to help poor children into competitive grants, its punitive approach to dealing with low-performing schools, and the "ugly" demonization of public school teachers.

This Pastoral Letter is so absolutely spot-on, I wanted to stand up and cheer. I urge you to read it in its entirety. The thing is though, it came out on May 18, and this is the first I have seen it. Its content needs to be shouted from rooftops. Members of Congress need to read it. Dismantling public schools not only undermines our alleged democracy, but Obama's blueprint for education hurts the very children that everyone claims to care the most about.

Book Review: Ash

Ash by Malinda Lo is a novel-length retelling of Cinderella for young adult readers. Many of the elements of the plot will be recognizable: Aisling (nicknamed Ash) loses her beloved mother, her father remarries a proud woman with two daughters of her own, her father dies leaving her at the mercy of the stepmother. There are differences as well, including a subtext about conflict between the old ways still practiced among the people of the North where Aisling has grown up and the "modern" thinking in the more developed cities of the South. While some people choose to dismiss it as superstition, in Aisling's world the lines between waking and dreaming, real world and the fairy realm, are very much blurred. The magic isn't identified as good or bad, it is simply there. There are also some significant differences from Cinderella which I will not disclose here.

It took me a little while to get into Ash, and there were times when I bogged down in Lo's descriptive text. Now that I have finished it and am reflecting on it as a whole, I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed it. It is very well written. Retellings of fairy tales are a genre of fantasy unto themselves. If you enjoy reading them, you will probably like Ash.


Recommended for young teens and up. There is some sexual innuendo, but nothing explicit.

Angst

I am struggling with something. It has to do with money, and I have a very complicated and angst-ridden relationship with money (and those whom I perceive to have money.) My 14-year old daughter worked for 2 weeks at a summer camp which she has attended before as a camper. Later in the summer they will have a program for teen campers. Tuition is out of our price range: close to $2000. Last week when I picked our daughter up for a night off, she mentioned that there was still space in the teen camp, that she really wanted to go, and that the directors had told her that there was scholarship money available; we had only to apply.

This week I received an email, and then a phone call, from a camp board member -- who handles much of the registrar duties -- asking whether we had given any more thought to our daughter's attendance at the camp and how much money we thought we could contribute toward her tuition. Here is my struggle: We really hadn't planned for her to attend camp, she hadn't shown much of an interest earlier in the spring, and in no way had we budgeted for it (not that we are particularly good at budgeting anyway.) I feel that this opportunity should not have been offered to her -- with the implied promise of scholarship money -- without including us in the conversation, if there was going to be an expectation of a monetary contribution on our part. It puts us in the position of being the bad guys to our daughter -- having to say no, we can't afford it.

Now, nobody has said that we can't apply for a full scholarship. However, just the fact that the question was raised of us making a contribution tells me that there is an expectation, spoken or not. And what that does is put me in a place of feeling ashamed.

Having to ask for help with money makes me feel ashamed. It is a gut-level, emotional response on my part that I haven't really been able to cleanse myself of, even after years of therapy. It touches on all kinds of things: the thought that I haven't gone on in higher education so that I can make more money, questions about how we choose to spend any extra money we might have, the thought that maybe if we were "better" with our money we wouldn't need scholarships, etc. etc. etc. There's room there for a lot of self-recrimination, and I go there very easily.

Yet I have a big problem with "strings attached" scholarships. People for whom money is not an issue do not understand that it can be an emotional and psychological burden, as well as a financial burden on a family or individual. Even if the strings are just asking one to justify their request for financial help. It is putting up one more roadblock for people who already have a lot of roadblocks to get over.

I'm not saying all of this to elicit sympathy for poor me and my economic plight. Our finances aren't great, but we're okay for now, and a hell of a lot better off than some others. I know that. We probably could come up with a token contribution of $100, and forgo something else, and ultimately not really notice too much. But if it is hard for me, what is it like for other people, for whom there is little flexibility?

Individuals -- even very decent, well-meaning, generous individuals -- who operate from a place of privilege don't, or maybe can't, understand what it feels like.

This maybe the subject of another blog post, but it's uncomfortable and painful, so I'd better spill it out here while I'm on a roll. I run into this a lot among Quakers, my spiritual community. There is a saying that Quakers came to the so-called new world to do good, and did very well indeed. That is to say, that on the whole, Friends tend to be quite comfortably well off. There is an expectation that Friends will practice "right giving" with their money, and indeed Friends are very generous. For example, if the children are selling cookies at the rise of Meeting to raise money for earthquake relief in Haiti, it is not unusual for them to raise $500 very quickly. Friends in my Meeting have also been very quick to respond when it comes to hooking up someone in need with an agency that can help. And even to make private, personal financial donations.

However during the 2 years that my husband was unemployed, when we came close to losing our house (and I know we're lucky to own a house,) again and again I ran up against individuals that simply didn't get that when I said we didn't have extra money, we didn't have extra money. And when it came to making a financial contribution to Camp Woodbrooke for appearance's sake because I was on the board and we were fundraising, or when as a congregation we are asked to increase our individual donations to the Meeting, I feel angry and ashamed at the same time: ashamed for the reasons discussed above, and angry that when all is said and done, my "in kind" contributions really don't carry the same weight as a monetary contribution.

I suspect this will continue to cause me angst, and I just have to deal with it. But it is tormenting me right now, and I really needed to unload. No response necessary, but as always I do welcome your thoughts.

Book Review: The Invention of Hugo Cabret

My carefree days of summer reading were short-lived. Next week I begin a class for my school library media specialist certification, called "Trends in K-12 Literature." The reading list is extensive, and I've tried to get a head start on it. (Thank heavens, no boy wizards on the list.) I've seen The Invention of Hugo Cabret around, but I probably wouldn't have gravitated toward it if it wasn't required reading. At approximately 525 pages the book looks like a tome, but it is really more of an extended picture book with pages and pages of illustrations that are reminiscent of an old movie, interspersed with Hugo Cabret's story. (Indeed, it won the Caldecott medal -- given for best illustrations in a picture book -- in 2007.)

Hugo Cabret is an orphan who, due to tragic circumstances, lives by himself in a Paris train station. His most treasured possessions are a notebook of drawings from his deceased father and a rusty automaton from the attic of a museum. His path crosses that of an old toymaker and his young god-daughter, and there is a mystery that Hugo must solve. (I don't want to say much more because it might spoil the magic of this book.)

Author Brian Selznick says that he was inspired by real events that were recounted in the book Edison's Eve: a Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life. I found the format hard to get into at first, although veteran readers of comic books and graphic novels won't be disturbed by it at all. As an adult reader, I thought that the story moved a little too quickly and was tied up a little too neatly at the end. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and would have loved it when I was about 10. Judging by the number of copies of this book in my summer school library, it is a popular book with middle grade readers.

If you like reading kids' books, if you like old movies, or if you're looking for a fun book for a 9-12 year old reader, I recommend this book.