3 posts tagged “school”
I'm thinking a lot about the upcoming election. And by "a lot", I mean EVERY WAKING MOMENT. Apart from trying to do what I can for Barack Obama in $20 increments and hour-slot phonebanking, my colleague and I are putting together a mock election at our school, complete with 8th-grade-led "town hall" meetings presenting the candidates' positions, amid Much Political Sniping and Griping.
There are apparently a handful of high-rolling, sensitive-type Republicans who are feeling oppressed by the largely Democratic community of my Jewish Day School. One has even questioned whether I am providing "equal time" to the Republican candidate in our library collection (an "activist librarian"!). I am professionally offended!
So I've not been trumpeting my politics at school, so much. But I am tired of lurking in the dark, people! I don't need no stinkin' secret ballot! Here are my ENDORSEMENTS for all y'all:
PRESIDENT: Barack Obama. Why: Time for change!
US REP (Dist. 15): Mike Honda. Why: No time for change!
STATE SENATE (Dist. 11): Joe Simitian. Why: Sounded good on the smart voter website!
STATE ASSEMBLY: Jim Beall, Jr. Why: Seems to not be stinking it up?
SUPERIOR COURT JUDGE: Diane Ritchie. Why: Need some women judges!
WEST VALLEY-MISSION COMMUNITY COLLEGE DISTRICT: Okay, these I am actually leaving blank. They are not exactly blanketing me with information about my choices.
CAMPBELL-UNION HIGH SCHOOL DISTRICT: Lizandro Carrasco and Rick Costanzo. Why: ZZ's in their names! (not only that, but who can resist?)
CAMBRIAN SCHOOL DISTRICT: Randy J. Scofield and Susan Pyne. Why: Like the incumbents! Cambiran School District seems to be doing OK!
PROP 1A: No. Why: Hate trains. Hate LA. No need to get there quickly or really at all.
PROP 2: Yes. Why: If I lived my life in a box, I would also like to turn around occasionally. It doesn't seem that much to ask.
PROP 3: Weak Yes. Why: How can you vote against children's hospitals? BUT, why do they need more money when still have money left? Conclusion: bad karma to vote against sick kids.
PROP 4: No. Why: Pretty sure pregnant minors seeking abortions need care and compassion. Pretty sure if they could get it from their parents, that's the first place they would go. QUIT TRYING TO MAKE IT HARD FOR YOUNG VULNERABLE KIDS.
PROP 5: No. Why: Doesn't really change too much.
PROP 6: No Why: Sick of spending money on prisons. Bet there are lots of things we could be doing when kids are three to keep them out of prison when they come of age.
PROP 7: No Why: Don't really understand it. All the green and conservation groups are recommending "no". So, no.
PROP 8: No no no. Why: Because I love marriage. And I love being a family. And I BELIEVE KIDS DO BETTER WITH TWO PARENTS. So let's GIVE them two parents. Let's STRENGTHEN marriage. Let's GIVE SIMPLE BASIC CIVIL RIGHTS TO ALL AMERICANS. Jesus Christ, I can't believe there is even debate about this. And what I laugh at most is this: "Traditional" marriage. Let us take a look at the Judeo-Christian patriarchs, yes?
ABRAHAM: Two wives (or a wife and a concubine -- open to interpretation)
ISAAC: Don't know. Leasha, help a gentile out.
JACOB: Four wives, or two wives and two concubines.
MOSES: I think only one, but I like her, because she's a shiksa
SOLOMON: Like, a thousand.
DAVID: What, eight or something? Plus killing off the inconvenient husband?
So it's very clear that this tradition of marriage is really worth venerating, and that two same-sex adults who want to marry would be an abomination, right? There's just nothing to the argument in favor except bigotry and fear and intolerance.
PROP 9: No. Why: Already exists, pretty much.
PROP 10: I think No. Why: Because, from the wording of the propostion, it sounds suspiciously like it will be used mostly to incentivize people to buy Priuses. Check it out -- Priuses don't need any incentives. What we need is incentives to drive everything less, Priuses included. Also, it seems like VC firms and such are already getting into alternative energy, again without state incentives.
PROP 11: No Why: Because it doesn't affect federal districts. Otherwise, I'd be all over this. Put it up again next year and make it determine our US Representatives.
PROP 12: Yes. Why: See Prop 3. Bad karma to vote against disabled veterans.
MEASURE B: Yes. Why: Because BART should go to San Jose. Now, I spent a goodly time commuting to a job in SF and living in Oakland, and let me tell you, BART sucks. And then, when you move to the South Bay or Peninsula and you get to experience the pleasure cruise that is CalTrain, only then do you realize what a prison barge BART really is. But, nonetheless. Let's have a viable regional rail and quit being so backward with our pubic transit.
Don't forget to vote on November 4th.
I came to teaching through a program called San Jose Teaching Fellows, which was a "highly selective [and unsurprisingly defunct now, I believe -- AZB] program that is mobilizing talented young and mid-career professionals" to teach in the pretty dismal San Jose Unified School District. Not nearly as selective as Teach For America, and not nearly as demanding, it seems, from reading this book. But pretty darn demanding and exhausting as it was.
Donna Foote does a pretty good job of balanced reporting as she follows several TFA "corps members" through their first year in an LA high school. She represents their passion and energy, their disillusionment and "reillusionment", and their successes without completely endorsing The Program. As a "career teacher" (kinda) and an employee
of a wealthy private school (totally), I am deeply conflicted about TFA and this book did nothing to bring me down on either side of the fence. These teachers are passionate, but utterly unpracticed (and untested); they are not yet burned out (and yet they almost ALL LEAVE when their two years are up, if they make it that long); they are only assigned to schools that ALREADY have gigantic turnover -- but they do seem to make a difference in their short tenure.
Two things that were somewhat compelling -- the principal of the school in question described his conversion from anti- to pro-TFA as coming to see them as soldiers. We have a volunteer army in which people enlist for brief, finite amounts of time (at least, we used to before GWB's endless war kicked in), they receive brief but intense training, and then they learn on the job, so to speak. (Although, as I write this, don't you think we might be doing a bit better in Iraq if our soldiers needed to take a tyear-long credentialling program, pass a Middle East proficiency exam and spend a year observing a "master soldier"? Hmm.)
The other was a quote from Wendy Kopp, the founder of TFA, who said that part of the goal of TFA was not only to provide excellent teachers for underserved areas, but to grow a network of Leaders who would have first-hand experience of educational inequity. So that, once they leave TFA, and go to law school, and then run for office, the Crisis in Education will be seared into their personal values and commitments.
That actually makes a lot of sense, copout though it is in terms of address the "teach-for-awhile" stigma.
My personal feeling is ... I was such a shitty teacher in my first year, and I'm so much better now. It has nothing to do with the ridiculously stupid and worthless credentialing program I went through, and everything to do with experience, confidence and SEEING OTHER TEACHERS DO THEIR THING (even the bad ones!). What we ought to have is apprenticeships, where you pass a few tests to weed out the total idiots, then spend a year or two being an OBSERVATIONAL AIDE in a classroom in the field where you want to work. You get paid, the teacher gets some assistance, you get to see how to do it or not do it, and then you've got experience to draw on before you ever enter a classroom. Fit some student teaching in there somewhere. Maybe some of the methods classes. Who knows?
And -- go year-round. There, I've said it. 4 days a week of regular curriculum, 1 day of enrichment or remedial instruction for the kids, 1 day of planning for the teacher. ALL YEAR ROUND. And all those teachers who took the job simply so they could veg by the pool in July and August (and because the coursework is sooo easy) can go work in fast food.
As I have mentioned, ever since I became a parent I find Holocaust literature nearly unbearable in the visceral horror it elicits in me. Fiction, non-fiction, whatever ... it makes me want to stockpile food and weapons in case Anyone Ever Dares Threaten My Child.
Naturally, this is a rather large part of my job. So I try to avoid it in my pleasure reading, when I get to read for pleasure. And yet, somehow, in the past few weeks, during my Completely Debilitating Flu-like Symptoms, three (3) (!) ... no, wait, FOUR of them slipped into my bedtime reading. What the?
The Zookeeper's Wife was clearly the most brutal of the four, being a true story and taking place in Warsaw. Like most narratives about those who hid Jews, it manages to be both inspiring and admonishing -- why didn't more people do it and WOULD YOU DO IT? I think about this all the time, literally all the time. Who am I, in my position of (relative) privilege and (relative) power, who am I not speaking for? How do you judge history's nameless who Did Not Act? How should my own complacency be judged? Is it not the absolute height of hypocrisy to say "oh, the horror" and then send my time and money not to Darfur, or to lobbying ol' Zoe Lofgren and Mmes. Boxer and Feinstein, but to AT&T for my super DSL connection and my nifty cell phone and to my own bed to read escapist novels?
Yes it is. You can see why I try to maybe keep off these on a regular basis. No one likes her chai tea to turn to ashes in her mouth.
Anyway. Okay, so The Amber Room and People of the Book were both about priceless "degenerate" art looted by the Nazis (oh, shit, there's ANOTHER recent YA book I read about this: The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World, by E.L. Konigsburg of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler fame ... no wonder I'm so spun up). Amber Room was Da Vinci Code-esque (although far more artistically crafted -- that Dan Brown is a Bad Writer) and not really worth it for the Thrill. People of the Book dealt with the Sarajevo Haggadah, and is AWESOME. And the heroine is a book conservator! Again, the tragedy is that the book's parade through persecution: expulsion, Inquisitions, Nazis, Serbs ... like a flip book of anti-Semitism through the ages.
I wanted to write more about The History of Love -- I really liked it -- but I'm drained and I have to go ponder my complacency.
