Down by the River

Read the lyrics. Then go on.

Neil Young - Down by The River Lyrics
Be on my side,
I'll be on your side, baby
There is no reason for you to hide
It's so hard for me staying here all alone
When you could be taking me for a ride.
Yeah, she could drag me over the rainbow, send me away
Down by the river I shot my baby
Down by the river,Dead, oh, shot her dead.
You take my hand, I'll take your hand
Together we may get away
This much madness is too much sorrow
It's impossible to make it today.
Yeah, she could drag me over the rainbow, send me away
Down by the river I shot my baby
Down by the river,Dead, oh, shot her dead.
Be on my side, I'll be on your side, baby
There is no reason for you to hide
It's so hard for me staying here all alone
When you could be taking me for a ride.
Yeah, she could drag me over the rainbow, send me away
Down by the river I shot my baby
Down by the river,Dead, oh, shot her dead.

Now, this was playing in Starbucks. I have heard the song lots of times, but I've never listened to it closely -- I just knew something agonizing happened by a river. My best friend loves Neil Young. I heard the song a lot in my early 20's. I knew -- Neil Young, sincere, ex-addict (Needle and damage done...) Later, Reaganite, god knows why. Didn't know exactly where he stood now. Son has autism.

I SHOT MY BABY?

Over and over again over my Vanilla Soy Latte. Now, I have written elsewhere about the collisions of the homeless people and the lattes and how the sensibility is more than steel-toe ironic.

Maybe it's heroine.

Maybe it's the voice of a young criminal he's imagining.

HOW THE FRIG DO WE KEEP TALKING ABOUT ANYTHING WHEN THERE'S JUST BEEN A SONG WITH SO MUCH BLOOD IN IT, EITHER WAY. Even if the next song is HAPPY TALK! You know? From "South Pacific"? Sounds like Dr. Norman Vincent Peale on Heroine:

Happy talk, keep talking happy talk
Talk about things you like to do
You got to have a dream, if you don't have a dream
How you gonna have a dream come true?
Talk about the moon floating in the sky
Looking at a lily on the lake
Talk about a bird learning how to fly
Making all the music he can make!
etc......

I WANT TO GET ON THE TABLE. "People, the gentleman on the SOUND SYSTEM has declared that either he has killed a lover, his innocence or that he used to use heroine and is in such a dynamic state of fear that HE IS RIGHT IN THAT MOMENT AGAIN. I THINK WE SHOULD JUST STOP. I REALLY THINK WE SHOULD:
Cut the b.s.
Put the coffee down.
Stop talking about jobs and parents.
And just look at each other.
And then someone should go get some washcloths and we should just.
Wash our faces.
And start talking about
Do we have what we NEED?
Do our friends?
Does everyone we talk to -- everyone -- the neighbor, the guy at the next carrell at work, the people in our family. What could we do so that they had what they NEED.
What about other people we know of -- the people we read about -- google Naomi Klein and Jeffrey Sachs when we get home and send them ten dollars toward what they do, if we can REALLY afford that. Some can, some can't. Don't do more than that. Pick a number you can do often. Without thinking. So that it's like breathing or washing your face.

I'm sorry, you can't play "Down by the River" in a Starbucks and not declare an emergency. Maybe you should. And the day that about 150 people hear "I shot my baby" and just sip their coffee is a day that we are
1) just a few months from voting for two candidates for president, neither of whom should be trusted with a litterbox
2) we are walking into an election year with no plan to save the planet or the world
3) we have grown to hate our children so much that all we think about in terms of education is cutting spending and designing tests

oops.

I shall be taking my latte in the park.

Accursing

The English is Italic, The Hebrew transliteration is bold, and the translation of the Hebrew is in plain text. I wanted to know how something becomes accursed -- from the way the Hebrew word defines it, the objects are accursed because of what happened to them -- they were used by a culture that did not obey the Old Testament god. And in taking them, the Israelites would become accursed. The objects, however, did not do anything. They were part of a culture which did. The actions of that culture made them accursed. Those actions were deemed accursed by the culture -- Joshua's -- which was victorious. No one will ever know what the People of Ai had to say for themselves about it. We have to take Joshua's word and the way it was transcribed in the most popular version of the Old Testament story. I've always found him fair, but that may purely be because he came after the ever-popular Moses, and after two grades of a man I ridiculously imagined in the shape of a Protestant from Northfield, Illinois who now runs the NRA, I was ready for someone I could picture as a conventional teenager with an open mind and new ideas. I mean, young "let my people go" Charleton was ok for fourth grade me. By sixth grade, I was ready for someone who could write Supreme Court amendments, especially as we were reading Brown v. Board of Ed in Secular Studies. Sadly, I don't remember much about him beyond occasional stories, but this was a very important one. The accursed things were certainly accursed, but by what was done, not by birth.

Something becomes accursed when it is badly used. Someone becomes accursed, if people do, in a similar fashion. In an age when we no longer have the benefits of splitting oceans and must rely on science and negotiations and poetry, perhaps we can un-accurse things by re-using them well. We don't have endless supplies of things the way we used to -- no children of gods come down and multiply fishes. We've run out of favors from all manner of gods and goddesses, or they've decided it's time for us to grow up. Isn't that why we were given the abilities to write poetry, music, theater, do science, negotiate, create minor energies, etc.? So that they could go on and travel and do other things and not expend their energies, much needed to sustain us, so we could sustain ourselves?

So let us stop accursing -- and start re-claiming. The trick is how to cleanse someone who has been so badly used, or something, etc. But, certainly there are enough of us to solve this. My cats would say, by golly, just start washing!

Translation:
http://scripturetext.com/joshua/6-18.htm

Joshua 6:18


And ye in any wise raq (rak)leanness, i.e. (figuratively) limitation; only adverbial, merely, or conjunctional, although
keep yourselves from shamar (shaw-mar')to hedge about (as with thorns), i.e. guard; generally, to protect, attend to, etc. yourselves from
the accursed thing cherem (khay'-rem)physical (as shutting in) a net (either literally or figuratively); usually a doomed object; abstr. Extermination

lest ye make yourselves accursed charam (khaw-ram')to seclude; specifically (by a ban) to devote to religious uses (especially destruction); physical and reflexive, to be blunt as to the nose
when ye take laqach (law-kakh')to take (in the widest variety of applications)

of the accursed thing cherem (khay'-rem)physical (as shutting in) a net (either literally or figuratively); usually a doomed object; abstr. Extermination

and make suwm (soom)to put (used in a great variety of applications, literal, figurative, inferentially, and elliptically)wholly, work.

the camp machaneh (makh-an-eh')an encampment (of travellers or troops); hence, an army, whether literal (of soldiers) or figurative (of dancers, angels, cattle, locusts, stars; or even the sacred courts)
of Israel

Henry

leaning on larry, leaning on henry, leaning on larry, leaning on henry, etc. henry in white...

An amazing story

Roll back seven years ago. My first bonding experience with Henry came when the radiator cap came off our heater and, being a nice Jewish girl and not knowing how to put it back on, I called the fire department as the steam filled my bedroom, then my apartment. I shut the door on the bedroom and had to chase Henry out of there. The fire dept came and left, not at all surprised by my call (my neighborhood is right next door to Hasidic Jewish Boro Park) and I saw Larry, but no Henry. Frantic, I raced around the apt and I thought he left. Finally, I noticed Larry's nose had been pointed toward the bottom of the refrigerator the entire time. I looked down to find Henry's little white butt stuck at the bottom. He got under, but couldn't get out. I reached down and gently pulled him out and from that moment and onward had a purring Henry in my arms.

Flash forward to this morning. I wake up and I see Larry, but no Bernie. I ask Larry, where's Bernie and he won't move. I'm like, "You know, Bernie? BERRRRRRNIE?" I race around the house, calling and calling and no Bernie. A little sooner than seven years ago, I realize Larry has been pointing his nose toward under the bed the entire time. I look under and there is my 19 month old tub of fur, stuck, it seems. So, I pull off the futon, and grab him by the scruff of his neck through the one part of the frame wide enough to pull him through, and with a lift, I have a cooing, purring little 14 pounder in my arms. I run him to the actual bedroom (the futon couch lives in the living room), close the door and see if his back legs work by throwing the catnip carrot and they do. As usual, Larry is already behind the door and Bernie is sniffing for him ("It's going to be okay, little buddy.") So, I let Larry in to feed them both a celebratory extra breakfast and Bernie races out the door, runs under the futon and then right out. He was perfectly capable of getting out.

They re-enacted the Henry story for me. (And found a way to get a second breakfast.) Bernie could never fit under the refrigerator, not even at eight months, so this was the closest they could come.

Larry's been sitting in Henry's chair for week's now and he hadn't for months. Bernie, too.
After they ate, the two of them curled up in the sun for a few hours.
They did well and they did me a lot of good. They really did. I'm very lucky.

We celebrate Henry this week and always

Henry Aloisius Snoopy Fergus Kay

February 4 (observed birthday) 2001 - July 16 - 2007

Larry, Bernie and me and everyone who loved him which is everyone know he's still here.

Larry still keeps looking for you. He's been reminding me every minute about this week and about Wednesday. He's always watching for you and he knows you're here and so does Bernie.

Enter

I went on an interview on Tuesday to which I was eight minutes late because my subway line was unexpectedly re-routed over a local line. It didn't occur to me that the local line was THAT much slower until I realized that I should've been in Manhattan at a time I had not yet reached the express stop two stops from my stop.

Eight minutes is not a long time. At a previous interview, the principal made me wait 45 minutes.

Still, I knew the job was gone. I felt as though I'd put myself on the breadline in one fell swoop.

Should I continue walking toward the school?

I called 411 to get the school's number -- to tell them I was walking on the way -- the number was dialed directly. No one picked up. When I got there, I learned the principal was on a long interview by phone with someone else.

I didn't stop to see what I looked like. I signed in and ran to the door. I don't know if the front bangs on my hair were fallen onto my forehead or eyebrows. I think not. I think I would've felt them, but I don't know. I ran right through traffic to make it by eight minutes.

I got out of the train, see, at the time of my interview.

Do I continue walking? This principal is known for her efficiency.

Shouldn't I just go home? Why waste everyone's time? Why give her a reason to remember my name?

I chatted with the guard as she flipped back my ID. She said the principal was nice but strict and as I went through the door, I said that I knew and eight minutes meant I was in deep trouble. I walked in and the lady on the phone waved at me and asked me to go wait in the room with the Gestetner machine where all the noise was and the people came through and when they saw me they went "Oh." This must be where she puts the dunce caps, I thought.

Then we met and I apologized and I meant it. There was nothing I could do. She seemed like it didn't matter. She also seemed like she didn't know who I was. This has happened before, but I won't know why it happened here because I was late. Anyway, she didn't know anything about me and mostly there wasn't a lot to say and I disintegrated, as I often do when people don't know me and I've already made a bad impression, into "Um" and "Oh" and "Well" and, as always, I tell the absolute truth. So, when, angrily, she asked me how long I had been working at my school (trying I could see to figure out my years of experience/age) I said, "8 years, and before that 4 years at the other school and then before that..." "I'm older than I look." She kind of nodded sort of, and the conversation just floated on our mutual loss of what to say to each other because neither of us really knew why we were there.

She tried to end encouragingly, so much so that it didn't hit me until I left how absurd what she had said was and anyway her body language was basically the equivalent of throwing me out.

Next time I can see that I'm going to be late, as I did back at that express stop, I get out of the train and re-schedule. I don't know if it would've gone that way either way, but those eight minutes mean I'll never know.

Amnesiac Interviews?

I feel as if I've been dropped into a twillight zone. I arrive dressed very well, having read as much as possible about the school whose doors I enter, having read as much as I can in the days that have elapsed between the email and the day of the interview about sometimes entirely new subjects for me, files on computer of material to reference, and notebook when I don't need the machine, packet of student essays and, as of this week, corporate haircut. I'm as polite as Garrison Keillor. Patient as his audience and, for that matter, a grandparent with a child who is learning to say "Grandpa". You don't force it, you wait, and you hope and you never more than pray for it. I sit in offices as long as asked, no matter how many noises roll past or above me. Even when no one seems to know I'm there. None of that bothers me. I'm just confused by the latest strategy of some of the principals and I am wondering if anyone has experienced it and how they handle it.

I've been called for several interviews now at which:

1) The interviewer has not seemed to know why he/she called me.

2) The interviewer has taken notes on the answers to a prescribed list of questions dispassionately, occasionally nodding to my answers and then almost physically stopping himself.

3) I've been asked almost no questions while the person thumbs through my CV trying to remember why she called me. This is before having enough time to be bored with me.

4) I've been talked with in the lobby, while the interviewer describes the position to me as if it were neurosurgery, hoping I'll walk away. When I greet it with pleasure, the person seems dumbfounded, so I suggest we proceed to the office.

My only guess is that I was originally called because I seemed interesting in some way and then someone dropped a ball. I often wonder if the "some way" was that I just turned 40 -- I'm class of 1990 so it's a good chance I'm 40 if you can do math, or if you add my years of the DOE to 22 or 23 the years people usually start teaching. Anyway, if you're looking to round out your search with a few veterans so that you make sure you don't seem to be unbalanced, I fit a certain niche. Or, if you like people with interesting and long CV's I also fit that niche. If you like people with interesting degrees, I fit that niche. But, I digress.

For whatever quick reason the person put me in a pile, they stopped there. The person did NO MORE homework. OR SEEMS not to have.

What is this about and am I the only one going through it?

If you've been to one of these amnesiac interviews, can you let me know?

Where do closed schools go?

So, it's official. Brooklyn Comprehensive is no more.

The last graduation ceremony was a little over a week ago, at which a graduate from over ten years ago praised one of our finest teachers for making him the lawyer he is today.

In kitchens, bedrooms, cars, on couches and maybe even in someone's dreams this early afternoon, someone is mentioning, "oh yeah, I heard about that," that their high school closed. I can guarantee to a student he/she isn't happy. But, they feel, as they felt before they walked through our doors, powerless and completely accustomed to disappointment. It took a long time to break them of that feeling and I'm sure not very long for it to be re-instilled by a government agency, a disturbing and unfeeling neighbor, boss, relative, spouse or side of themselves. It's inevitable. The trick was for us to teach them how to re-instill in themselves the flame of hope. I know several of my colleagues were excellent at this.

As I don't know how they feel about appearing on the great white way of the blogosphere, I'll just describe the ways they did --
--a vivacious, youthful history teacher, with the eternal sex appeal of a knowing Jewish mother
pushed the kids to say what they meant and to realize that they could understand history because it just meant paying attention to what was happening around them and why it happened and TAKING NOTES in class.
--a furiously bright and stone cold vixen of an English Teacher told them she would not believe one stereotype or let them stereotype her and that they worked from a clean hard-nosed slate together to make themselves better -- both of them. Not a question in the world she couldn't make as clear as a tree branch and she taught them to carve their essays upward from sentence to paragraph to connected paragraphs to completed essay. Kids came back after school to make their work better and better.
--a handsome musician with words asked the kinds of questions anyone could take hours answering and then taught the students to listen to language as is if it were music. They learned to read hard books by listening to them read. And they liked them

There were more, and yes, those were my friends, but I could sit here and type for days.

There were endless frustrations. Kids came to school one day and disappeared for weeks. The brighter the kid, the less consistent and the more problems. The weaker, the more consistent, but the more in need of services that we often didn't have -- but, at least, you could work with th student and improvise. You could work with memory. I have to admit that there were certain kids I longed to see more than the kids I did see, but I was lucky because I worked in a place where it was rare that I really didn't want to see someone, though sure there were a few. More people didn't want to see me, I think.

The school will only really be closed to those people -- the ones who never want to see or think of any of us anymore.

Living in the Real World

A colleague and I were talking last night and a familiar refrain came up. Now we, as teachers are "living in the real world" where we can be fired at whim like everyone else. Once upon a time, as he said, "you became a teacher, you died a teacher." I remember the resentment of my friends and relatives about this -- what right did I have to the job security I had.

I have a bold question to ask all of you -- the one person and cat who read this blog. Who comprises the economies we speak of? Are we discussing economies which are built by people and which function or are we discussing ones in which other beings exist? I don't know how an all cat economy would exist. I suspect that cats would really fight hard for tenure, but Larry and Bernie are immersed in aviary discussions at the moment, and I don't want to disturb them. Improving their woodpecker imitations, I think, is the goal of the day, so that they might get a better view of the very languid birds who sit on our fire escape between their tree nibbles. It's all about the view, as there is no conquest happening here, thanks to the human peacekeeping squad.

That's how those woodpeckers stay alive, by the way, as Bernie would undoubtedly fly right at them, left on th street. Larry, on the other hand, doesn't have any killer instinct in him now. If he had been left untouched by me -- the Larry I met years ago would certainly have taken out whatever birds remained and he and Bernie would've been a team as they are now, and as he and Henry were on the streets, and a nearly dead pair, too. I got them just in time. Bernie, too was on his last legs, feisty though he was. Cats don't live very long, left to fend on the streets. So, I suspect all those who become pets know that it's better living the way things are now, than in the "real world," artificial as it might be. Bernie looks like a pasha and Larry like a prince. They beam love at me as they breathe.

I don't know many humans who can truly survive an economy as harsh as what they call, the "real world." Most businesses have systems for firing people -- they, at least, give you a warning, a chance to improve, an "action plan" -- I've heard of this at Verizon, and I'm sure it exists in other places. I am sure there are businesses that just fire you without warning, and this is inhumane. When thousands of people are let go immediately, it hurts our economy, and it literally destroys lives. It is akin to killing those people and there should be laws against it and jail punishment for it. You cannot enter into a contract with someone where you will provide them with sustenance if they complete a service and then terminate that contract without warning. You must give people REASONABLE notice. Two weeks is not it. Who are we as human beings that we let other human beings just waste in front of us? What gives us the right to put the death sentence to people because they have failed us? So they failed us? So what? We failed them, to in that we didn't properly prepare them for what was ahead of them. And we didn't select a good fit for the position. So, let's set things up so they can leave in a humane way and so we don't make the same mistake again.

There are also some professions that require stability. One reason it was useful for a teacher to know he or she was coming back the following year was so that she or he could plan ahead for the following year. Also, the teacher could develop skills in a grade level/set of grade levels and become a part of a school. I went to a private school in which some of the teachers had been teaching a certain grade for many years and they really knew their material. At the public school I went to, also, there were some teachers famous for the electives they taught for many years and I couldn't wait to take them. I guess that's not something we want to pass on to our grandchildren.

It takes a long time to develop a course into something worth waiting for -- you can put together a course quickly. But, you won't have the connections between the lessons, the intricate details, the thorough research, the anecdotes, the incidental notes, the amazing ideas, the pictures from your visits to museums that are related -- the life experience that will fill the course and make it great -- that takes time. And frankly, you won't be that great a teacher until you've been teaching for five years or so. Sure, you'll be pretty good. Check back in with yourself in your fifth year. You'll feel the difference.

Or maybe not. Maybe this has all been an illusion. Maybe some doctors are amazing from the start and nothing changes with time. No actor grows. No child develops.

I've always felt that teachers ought to be mentored the first five years and not work alone. But, what do I know.

But, here's another thought about the real world.

There are all kinds of professions in the real world and all kinds of people. And some of the people in the real world CANNOT survive in a survival of the fittest kind of profession and teaching was supposed to be one of the places in which such people could thrive. It was supposed to be a place in which a person could develop skills which involved training others and not a lot of back-biting and social skills related to climbing a ladder of any kind. To suddenly throw veteran teachers who have years of experience DOING THE JOB WELL into a snake pit is an act of the purest evil. The kind of person who becomes a teacher is not the kind of person who works on Wall Street. It has nothing to do with intellect, it has to do with temperament. These are not people who want to fight for their jobs. They have already done this by controlling classes of difficult students for 10 to 25 years in some cases. These are people who prove themselves by doing. They come in, go to work, work hard and go unnoticed. They are not showmen. They are very proud, very honest and very frightened. They didn't have time to go to the gym. They wrote tons of courses and they graduated so many success stories that they could talk about but they don't like to brag and they won't. They never wanted to have to ask for another job again. They thought they already earned their job and they can't imagine what they did wrong and somehow they feel they must have done something, no matter how many times you tell them otherwise. And the papers keep hinting that they did something.
They don't know how to speak up for themselves and they never did. That's part of the reason they became teachers because one thing they did know how to do was speak on behalf of others who did not know how to speak up for themselves. It's a great irony of the profession.

I just can't talk about raises

I just wish I wasn't being discriminated against for my salary in the DOE, okay. I can't talk about the raise, anymore. I don't blame anyone. Please, please, please. It's hard to look for a job within the Dept. of Education of NYC and know that the very raise they gave you is now working against you. There's just something insane about it. But, I don't want anyone to hate me. I've been very lucky. Everyone has been very kind. You can just see why it can get to you, after a while, going to interviews with principals of schools who work for the DOE, knowing that they are going to have a hard time affording you, when the DOE set your salary. So, the DOE thought you were worth that money, but they won't help you find a school within which to earn it. This is true for everyone, even my friend who has something like eighteen years of remarkable service with tons of honors. All of the teachers from schools which have been closed, from the one with the orneriest record to the one with the shiniest are being told that there are no permanent places for them -- not officially, but they do not often get interviews, and when they do, they are quickly rejected for cheaper options. They will become long-term substitutes known as Assigned Teacher Reserves, who will continue to be demonized in the press, and then they will -- I WILL -- be fired. The contract expires in October 2009.

The UFT promises they will not allow this to happen. They will put up a fight.

My fear is that New York City will roll right over them.

Here's the UFT story about it
http://www.uft.org/news/teacher/top/job_barriers_atr/

The Audacity of Audacity: In Praise of Elections

I write this piece in the hopes that all of us who have come to think of as the word, "change" itself as an advertising synonym for "new and improved" will wake up and realize that the whole idea of an election is an opportunity for a mini-revolution. In countries which share this twenty-first century with us and also drive cars, have universities and accept the idea of global warming, as, at least, something worth considering, elections do offer the opportunity to elect leaders who will bring something entirely new to their governments. Even in counties where said leaders go back and forth on how much they want to take in public opinion, like Venezuela, their leaders can make strong choices about the economy, education and take them into new directions which actually bring both change and hope. For those of you not so keen on Chavez, you can even look at the Israeli government and, whatever you think of their politics, their elections do reflect changes in poltical mood and, at one time, so much hope it threatened those who were scared to see it, in the form of the late Yitchak Rabin.
Of course, we all know from our elementary school history classes how much our founders fought for the right to free elections and how long it took for everyone in this country to get their respective rights to vote. In practical terms, we still do not all have the rights to vote, and perhaps that should be the biggest election issue of all. There aren't proper voting machines in every county in this country -- perhaps the most revolutionary and practical thing the Democrats or Republicans could do would be to simply BUY ENOUGH VOTING MACHINES so that EVERYONE COULD PROPERLY VOTE. They could save money on all the ads and just get some equipment. Then do some grassroots work informing people how to use the machines and, oh, by the way informing them about the wonderful party and candidate that cared enough about the election to do this. See if the other party wants to cross the dirt roads to get there. There are people in this country who have probably never voted in their lives. Is that how we want to keep it?
People in this country don't vote for a lot of reasons. Some don't vote because they don't think it matters. Maybe they get that impression from the candidates who don't reach out to that many people. They just go on television. That's not reaching out, that's doing what's convenient. I know John Edwards reached out and didn't win. I also know the media didn't want him to win. But, these two candidates have the media on their side. They can make this happen. And in doing so they can really create change. They can create a real American election, for one.

In case you're wondering about our new standards here in NYC....

Check this out
http://avoicecriesout.com/2008/05/30/joel-kleins-brilliant-credit-recovery-program-teaches-kids-a-life-lesson/

Now, I'm a bleeding heart, but I'd go make the kid read a couple of books, do some journals, write some essays, talk to me....Fun, but simulated semester conditions.

Roger Manning, NYC - vintage video 1988

This was and still is honesty to me which is probably why I can talk less and less.

The Second Grade

The show I watched every day was Lost in Space in re-runs. I watched a parade of re-runs. Family Affair, The Courtship of Eddie's Father, The Addams Family, The Munsters, The Partridge Family, That Girl, Bewitched, I Dream of Genie, Green Acres. I had very little connection to the time in which I was in. That was okay because I hardly talked to anyone so I very rarely needed to make conversation or understand what anyone was talking about. It turned out that much of my generation was watching these programs too, as many of our recent movies have proven. In fact, the whole retro feeling that pervaded the 90's was very much the mid 60's and early 70's and had the goofyness of some of these shows. Some of what I was doing in my quiet was percolating. Thinking. Getting close to my own aesthetic.

I was also making my first trips to the Museum of Modern Art and talking to my mother about Marc Chagall and where poverty figured into his paintings.

Maybe everyone needs a period of silence. Maybe I am going back again because I have to re-discover my aesthetic. My ability to use my own is being run over by an administration that feels my job is expendible, the school at which I worked was not worth sustaining, and that I now much make the argument to principals for why I am valuable. Again and again. That's always very hard to me as I can see why many people are useful. I see myself as one of many choices and not the best of the lot. I am working because I am the right person for the kind of school at which I have worked for the past eight years. And now it is closing.

Danger, Will Robinson!

On a nice day when I should be cleaning the windows

and maybe I will, yet.

I was tempted to write a short story this morning about a woman who mostly communicates with an imagined community. She spends most of the day focused on what to say, how to say it and in anticipation of the responses of people with names that sound like they were meant for CB Radios-- "Bingo1," "FrenchFryeater25," "DRoberts9898" etc. That's what email addresses look like to me. Of course, it was very much autobiography. That is what I've become. I'm haunted by the possibility of reaching some mythical character behind the pseudonym. Often these folks were once, or are still people I see in flesh and blood. However, the internet communication is a thing in itself. It's like whispering in someone's ear or passing a note. It's several steps backwards for me, in a way. In the second grade, I didn't talk to anyone outside of my neighborhood. I just wrote. My writing was very good for my age. All of my verbal energy was focused on it. All of my shyness was indulged, which may or may not have been a good thing for a six year old. Both of my teachers --one for Hebrew studies and one for Secular -- learned to look for my written work and they always wrote back and we had a terrific correspondence. I was very lucky they were so attentive.

The folks out trucking in internet land are a mix of compulsions. Some stay away for days, some check every few minutes, some just don't know what to say even when they read your emails, so they just talk to you when they see you, whenever that might be. Some get back to you right away and engage in tennis volleys with you of email after email until you both tire. You feel like you've told them a lot and that they've told you a lot, and you have. Sometimes I've written as beautifully as I ever could about the most important things to me or to them. And then I don't see them, though they live just forty minutes away or so. The intimacy of the email becomes an excuse never to get together. It affords me a reason to remain shy and isolated like in the second grade.

I wasn't unhappy in the second grade. Actually, I was fairly thin, for me. I had steady routines -- programs I watched on TV, things I regularly talked about with my grandmother when I got home, a time I did my homework and I even limited what I ate. I'd spent a lot of time before this roaming around Israel trying out different places to live with my mother, both of us agreeing that none quite fit. So maybe I was desperate to lock in what I thought did fit and leave it there. There was no conscious decision, however. First grade had felt very noisy and muddled. Too much of everything and too public. So my personality became part of the ether for a year. In third grade it popped right out with a vengeance. I had a wonderfully warm teacher who just made silence seem stifling and made me want to be part of everything.

I'm back in the ether again. It's not painful or anything. I've lost the connection with what makes me want to be part of the everything outside -- and everything outside is shrinking. My school is closing. Randi Rhodes is on Nova M Radio and Air America seems strange to me now, though I still listen sometimes. I hardly see my friends as they are in all different directions. I have long conversations with cab drivers and the lady who takes my orders at the pet food store because they are the people I regularly have contact with. I've become chatty at the grocery store, too. We're all still anonymous with each other, but we share stories of our days just to let the tension out and it feels better. You don't get that on email or from a blog. Emails and blogs are about craft and information. There's hardly any emotion to them, except in the stories I write, I think.

I hope, like in the second grade, I begin to write like a demon.

Return of The Bread Man

For the three of you and cat who follow this blog regularly, I have decided to bring back another story about "The Bread Man". I'll link to the first one at the end of this one, for those of you who have never met him before. My grandmother convinced me that this guy really lived, so I am going to take her word for it.

It was a cold day in April, windy from a rain that had fallen an hour ago. The Bread Man had closed the bakery early. Nobody shopped when it was raining. The mothers of the town bought their food supplies with an eye toward plenty and it would take a disaster (as it later did) to drive the families of the town to starvation. Certainly, they would not starve in one day. So there was never any need to shop in the rain.

Sophie had left school early, escaping through the window before geometry. She hated her teacher and her father had arranged for a math tutor at home, so she didn't worry about missing class. She bent down to clean off her scuff knees and also to pull out her journal. To the aggravation of nearly everyone, Sophie had a habit of stopping mid-walk to stare and then write slowly in her journal. Either that, or to take out a book of English poetry. She had just finished the poem, "Leaves of Grass" and she loved to copy down lines from the poem, especially the lists of kinds of people who existed in Walt Whitman's "America". Butchers, shopkeepers, boys who bagged groceries. In the tiny town she lived in, one thing was usually done by one person. Bread was baked by The Bread Man. There was no Bread Boy learning at his knee. It wasn't the proper time for it.

The air was beginning to dry as the light of the day settled down toward a bright grey. Sophie was turning the corner at which she knew he would be sitting. Always at this time of the day, if it rained, The Bread Man would be sitting on the corner eating a loaf of bread and a salami. One in each hand. He never made a sandwhich, except in his mouth, which he said was, "the best kind". Sophie sat next to him and took out her Walt Whitman, her high cotton socks catching a bit on the cleanly paved street. The Bread Man looked at her and said, "Are there any bakers in that poem, Sophie?" Sophie thought a minute and said, "If there aren't any, it sure feels like there are. He's got practically the whole country in it. He loves absolutely everybody." The Bread Man thought a bit and said, "That's why you like the poem?" Sophie's hair lifted a bit in the wind and she bolted forward, "No. Absolutely not. The truth is, I like the fact that he says that America is singing. I think that everybody sings in his own way and I've never met anyone who thought the same way. Even you sing." The Bread Man's eyes opened wide, "You've heard me?" "No, no, no," said Sophie. "It's in the way you move and walk around. It's very much like Lord Byron or Tennyson." "Byron?" said The Bread Man. "Byron wasn't such a nice man. He tried to make a show of himself, but he wasn't so nice. He talked too much about things. I make beautiful things." Sophie's eyes watered, "I didn't mean anything insulting by it. You just carry yourself like you are a big Romantic person. Like the singers at the opera when the story is about love or danger. It's very pleasant to watch you. You have a rhythm like the Polish folk songs do." At that, The Bread Man smiled. "People think I don't know anything. That's why I only talk to you. In fact, I always have a song in my head when I work. But, it is nothing big and phoney like those big poems of Byron. I do like the Polish folk songs. The woman who gave me my job used to sing them every day. Do you remember her?" Sophine looked down because she did not. "You were a baby when she left here. She left here for America, you know. Like you, she had a marvelous singing voice. Every time she sang, I felt like I turned into a big pearl." Sophie started to laugh. "It's true. I felt big and shiny and smooth. And like I would float into a cloud." Sophie's face filled with sun and softness. "You make me feel that way when you sing, too. And someday you'll go off to Hollywood and be a big star."

They sat together for a while, Sophie reading and The Bread Man finishing his food. Then, taking a deep breath, Sophie turned to The Bread Man and looked as straight into his eyes as she had ever looked at anyone. "Will you come with me when I go? You can protect me and you can make my meals. You would make me laugh, most of all." The Bread Man was very moved and his face turned the pink of a new rose and he wiped all of the crumbs off his hands and face. "Everyone in this town will go with you, and I will be first in line, Sophie. We will be in your heart. But, a person like me cannot go with you. My job is here. I am the only Bread Man here. In a big city, there are a million bread men, each singing louder than the next one. You cannot sit on an empty street and talk to a friend, either."

Before she could stop herself, her lungs heaved with tears and her body shook hard. "Then I don't want to go," she insisted again, and again. She knew that her parents had invested time, energy money and their hearts on the idea that she would leave her town. One sister and one brother had done so and they wrote about amazing things. Her brother Al fixed watches for a famous jeweler in New York City and studied law. Her sister Deborah planted trees and built houses in the middle of the desert in Palestine. But, Sophie loved her street and she loved things just as they were. Except when she started to sing. When she sang she saw nothing but the clouds and the trees and crowds and crowds of people as if she had turned into her Parakeet, Chipper, who loved to stand and sing at the top of her balcony.

They sat together that afternoon in silence. Just as he left, The Bread Man pulled a roll from his pocket and handed it to her. "You're not going so fast, little girl and you need to eat regardless." She took the roll and before she could ask he said "Yes, yes, I put raisins and honey in it and no, I won't tell your mother." She smiled as he walked away. Then, like him, she took a big bite out of the roll and concentrated closely on the sweetness and the falling of the night.

For the first Bread Man story go to
http://saddleshoe.blogspot.com/2006/10/bread-man.html

What is considered not-hireable

Here's an excerpt from a post on Education Notes.

....I'm a Music teacher.Masters plus 30 credits.20 years longevity in NYC school system.Biggest Chorus for about a decade in Manhattan middle schools.Full S ratings throughout career.Great letters of satisfaction, commendation, awe, and thanks through entire career.Full of energy, full of skills -- pianist, opera singer, know many languages, accomplished music historian, directed theater, playwright....Before teaching, was for years a Senior Staff Editor of the largest and most prestigious music encyclopedia in the world - 24 vols. Was responsible for some of the largest bibliographical articles in it, international reputation in music bibliography.Problem: Am 61 years old with relatively big salaryRepeat. Would you hire me? If so when?You're not the only one who wouldn't.Applied to 10 schools through the Open Market. Though clearly one of the most experienced, educated music teachers in the system, did not get called for a single interview....

The author also notes that he knows lots of Grad students without degrees who DID get interviewed and hired...

Read the full posting on Ednotes online http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2008/05/tim-daley-do-you-want-to-hire-me.html

What I think about while my city is thinking about firing teachers

The first time I heard the tenor Carlo Bergonzi was 1978. I was ten years old, and like now, thought I had the right to express a respected opinion about everything. Unlike now, when I know what a schmuck I am for thinking that (and how bad it is that this knowledge doesn't stop me), I had absolutely no idea how dumb I could really be.

In the honest part of me, which is in my silence and in my writing, I always knew that there's no reason at all to have any kind of judgemental opinion about a performance because any interpretation could be valid. Of course, I wasn't paying for the opera tickets that night. My mother was and she was furious and seeing death. Carlo Bergonzi was way past his prime and in the latter part of his career. Anyone could see and hear that, even people as new to opera as we were then. He had obviously been a great star because he got applause when he came on stage and because, no matter how forced he sounded, there was a steady stream of respectful applause. But, I knew that the train ride home was going to be murder. My mother was going to have absolutely nothing good to say, everything was going to be painted in bones and maggots and the number of hours it took her to earn the money for those tickets was going to be emblazoned on my forehead. Meanwhile, what did the two of us really know about the performance we were so condemning? We'd listened to a recording of the opera a couple of times and were in our first year of attending live performances.

In many respects, my mother was absolutely right. Carlo Bergonzi was not the best tenor in the world ever, and that The Metropolitan Opera was serving him up in a lead role for top dollar seemed shameful. Inasmuch as one believes that just being able to pay for the price of the ticket and cramming some listening in before the show made either of us an expert on what great or very good singing was, she was very right. If that were true and she was right then The Metropolitan Opera House and the Department of Education should let anyone with bus fare and a certificate from a three hour course decide how they do their business.

But, as I know now, she was absolutely wrong. And I knew it then, too. Without the pressure of my mother's sense of injustice to the American blue collar worker and her feeling that every attack was personal (and increasingly, that there was a team specifically assigned to torment her) --left to just breathe, I actually enjoyed hearing him. He still had a beautiful sound to his voice and he was artful. That he was a tremendously artful tenor is much clearer to me now and I have also heard recordings of him from 1960. But, really: who is to say that his performance was not world class and that it was not, worth far more than bringing out a younger, more robust but ordinary tenor. Listening to what I can remember of it now, and later recordings of his that I have also heard, there is a great deal of passion, art -- the latter of world class quality. And I can say that I heard Carlo Bergonzi live. The way I can say that I saw Lauren Bacall in "Waiting in the Wings." Yes, she missed lines and it was a boring play. She still had terrific charisma, a fabulous face and to see her and Rosemary Harris go at it was still wonderfully charming and sexy. I got the tickets to that one, so no, my mother didn't bleed iron. She scoured my skin in several repetitions of that half-Yiddish/half English "Ech..." which translates in my late grandmother's words into "I was not enthused." All I could think of was, "Why the F-- are you complaining? I got the tickets and you got to see, in at least Rosemary Harris, one of the best actresses to ever grace the stage and a pop culture icon in Lauren Bacall. And those women had incredible stage presences before they even opened their mouths."

Deep, deep down, my mother knows all this. In later performances at the Met, when we found ourselves without a choice but to see Bergonzi once again, my mother pointed out several moments of beauty. And, given the baritones of the period, we had already found ourselves indulging in the decent acting, half-baked imitation of Leonard Warren that was Sherrill Milnes. For those of you who don't know opera, think Robert Goulet. Or think Usher. He was handsome, he was a pretty decent actor with a lovely sounding voice and the brains to steal brilliant choices from the greater singers who came before him. To show just what I knew about opera then, I was a big fan of his. I still have umbilical chord ties to his recordings and keep a few arias of his on my Mp3 player. No, he's not magnificent as a button I have of him pronounces. He was smarter than he was good and he put together strong performances until 1981 when he became ill and probably should have retired. And yes, I was part of the respectful applause in the years that followed. Listening to Milnes had lead me to Leonard Warren -- think someone on the level of Domingo in baritones or Barbara Streisand or Celia Cruz or Sarah Vaughn, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Jay-Z or Nas. He was excellent enough to have taught me how to listen for more excellence. I had seen and heard all of Warren's phrasings before (because Milnes was, by his own admission in interviews, an excellent thief), so what might have been the initially jarring woody darkness of his voice, was easy for me to attend to, take in and enjoy beyond words. It was like having having seen the movie before reading the book. I could visualize and had a context for something otherwise difficult and alien to me which was better than anything I had ever seen.

I imagine that you heard the "bell" in that last sentence. You recognized the moment where the moral of the story is about to come in. It had the tone of your parents, which they stole from their parents or someone else's parents, or, in my case, a friend whose didactic skills and instincts are impeccable.

No one is impeccable. My friend is as close to the platonic form of the word as a human can be.

If I hadn't tried to imagine what it would be to be "impeccable" I wouldn't be able to recognize it in my friend. If I hadn't had so many friends and teachers who also aimed to be beyond reproach, I'd've never been able to see it in his every motion and to recognize how far above he is everyone else I've ever known.

So, this is what I think about as my city looks to fire teachers who have either been accused of everything from being late to being lecherous but have been convicted for nothing at all or who had the double misfortune, like I've had, of being at a school that is being closed and being 40 or over and making a salary that most principals find prohibitive -- they can get two young teachers for the price of me. And that given the angst that comes with not having enough money in your budget to hire all the teachers and guidance counselors you need, and the general feeling that you don't know what economy you're bringing your students into, I can almost see how my commanding the salary I do, which, by the way is much LESS than that of a close friend who sells phone services, seems daunting. Even if I am AS GOOD as Leonard Warren or Jay-Z, why is it necessary to have someone so good? Does a school necessarily need a fantastic teacher when it can have two serviceable ones? That's a real question, actually, and I'd also bet that thought is very much a part of the climate in which principals make their decisions. After all, they are coming to schools and finding their budgets continually slashed. The atmosphere is not one which encourages one to think about giving the best to your students. It's one where you think about being able to give, at all. In other words, if the Mayor and Governor and everyone involved in the Department of Education's budget doesn't want to fight hard enough to get public school kids in this city MORE THAN THE MINIMUM, what's a principal to do? In the principals' minds, anyway, even if they think about spending their pennies in my direction they'll pause thinking I'm more likely to be like Carlo Bergonzi in 1978 -- not in my prime, though very much a great artist. Or, I might be Sherrill Milnes -- a take-off of other great artists who was very durable, but then broke down.

First of all, anyone who has been in a NYC classroom knows that students do not supply the respectful applause of an opera audience. After 14 years, I had to be at least as good as a durable Sherrill Milnes. I had to be able to command students' attention and get decent test results. Or they would do worse than throw tomatoes at me. Plus, I have mostly good reviews, and most of my fellow colleagues who have lasted as long, have even better ones. Those who have some bad reviews also have excellent ones. Do you know how many sorely bad performances Luciano Pavarotti gave? Besides the times he was caught lip synching? I sat through, at least, five of them. Five out of thousands which were excellent, ten of which I heard. What is the balance of the careers of all of us ATR's -- Assigned Teacher Reserves? That's the important statistic? We have actual track records you can point to -- what are they? Do those teachers who have two U ratings have them in succession and are they both from the same principal -- and were there none from any other? And again, is it two U's against 13 S's. And are there letters of praise in the file?

We are in this position because we are teachers unlucky enough to be made full-time substitutes instantly when our schools closed or because their positions were cut, or because, perhaps, we had the misfortune of having a student accuse them of something they didn't do? Most, if not all of the teachers in the Rubber Rooms who are either NOT FOUND GUILTY or who were found to have done something worth punishing with something as small as a letter in their files, will return to work as ATR's. This is even true of individuals who have had their charges dismissed. It's just easier to pull the person out of their position rather than return him or her to a place where he or she was unwanted enough for someone to have told a lie about them or for them to have been a mild misunderstanding --say, a teacher thought he/she was doing something the principal agreed with and actually the principal NOW SAYS he/she did not.

So, the vast majority of ATR's are in that position through no fault of their own. I didn't say that ALL of them were. But, I'd take a bet that the percentage would be 80 or 90 percent, if only because so many are teachers whose schools just happened to close. The schools' closing does not indicate anything about their abilities. In the corporate world, if a project fails, you don't fire the individuals who carried it out -- or not just them. You fire the director or vice president who was in charge. Many principals have been fired for other reasons, but a great many of the principals of schools which are closing will go on to lead other schools. That doesn't trouble me because I know that you cannot place the blame for an entire school's failure on the back of any one person. I also know that many excellent performances in the arts and in schools have gone unappreciated. My school wasn't closed for poor results. We had especially poor attendance after we were moved to a dangerous neighborhood. Some years, we had poor attendance because the students who were coming to us had a history of poor attendance. They got better. That didn't count. When they graduated, we had to start again, sometimes with similarly bad attending groups. And they got better and it also didn't count.

In 1978, most of the audience applauded for Carlo Bergonzi. He gave a world class performance that showed artistry, knowledge of tradition and an ability to use his resources to their best use. It was far better than the early performances of the young, and later to be very interesting, Neil Shicoff. I learned a lot from it, and I always learn something when I listen to his recordings wherever they are in his career.

On that night, however, I sat enraged the way many people do now when they think about teachers making more money than they think they should, for whatever reason. I learned fairly quickly to think with my whole brain, not just the part of it that was responding to immediate anxieties, and to listen much more carefully. In my platonic ideal of a classroom, my students learn to listen, read and write as carefully as possible with all the knowledge which is required for them to take on the hardest and best literature in the deepest way.

Maybe that's not worth the price of admission to the vast majority in this city. Maybe they would rather my students met minimum competencies very well. Certainly, it is easier to count smaller accomplishments than larger ones.

So, now I know why so many of my students do poorly at math. They live in a city where a large percentage of people are counting in very small, digestible quantities.

I hope that most of them have better taste in music.

The Daily News and the Rubber Room

On May 4 and May 5, The New York Daily News printed two articles about NYC's Rubber Room. In brief, a "Rubber Room" is a holding pen in which teachers, paraprofessionals, school aides, secretaries -- almost all school related personnel -- who are accused of violations wait to be tried. They can wait there for months into years. Because the city claims they are dangerous to kids, the individuals accused aren't given anything to do. The punishment is a la Sartre's play No Exit in which individuals are trapped with nothing to do but be in close confines with other trapped people.

You can look up the articles. It's not that I don't want to give you the links, it's that I am so disgusted and so tired of hearing about this issue in the way that the Daily News presented it, that I don't want to look for the addresses again. They're not hard to find. Go to http://www.nydailynews.com/, type in "Rubber Room" and they come up.

They were yet, two MORE articles that talked about how much money this system cost. And, of course, the paper claims to have gotten volumes of emails which basically called for the teachers to be drawn and quartered.

What everyone forgets is, no one in that room is proven guilty. If you've been proven guilty, you've either received a fine, suspension or termination. If you've been proven innocent, you will be placed back in your school.

Suppose we applied this to our general legal system -- would we shoot all detainees? I realize that some of our prisons, like Abu Ghraib, make it seem that way. But, I thought the consensus in this country was not to destroy the Constitution entirely.

In my very, very nebbishy consternation, I wrote a letter to the author of both articles. Depending on what she does, I'll print it here in a few days.

At this moment, however, I wish to remind all who read this that
1) No teacher chooses to be accused of anything
2) An accusation does not equal guilt
and, a very sad
3) Many of the accusers -- students, parents and principals -- have motives for their actions which have little to do with what has actually occurred. I met a teacher who was accused by a parent of possibly giving an answer to a test to another student in that paren't class. Nobody corroborated the parent's story. The teacher spent the year in that confinement cell waiting for it to be determined that she could be released. What do you suppose the accusing parent got out of it? His/her son didn't have this tough teacher for the rest of the year. Now, there's an ugly way to keep your grades up.

Think back: imagine you were given the chance to get a teacher you hated pulled from the classroom in one, fell swoop. No more awful assignments. No more boredom. No more criticism. It's tempting, isn't it? Maybe you wouldn't do it, but you know someone who might. The way you might not destroy the teacher's desk, car or room, but students have done. And now they can take it one step further. They NEVER have to see that teacher again, if they plan it right....

Furthermore, it is a fact that our current DOE actively creates disincentives for keeping senior staff. Before this administration, the DOE supplemented school budgets so that they could retain older, more experienced and YES more costly teachers. Don't teachers have a right to be paid for their experience? Regardless of what you think on that question, with this administration the DOE no longer does this. So, you can get two younger teachers for the price of one older teacher. I don't know, Walmart is one of the most popular stores in this country. What do you think the principal's are shopping for in teachers these days, as a result? As you would expect, the average new teacher doesn't last three years -- just the way the average bottom priced item at Walmart doesn't.


Be well, everyone.

Let's just say I like the smile on this kid

14 Reasons Hillary Clinton Should Quit

http://thepage.time.com/halperins-take-painful-things-hillary-clinton-knows-%E2%80%94-or-should-know/

HEAVEN IS ADOPTED

My friend who was fostering her couldn't resist her!!!!!

A happy ending. Whee! (with homage to Henry)

As if Bill Clinton's bozo comments weren't bad enough

Check out David Sirota's latest piece "Pennsylvania and the Persistence of the Race Chasm"

http://action.credomobile.com/sirota/2008/04/pennsylvania_the_persistence_o.html

Heaven

That's her name and my friend just adopted her after fostering her!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

An interesting letter reprinted from New York Teacher

CHANCELLOR'S REGS ANTI-TEACHER
The following was sent to UFT Vice President Richard Farkas and forwarded to the New York Teacher (5/03)
To the Editor :
At a well-attended chapter meeting this morning the staff loudly voiced its concerns about a rash of corporal punishment allegations that have been made against teachers at our school. All of these allegations proved to be unfounded but teachers have been removed from the classroom for protracted periods of time while the allegations were being investigated. This not only demeans the teacher, but also disrupts the education of our students. I explained the Chancellor's Regulations to the staff and stressed caution in all dealings with children, but many felt that the regulations are ludicrously unjust to teachers. On the other hand, when students curse at or abuse teachers, little happens. Recently, for example, a teacher's aide was physically assaulted by a student. There was a superintendent's suspension as well as police charges. Even before this case was heard in court, the student was returned to our school as if nothing had happened. District 6 would not transfer the student. Such incidents undermine the school's disciplinary code and destroy staff morale. The Chancellor's Regulations are clearly anti-teacher. Teachers are considered guilty until an outside investigator gets around to determining that the charges were unfounded. In one current case, even after a teacher was cleared, he is still waiting for authorization to return to his classroom. We have had cases where teachers were removed from their classrooms for weeks before being returned. Another unfortunate result of this process is that children have learned that they can get back at a teacher by making a single allegation. Some have even turned it into a game of trying to get a teacher fired. In addition, there seem to be forces outside the school that are influencing parents to make frivolous complaints against staff. All of this has created a climate where teachers have to think twice about enforcing discipline or coming to the assistance of a colleague.We understand and support regulations that exist to protect children. However, the current regulations are grossly out of balance. The regulations are being used to attack teachers for ulterior purposes. The effect of this is damage to teachers' well-being and morale, disrupted education and wasted money for coverage of the classes of teachers removed from duty. Teachers deserve and are entitled to the same legal principle that all Americans enjoy : innocent until proven guilty, and a fair and quick hearing.
John Eichele, IS 52, Manhattan

Delta

If you have taken this rubble for my past raking though it for fragments you could sell
know that I long ago moved ondeeper into the heart of the matter
If you think you can grasp me, think again:
my story flows in more than one direction
a delta springing from the riverbedwith its five fingers
Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1989 by Adrienne Rich.

John McCain: The greater of the evils

10 things you should know about John McCain (but probably don't): 1. John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now he says his position has "evolved," yet he's continued to oppose key civil rights laws.
2. According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, Russia and China. Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain "will make Cheney look like Gandhi."
3. His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.
4. McCain opposes a woman's right to choose. He said, "I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned."
5. The Children's Defense Fund rated McCain as the worst senator in Congress for children. He voted against the children's health care bill last year, then defended Bush's veto of the bill.
6. He's one of the richest people in a Senate filled with millionaires. The Associated Press reports he and his wife own at least eight homes! Yet McCain says the solution to the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get a "second job" and skip their vacations.
7. Many of McCain's fellow Republican senators say he's too reckless to be commander in chief. One Republican senator said: "The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He's erratic. He's hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me."
8. McCain talks a lot about taking on special interests, but his campaign manager and top advisers are actually lobbyists. The government watchdog group Public Citizen says McCain has 9 lobbyists raising money for his campaign, more than any of the other presidential candidates.
9. McCain has sought closer ties to the extreme religious right in recent years. The pastor McCain calls his "spiritual guide," Rod Parsley, believes America's founding mission is to destroy Islam, which he calls a "false religion." McCain sought the political support of right-wing preacher John Hagee, who believes Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for gay rights and called the Catholic Church "the Antichrist" and a "false cult."
10. He positions himself as pro-environment, but he scored a 0—yes, zero—from the League of Conservation Voters last year

from moveon.org

Bernie DeNiro

EVERYONE SHOULD READ

THE CORPORATE SURGE AGAINST PUBLIC SCHOOLS
http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/2008/02/corporate-surge-against-public-schools.html

Since we no longer have Edwards

I move to the more beatific speaker of the two Democratic party candidates left to me and the one who has not been on the board of Wallmart nor supported the Iraq war from the start.

John Edwards Leaves with a challenge to the Democrats

Thank you all very much. We're very proud to be back here.During the spring of 2006, I had the extraordinary experience of bringing 700 college kids here to New Orleans to work. These are kids who gave up their spring break to come to New Orleans to work, to rehabilitate houses, because of their commitment as Americans, because they believed in what was possible, and because they cared about their country.I began my presidential campaign here to remind the country that we, as citizens and as a government, have a moral responsibility to each other, and what we do together matters. We must do better, if we want to live up to the great promise of this country that we all love so much.It is appropriate that I come here today. It's time for me to step aside so that history can blaze its path. We do not know who will take the final steps to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but what we do know is that our Democratic Party will make history. We will be strong, we will be unified, and with our convictions and a little backbone we will take back the White House in November and we'll create hope and opportunity for this country.This journey of ours began right here in New Orleans. It was a December morning in the Lower Ninth Ward when people went to work, not just me, but lots of others went to work with shovels and hammers to help restore a house that had been destroyed by the storm.We joined together in a city that had been abandoned by our government and had been forgotten, but not by us. We knew that they still mourned the dead, that they were still stunned by the destruction, and that they wondered when all those cement steps in all those vacant lots would once again lead to a door, to a home, and to a dream.We came here to the Lower Ninth Ward to rebuild. And we're going to rebuild today and work today, and we will continue to come back. We will never forget the heartache and we'll always be here to bring them hope, so that someday, one day, the trumpets will sound in Musicians' Village, where we are today, play loud across Lake Ponchartrain, so that working people can come marching in and those steps once again can lead to a family living out the dream in America.We sat with poultry workers in Mississippi, janitors in Florida, nurses in California.We listened as child after child told us about their worry about whether we would preserve the planet.We listened to worker after worker say "the economy is tearing my family apart."We walked the streets of Cleveland, where house after house was in foreclosure.And we said, "We're better than this. And economic justice in America is our cause."And we spent a day, a summer day, in Wise, Virginia, with a man named James Lowe, who told us the story of having been born with a cleft palate. He had no health care coverage. His family couldn't afford to fix it. And finally some good Samaritan came along and paid for his cleft palate to be fixed, which allowed him to speak for the first time. But they did it when he was 50 years old. His amazing story, though, gave this campaign voice: universal health care for every man, woman and child in America. That is our cause.And we do this -- we do this for each other in America. We don't turn away from a neighbor in their time of need. Because every one of us knows that what -- but for the grace of God, there goes us. The American people have never stopped doing this, even when their government walked away, and walked away it has from hardworking people, and, yes, from the poor, those who live in poverty in this country.For decades, we stopped focusing on those struggles. They didn't register in political polls, they didn't get us votes and so we stopped talking about it. I don't know how it started. I don't know when our party began to turn away from the cause of working people, from the fathers who were working three jobs literally just to pay the rent, mothers sending their kids to bed wrapped up in their clothes and in coats because they couldn't afford to pay for heat.We know that our brothers and sisters have been bullied into believing that they can't organize and can't put a union in the workplace. Well, in this campaign, we didn't turn our heads. We looked them square in the eye and we said, "We see you, we hear you, and we are with you. And we will never forget you." And I have a feeling that if the leaders of our great Democratic Party continue to hear the voices of working people, a proud progressive will occupy the White House.Now, I've spoken to both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama. They have both pledged to me and more importantly through me to America, that they will make ending poverty central to their campaign for the presidency.And more importantly, they have pledged to me that as President of the United States they will make ending poverty and economic inequality central to their Presidency. This is the cause of my life and I now have their commitment to engage in this cause.And I want to say to everyone here, on the way here today, we passed under a bridge that carried the interstate where 100 to 200 homeless Americans sleep every night. And we stopped, we got out, we went in and spoke to them.There was a minister there who comes every morning and feeds the homeless out of her own pocket. She said she has no money left in her bank account, she struggles to be able to do it, but she knows it's the moral, just and right thing to do. And I spoke to some of the people who were there and as I was leaving, one woman said to me, "You won't forget us, will you? Promise me you won't forget us." Well, I say to her and I say to all of those who are struggling in this country, we will never forget you. We will fight for you. We will stand up for you.But I want to say this -- I want to say this because it's important. With all of the injustice that we've seen, I can say this, America's hour of transformation is upon us. It may be hard to believe when we have bullets flying in Baghdad and it may be hard to believe when it costs $58 to fill your car up with gas. It may be hard to believe when your school doesn't have the right books for your kids. It's hard to speak out for change when you feel like your voice is not being heard.But I do hear it. We hear it. This Democratic Party hears you. We hear you, once again. And we will lift you up with our dream of what's possible.One America, one America that works for everybody.One America where struggling towns and factories come back to life because we finally transformed our economy by ending our dependence on oil.One America where the men who work the late shift and the women who get up at dawn to drive a two-hour commute and the young person who closes the store to save for college. They will be honored for that work. One America where no child will go to bed hungry because we will finally end the moral shame of 37 million people living in poverty.One America where every single man, woman and child in this country has health care.One America with one public school system that works for all of our children.One America that finally brings this war in Iraq to an end. And brings our service members home with the hero's welcome that they have earned and that they deserve.Today, I am suspending my campaign for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency.But I want to say this to everyone: with Elizabeth, with my family, with my friends, with all of you and all of your support, this son of a millworker's gonna be just fine. Our job now is to make certain that America will be fine.And I want to thank everyone who has worked so hard – all those who have volunteered, my dedicated campaign staff who have worked absolutely tirelessly in this campaign.And I want to say a personal word to those I've seen literally in the last few days – those I saw in Oklahoma yesterday, in Missouri, last night in Minnesota – who came to me and said don't forget us. Speak for us. We need your voice. I want you to know that you almost changed my mind, because I hear your voice, I feel you, and your cause is our cause. Your country needs you – every single one of you.All of you who have been involved in this campaign and this movement for change and this cause, we need you. It is in our hour of need that your country needs you. Don't turn away, because we have not just a city of New Orleans to rebuild. We have an American house to rebuild.This work goes on. It goes on right here in Musicians' Village. There are homes to build here, and in neighborhoods all along the Gulf. The work goes on for the students in crumbling schools just yearning for a chance to get ahead. It goes on for day care workers, for steel workers risking their lives in cities all across this country. And the work goes on for two hundred thousand men and women who wore the uniform of the United States of America, proud veterans, who go to sleep every night under bridges, or in shelters, or on grates, just as the people we saw on the way here today. Their cause is our cause.Their struggle is our struggle. Their dreams are our dreams.Do not turn away from these great struggles before us. Do not give up on the causes that we have fought for. Do not walk away from what's possible, because it's time for all of us, all of us together, to make the two Americas one.Thank you. God bless you, and let's go to work. Thank you all very much.

All through the night

For the past two years and a few months, this Cole Porter song has been all too useful for me. The song, which can be heard as referring to an imagined or lost love who is never there "when dawn comes to waken" the singer of the tune has been for me and, I'm sure a billion others like me, a refrain used when facing an actual loss of a romantic partner. For the past week, however, on and off, at differing times of day and night (because my sleep cycles have been completely disrupted) I've gone back to the memories of a different time, place and...job. I've been remembering as best I can what it was like to have worked at Brooklyn Comprehensive Night High School when Malaika Bermiss was principal and many of my colleagues and I were even younger than we are now. The more I go back, the more I want to, and in fact, a great deal of yesterday was spent just doing so in my own head while not doing anything else except tending to my cats all day. Whenever I tell people about Malaika, I always start with how she hired me which she actually did twice in almost the exact same circumstances. I'm only going to write about the first time here.

I had been working for a year and three months at an adolescent teaching facility on Rikers Island. Although the students were some of the most brilliant people I have ever met or taught (as a rule, the worse the crime, the better the brain), the job wore on me. The prison system added to the educational system is a lot of quagmire to be involved in at once, the program itself was kind of a factory and I was being asked by the principal, regardless of my skills as a teacher and the fact that my classrooms were comprised entirely of imprisoned 18-21 year old males to start putting on dresses and look prettier when I came to work. Needless to say, it wasn't the kind of place you imagine throwing the energy of your early 20's wholeheartedly into in order to change the world. Nothing more was going to be done for the students than what was being done, and no student took the GED who wasn't very likely to pass. It was a good statistics machine. All the principal was asking me to literally do was ease up and be "Vanna White". Moreover, she wasn't going to release me from my job because I was too good. I needed someone really, really smart, politically savvy, trustworthy and most of all, who actually cared about education to get me out of this. Someone at WBAI where I worked in the Arts Department told me they had just interviewed with this really interesting principal but that they couldn't take the job because of the hours -- they were at night. Night didn't bother me -- I was only a year away from college and endless all-nighters.

Malaika Bermiss was sitting at her desk in her very overcrowded office, still working in the late afternoon, on the day I met her. Calculating with my very rough math skills, since she turns out to have only been 17 years older than I am, she was probably about 40, the age I will be in a week and a few days. I told her when I called that if she wanted to interview me that day then I didn't have time to change into my interview suit and I'd be in jeans because that's what I had worn to work. She said that was fine. I think she was wearing either a denim shirt and skirt--her clothes were elegantly loose and comfortable as I learned they would always be whether they were cotton or silk, high fashion or a sweatsuit. So that I don't get overwhelmed and so that I can take small readings first, I glom onto a person's initial gestures only and maybe one or two facial characteristics. With students, I am much the opposite, but I want to confine adults to a few controlling variables. Malaika was a firm handshake, a commanding and intelligent mezzo-soprano voice, and big-brown-no-b.s. eyes. She turned around in her chair and looked straight at my face. There was no up-and-down of my clothing, my weight or my bearing. I think I smiled and I know we looked straight at each other during what was not a short conversation. That sounds like nothing, perhaps, but there's almost no one I will look directly at for more than three minutes at a time and usually not even that in an initial meeting. I can do so with students because I need to. Usually, I fidget, look at my shoes, the sky, my fingernails or just away. It's not that I mean to be rude to adults I've just met, but I need time to trust them and like to do so in bits and pieces. Malaika Bermiss could be trusted instantly because she meant what she said.
We agreed on a lot, at least in spirit and having taught at Rikers made it easier for me to articulate how I felt about giving people second chances and the fact that I didn't want to judge those students or the students I would meet at her school based on what they had done in their past. By then, I also knew how to bluster about "having control of my classroom" as well as anyone, which I'm sure she saw through, but I did have a fairly decent technique for teaching essays and I liked doing it. What was clearest from what she was saying and the way the school was already running was that this was going to be a school designed for this population and we were really going to work with that in mind. She's the only person I've ever met who has ever recognized in practice that growth means you have to be allowed to make some mistakes-- and who knows how to look at something other people call a mistake and find what is useful in it.
I can hear people chiming "those mistakes are happening with children" -- and I'm afraid I will have to tell you that more mistakes happen when you don't try to fix problems than when you do and you still have to work out the fine tuning. Ours was a school where test scores and graduation rates got better and better. We're being closed because it's cheaper to run a GED program for the population we serve than an intensive high school. And the program won't even be run by the DOE -- it will be run by a non-profit organization and the students' statistics won't be counted in NYC public school numbers.

The woman I met that day, was most importantly, accountable. She wasn't going to let the school remain a "program" -- it was going to be a regular "high school" and not an "alternative high school". These students were not going to be cut off from the mainstream more than they had been. They were going to get a solid high school education which could serve as preparation for college. And somehow we were going to figure out how to do it. The same somehow, sort of, that she used to get her superintendent to call the superintendent in charge of the program I was working in and tell my principal to let me go which she finally did on the last day she had to do so.

It's 5:23 am. Soon it will be daytime. Confound it.

In Memory of Malaika Holman-Bermiss

Ad astra per aspera -- To the stars despite the difficulties. January 14, 2008.

In lieu of flowers, the family has established an endowment fund at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, one of Malaika’s favorite institutions. The goal is to endow a chair in the Opera house on the mezzanine level that will have a plaque that bears her name. More importantly, the endowment helps BAM to continue bringing world class performance art to the people of Brooklyn. Please send any donations to:
Brooklyn Academy of Music

Attn: Endowment Office

30 Lafayette Avenue

Brooklyn, NY 11217
Please note on the check "In memory of Malaika Bermiss."

Some of Mrs. Bermiss' last published thoughts about Brooklyn Comprehensive Night High School are in the article below from CITY LIMITS, March 19, 2007.

GOOD NIGHT, NIGHT SCHOOL:BROOKLYN COMP TO CLOSE
When this nontraditional school closes next year, only one other similar school will be left for students who are busy from 8:00 to 3:00. > By Matt Sollars


Ladonna Powell, 19, lives on her own, works at a bakery in Manhattan to pay the rent, and attends high school classes at Brooklyn Comprehensive Night High School because they fit into her schedule. Powell says the school, one of only two night high schools citywide, is important for struggling students who can’t make it to a day school but want to earn a diploma.
“Each person has their own problems,” she said. “We need this school to stay open. It’s a second chance.”
The public school is slated to close, however. The city announced in December that Brooklyn Comprehensive, which opened in 1990 to help students who had trouble in a traditional high school setting, would close this June. Teachers and students said they felt stunned and betrayed. The teachers’ union mounted a lobbying campaign, and by late February the staff was told the school would remain open until June 2008.
The city says five new "transfer schools," designed for “overage, under-credited” students, will replace Brooklyn Comp’s services. But while they will have some nighttime classes, it looks like they may not have an after-hours curriculum as complete as Brooklyn Comprehensive, which has the full high school curriculum except art and P.E. The other similarly complete nighttime school in operation is the Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day High School, located on Second Avenue near Stuyvesant Town. The Department of Education cites “low demand” as the reason for closing the night school.
“Attendance has dropped significantly in recent years,” said Melody Meyer, a department spokesperson. She pointed specifically to an abysmal 33 percent attendance record at Brooklyn Comp last year.
The school’s former principal, Malaika Holman Bermiss, says “attendance was always horrendous.” But she and some current teachers counter that the attendance rate dropped precipitously after the school was moved from Midwood High School to South Shore High School in Sept. 2004, due to space constraints at Midwood.
Indeed, school attendance records seem to support Bermiss’s argument. Brooklyn Comp had a 66 percent attendance rate in 2003-04, its last at Midwood. That’s not too far from the 72 percent average for transfer schools in the city. But in the next school year – the first at South Shore – attendance fell to 49 percent. Then it dropped to 33 percent last year. Meanwhile, attendance at traditional high schools citywide is 90 percent.
South Shore, which itself suffers poor attendance and is slated to close, is a large white building at the intersection of Flatlands and Ralph Avenues in Canarsie. A 20-minute bus ride from the nearest subway stop, the school is remote to reach even by car. In addition to the long commute for a student population scattered throughout Brooklyn, teachers and students do not feel safe, particularly at 10 p.m. when the school day ends. The day begins at 4 p.m.
“Muggings have been bad,” according to English teacher Sharon Pearce, in an observation echoed by several others. “Some parents won’t allow their kids to come to school any more,” says the 14-year Brooklyn Comp veteran.
Current principal Catherine Bruno-Paparelli did not respond to requests for comment, and officials declined to show a reporter around the school.
Charles Turner, Brooklyn district representative at the United Federation of Teachers, called moving a night school to such a remote location “a thoughtless decision.” He believes Brooklyn Comp has become “collateral damage” of the decision to shutter South Shore, one of five schools that DOE announced in December would close.
Pearce finds it ironic that the city decided to close Brooklyn Comp and send students to transfer schools, which accommodate up to 250 students. “We were one of the new ‘small schools’ before there was the expression,” she said.
Bermiss fears that a new school, even one that looks like Brooklyn Comp but meets during the day, will miss out on helping a certain sliver of students. “It’s a time frame issue,” she said. “Some of our students had neither children or jobs, but what they needed is what we offered them at 7 p.m. in the evening.”
She believes Brooklyn Comp was hampered by not ever having its own facility. Before she retired in 2005 after 34 years in the city school system, Bermiss did propose an expansion of Brooklyn Comp that would have included a dedicated facility. Now she hopes that the extension through next school year will allow the teachers and staff at Brooklyn Comp to keep the school going in a different format and location.
“My concern is that there be a full-time night school in Brooklyn to meet the needs of students,” Bermiss said.
Student Natalie White, 19, certainly agrees. White started at Brooklyn Comp in September after she “messed up” at Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush. Close personal attention from teachers quickly helped White gain confidence in herself.
“I never got an A in any class before,” she said. But after getting help from teachers in English and Spanish and A’s in both classes, she said, “I kind of knew I had some kind of potential.”
However, White knew she would not have enough credits to graduate by June 2007, so she stopped going to school. “I thought it was the end,” she said. “I was kind of thinking of giving up or going to another school.”
Now that another school year has been added, White says she will return and hopes to have enough credits for her diploma by January 2008.
- Matt Sollars

Work?

I urge everyone concerned about work, getting it, keeping it, etc. to read this post.

http://nyceducator.com/2007/12/work.html