4 posts tagged “social justice”
Oh, boy, am I proud to be an American today. Not so proud to be a Californian, but so proud of my country for electing Barack Obama in dare I say a LANDSLIDE. (Or it will be when NC's votes finally come in. ) Look at that beautiful blue map, folks.
Eric and I spent Election Night at Silicon Valley for Obama's big party at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, which was pretty fantastic. I know most of those people put in WAY more time and effort than I did in getting Obama elected, but besides a few bucks sent to Howard Dean in 2003, I've never been remotely involved in anything political besides casting my ballot. So for me, knocking on doors before the primary, going to house parties before the convention, calling swing states this past month (with my MOM, no less!), putting up my Obama and No on 8 signs in our window ... it feels like the height of civic engagement. And with Obama's election, it feels like the dream of grassroots movements isn't dead, that unlikely dreams can prevail with enough people caring and doing just a little bit more.
I bet it feels that way for a lot of people today.
(Here's the tenuous book-related content): I read
Maybe he won't be able to achieve everything we've asked of him. Maybe we won't be able to do everything I hope he asks of us. But I think it's possible that the movement is bigger than the one person, and that how I feel -- that my contribution can make a difference, that my vote is important, that I'm not just a taxpayer or a constituent but a CITIZEN and that I too can bring about change -- is not my feeling alone but a feeling shared by millions of others who never dreamed that a day like this would happen in their lifetimes, if ever. So many wounds are beginning to heal today. So many wrongs are beginning to be rectified.
And then California has to go and harsh the vibe by stripping away basic human rights from fellow citizens. It's sad that the exultation about Obama's election is so tempered and tainted with the deep sorrow and outrage I feel about Prop 8 passing.
Let's hope the courts do the right thing again.
Hey, everyone! Looking for an antidote to all this doom-and-gloom market news? Need a little feel-good pick-me-up?
This ain't it:
But really, who hasn't needed help in their lives? Who hasn't made some bad decisions and needed to be bailed out? That's where your reliable friends and family come in. I speak from the position of ineffable privilege, since I had NONE of these poverty risk factors (totally stable, affluent upbringing), and managed to make absolutely NO stupid teenage decisions to derail my march to the Ivy League. In fact, my entire pre-adult experience can be summed up in this brief, completely true episode, circa 1992:
ME: What are we doing tonight?
Non-sexually-threatening, possible gay high school boyfriend: Let's go to this party.
(We arrive at the party. There is beer.)
NSTPGHSB: Are you going to drink?
ME: No, I have to drive (thanks, DARE!)
NSTPGHSB: Me neither. Let's go to a movie.
ME: Sure, but I should call my mom and tell her my plans have changed.
(We both responsibly call our parents.)
MOMS: Your plans have changed? You are leaving the beer party to go to a movie? You must have secret teenage ulterior sex-and-drug-related motives. Come home right now!
Damn.
But I digress. Even I, with advantages a-plenty -- personal, parental, educational, societal -- made some stupid decisions as a young independent and needed to be Bailed Out by my parents with cash. Had I no safely net, no one to help me out, these silly, easily-made errors would likely be dogging me and my credit rating still. Stupid, easily fixed, and yet somehow we let families be crushed by this for generations.
This book took a much different tone than Nickel and Dimed, although it covers a lot of the same ground. It did a much better job, I think, in examining the many factors that contribute to entrenched poverty, and doesn't canonize any of the people it pictures, the way Barbara Ehrenreich's book did a little. Not a quick read, and not uplifting -- it left me more disheartened with the problem than Fired Up, Ready To Go -- but still, compelling.
Another thing this book taught me: I am the only middle-class American that cleans my own house. Even my robot slave Scooba went all SkyNet on me and I mop my own floor. Seriously, a chapter of this book was devoted to the unhealthy stressors of poverty, which included cleaning one's own house. Once people claw their way above the poverty line, apparently their first call is to the Merry Maids.
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.
