so, what do I think? #1

I teach high school math in a very poor, very violent neighborhood in a major US city with a really bad school system. I'm a first-year teacher, and it's a mess. My background is intellectual, upper middle class, focused on social responsibility, politically active, and liberal: that describes my parents and grandparents, and the parents of many of my friends. Almost none are teachers. Periodically, people ask what policies I think would improve the public schools. Recently, a stranger on a plane asked. This is the first of what I hope will be an occasional series exploring some possibilities. I'm interested in seeing how my thinking changes over the next year and a half.

To put one of my premises out there: I imagine, as I say these things, a conservative (like one I recently met on a plane) saying that parents should be responsible for these changes; that expectation is not reasonable or realistic, for reasons I might write about later, and really I think it's irrelevant. Do you want students in low-income districts to have the same educational opportunities as students in wealthy districts? Yes or no. If yes, saying parents should be responsible is a cop-out, unless you have a plan to make or help parents be responsible. Without further ado, the proposals.

1. More money. Schools in impoverished areas shouldn't get funding parity with wealthier districts - they should get double the per student funding. Among other things, parents in wealthy districts provide a vast number of resources that poor parents simply cannot provide: graphing calculators that students can use at home, buying college reference books, making sure their students get therapy or medications if they have mental illness, dental care, computers and internet at home - the list goes on. Money is not the only thing my students need, and more could certainly be done with the current budget, but let's be real: many of the people who refuse to throw money at the education of poor children are the same ones who throw money at their own children's education. They're not doing that for nothing.

2. More staff. See #1. Having someone constantly available to manage a student who's out of control (e.g. an office to send that student to) would free up a lot of my time to actually teach. Instead, what happens is that if a student disrupts or endangers the class, I write up a disciplinary referral and it gets dealt with later; if I'm really lucky, someone will be available to take that student, but those people all teach their own classes and are pretty overworked; they also don't have anywhere to put the student where the student will be supervised. In better-functioning schools, you can just send a kid to the office for cursing at you; in my school, no way.

More staff also means smaller class sizes, which, wow. That would be awesome. Thirty-three kids is a lot. Maybe even having two preps be standard - I have that this year, and it's great, and I don't know how I functioned without it for 2 months.

3. Better staff. The quality of most teachers is, well, not stellar. (I include myself in this, though I think one way in which I am unlike many of the other teachers at my school is that I really want to get better.) The recent NYT magazine article about the achievement gap and the KIPP schools casually mentioned that KIPP teachers work 15-16 hour days. That's great for the students, but it's not a national policy solution. You can get a few more smart, motivated, ambitious, etc, people into teaching by upping the mystique, and a lot more by making public schools better work environments, but to do this on a national scale you'll have to up the salaries. That kind of time commitment is what people do in I-banking, where they are making boatloads of money. I'd suggest making teacher schools something like law or MBA programs, where you worry about whether you'll get in and have to be intensely devoted to it for at least a year or two; I'd also suggest having teacher salaries start at $60,000 and go up to $150,000. You could even start lower if you were willing to make the ramp pretty steep. Teaching will never fully compete with Wall Street - that's not the idea. But you want a lot of talented people who have other options? You're going to have to pay for them.

I am not sure if doing that would produce a system where I wanted to work right now. For me, teaching was a step up financially, and I was fine with that. But realistically, money is a great way to attract people to a particular job, and while that kind of environment might make me less interested in teaching now, the money (and the doubtless improved work environment) might also make me more interested in teaching long-term.

4. Better management. See #3 and #1. Management at most public schools is abysmal. I have this fantasy of having professional development that's not a complete waste of my time, seeing the teaching schedules for half-days and special events before the day of, and getting feedback from observations. This, again, you have to pay for.

5. Better staff/management development. I'm going to write more about this another time.

6. For the luvva Pete, can I please just have a curriculum for every class? And maybe a computer in my classroom? And while I'm wishing for the impossible, how about paper for the flippin' copy machine?

Idlewild

What's most interesting about Idlewild (OutKast's gorgeous movie set in a semi-mythical Prohibition-era Georgia) is not what it owes to the past, but to the present. The score, of course - there's no way those songs would have existed 'then' - but also the dance scenes, floating somewhere between musicals and music videos, and the characters.

It's simple, really. Before there were gangstas, there were gangsters; before there was crack, there was hootch; before there was the club, there was the club. More complicated things, too: the role of women as simultaneous seduction and salvation, the dream of getting out, the fear and reality of violence, having to choose between being cool and having a future. Idlewild is about now, dressed up as then. Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street is about the same subjects, but it's not half as pretty.

home is....

Three full-time residents, three cars. Looking around a roomful of friends and realizing I've known everyone in it for over 10 years, except for the little siblings (I met them 8 years ago). Bonjovi on the radio. "You only bought two and a half pounds of green beans? That might be enough for your little brother.... by himself!" Constantly being interrupted. An orange and a penny in my Christmas stocking; also contact solution. At least two glasses of wine a night. The promise of the interstate. New bars with exciting beer lists and murals - what's happening to this place? My grandmother's artwork on the walls. Scraping the frost off my car before I can go anywhere. Buying rounds at the bar. My dad making cappuccino. Watching most of the first season of Big Love on DVD. My little brother at the computer. Being the only one up at 2 am. Borrowing cash from my mom to go out for a beer. Drinking cream soda and root beer. Apple pie. A golden retriever sleeping sprawled between the top of the stairs and the door. Strip malls. When the cop who breaks up the [very quiet] party is my high school biology teacher's son. Sleeping until noon. Homemade granola. Tonight's dinner question: what would you do about Iraq? They let you smoke in the bars. Almost certainly being safe to drive. My sister napping on the couch. Mexican wedding cookies, molasses-ginger drops, sugar cookies, and lebkuchen. Emmy Lou Harris singing "Light of the Stable." Knowing how to get everywhere. Do you want to talk to someone on the other side of the house? No need to go anywhere - just shout! Knowing that Git'n'Go used to be a QuikTrip. Winter grasses at the edge of the garden. The lieutenant governor coming over for brunch. Frustrating and comfortable. Drinking beer in an outdoor gear outlet store at 3 am because my friend is the manager, and the cops broke up the party at her house. Dancing to Journey. My friends' parents. Hearing about Catholic Worker houses. Hypothetical karaoke. More prosciutto than you could possibly eat. Drinking champagne. The dishwasher running constantly. Driveways with basketball hoops. Someone has to go to the grocery store every day. New kittens. Two dogs. Trading Christmas cookie plates with my friends' families. The gold dome of the Capitol building. Being surprised by how white everyone is. Driving past my high school. Reading articles aloud to each other. My mom asking what I think of the garden. Red pepper pasta sauce. Adriatic pita bread. Blessings for the road. Never wanting to stay. Never wanting to leave.

sex-neutral

In 2005, I borrowed a book called A Return to Modesty¹ and got kind of annoyed with it.

Conveniently, someone else has written the same book again, so I don't have to come up with new ways to be irritated. Dawn Eden² is older, and she became an observant Catholic instead of an observant Jew, but it's basically the same old same old. Some woman becomes religious, stops having sex, and realizes how much happier and more fulfilled she is when she's chaste (or celibate or modest or whatever) and religious. Next step: publish a book so all the rest of us can learn how to be just as satisfied with our lives.³

The arguments are oddly similar to the way polyamory advocates sound sometimes: "Why didn't I know about this before? I spent all that time trying to be [monogamous/promiscuous]! I never realized that I actually could sleep with [lots of people/no one] without being [skeevy/lame]!"

The most noticeable aspect of this interview with Eden is that the focus of her romantic life, both before and after she was celibate, was primarily on finding a husband and secondarily on relieving her insecurities about being good enough and lovable enough. Note that when she talks about her pleasure in sex, she says:

There were times when I would count how many men I had had sex with in one two-week period and thought, "I must be this really hot, attractive chick to attract so many men."

Also:

I used to believe that, if I knew that I would never get married, I would kill myself.

Not anymore, but now,

as I was writing, I didn't want to think of what would become of me if I didn't get married. It was too frightening to imagine.

It gives you a sense of how central the idea of marriage was and is to her life. Also of what she sees as the alternative.

If you desperately want one kind of relationship, and start pursuing something completely different, you'll be unsatisfied. No real surprise, then, that when she stopped sleeping around and started looking for something she actually wanted, she got happier. Chastity, in Eden's view, is about not pursuing sex, but instead pursuing serious relationships with people whose values you share.

Instead of following the pop-culture prescription, to single-mindedly pursue a man who's going to make you happy, I am suggesting women should be singular and concentrate on being the best people they can be and displaying grace as individuals and as women. In doing that they will become more giving, more appreciative of everyone around them, so not only will they be better able to have meaningful friendships and relationships, but they will also be able to enjoy this time they have as singular women.

Similarly, she says chastity made her a better friend: before, her romantic life and friendships were about activities, and now both are about values and intense personal connections.

I have no doubt whatsoever that this transformation happened in Eden's life. But check it out: fundamentally, none of this is about who you have sex with. It's about caring, respect, connection with other people. For her, that happens through her relationship with sex. FOR HER. But she, like a lot of conservatives, conflates values with sex; like Wendy Shalit, she assumes that because she fundamentally wanted marriage and preferred chastity to promiscuity, all other women want that too.

I think, honestly, that it's a failure of imagination on her part that makes this happen: for her, relationships are either permanent or superficial; either no sex until marriage, or promiscuity. It's a false dichotomy, not just because there are possibilities between those two extremes, but because there are possibilities that combine those qualities, or have neither of them. It's also a way of trying to get people to be less obsessed with sex that is, itself, incredibly obsessed with sex.⁴ Really, the most telling line in the whole interview is her summary of her message:

It's about having substance as a person, seeking out friends who have depth and substance.

But why exactly does that have to be about sex?

---

1. By Wendy Shalit.
2. The Thrill of the Chaste.
3. Start following the Amazon links for those two books to find a few more. Their covers even look similar - part of a woman's face in some kind of old-fashioned painting.
4. The most extreme example of this I know is Westboro Baptist, who protest 'gay-friendly' organizations like the U.S. military with signs that depict sodomy using stick figures. That shit is weird.

whoa

"This unconstitutional darkness, we will stab at it with our dagger until we kill it."

what to eat, #4

Those who know me (and if you don't know me, why are you reading my tiny-ass blog?) know that about three quarters of my cooking is slapped together by remembering what someone once said was the right way to do something. The other quarter involves obsessively reading every recipe on the subject and calling my mom at least twice. This is the first kind of recipe.

Roasted Root Vegetables with Basted Eggs¹
What to buy
a buncha root vegetables. potatoes - yellow, purple, white, mixed fingerlings, who cares? but let me know how it goes if you try new potatoes or the big Idaho bakers; sweet potatoes; parsnips; beets; celeriac; salsify; carrots if you want, but I don't think they're much of an enhancement.

eggs. spring for happy local ones if you can, and goggle at the deep gold of the yolk.

a box of chicken broth. completely optional - you can also use veggie bouillon or water, but I really like the organic free range chicken broth at Trader Joe's, and think it makes the eggs better. you only use maybe a tablespoon for this recipe, so make sure you'll use it for something else.

What you should already have on hand
some olive oil
a little butter
salt
pepper
garlic
maybe some rosemary or chives or something, but don't stress

What you do
1. Roast the veggies. Turn the oven up to 450, then wash 'em, peel the skins if you don't want to eat them, and chop them up into half to one inch chunks. Put them in an ovensafe pan, toss in enough olive oil to coat them very lightly, and sprinkle the salt on (also lightly). Peel a few cloves of garlic and put them in the pan whole. They're gonna turn into practically spreadable, unbelievably delicious little nubbins of roast garlic. Stick the pan in the oven. Start checking on them after 20 minutes, and pull them out when they're all cooked through (soft, but not custardy).

2. When the veggies are done, make the basted eggs. (Side note: I have no idea if this is how you're supposed to make basted eggs, but it's working for me right now. This was my big revolution in egg frying - before, I was really bad at it, and always broke at least one of the yolks. This way? It works.) Melt a little butter in a small pan on low. Keep the heat really low! Otherwise the eggs will be too tough! Crack your two eggs in there when the butter's all foamy. Once the bottom of the clear white has turned actual white all the way around the egg (while most of the depth of the white is still totally clear) slide your spatula under the eggs so they don't stick. Salt and pepper the eggs, and put a little rosemary on them if you want. I love eggs with rosemary. Now add a slug of chicken broth (or water, or veggie broth, or whatever) to the pan, and cover it. What's a slug? Who knows.² Let it cook for a few minutes, or til almost all of the white is cooked. Flip the eggs over carefully, cook another few seconds, and slide them out onto a plate. Serve yourself some veggies, too. Yum.

3. Got buttered toast? You just made yourself an upscale diner breakfast for dinner.

I ate this 3 times this week - once fresh, twice with the left-over veggies reheated in a pan. I'm still not sick of it.

---

1. Hat tip to the Gardener, who made the first batch of roasted root vegetables this is based on.
2. I feel like people laugh about 19th century (and earlier) recipes that tell you to put in a handful of this or a pinch of that, but seriously? That's what my recipes, and my mom's recipes, and most of my friends' recipes tell you too.

how you know parents are on your side

"I think you owe her an apology."¹

---

1. Especially when closely followed by "Ain't no 'sorry.' What are you sorry for?"

what about misconception care?

While I could say any number of serious things about this article, all I can think is come on, preconception care?

hello, Gorgias

This Salon article - one of the ones you need to watch an ad to see, but worth it anyway - is all about rhetoric, sophists, and philosophers.

you have to ask why

There's this idea that seems to be ambling around the feminist blogs whenever people start talking about appearance culture. You might see it in the comments on I Blame the Patriarchy (it's probably in this comment thread somewhere), and I don't know where it comes from. To summarize: "Individuals decide who they want to please (and yes, there’s no reason it has to be men), and that.. is a healthy part of social existence. In other words, the problem isn’t pleasing people."¹

Ok. I'm going to try not to dump my irritation too heavily on this particular person's head just because he's got a convenient summary. But let's review. It's true, most of us like making other people happy at least some of the time. However, I think we can agree that pleasing people usually means fulfilling their desires. The one thing we can all agree on - Puritans, post-modernists, neo-Aristotelians, feminists, Marxists, maybe everyone except modernists and the occasional Third-Wave feminist - is that desire is not neutral. People want things for all sorts of reasons. Maybe it was on TV a lot when you were a kid.² Maybe you had a secret crush on your 3rd grade music teacher who always wore that kind of shoes. Maybe you're color-blind and like really really bright colors because you can see them. Maybe desires for sugar and sodium were evolutionarily advantageous to our primate ancestors. Desire comes from a lot of different places, and so when we think about pleasing other people - about our desire to fulfill other people's desires - we need to think critically about where that need to please comes from, and where the specific desires we want to fulfill come from.

It is my belief that most women's desire to 'look pretty' comes at least partly out of patriarchal bullshit on one side or the other. Kugelmass does say that there's a problem "that women are expected to do more to please men than vice versa," but I don't think he gives this problem enough attention. In fact, women are required to put vastly more effort into their appearance than men. There's the time spent picking out clothes so we look just sexy enough (but not too sexy! then we're asking for it!); even professional clothes are a lot more work for women. There's the grooming regimen: at the bare minimum, shaving legs and underarms a couple of times a week, skin care and moisturizing, styling hair, haircuts every 6-8 weeks or fairly maintenance-intensive long hair, and most women add on at least a few other things, like nails or eyebrows or make-up (in some places and jobs, these are required). There are the shoes, and anyone who's ever tried to find comfortable, professional women's shoes knows exactly what I'm talking about. Ah, you say, but women are free to reject these 'requirements' - they really are, at least mostly, about choosing to please other people. You yourself just ignore a lot of these so-called requirements.

That's true, I don't, but I'm under no illusion that I don't pay a price for it. There are a number of office environments - including some of the most prestigious and best paid - where I couldn't work looking like I do. There was a New York Times article in the last year or two in which women on Wall Street talked about how they resent the brutally uncomfortable shoes which they feel they must wear in order to keep their jobs, but which damage their feet permanently. Some of the benefits of meeting the requirements of conventional femininity are just things I'm personally prepared to do without: I'm queer - right now I'm dating a woman, but my queerness means that there are a number of straight guys who just aren't really dating options for me, and that includes most of the ones who care about all the beauty shtick; I don't want to work on Wall Street, or for a high-powered legal firm, or in most office environments; I'm willing to accept the incidental damage it will almost certainly to do to my career. This shit is coercively enforced, and while you can opt out of the work, you pay a price.

So that takes care of why women want to do their pleasing in this particular way; let's talk about why men (or heteronormative culture) enforce these particular standards. Hint: it's not handed down with our genetic code. There are a lot of specific standards, but let's look at three that have particularly elegant patriarchal implications.

1. Shave off your body hair. This makes women look young (pre-pubescent, ick) and powerless. Nuff said.

2. Wear high heels. This makes women actually physically powerless, because we can't run or move freely; it also damages women's feet. Compare to the tradition of foot-binding in China or corsetry in the Victorian era - it's just not that different.

3. Be skinny. There's much to be said here, but what always strikes me about the obsession with thinness is that women aren't supposed to take up physical or metaphorical space.

The people making the argument that it's cool to want to please people - Kugelmass included - seem to ignore the actual content of what it takes to please others, putting the beauty ideal in the same category as cooking your friend dinner once in a while or remembering your Mom's birthday. It's different, and it's different because the desires we're trying to fulfill are social, and systematically oppressive to women. Maybe the worst part is that I really believe that appearance culture is a collective action problem. Here's what I said on Bitch, Ph.D.'s blog:

As long as most people try and get as much as they can from it - by trying to be as conventionally attractive as they personally can - all the flack from it continues to fall on people who can't conform (fat folks, butch women, short men, people with less money). This, I think, is where Twisty's point about femininity being a survival strategy comes in: even if you identify as femme/femmey, even if you actually get some personal satisfaction out of wearing low-cut shirts/high heels/lace underwear, being femininely attractive still gets you cultural approval that other folks don't have access to and makes it harder for those folks to fit in (or survive) by reinforcing our messed up norms about attractiveness. So you have to weigh what you need to survive or feel ok in your own skin or your own life against the social effects, just as you do when you buy groceries and have to choose whether to spend another few dollars on having it be organic so you feel better about yourself or a little less money so you can make it to the end of the month without being broke. For each decision, it's about whether it's going to make your life better, and whether it's going to make the world a better place for you to live in.

You can't just say that pleasing people is fundamental to being social. You have to ask why you want to please those particular people, why you want to do it the way you do, and what effect it has around you.

---

1. From Joseph Kugelmass, who introduces his post by saying "I really don’t want to fight a bunch of different battles when it comes to gender. I want to fight just one battle, for equality of the sexes. Which is why I’m sorry to report that I find I Blame The Patriarchy alienating, and have to respond to the latest post there." Sorry dude, you don't get to decide that there's only one feminist battle. Also, hey, you find I Blame the Patriarchy alienating? No way! You and 97% of the human race! And Twisty, she does not care. It's part of why she's cool.
2. In a fascinating bit of correlation, women who watched a lot of Disney movies growing up have notably more conventional ideas about gender than women who did not. (This from the prestigious journal, 'some chick in my grad school class.')

yes

“I came to teaching to touch lives and educate and be this enchanting artist in the classroom,” she says, “and I have done nothing but lose 10 pounds in a month and develop a disgusting smoking habit. These kids need something much greater than anything I can give them. They need a miracle — and they need a miracle like every day.”

so far

I've been pushed, shoved, and lifted out of the way, ducked around, called dyke and bitch, had my hair and shoes insulted, been told to quit, that nobody likes me, and that "I will hurt you," had my stamp, stamp pad, coffee mug, clipboard, transparencies, marker, pencils, and wallet stolen, been full-on cussed out 7 times by 3 people, been sorta cussed out at least every other day and usually a couple times a day, had my fingers slammed in my classroom door, had paper balls and pens thrown at my head, and had the plexiglass window in the door to my classroom broken out of its frame. And this is just what I remember.

Joy

You know what's awesome? Being the only one in the house so you can play Lucinda Williams loud at 8:35 AM. You know what's even better? Eating apple crisp and drinking tea and looking at the sunny October morning while you do it.

medium picture

Go read this now.

As self-obsessed and miserable as I am right now, thinking about the future of the country in light of the basic realities of one part - just one part - of our general situation can make me even more miserable.

Then sign up to give time or money to elect Democrats this fall. Not that it'll change much, but even changing a little is so, so, so worth it.

vampyros lesbos

I have a gay transgender vampire in my 2nd period class.

And that is the least of what's happened to me today. Absolutely the least of my worries.

tips

1. For straight teacher/educators who want to support queer teachers/educators: don't tell your kids you're straight. I realize queer-friendly straight role models are important, but it'd be nice if not denying you were gay didn't automatically mean you were.

2. For people who post in women-seeking-women on craigslist: don't mention your last relationship, the eighteen criteria any woman you date absolutely must meet, how lonely you are, or how much craigslist sucks. In fact, don't provide any meta-context for your ad at all: just talk briefly, amusingly, about how cool you are and how you'd like to meet someone for x pleasant, non-threatening activity.

3. For publishers of math textbooks: putting the section on solving equations after you've already been working with equations for 5 sections is dumb.

4. For principals of public schools: I'm probably better than nothing, but not much. I'd take half my current salary for half my current workload, no problem.

5. For my students: if you want to learn some math, you eventually have to do some math problems. That's how it works. You also have to come to class and do your homework. 9th graders, this goes double for you, because even if you've already been in a room where someone talked about it, you didn't learn it then.

6. For myself: if you haven't been hungry for two weeks and have therefore been getting your sustenance mostly from yogurt, fruit, toast-with-peanut-butter, and ice cream, and then suddenly eat a full dinner followed by pizza for lunch the next day even though you're still not hungry, and you're really stressed out and feeling like crying before you have the pizza, you shouldn't be surprised when you get a migraine.

7. For the creators of Algeblocks and the fabulous college professor/7th grade math teacher who gave me a set: you are both incredibly awesome and should know it.

This message, like my lessons, was brought to you by the extraordinary Gardener, who has been lovely to me the last few weeks, and the amazing Mathematician, who has been feeding me dinner and math advice since it all started.

also, Political Schmientist: my classroom still looks much as it did when you left, except someone wrote "ASS" on Lundberg.

at the last minute, extra work!

we are not there yet. we will never be there. I hate everything.

sometimes, things actually are inspiring. especially when you're in survival mode.

My dear friends (yes, you are my friends not merely CMs),

This is the low point of Institute. Week 3 has the most dues dates, the highest stress levels, the fewest hours of sleep and the most frustrations of any week at Institute. You can do it!

Week 3 is NOT indicative of the life of a teacher. You are learning to teach. It is difficult. That is why most ed. preparation programs require years of student teaching. We do it in 5 weeks. There is a lot to learn in 5 weeks. You can do it!

The life of a teacher is not one of day-to-day survival. It gets easier. You will have time for your friends, significant others, favorite TV shows, and life outside of teaching. You NEED a life outside of teaching. The life of a teacher is not Institute life. You can do it!

I have already seen so much skill, knowledge, talent, and drive in each of you. If I didn't think you could do it, then I would have told you by now. It is unjust to make you work this hard if it is hopeless. You will all be good teachers, but it may not happen over night. Be patient. Take one step at a time. You can do it!

Look out for one another. This is our Institute family. We have made it too far to let any our family members struggle alone. Be there to empathize and to add a little sunshine to a teammate's day. Plan a cheese steak social or two. You can do it!

Lastly, I wouldn't get out of bed every morning if I didn't have 16 great colleagues. I wouldn't live this lifestyle for 5 weeks if I didn't believe that ALL of you will achieve success with your students over the next two years and beyond. I wouldn't encourage you to teach if it meant you had to be a martyr and live everyday like a day at Institute. You don't. I do it because y'all are the good teachers that my students need.

I'll be in my room with the door open after the movie.

-S.

summer

Summer smells like sweet corn and stone fruit, clean dirt and rain, sweat and cedar.

This summer also smells like permanent markers, sharp nerves and chalk, stress, raw onion, white cheddar popcorn. And tonight, a little like sweet corn.

I am going to make it through this summer if it kills me.

this is criminal

Michael Lewis, an eighth grader who was expelled from Baker Middle School for fighting, said he had not gotten into similar trouble back in New Orleans. "You can't really hardly communicate with other people" in Baton Rouge, he said. "I don't know why they have such a grudge on us. They just do."

If it were not for the hurricane, Michael said, he would be enrolled. "I love school," he said. "There's no place I would rather be, during school hours, than school."

Mr. Cowsar said Michael had asked to join his group, whose efforts to become an official charter school have faltered. The group lost financing for the two teachers it had in the fall, and it had only a couple of volunteers to handle about 15 children ages 4 to 14. There was no room for Michael.

Michael said he had wanted to go to summer school, for which parents must pay in some districts. At any rate, he said, his mother did not have time to sign him up. "I want to stay in a child place," he said, "but life keep putting me in a man's place."¹

There are kids like him everywhere. Most of them aren't as eloquent. Either way, it breaks my heart. When a kid like this can't get a decent education even when he tries, something is terribly wrong.

March 19, 2007: Now that I'm a teacher, all I have to say is: I don't feel the same way anymore.

---

1. from The New York Times

give up

I can't keep my mouth shut about politics, which is how the Political Schmientist and I ended up having a full-volume conversation about the risk of American fascism at 11 pm in a campground in a national park in Utah. I'm sorry to anyone I kept awake that night.

This article by the Apostropher says much of what I would like to say.

"There is no war on terror. There never has been." He points out that the forces supposedly arrayed against the United States are incapable of toppling the rickety governments of countries whose populations sympathize with them, and have as much chance of bringing down the United States as of breaking up Mars to mine it for its iron.

He also points out something important: this is a war about resources. We are, as far as I can tell, nearing a historical point at which water and oil, among others, will become extremely valuable. The government of the United States is trying to ensure that those resources, so vital to the way we live right now, continue to be available to us, and cheaply. That's why we're not being asked to sacrifice materially.

Bitch, Ph.D. describes our options as, "We can go down fighting, or, you know, we can sink the money and manpower into finding ways not to go down." Personally, I don't know if there are ways for us not to go down. We may already be totally screwed. What I do know is that if we wish to stop this resource war, if we want a chance to live in a world that is not scrambling and killing over oil and water, we - we Americans - need to stop using so goddamn much. We need to give up our SUVs, our elderly Volvo station wagons, our golf courses, our imported bananas, our cheap vacations: we need to give up the way we consume resources.

It may not be enough. There are 6 billion people on this planet, and we may not be able to give up enough. But unless we try, we are making demands on our world that will require a vast and violent scramble for resources. We have to try.

I don't need to tell you what the chances of this actually happening are. I'm not even trying myself.

living in hope

Part of the reason I'm grumpy today is that I have the overwhelming sense that the world is going to hell and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. The New Yorker article about Iran,¹ the NYT Magazine article about abortion in El Salvador,² the Duke lacrosse case all contribute to that feeling, but it started in a conversation with my dad.

My dad went to Harvard in the late 60s and early 70s, and so did his best childhood friend. He sums up his time there by saying that when he got there, you had to dress for dinner; when he left, there was co-ed skinny-dipping in the Adams House pool. It sounds flip, but it wasn't, really. It meant that Harvard had liberalized, that it was going to be a democratizing force, educating women and people of color and poor people and rich white men all together and helping make a new world.

It didn't, of course. My sister's going to graduate from there in two months, and she talks about it as a place full of social climbing, personal greed, and privileged ambitious people who feel they deserve their privilege.

My dad's kind of upset about this. I think it's because he had an image of Harvard that's idealized in a way I can imagine my image of Swarthmore becoming idealized. He remembers having amazing intellectual conversations. He also was part of at least one sit-in, which I found out about when I found the t-shirt with a red fist on it in his closet. The Harvard student body doesn't go in for that sort of thing anymore, as far as we can tell.

Anyway, all this got us talking about how, in that time, people believed in the power of sit-ins and activism and marches in a way that we don't. That I don't. I went to a lot of protests in college, but more because I couldn't think of anything useful to do than because I thought we would change anything by marching. All those strategies have been worked around and worked into the category of normal disruptions and don't constitute the kind of major challenge they used to be. It's what I think Foucault says in Discipline and Punish³ about challenges and repression getting sucked into the social order.

So I said to my dad that I couldn't think of anything to do that would actually address the problems I see in the world. Nothing that would actually do any good. I have no faith. He went into a speech about how, first, as humans we need some hope and we need to feel like we're doing something, or why not go be a ski patrolman?⁴ And second, the basic problem is campaign finance.

I don't know about the second. The first, though, is exactly the problem I'm having. My dad seemed to think that I was giving up hope and not doing anything; the problem is more that I feel that exact need and can't figure out how to direct it. When I was a high school activist - and a pretty effective one, considering - I felt like my choices, once I saw the injustice of the world, were to either accept that injustice (which meant defeat) or to fight it. Fighting was the only choice that had hope. These days, I'm having trouble mustering up enough hope to go on fighting.

On this day of all days⁵ I got an email from an old high school friend who just left his job as a union organizer, donated his car and all his savings to charity, and founded a religious activist center called the Burning Bush: Center for the Working Poor in L.A.⁶ I can't think of a more profound choice to live in hope than that.

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1. By Seymour Hersh. Summary: Bush wants to go to war with Iran and change the government there. No one else thinks it's a good idea, politically or militarily.
2. It's illegal. Period. And the ban is enforced. Bitch, Ph.D. has the stunning quote: forensic vagina inspectors.
3. Which I haven't read, like most people who talk about Foucault. Also, did you know he used to be a big figure in the SF leather scene?
4. My dad was a ski patrolman, and he quit because he felt like he was just having fun and not doing something to make a difference. Oddly, that resembles my position now.
5. Before I get too cosmic about this, I should point out that it's the first day in a week that I've checked my email.
6. For those keeping track at home, this is the acquaintance who burnt all the teachers and the administration on all the activist clubs his senior year by advocating intensely for condom machines in the bathrooms, leaving us unable to find teacher sponsors for my last two years there. He also read Saul Alinsky in high school and was as dedicated (and mostly effective) an activist as I have ever met; so were his older brothers. The condom machine campaign was basically cover for a successful attempt to get a peer sex ed program in our high school. Finally, he's the one who thought I had no sense of humor because I didn't think his sexist jokes were funny. While my high school memories of him are slightly bitter, every time I've run into him since high school has been pretty awesome, and I've liked him a lot.

a better account of the emotions

The Hipster Monk once sent me a pretty awesome interview with Martha Nussbaum in which Nussbaum argues that one of the biggest problems with modern political theory is that it provides an inadequate (and basically non-existent) account of the emotions. This article on Alas, a Blog reminded me of it.

That's all I have to say right now. I'm kind of grumpy.

intentions

In the same year that I took that class on genocide - the same year in which the US went to war in Iraq - two eminent persons came to Swarthmore to argue publicly about whether we should support that war. They were Mark Danner, arguing against war, and Leon Wieseltier, arguing for it, and what I remember is being in the big main-stage hall, listening to them. Mark Danner is only about 6 years younger than Leon Wieseltier, and they are both younger than both of my parents, but somehow the impression I have in my head is of a grand old man arguing with a younger, well-spoken but less impressive Mark Danner. It's partly because Leon Wieseltier has this wild head of white hair, and partly because Mark Danner looks young and is short. Wieseltier is also one of the most articulate people I've ever heard - he's The New Republic's literary editor - and the combination of that and the general impression meant that even though I agreed with what Danner was saying, Wieseltier seemed far more persuasive that evening.

But he was wrong. He and Danner are both good people, people of conscience, people who, like me, wanted to see Saddam Hussein out of power but weren't sure they trusted Bush to do it. The difference was that Wieseltier looked at that problem and decided that, regardless of the means, regardless of the instrument, Saddam Hussein was a genocidal tyrant and removing him was the right thing to do; he argued that we were all bound to support the goal of getting rid of him, despite our fears about what would come after. Danner, like me, thought that war itself and what would come after might be so devastatingly bad for Iraq, the Middle East, and the world that we could not in conscience support Bush in going to war, not when we knew that his intentions and plans were so different from what would actually need to happen to create a tolerable postwar situation in Iraq.

If you ever wanted proof that intentions matter, this is it. What's happening in Iraq right now is a disaster, and it's because the people running this war had the wrong intentions. Their intentions shaped how they went about this war, and because of those intentions as much as anything - because of the way the war as been waged - Iraq is a chaotic, terrifying disaster, the US has negative international credibility, the US military is engaging in torture, and both the Middle East and the world as a whole are less stable.

genocide

The war in Iraq has entered a bloodier phase, with the killings of Iraqi civilians rising tremendously in daily sectarian violence while American casualties have steadily declined, spurring tens of thousands of Iraqis to flee from mixed Shiite-Sunni areas.

The first thing I thought of when I saw this article - even before I read it - was this class I took my senior spring. I had been planning to take a class about moral decision-making and political theory, but it was a lot like the amazing seminar I'd taken the semester before, and in the first week of classes, I heard about a directed reading¹ on genocide. I went, and I felt this sense of responsibility, like even though it meant studying all of these incredibly horrific things, I couldn't possibly not take it. For the rest of the spring, I would periodically walk into the Hipster Monk's room and scream, because the things I was reading about were so horrific. The Political Schmientist is studying human rights violations in grad school right now, with some emphasis on sexual violence, and I think she's having a similar experience.

Folks, that's what's on its way to happening in Iraq. The NYT article I linked to doesn't have a lot of the explicit details of violence that are so difficult to read about, but the process it describes is familiar to me. Iraqis are starting to be scared - and apparently reasonably so - to be ethnic or religious minorities. They are leaving their homes to go to places where they will be members of the religious or ethnic majority, despite a long history of fairly peaceable coexistence and despite the major financial costs of doing so. Civilian casualties are increasing, not decreasing, and the focus of the violence is gradually shifting from Americans to Iraqis.² These are warning signs of civil war, and especially of a civil war with the potential for genocide. The situation reminds me a great deal of the former Yugoslavia's disintegration: get rid of a violent dictatorship that overwhelms ethnic tension, then watch as the record of prior coexistence gets drowned in appeals to nationalism/sectarian ideology. Watch people dehumanize "the other side," then threaten them, then kill them, then try to wipe them off the face of the earth. It's not just civil war we're risking in Iraq, it's genocide. I don't know who's at greatest risk for a genocidal campaign, but the Sunni-Shiite violence right now has that potential.

I want to draw attention to one point in this article that hadn't really occurred to me: US training and arms for Iraqi police and military are fueling this conflict.

The migrations are partly caused by the fear of partisan Iraqi security forces, many of them trained by the Americans. The police and commando forces are infested with militia recruits, mostly from Shiite political parties, and are accused by Sunni Arabs of carrying out sectarian executions. One Sunni-run TV network warned viewers last week not to allow Iraqi policemen or soldiers into their homes unless the forces are accompanied by American troops.

It's not really surprising: part of the reason for the Taliban's success is that we armed and trained the people who became the Taliban when we thought we could use them against the USSR in Afghanistan; a major cause of brutal violence and human rights violations in Latin America is the training the US provides to 'friendly' Latin American military forces at the School of the Americas. Every time we arm and train combat forces, it ends up biting us in the ass. The US government has been talking a lot about "Iraqification" - turning over responsibility for security to Iraqis - but that, in and of itself, seems to be increasing the risk of a civil war and thus of genocide. What's surprising is that it didn't even occur to me until today to connect the training and weaponry we provide in Iraq with the results we've had in providing same things elsewhere. There's no reason to think Iraq will be better, which is pretty incredibly depressing to think about.

The worst, for me, is that I can think of absolutely nothing productive to do in response.

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1. At my school, directed readings happened when a student wanted to study something and persuaded a professor to do it. We met slightly less than a normal class, and it was a one-off: it will probably never be offered again, especially since that professor's retiring. That meant it was a lot easier to get it to happen, because it didn't change the whole department's balance of course offerings.
2. The large majority (65%) of attacks are still against Americans and other foreign forces; in September, though, it was 82%.

belated outrage

As I occasionally do, I was narcissistically reading over my old blog posts in an attempt to avoid actually doing something today. I came across the one about the next Bob Dylan, and thought I might mention my total irritation over the UPenn radio station's 885 best albums list, as voted by their listeners. It's a little late, since they finished the countdown in October or November or something, but it still pisses me off. Why? Because of the top 10 albums, exactly zero were not white guys with guitars. You have to go down to #13 to find a white girl with a guitar¹ and #14 to find a black guy with a trumpet². Then it's all white guys with guitars til #23³ and then I get too depressed to keep counting. But of the top 30 "greatest albums of all time" exactly 3 are not white guys with guitars? Are you serious? And of the top ten, 4 are Beatles albums?

Dear XPN Listeners: you suck. I include myself in that, because I didn't vote, and if I had, I probably would have included at least one Bob Dylan album, thus doing my bit for the tyranny of white guys with guitars.

with grumpitude,
North

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1. Joni Mitchell's Blue.
2. Miles Davis's Kind of Blue.
3. Carole King's Tapestry. Which is not one of the 200 greatest albums of all time, let alone #23.

one simple request

please, please, when I ask for a little container of guacamole, don't put shredded cheese on it. please. it's really all I ask.

poke, poke

16-year-old boys get a bad rap, points out the Gardener,¹ but they're such fun to mess with. Witness this conversation with my cousin Dingo. Imagine me in the car, my dad driving, my brother (also 16) in the front seat, and Dingo's 12-year-old brother the Lost Boy sitting between Dingo and me in the back.

Lost Boy: "Hey, do the kids at [program where I work] have beards?"

Me: "Well, they don't get to shave, so some of them do by the time they leave."

Dingo: "Wait! Does that mean the girls get all hairy and nasty too?!"

Me: "Hairy and nasty like this?"

[pulls up pant leg to reveal unshaven leg]

Dingo: "Aaaaah!"

[hides in his coat]

Me: "I don't shave my armpits either."

Dingo: "But you're a girl! That's what girls do! ... Do you have a boyfriend?"

Me: "I did for a while. He didn't care."

Dingo: "He's crazy. Insane. He really didn't care?"

Me: "No. That was one of the reasons I liked him. But now I have a girlfriend."

Dingo: "NO WAY!"

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1. A new addition to our cast of characters. Also, my girlfriend.

static

I had this experience in January in which I got told that I'm bad at taking feedback. Outdoor ed organizations are kind of obsessed with feedback, with having it happen all the time, and having the people I was about to be working for think I was bad at taking feedback did not enhance their desire to hire me.

The thing is, I was bad at taking the feedback I was getting, mostly because it was inaccurate. In two years of getting formal feedback (a page and a half, in writing) every week and informal feedback nearly every night that I was working, I'd heard a bunch of times that I was good at taking and getting feedback. Which I think is pretty much true, with one caveat that I'll talk about later. But if feedback's inaccurate and you say so, you're being defensive. It puts you in this terrible double-bind where your boss can think stuff about you that hurts your status, and if you challenge it you get more feedback that you're defensive, and if you challenge that it just gets worse.

So. This got me thinking. The place I'm working now has this culture about feedback in which people say "if you have any constructive feedback,¹ I'd like to hear it, but I don't really care about the positive stuff." I hate that attitude, and I don't think it's just because I like getting compliments. Positive feedback does three really important things for people and organizations.

1. Positive feedback helps people keep doing things right. People don't always know exactly what they're doing that's effective, and they need to know. These things change from person to person and situation to situation, and we all need that positive reinforcement. Sometimes those things aren't even conscious, and positive feedback does the great service of allowing us to choose to keep doing things we were unconsciously doing well.

2. Positive feedback is a clear demonstration of noticing and caring. Seriously, when someone you just met says, "I'm criticizing you like this because I care about you," do you believe it? I don't. I need evidence that this person is paying attention to me and caring about me before I'll believe it. Some people I trust to give me critical feedback, because they've already shown me a thousand times that they care about me; with people with whom I don't have that trust, positive feedback helps create it.

3. Positive feedback makes people feel happy and appreciated. Everyone likes praise. Most people will work in order to get it. Usually, people in good spirits do better work.

Don't be so damn macho, people.

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1. Constructive is the euphemism for critical/negative. I personally dislike that euphemism, as I dislike many euphemisms. Shouldn't all feedback help you learn and grow as a person?

the only thing more painful than learning from experience

I've been on my way out of the city I used to live in for two and a half years. When I graduated from college, I thought I would need to choose between doing wilderness stuff and having friends.¹ For a while - maybe two years - it seemed like I'd squared that circle: I was working for an outdoor program, helping address the tremendous social needs of the city I lived in, and living in a community that meant something really important to me. By the end of it, I was in a kick-ass relationship. I was really happy most of the time.

After a while, I realized that I needed to work somewhere else to keep learning; I also realized that I wasn't getting enough or serious enough wilderness. So I left. Here I am, with plenty of access to wilderness, a program that's teaching me a lot, and no friends. And because I've been imagining this as something that will come to an end in a few months - as a temporary way for me to learn more, get some perspective, and be somewhere gorgeous before I returned to the city and a different job - I have no real sense that it's fair or even possible to start relationships with people here when I'm going to be gone so soon. So I've been spending my time alone. I've read two and a half books in 24 hours, gone for a two hour walk, made myself breakfast and lunch, read way more internet crap than is reasonable, done practically nothing productive, and despaired of finding something I want to do for the evening.

Nevertheless, I have this strong sense that being out here, doing outdoor stuff all the time, is something I need to do eventually. So do I do it now, when I'm here? Or do I return to my city and hope that there will be a time in the future when I can leave with a whole heart? How do I learn from what's going on right now?

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1. Lest you think either of those is trivial or easily replaced by, say, new friends or a new leisure activity, they're not. My friends are my family in a way that's hard to explain unless you've read a couple of books and seen situations like it, and being in the wilderness is how I restore my soul. Teaching about the wilderness - being an outdoor educator - is a pretty awesome way to keep me there, and also lets me pass on one of the most important experiences of my life.

scenes from the road

2350 miles, 5 days, 3 sets of relatives, no exhaust system at all.

Average speed in Nebraska: 88. That includes breaks.

Coming west out of Denver on I-70, I floored it for a good 3 minutes. My speed went from 55 to 52.

The unexpectedly nice thing about Starbucks putting its stores next to local coffee shops is that Starbucks becomes a reliable guide to local food. I stopped in Pittsburgh, PA, and Avon, CO, to go to Starbucks so I could get something better than gas station coffee. Both places, there was a local bakery next door. Pittsburgh fed me mediocre coffee, tasty pumpkin bread, and a slice of phenomenal oat bread; Avon gave me free tea. ("Excuse me, I just got a cup of tea. I should pay for it, right?" "No, don't worry about it.") Highly recommended.

On I-70 west of Grand Junction, the sign for Mack, CO, says, "Next services 56 miles." 80 miles later, the sign for Green River says, "Next services 110 miles." The speed limit drops to 30 during dust storms.

Loa feels semi-mythical. I'm not totally sure it exists. Tomorrow I'm gone for 8 days: let's hope the world doesn't go to hell too badly during that time.