Disappearing in Blue

This is a furious post. I needed to write it and some people need to know what it feels like to have things like, you know, schools, fly in the face of reason. But it's more than about schools. It's what it's like to be INCAPABLE of a mid-life crisis because I know too well what my mistakes have been, and how I have failed. It's my confession. Perhaps that's why the Catholics do that -- they tell someone, without an expectation of real solution, just absolution. I don't want forgiveness. I just want to see it in print, to know what I know and what I don't. So, being Jewish, it makes sense that this is half-Confession, half Kol Nidre -- the accounting we do on The Day of Atonement. I'm accounting, but I'm not letting go. I need to read it. To see it, to edit it, to re-visit it. It needs to be public so that it can explain what I cannot. If anything, I wrote this because I cannot explain what I keep trying to.

And before I forget, I know how completely and brazenly I steal from Jonathan Levy's rhythms when I speak and write. The only person I know who has ever explained why I so inhaled them is Michael Chabon in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh where the central character talks about stealing other people's characteristics so that you would never really lose them. Even before this onslaught of things that don't make sense, people had tended to disappear on me and me from them for a lot of different reasons. Unfortunately, this theft is not for me, like it is for Chabon's character, a substitute for being more around the person I've stolen from or being more in whatever my own voice is. It's a comfort and it has become what I call it to people who don't know who I'm really referring to -- my self-adopted step-father's voice. Getting to feel like you had a father when you didn't is an amazing gift and, in this case, it also came with a very late and necessary shot of morality. At around 26. Truthfully, what is "me" is mostly a punk-kid. I do try to let the punk out in an effort to not steal so much. And that's why this is probably not such a great piece of writing....but I am and have been carving my own voice somewhat more and more with a better model than I had before 26. I'm still a lucky kid, in many respects, and I know that, too. I just don't get it -- I have luck where I haven't earned it and disaster where I thought I had been more careful. So, here are "the books."

Sometimes, lately, I have absolutely no interest in having any will over things. I forget appointments, I sleep through things I have been looking forward to for weeks. I can't remember where I put anything. Worse than usual on the latter.

I have tried to do what you are supposed to do, say what you are supposed to say, be where you are supposed to be for most of my life after the age of 26. In graduate school, the reality that what I did was not being filmed for play on prime time or in independent movie houses was brought home to me. Students are who I was when I wanted to be all the things I wanted to be and expected that I could be. It's my job to make that closer to reality. And, people really have schedules, responsibilities and their own tragedies. It was time to say what I meant. To "be the thing" as another friend says.

So I mostly did. And there was a grand logic to things for once. I went to bed at 11, got up at 6, was at my office by 7am. I became what a friend called, "dutiful". Whenever I was needed to be there, that's when I was going to be there...mostly. I took on too much, got lost in a lot of dreaming and didn't often know how much work I really needed to do to accomplish what I had just said I would. But, there was going to be a will for most of the ways I felt I had to create. If I had to write and print out letters at 2am, then that's when it had to be done. I made it work.

But my "tin tooth" to steal from Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift was an innate need for there to be some sort of reciprocal feeling in exchange for this. I was good many, many times to try to win affections of many different kinds. I wanted to be good because I loved and wanted to be loved.
The kid my grandmother said "would have a dirty end" had been banished because I was devoted...I was there. I loved somebody and stood behind them, in front of them, next to them --was as near as I thought I could be, let someone amazing "get close" to me. I told the truth, but I tried very much not to hurt anyone. I got better at that. At first, I cared more about being truthful, about the sense something made in my head, than being careful about how and why and when I said things but by the time I was 36 or so I was better at it.

My grandmother cursed me because I fought for my freedom to leave home and not be the appendage of my mother's perversity. She thought I was born to sustain my mother the way she died to do that very thing. On my watch, the new "kid," the girl who found a way to work three jobs to loan people money, the girl who went back and forth and back and forth to help a friend go forward, the girl who said, "you're right, I'm an idea. The word needs to become flesh" and finally made a move...BAD THINGS JUST DIDN'T HAPPEN ON MY WATCH. I got the job, got the extension, got the cash, got whatever, somehow, someway, I always pulled out of trouble. If nothing else, the girl in me surfaced and just pleaded and I got the special paper, the copies in miraculous time, the award for a friend, that piece of research that was elusive, the phone call with the right person. I even found THE PERFECT SCHOOL for the over-aged, under-credited and sometimes zealously overwrought or just over-tired. God laughed at me, but she didn't hurt me. She seemed to be even deciding that, like for Frank O'Hara, the sun would finally talk to me -- I had a love, a soulmate. And then it all ... the mistakes of the toothfilled grinning kid hung like a chain around my neck. Bad mixed metaphor, but that's what it felt/feels like. Like the mark of Cain. It's not "why me?" It's "why now?" It's "why?" And it's still, "You can't be serious, I'm going to wake up, right." But, I can't sleep much to begin with. When I walk into Tilden, gloriously nice as most of the people are, I know it is 2009 and something terrible has happened. It's backwards. I had a soulmate I could talk to, friends I could talk to and a principal who knew me like a mother is supposed to. We didn't buy into bullshit -- collectively. We spoke freely and we acted freely. We. "We". I don't include the last two years of Brooklyn Comprehensive -- or the times I was more of a blithering idiot than usual, generally. Remarkably, for a set of human beings on task to help kids, and in Karen's and my case as two people trying to love, destruction of the individual was very minimal overall. Which is why it absolutely irks me that Karen and the school and my principal -- they all died ON MY WATCH. As an inspired friend said about our school, "Malaika gave us the gift of letting us be ourselves." And Karen gave me that gift at home. I thought being truthful and being loyal meant these things weren't supposed to happen. I'm not being foolish -- it's common sense.

Let me give that some perspective:
I have spent almost 17 years walking through dangerous neighborhoods at dangerous times on dangerous subway lines. Karen worried about this a lot, and sometimes she went to pick me up because of it. But, nevertheless, I sometimes walked through places I'd rather not admit to at 2am, got off at even worse places than where I started, while being short, fat, white, female and obviously carrying an expensive backpack with a laptop in it.

I also believed that, if you really could die just because your engine couldn't get gas at the moment from a clog or you mis-calculated by a gallon because you had a really good dinner and you didn't give this the normal second-thought you would have or you had what you thought you needed and it was wrong -- if a half gallon of gas can be the measure of a person's life-- I never would've believed that letting these confounded cessnas in the air would've been allowed. Period. Think about it. Karen had to wear, and did, a helmet while riding a street-worthy bike through NYC. No one in their right minds would ride a bike whose tires could give out on the drop of a dime for no apparent reason, or could give out for good reason and throw you into the nearest building. No one would buy that bike and ride it through a park. But,we let people go up thousands of feet without airbags and without the contraption that makes the plane into a veritable parachute -- breaking the plane, but saving your life. That makes no sense. Less sense than the fact that I have ridden trains home at 2am from Brooklyn's version of Gaza and lived.

Only in that awful movie, The Unbearable Lightness of Being do people die at a height -- in a moment of true happiness. I'm sorry, I hate that kind of mystical bullshit, too. When you're happy and you know it, you aren't supposed to let the f'ing car flip over. You're supposed to be a little bit more careful about the f'ing gas tank. And for god's sake, people are supposed to rally around a place that helped them when no one else would. They are supposed to say SOMETHING. And we weren't supposed to turn into vile animals -- all of us -- in those last two years, all out of fear and a need to prove points. Everything was still in our hands, all we had to do was say what we meant, tell the truth, "be the thing". And we slipped. I slipped, anyway. That makes me the most reprehensible person in Karen's life and I know it. I know it now because of how badly I have slipped also since she died into a bilious sloth. Not the most profound of the type, but nevertheless, not even remotely close to who I was before Sept 2, 2005. Two different people. And even the better one was, it turns out, awful.

I failed. I failed as a guardian of love, honor and respect. There is no way to deny that. I had a sense something bad was going to happen that night and I didn't say anything. I let the vinegar of a bit of anger and fear of being thought possessive settle onto what I had refined into a pretty good nervous system. I let myself nearly get my FRIENDS in trouble, people I knew since before I was 26, out of reckless despair. How can so much horror creep into something beautiful in a moment? I know, I know, they were having so much fun and so into the event that they missed the bump. That's idiotic. That's irresponsible. And I let it happen. All that night that Karen died Michael and Sharon kept asking me if I wasn't afraid of her crashing. They wouldn't stop. And I thought, "of course she won't crash. She told me the plane can glide for miles. People land planes in baseball fields if they need to...for god's sake she's KAREN. I have loved her too much for anything to possibly happen. " I know. I really DID THINK it could NEVER happen to us because we were too good, too nice and what was it? A little f'ing flight to nowhere.
F-- Kundera and his damned book and the movie. That's what I abhorred, I thought. I was supposed to be way too grounded and practical for that kind of B.S. and it walked right in and stole everything. "Unbearable" is definitely the right word. "Unfathomable." "Vicious."

Precocious, precious, stupid. That's what I was. With the most valuable things in the world. The only reason I am good at keeping my cats alive is that my mother was good at crisis healthcare. Not the everyday living -- she took overall terrible care of maintaining me, but it's little work to do that for Larry and Bernie and they are, in my mind, children to be watched over. My mother was excellent, however, when I was violently ill. She knew how to push through the crowd to get the right doctor then and so, so do I. It's maybe my one skill. How to plead for my cats and my life. Good one. Really useful. So long as my life hinges on a dime like it does nowadays, I guess that's important. I am incapable of being good, perhaps because I haven't got all the skills for it. I MISS THE BUMP. I have Asperger's Syndrome. I get lost in dreams. Maybe I can never love any human at all. My love turned out to be the most worthless thing and I dedicated most of my energies to living by that feeling and being loyal to it. And I was worthless, nonetheless. Worthless.

All of us -- Karen, me, the faculty and students at Brooklyn Comprehensive -- we were good. We had all made mistakes, but we were all making amends. Nothing made sense, nothing has made complete sense since Sept 2, 2005 and, doubly so, since Feb. 2006 when it was announced that Brooklyn Comprehensive would close. You decide to fund a school, you foster it, and when it's clear what needs to be done to take it to greatness, you close it and make a commitment to another school which opens with a violent incident, has a student and faculty strike and will take years to learn what we already knew. I'll take the bet -- in less than 17 years, the DOE will close the school which succeeded us. I give them ten years. By then, the argument will have been made that ALL overage and under-credited students should be doing GED programs virtually through the public libraries. And why not? Once you argue that you shouldn't be offering HS diplomas to the 18-21 year olds, it follows that soon the 16 year olds will also be asked to consider the virtues of just taking a test and saving the DOE the cost of actually re-teaching them.

The faculty at Tilden also have every right to feel outraged about their closing, the ridiculousness of it perhaps, epitomized by my being placed there out of nowhere, from my closing madness into theirs. They were another kind of good school -- they took the stand that the kids they sent to us needed more time. If they hadn't been so bold and stuck to their standards, they would've pushed those kids through without their ever having had the chance BCNHS was able to give them to shape up and really understand their work. It's a good school which DOESN'T graduate kids before they're ready. They ran a good shop. Too good. You're not supposed to be that honest. We could be that honest because we were the MASH unit and the conditions of our patients were already deemed critical. But, like malevolent insurance adjusters, they were supposed to sign off that the half-dead were actually "mostly alive."
You can't get the job of teaching most of the disaffected youth of this city -- of bringing them to TRUE 12th grade reading level -- in four years. Like I said in a previous post, I've worked at schools with 99 percent graduation rates (which were not Specialized High Schools) and they had the same cruddy Regents scores and deplorable SAT scores of the kids that Tilden refused to graduate. Should any student graduate high school with only the skills to achieve 300's in all sections of the SAT? With the minimal passing rates on the Regents? Why? Why push those kids through -- what's the rush to send them out virtually ignorant into "the global marketplace." Remember, you get 200 points on the SAT just for writing your name.... The GED is a 9th grade level test. And it will be hard for these kids to pass that too, en masse.

It will take a Supreme Court case to change this, but it's not my point here. I'm much too sad for a point. My guess is Manhattan Comprehensive will take a case to the Supreme Court if they threaten to close it. God bless Howard Friedman's luck and give him more of it. The sad thing is, the case will be for a 19 year old girl from Chechnya who is sponsored by some major foundation and has been so physically and psychologically wounded in such obvious fashions that not even Clarence Thomas would deny she deserves extra time to finish her high school diploma. The kids we see are equally battered, just not in the language of international warfare. Though I wonder if you can argue that it IS international warfare when our economy is ravaged, our unions are decimated and whoever profits from wherever gets a major upper hand over the futures of kids from East Flatbush. I'm too tired to try to really make this point.

...So, when the things that didn't happen to the nice, lucky kid I had become at 26 started to happen, I started to slowly, well...disappear. Since Tilden's color is blue, lately that's the color I fade into. Only it's colorless -- I have all the blue oxford button down shirts a human being can have in all the shades, but they don't look any different, one from the other. Karen had blue eyes that lit up like lightning and I can see them. And then I close my eyes in total rage against everything, especially me.

Of all prosaic things, I'm angry and I hate...you name it, given the day of the week, the latest news, etc. I take Mike Malloy's "Have I told you how much I hate these people" which he says with gusto about Republicans, to a universal level.

For a while I was listening over and over again to Sweeney Todd. Prosaic, formulaic, but honest -- "so what" creeped right back into my vocabulary the way my favorite English Teacher warned me it would. I am one of those "so what people," Mr. Wozniak. It happened. I had no idea what you meant, but I do now. I warn my students not to be and it's not all the time.

Oh, and by the way, nice, dedicated teachers with a love of beautiful language and music are not supposed to feel they have to kill themselves and then actually do it because they have a horrible disease that was then being ignored by a maniac Republican White House. Whether I was good or not, that was not supposed to happen. Mr. Wozniak was good enough on his own. Do you know what it means to let a fatherless kid follow you around desperately every day, to read the idiot kid's work no matter how stupid, and to call the idiot kid when she's in college and has this sixth sense feeling of being really worried about you and LIE successfully so she only sees later that IT WAS SO OBVIOUS you were saying goodbye in the last letter and postcard? He watched for every bump, except the wall that the plane was about to hit. Like Karen, he just turned the plane to try to get away or, at least, get the passenger away. And I flew out onto the ground, shaken to the brain, but salvageable. It took someone to tell me he committed suicide. I did a good job of fooling myself for about a month. Karen did not commit suicide, but she also missed the bump that affected HER. That one last bump. What is it, hubris? This vicious "lightness of being" crap. Mr. Wozniak needed more of it, we -- Karen and I -- needed a lot less.

I will never believe suicide is painless. How the heck can it be -- your brain is on. I don't blame him. I can't stand a kidney stone let alone what AIDS did before the wonderful world of cocktails to control it. But, what kind of nutty drive was I and the rest of the country on....? That is not a rhetorical question because we're doing it again. And we know it. We're not solving anything...

And what kind of an idiotic country, as it nears the twentieth century, had fools at the helm. Ronald Reagan was a professional fool. A court jester. Literally -- that's what a "B Movie" actor is.

We failed a generation of gay men, but that story has long been told...

What is it I feel...It's just there, like a literal grey film, a residue. The distrust and the destruction of what is hopeful. It lingers. My job this week is to exorcise it. To find a way to live in which it doesn't settle. To begin to, anyway. I can feel it piling up on my nerves like dust, making it harder to feel anything.

As my therapist says, "Who knows" really what anyone or anything will be in the future. And since it's likely to come, best to try to work on making it happy.

I look at my cats who must find me a puzzle -- they understand me completely, but must wonder why I have no fur, why I am so vulnerably built. And I wonder if that is my relationship to god -- I understand some of what she might be, but cannot fully grasp her. There is hope in that. There is hope in the limits of my logic. And I remember Karen yelling at me in the car for having no faith.

If I can just feel it more. Who knows? Is "Who knows?" better than "So what."? I hope so.

Museums

In one day, I made a lot of mistakes. Yesterday. But, today, I am back in the museum.

The Museum is what happens to a school when it starts to die.

New things happen, but the feel that things aren't meant to be touched, that you should start memorizing people and places in your body. You steal a walk, a tilt of the head. You remember a vest.

And where you would once jump in and try to fix something, you pull back. The view has been selected. The process is going to continue as is. There is a meaning to it. It is not to be interrupted.

The students complete the exhibit carefully. They go to class, mostly, they participate in events. The memories are not settled yet. It won't hit them that it was over, and that the school has closed until much later. A year or two after the school has closed and they want to look at it. When they don't have any pictures of ____. When they realize that nobody is there anymore. None of the people you thought you would tell -- when. Sure, you will stay in touch with some people. But, there are people you didn't know you needed, and people whom you don't know are traveling on your road. And teachers you didn't realize you always meant to ask something.

Mostly, the students will forget about it as they enter new places that become their old places, meet new teachers, etc.

The teachers will feel alien as soon as they get to their new places. Some will lose that feeling and some will feel .... who knows yet.

At present, I am in the Museum. Hidden in an area completely unused. The library. In here no one can see me, which is what I want. I am here with other colleagues who have learned better than I how to function within their imaginary spaces. One whistles. It's very intriguing. Like he's in a shop, in the back room, preparing the shoes, the books -- whatever he's working to create. He is immensely busy on every select project. The whistling makes him seem like he's much slower than he is. His fingers are much more nimble as he shifts, and organizes and considers. Whatever he's making, it's delicate, but important. He has classes later. There is no nervousness, just planning, plotting. An extended rehearsal. His presentation is going to be masterful. He's in love with the smallest detail of it.

It is my fault that I have never loved the individual pieces, the hinges, the smallest items. Mine have been improvisations with notes and tons of props and materials to build it with. What I have loved has been the surprises. Over time, I have controlled the variables so that we are "on task" as precisely as possible. There is still a wild energy I try to maintain -- a tangential question or one at the center which is meant to set off fireworks. Not that it always does.

So, for me the act itself is how I prepare for the act itself. I write the sketch, I select everything,
but like writing, teaching is also about re-teaching. For me. Some people are directors and playwrights in their classes. The classroom is the one place where I like to be an actor among actors. Where I feel, oddly, neurotypical. It's also been my source of acceptance for going on 17 years. Maybe it's that we're having some degree of fun or that because we're all working on something...for whatever the reason, my oddnesses just blend in with the activity. No one who has been my student really ever asks me why I dress the way I do, or much about how I live my life. It's patently apparent to them, somehow.

In the Museum, improvisation is much harder and I am much more focused on steps. I'm teaching my students steps of a routine to get through a number. The number has been prescribed and will not change.

We are enacting our various kinds of endings. My job is to help the kids exit, anyway that's safe. The simplest way to pass the Regents, some quick rules for how to handle yourself in college and then they have to go out the door and, as I say to them every day, I can't save them anymore. I can't give them extra time.

I must admit it is equally devastating to both know you are powerless and to know your students are being sent in harm's way. It was my last "power" in the super-hero world that I live in sometimes. I could do something about one kind of mess. A little bit. I could protect one or two kids the way my teachers had protected and defended me. I could say, "No, you are not going to take this bright kid and tell him/her he's nothing just because he didn't follow all the rules. Some of the rules are actually worthless. He/she has his/her own system of measuring worth and he/she can defend it in writing like a budding thinker. Move out of the way."

Now, I give them the rules, teach them to follow and fight later. If there's time.

Impossible Sleeplessness

From approximately 4pm until 8pm, I can sleep. I eat a heavy meal and I sleep quickly. After this, nothing.

Let Teachers Remain Blue Collar

I must confess Sharon Pearce mentioned this idea years ago and I didn't understand its significance. She said she wanted to be blue collar and I didn't get it. I do now.

The 100,000 dollar teacher is a bad idea.

It's not that teachers aren't worth that much, but the job is not, by its nature, one which provides monetary profit to anyone. We provide a free service. Traditionally, we have exchanged security for high wages, with both sides benefitting from the long-term commitment which resulted.

Teachers are artisans at least, artists at best. But, by the nature of my profession, I don't give concerts that sell for 150 dollars a ticket. I give my art in exchange for security, pension and benefits. I am part of a system which does not require those who receive my art to pay for it.

A doctor working in such a system would not make as much as one who decided to work in the free market. Nor would anyone who did.

Teachers shape their art to fit a particular system and place. If we were to travel around like salespeople and try to sell our art, some of us would make millions, others of us would die. Like with any group of artists, among those who could not be appreciated in their own time would be geniuses. Only they would have no students to leave behind to appreciate in value and pay royalties to their children.

In the spirit of a nation which wants an active citizenry, the teaching profession has shaped itself to serve and not to sell.

We should not, however, demand huge raises and definitely not exchange our benefits for them. We are artists who cannot exist without the system in which we work. In pulling ourselves out of "the market" we are allowed to present our lessons objectively and fairly. We are meant to be outside of the "professional" world. We are blue collar.

In tempting us with raises in exchange for giving up a part of our security, Mayor Bloomberg has threatened the very nature of the profession. What's to stop me from getting Apple or Pepsi to sponsor my work and to brand my lessons with their products? In proposing the idea of providing incentives to teachers whose students have the best scores, he encourages teachers to do what other professionals would do in the market place -- to limit their risk, to skew their work toward that which will provide them the most profit and to eliminate anything which might hinder them from succeeding. That kid in the back who just doesn't do well on tests, hmmmn..... Why don't I encourage his parents to put him in another school, to test him for special needs, and why don't I make him so miserable that he begs the program office to remove him from my class. Or, why don't I push harder on the special needs issue, get him more time, someone to read to him, etc. Anything that can get me the extra cash even if it's not right for the student.

Most teachers I know did not vote for this contract. People say that it was the younger teachers and the retiring teachers who pushed it through. I understand why both sides would want more money, but THAT is not in the best interest of kids. Frankly, I have colleagues who would NOT have retired had they been given positions through the seniority system. Instead, we are paying those people their pensions when they could be teaching our kids.

And anyone who enters the teaching profession expecting a lot of money should leave before they get tenured. I lived in shares in my first teaching years and another young colleague and I used to live on the 25 cent granola bars they sold at the local bodega. That's what you get for also having health insurance, a prescription plan, etc. If you wanted to make a lot of money in your twenties and early thirties you should've done something else.

Teachers should earn a fair and decent wage -- one which helps them to continue study and to survive in a way which does not leave them ragged. We should be solidly middle-class. And we should get overtime like members of other unions.

We are not professionals in the capitalist sense. I can't make any money for my school with the work I do. (Sure, I could write grant proposals, but that's not like earning a profit for selling Wi-Fi.) And I shouldn't. I should be allowed to stay out of the market so that I can teach my students honestly.

I shouldn't wear a suit. If I had wanted to wear a suit, I would've gone to law school.

I wanted to engage in the exchange of knowledge and to help my students develop as thinkers. That doesn't require that I wear Armani. I need to be clothed. As someone outside the market, I ought to be allowed to present a non-conformist image.

We did not form a union to make teachers able to compete with MBA's. We did so that teachers could earn a fair wage, have security and good benefits.

Let's return to the contract prior to this one. Let's give back the raises, get back seniority and everything else we gave up.

I would be giving up about 20,000 dollars. I am sure that if we all gave back the raises, the city would not need to lay people off.

I know. I don't have children, I don't own any property and I still dress like a college student. I eat like a high school student.

But, my classes run really well when I feel secure. The more worried I am about surviving, not buying new clothes, but paying the rent, the less I am able to function. This would be true of any sane person.

My last salary before this contract was a fair wage for me so long as I have seniority, tenure and all my health benefits.

Here you will argue that a lot of teachers were placed in positions through seniority which were not good fits. Bad fits happen even when you go through extensive hiring processes. In "the market" people work to make themselves fit. So do civil servants.

I was once bumped from a position which I thought was mine. A teacher from Brooklyn Tech took my position at Brooklyn Comprehensive. Therefore, I found myself working at The Choir Academy of Harlem -- a school in which students wore uniforms and which had a very conservative culture. My principal knew I wasn't exactly the right fit ideologically for the school, but he hired me because I was intelligent enough to, as he put it, "interview well". I spent four years at that school and learned a lot and the students were well served. I asked to leave so I could go to Brooklyn Comprehensive once the teacher who took my position retired, and had to strike a bargain in which I taught at Choir during the day and, per session, at Brooklyn Comprehensive at night in order to leave. That mean travelling from Harlem to the junction of Brooklyn every night for a term.

You see, however, that in striking that bargain I was able, even under the old system of seniority, to find the fit I wanted. Smart principals and teachers HAVE ALWAYS found ways to get the faculty whom they wanted. At one school, my principal excessed an art teacher she didn't like, then a few months later, "found the funds" to hire an art teacher she did like who has outlived her tenure. Even in the world of seniority, people have freedom and options. They also have the security to try to stay and grow into a position and to remain objective and true to the students throughout. Principals often traded teachers who were better fits for each others' school. We got a great teacher at Choir that way.

You think that doesn't happen "in the market". It happens in "Re-org's" all the time. Sure, some people are fired -- but this is not a for-profit profession. And incompetent teachers can be removed through the 3020a process. Meanwhile, teachers remain objective servants to their students. If the individuals who became principals really wanted to have the freedom of the marketplace they should've taken jobs which carried that risk. No company would accept 3 percent growth (which is what Bloomberg says has happened in our test results) over a two year period -- let alone this Mayor's term. Everyone is playing pretend financial genius in a world where that's the last thing that matters. The students matter, and therefore, so does making sure that we retain teachers who are experienced, highly skilled and who are not looking to make a profit off of the kids. Job security makes people objective and secure.

My mother was a dental assistant who workd for The Dept. of Health of New York City. She made very little money. Without my grandmother's and my uncle's assistance, I would never have had the life I did. However, my mother's benefits made it possible to get her hip surgery done at Lennox Hill Hospital. With a few exceptions, she can afford any medicine she needs. Had she worked in the private sector she would've made more money but not had these benefits. She also wouldn't have been able to complain when a dentist had treated a patient badly or done poor work. My mother is an annoying human being to know on many levels, but she was a very good patient advocate in her position. She got furious when shoddy work was done on the children she served and she raised hell about it. Once, a dentist held a kid's head still and was about to drill, which could've killed the child, who was pushing back as hard as a five year old could. First, my mother stopped the dentist. Then she reported that dentist. That dentist was fired. And yes, it was a new dentist at the clinic who had no experience with children who did this. Having an assistant with (at that time) over 15 years of experience was crucial in keeping that child from harm. But, that never should have happened. My mother still remembers how long it took to calm that child down, and that incident happened 25 years ago. My guess is the adult that child grew up to be also remembers it.

I don't want to make the low wages my mother did, and to be fair, I have more responsibilities and much more education.

My point is, though, that we are both civil servants, both blue collar.

We don't need to drive BMW's. We need security so that we can serve the city without prejudice. We not only need to be paid overtime, but we need to be reimbursed FULLY for the items we buy in order to do our jobs. If you look at my salary and divide it by the number of hours I really work, it comes down to something like 12 dollars an hour. I'm including time I grade, research, shop for my class, in addition to my classes and the times in which I have given up lunches and preps to work with students.

I don't want to be paid entirely per hour because that would cost the city much more money.

What I want is a decent, honorable wage. I do not want to make an extravagant living -- I just want security in exchange for not earning one.

I'll go back to my previous salary. It's a lot better than what I'll get if I lose my job and have to work for a private non-profit. I suggest my colleagues push our UFT president to return the mistake in funding allocation made in the last contract and return to us the seniority and security which we truly need.

Really, if this is about a funding crisis, the sensible thing to do is take a pay cut and get back the intangibles -- the seniority -- things that don't cost the city anything extra, but provide me with good faith from my employer. Cut my salary back to the last contract. You can still reform the schools -- there are systems in place for firing incompetent teachers and most of the new schools which have opened were around during the last contract. And, it stands to reason, if I give back salary you can open MORE new programs, not fewer. All I want is my seniority back. It's fair reward for the 16 years of service I have put in below market value, at the very least.

The city's roster of teachers is also bloated with new, untenured faculty who were mistakenly hired for positions which do not exist. We now have Teaching Fellows whose masters degrees were paid for by the city, but for whom there is no work. They were hired in the hopes that the new contract would push experienced teachers out. They were hired with the idea that they would take all of the new positions opening and the experienced teachers would hang in ATR limbo. They had no idea of this, I'm sure, although they were trained in a culture that was anti-teacher. Why anyone would take a job where you are taught that the older and more experienced you get, the less you are to be trusted is beyond me. In fairness, since they have not yet earned the right to security, if more cuts need to be made, untenured faculty ought to be cut. The Yankees couldn't keep Shelley Duncan on the roster once Giambi came back. And think about it, he didn't really make that consistent a contribution. Giambi often did and he had a huge salary to earn. Shelley Duncan was working much harder than his minor league contract paid for...and most of the time he was really only up to his contract. It was a surprise when he played well.

I am not Jason Giambi. I have to work WITH plantar fascitis. I also can't take sponsorships from companies and, if I could grow a moustache, absolutely no one would care.

So pay me blue collar rates and give me blue collar protection. It'll save us all a lot of misplaced energy.

OR, give me the same blue collar benefits Corrections Officers get. Let me retire at 20/40. A lot more people will retire at that deal than 25/55 because those of us in our 40's can find non-profit jobs to supplement our pensions and re-train a lot more easily than people 55 and over. Ironically, the more senior teachers are more likely to stay so that they can have the best pension they can added to social security. Offer a chance for those of us to leave with our pensions now who, under current conditions, see lack of job security and worse ahead of us, and we are bound to go. I'd rather not spend the next 15 years fighting for my life against market economics. My union ought to see the virtue of that, at the very least.

Is this budget crisis being used to bust unions?

It's not just a blogger idea anymore....Rachel Maddow raised it on her recent show on MSNBC.

Six...is a little blurry as I rolled around on all my catnip toys at once

Three catnip mice, one cigar. And later, another cigar and I think there were a few fish...

I don't know why. I hogged them all. I let Bernie have one mouse. And he got two cigars of his own....

There was just something about the "Happy Birthday" feeling and the fact that I COULD hold two mice with my front paws and another with my feet while leaning on the cigar....

Happy Birthday to Brother Henry in the Sky, too! From Larry (Birthday Boy), Bernie (I had a birthday a little while ago) and mom.

Weeeeeeeeeeee!

Sunday is Six!

Is it so much different from five?

Leaping, loving, Larry Lightfoot. Larry Liebschen. Larry who makes us a family and teaches us every day.

You tell me, Larry how it feels to be SIX on Sunday.

The Myth of Graduation Rates

Dear Chancellor Klein,

I've had a very fortunate career in that I've taught predominantly at schools with high graduation rates. This has been a blessing because, in all except one very important instance, the schools' graduation rates helped secure their futures. I've also felt very good during one special night in June every year.

And I've also felt guilty.

The students I have taught, no matter whether they have been at schools with outstanding or deplorable graduation rates, have had exactly the same sets of skills. The ranges of SAT scores and Regents scores were not any better. The intensive need for remediation once New York City High School graduates reach the college level bares witness to this.

What helps a school to have a higher graduation rate with these same weak students is
a) if these students can come to school often enough to earn credit in their coursework
b) if these students will go to summer school and eek out a passing grade on the Regents
c) if there is an overall philosophy at the school which weighs effort as strongly as skill
d) if you praise and honor students with "A" averages, but SAT scores well below the national average. I never knew people scored in the 300's on sections until I worked at a school with an amazing graduation rate.
e) And this is not bad -- if you encourage all of your students to keep going in education and help show them that there is a future for them. This includes the ability to place them either in community colleges with welcoming atmospheres and/or one of the hundreds of four year colleges which accept students with score in the 300's.

I'm not ashamed of any of the work I've done, but what I'm trying to say is that students graduate because they believe in themselves and their schools accept that this self-confidence ad persistence will eventually help them to really have skills.

The schools which do not graduate students en masse are sometimes places where the teachers cannot accept that their students don't need MORE TIME to learn and are unwilling to pass them on and make them someone else's problem.

I wonder, if you asked someone teaching a Remedial English class in college how he/she felt having a dozen students from the same school who graduated on time. What would he/she think of the fact that getting the student out in four years was more important than getting them ready for college?

Happy Birthday from Coney Island Hospital

I was sitting at my computer this evening when I got the above as a text message. The same person had called me early in the morning to wish me a happy birthday, but had indicated this was a rough patch --or that this was not going to be a good day on his/her end of the text.

What would you think when you got that message?

It turns out my friend was spending much of the evening at the side of a hurt student. A noble thing -- there's no pay in it, just the respect you get for being there when no one else would.

Still the friend didn't give me any details of WHY he/she was at the hospital. I got answers to "Where are you?" But not "Why?" I didn't find out until this friend got home what had happened.

So the last hours of my birthday from about 8:00 on were a mix of worry, anger and confusion. When I called the hospital, they had never heard of this friend. Now what? Still no answer to why. Only where.

Was I meant to spend the evening along side the student, as well?

Maybe I should have. Maybe there is something long lost in me, a part of me that no longer jumps to the side of nearly anyone which was meant to be revived here. Maybe my fate was meant to change, but I backed away from the moral impetus which had been given to me.

But, I got angry and I cursed and cursed in various codes of text. I felt like this was a game.

And it was, to some degree. The message was meant to tell me not to text, in a way. "I'm too busy". It was just the kind of busy that is supposed to be a friend's business.

It was a suitable ending to the day, I suppose. After at first, understanding that I could choose my classes in which to "push-in" (assist), I was summarily told that I should have been doing nothing of the sort this week and should've just taught the classes I was assigned on my own. It would have been a far easier week had I done so. But, I guess I couldn't believe that I was supposed to wait. I thought I was supposed to find places to be useful.

Perhaps the biggest frustration I have had in the Dept. of Education is that I can never find just the right place to be. I can see a problem, but I can't solve it. There isn't funding, things aren't done that way or someone else simply has what seems like a better idea and sometimes is one.

It's just now in two instances in which I had previously been staring the minutes in the face with some confidence and ease, that I again walk a tightrope. I'm accursed for my not just waiting to be assigned when I was unclear that was happening. So, too, I am at fault for wanting clarification where it wasn't necessitated. Someone is trying to tell you they're busy, you don't go further.

It is, by far, the worst lesson of my existence, that sometimes you are not only not the center of attention, but you don't even matter as an individual. You are to remain silent when silence is given.

It's counter-intuitive and somewhere, I believe it's wrong.

Maybe the text message wasn't a note, but a forecast of 42. 41 has already begun a spiral in directions unknown.

Questions for "The Rally"

It's hard for me to get to rallies or anything much these days. This spring brings three preps -- granted, I wanted them -- and a need to try to get back into optimal physical health.

Therefore, in case I don't get there, here are some important questions:

1) I have heard from reliable sources who have been vigilant enough to find a problem that the Excessed Staffing System isn't quite "working". I mean, that principals don't check the mailboxes at all? Isn't that a violation somehow of this new agreement? What is the UFT doing to encourage them to do this? Putting our own system is not enough. Bluntly, I've gotten responses to jobs which are posted on the ESS when I write to them via Idealist or Craig's List -- places they post the same listing. Why do they avoid the ESS Mailbox?
2) I've heard also that our discounts are not in the system yet -- so a principal who does check on us to see how much we cost can't tell. Someone also said something to me about not all ATR's being discounted, but I couldn't catch the specifics. So, which one of us are Bargain, which are Clearance and which are Regular price? And when can they input this information into the system --- the Excessed Staffing System and generally -- so that principals don't still think I cost a quarter of their budget? Again, I heard it from folks who want this to change -- us pointing it out is to help keep it a UFT priority.

Not only should UFT be making sure this is fixed but GRANTING US A FOUR MONTH EXTENSION on the original year that it was going to take to see if this new discount was "good for children". Because Nov, Dec, Jan and soon February will have gone by with it being broken. There are people in the UFT who have been good enough to follow this and push on this, but we need to be vocal. Even if the system is a lark when it is operational, a broken lark is even more insulting to all of us and must have Klein laughing in his sleep.

I'll try to get there in blue and black -- blue for Tilden, black for Brooklyn Comprehensive. Or maybe I should just wear the suit I wear to interviews -- a light blue shirt underneath dark navy pinstripes. Maybe I should wear a sandwhich board over it for any principals who might be driving by. Or a big hat. Worked for Bella Abzug....

I do want to be hopeful. I don't have a lot of faith in general. The fact that the DOE might be able to get away with having made us an offer it not only didn't carry out, but sabotaged, just makes me feel very abused. We all should feel that way.

Cheap Perfume

"I'm a New Yorker," he said. "I live in New York City. I walk the streets like everybody else does." -- a recent candidate for Mayor.

If you're guessing the speaker of the quotation above is Mike Bloomberg, you're almost right. It was Ron Lauder talking to the NY Times back in his 1993 campaign for Mayor --one in which TERM LIMITS was his big issue, which of course, he has since reverved himself on, like so many "Mike-a-like's."

Ron Lauder was whom I first thought of when I saw Mike Bloomberg. A thin slice of colorless salmon. A man addicted to his pose for his Bar-Mitzvah photos -- the one that makes him look young and promising and a little like Harry Truman.

I couldn't see any reason to get excited about him, until I heard him say on television that some parents don't realize how just how bad the education their children receive is. For a flicker, I thought, "Hmmn. An academic elitist! Someone who might have the courage to go out there and tell a group of immigrant parents that they should expect more from schools here than they received in the places from which they fled. Or just that, "Good penmanship does not equal good writing." The latter is a hard one to dispel even from immigrants of my mother's generation, whose women especially have had their hands invisibly bound in such a way that every curl looks like a bakery bow. How can you concentrate on what you are trying to say when you are so busy decorating a cake? I know people do, but my point is, that I once had to explain this to a parent who honestly did not know --- that her child had no understanding of sentence structure so, in fact, her English was very poor, not excellent as she had been told by her still-colonialist style school "back home". I promised her she would learn and she did and she graduated a much better writer, no less sloppy a calligrapher.

Candidate Bloomberg, I thought, would never open a school called, "Ghetto Film School." He would see that there is no remaining irony in that title. That it is a travesty, no matter how good the offerings might be --even if the school (which is slated to open next year) offers a six-week film course which sounds suspiciously like the for-profit courses of that kind all over Manhattan. Was Spike Lee made in six weeks?

40 Acres and a Mule. Now that's an honorable -- in your face -- reclaiming my nation title. I would love Spike Lee if only for the name of his production company, but of course, he has talent, intelligence and diligence.

I know, someone is going to write to me that this is a wonderful school with amazing people....And I'm sure it is. I just think that if I had a kid I would know how insulting that title was. Yes, the "Ghetto" has been branded in Rap Videos and Holocaust movies. That's another reason not to use the word.

Back when Alan Lomax crossed mountains and strata of class to record music, the word, "Folk" was used to describe struggling, working people. I imagine that is a major aim of this school.
So, why not do something daring and call the school, "Twenty-First Century Folk Films." It would embrace so many histories even in that clumsy attempt at a title. And it would acknowledge, too, what Mother Jones published in its Jan/Feb 2009 issue: "Class is the New Black." You can go to that article via this link: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2009/01/class-is-the-new-black.html

The year of our first president of African-American descent shouldn't be the year that Ghetto Film School opens. I know that I am making a big deal over a title -- but I think that unless they have some outrageously good historian on staff who puts a big exhibit on all of the ghettos of history in the lobby and then asks, "What is a ghetto?" the name will always give me chills. Maybe that's the point. But, I asked myself, what if I started a school called, Clinical Depression Writers Academy. I promised that it would be devoted to giving voice to the suffering in the same way that Prozac Nation, The Noonday Demon, The Hours and Crime and Punishment had. Would you send your kids?

I used to think you named a school to inspire those who entered into it. What about naming the school after Oscar Michaux, one of the first African-American filmmakers?

No matter what anyone thinks of Bloomberg's rapid closing of schools, attempts to cut veteran teaching staff and change the culture of our public schools, they might look at "Ghetto Film School" as a representative statement of the current Dept. of Education Aesthetic.

I can't think of anyone, parent, child, teenager...whom I can say that name to without feeling shame.

Let's not even go into the other facts of the week:
If Bloomberg fires 16,000 teachers he will be cutting all the young people and faculties of the small schools he said were so important. All THAT MONEY spent will have been wasted as if in a Ponzi scheme. Maybe that was the point -- to bankrupt the DOE so that it could only run on the least number of teachers possible and maybe he doesn't care if they're experienced or novices. He just wants our schools to have as little as possible.

Then, there's the brilliant and frightening possibility posted on re-posted on Ednotesonline.org from Accountable Talk: http://accountabletalk.blogspot.com/2009/01/trading-tenure-for-jobs.html

The Loss of Teachers' Voices

When was the last time you heard an interview with a teacher about education on a major radio or television station -- I mean an active teacher, not someone who used to be one.

Whenever discussions of education are held, it's the voice of politicians or businessmen. You rarely hear any statement with that heartening introduction, "I've been teaching on the same street to the children of ... for 36 years."

Those people do exist and I work with some one them. And they are fantastic teachers. But, these days they spend their days leaning against windows in quiet moments, afraid of what is going to happen next. Administrators come and go, and with them changes in policy, but in the process they wear on the nervous systems of dedicated professionals who really care about your kids. I say, your kids, because I don't have any children in the school system, but some of you reading this, do.

There is nothing fair about seeing people who have worked arduously with kids for almost as long as I've been alive finding themselves in fear of what they KNOW will be disaster.

A new program gets introduced to the school -- well -- new to this administrations. The faculty has tried it before and it didn't work. And they're demanding that teachers do it again. The kind of insanity -- of doing what fails over and over, is not unique to schools. But teachers find themselves alone when they are forced to do it. When a company does this and fails, they are publicly scorned. When a teacher does this, no one takes the time to ask how the failure happened. They just blame the teacher, who knew it wouldn't work all along.

Why didn't the teacher protest? There is no forum for protest in the Dept. of Education. None. You don't like it -- you're insubordinate.

And you can be fired for being insubordinate.

So, colleagues I deeply respect, bite their nails after over 20 or 30 years of knowing how to teach, facing the reality that they will not be able to do what they most want to and are best at doing. They will work within an insanity for which only they will be blamed.

The Alternate Universe of Borough Park

Just as Larry arches into a half' G-cleff, tail up, head curved down a bit to get an angular view of the B-I-R-D-S, Benie instinctively wolfs down water in an enormous slurp, turning Larry quickly around. "It isn't as much fun without me," is the message and Larry, acknowledging the intense wings the two of them share, follows Bernie with his eyes. Right now, though, he'd rather look on the window, so "fast game of tag up and down the bookcases" begone! There's time for that in the puffier part of the day, when the birds plump quietly and unseen.

Just watched Werner Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the Universe." Began a week ago, finished this morning, and it brought with it a great peace. The South Pole is sparsely peopled by types Karen wanted to be, though I don't know if in the forever-sense. A woman travels across a border hiding inside a clean sewage pipe being carried on the back of a truck for five days. The small round shape -- the imposed lens would've been fascinating, infuriating and inspiring...but also nauseating. This same woman (whose name was "Karen," of course) traveled across Africa in a garbage truck crossing arteries of territorial hatred, and finally escaping captivity with the help of drunk Russian Scientists. I think Karen Hunter's instinct to fly was a good one, especially if crossing violent, gorgeous earth.

Almost slept, but couldn't quite -- Friday I collapsed after taking a long stroll, completely in vain, across 18th Avenue, in the Center-North of the Alternate Universe of Borough Park. Though I don't have a bag ready to go to Ethiopia, Nigeria or Alaska (and I want one), one thing I have is a map of streets which are other-wordly, or, at least, discordant. Walking past manicured tiny lawns makes me feel just a bit more interested in what placing a knife to the back of my knee and lopping it off would do to me. The confinement of my body is whale-like and with the up and down changes of air quality -- half-radiator/half cold wind, all cold-wind, all moistish cool, my asthma is running for president of the United Federation of Thrashed Lungs. It sends mailings out while I sleep and has built a coalition among the residents of bronchial tubes inside teachers experiencing this punishing, quixotic air. My asthma promises no nasal drip tapping, or hanging chads of handkerchiefs. Paper ballots, with some healthy lungs doing the monitoring from Eustachians for Justice.

Almost made it to the stores I had wanted to see but it was too close to sundown -- the 30 or 40 shoestores which fill the Universe of Borough Park, home to a dozen or more Hasidic Jewish Communities were all closed, every last one. Running from about 40th street and 13th Avenue to 60th Street and 18th Avenue, are bakeries, stores which sell fine silver, pocket-sized booth selling specialty skullcaps (like a knitted on with the Yankees symbol on it), slightly bigger bagelry's, kosher pizza and falafel warehouses, and intermixed among these, clothing for the well-dressed European woman and man of 1941. Setting aside the special fur-laced hats and high socks which some Hasidic Jews wear, the vast majority of the Hasidic community is simply walking around high quality Film-Noir wear. Well-tailored suits with broad shoulders for both genders. Shapely and sensibly sexy black dresses or jumpers--everything with a soft curve to it, as if it were an upward breath that could lift a bit in a Swing dance. There's plenty of silk, lace and wigs designed to look like real hair worn over what are undoubtedly well-done hair styles, by women honoring the rule that no one but her husband should see her mane. This is a particular shame and a source of irony as ALL of these women choose wigs which must be close to what their actual hair looks like and which are damned good. It's like the rule that says we can't have a full figure statue of a person which is completely anatomically correct -- it must have a blemish to show that it is not real, it is not an idol. The seam which you can sometimes see in the wigs these women wear is that same flag "You are not getting the real beauty."

Almost an odd 40's movie, but not one because you cannot escape the long beards and curly locks on the men who also carry cell phones, work on laptops and drive Land Rovers. It's another planet, as Karen would say, and it's one I like to walk through sometimes, when the alien in me needs company.

People come to these specific blocks like those immigrants to Antartica. They are wrestless and looking for others like them -- who need to experience a rigor, a set of strange rules which put them at odds with nature and allow them to play chess with mortality. On Saturdays, when according to Orthodox Judaism, you cannot make anything or engage a force of power (like electricity) to cause a machine to make something, the Jews of Borough park storm up the avenues leading out of their continent and into Bensonhurst, Sunset Park and Bay Ridge. These are rarely spirals of contemplation, but usually power-walks. Why so fast? To see what you never have time to see on other days? Or, to move with the speed of a plane above interesting, but potentially dangerous territory.

I stop on my walks and go into a few caterers and sweet shops. By now, I am a regular at one of the local supermarkets, as well, and the owner doesn't know what to make of me. I can usually identify the music being played -- prayer music sung by famous cantors like Yossel Rosenbaum. I buy products which only have Hebrew written on them. Of course, I am that word which Chaim Potok made famous in The Chosen: Apikoros -- Hebrew for hypocrite.

Herzog wonders about the motivations of current explorers of the South Pole, noting that Shakleton's attempt 100 years ago, was on behalf of the British Empire. Wishing it could have been left unseen, unnoticed, or, at least, "unconquered," he seems to relish the stories of those who find themselves there to find community. The saddest story of the film involves a young man who came to preserve a local language -- I won't tell you what happened because you should rent or buy the film. But, the inevitability of Ph.D's taking to the highways for study and because they are not natural parts of whatever is left of the market economy, hit me in the stomach. You know when you study something that has several possible applications, but is not a single skill, that you will have to adapt and find your way to use it. That we may as well still be waring wigs and carrying our work in scrolls as far as the rest of the world is concerned, hadn't quite reached me until that moment. Karen had been told that because of her artistic and intellectual interests she would be better off in Europe as Americans tend to marginalize people not enlivened by consumerism. I told her that was bullshit and still believe it.

The Alternate Universes of Borough Park, the East Village and Inwood stood for me as proof that you can sustain your ideas and your art if you insist upon doing so. But, I was never as aware as I am now of how the market could pack an idea in mothballs and package it, buying real estate around it for people to consume and re-consume it. Much worse, how a bad economy could make the individual feel that anything not of immediate use is frivolous. Very few of my friends go to hear live music downtown, even if they live there. Yes, the bands have changed. But, that used to be the point.

What a comic, thin, man in a traditional dark suit and ice floe beneath his chin called, "The Great City of Borough Park," is a truly profound entity. It's a loosely planned community in the religious sense -- there are multiple kinds of Hasidim, and within them different groupings. As if someone had run around the blocks gluing down pieces of Shtetl, there are tiny shuls (synagogues) that fill tiny houses with hand-painted signs identifying them. Then there are the virtual classical parodies which serve glorious school buildings, community centers, houses and synagogues and, alongside them enormous chandeliers nearly breaking through the bay windows of garden apartments. The unwritten economic agreement to keep the neighborhood affordable for the community who lives there is unparalleled in NY. ( Hasidism do occasionally rent to non-Jews when the few apartments which become vacant aren't immediately gobbled up by the "cousin-of my youngest niece and her husband who are expecting quintuplets," etc.) That you can still find not just outfits right out of The Third Man, but Challah made with honey and eggs with no concern for cholesterol, is itself worth the walk.
For me, though, it's an opportunity to be an alien among my own aliens -- I can balance two worlds at once. Neither is home, and I envy both the people in Antartica and the Jews of Borough Park that willingness to make allegiance with a lifestyle.

Someday, I'll pack Larry and Bernie up in a Volvo (once I learn to drive) and we'll go to whatever that place is which will feel right. For now, I am a very slow traveler. I was and am willing to go faster and could have made that plainer when Karen was here. In the stillness is same desire which the bird's offending Larry have to "plump" and be "home" for a while. I found that home was created by the love of the bird I was flying with which is probably what they feel too.

Hopeful Eloquence

My fellow citizens:
I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.
Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.
So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.
That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.
These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land – a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.
Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America – they will be met. On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.
On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.
We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted – for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.
Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things – some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. My fellow citizens:
I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.
Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.
So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.
That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.
These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land – a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.
Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America – they will be met. On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.
On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.
We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted – for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.
Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things – some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.
For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.
For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.
Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act — not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. All this we will do.
Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions — who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.
What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. Those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account — to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day — because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.
Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control — and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart — not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.
As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers ... our found fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all the other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.
Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.
We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort — even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.
For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.
To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West — know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.
To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.
As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment — a moment that will define a generation — it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.
For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.
Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.
This is the price and the promise of citizenship.
This is the source of our confidence — the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.
This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed — why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent Mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.
So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:
"Let it be told to the future world ... that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive...that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet (it)."
America, in the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
Thank you. God bless you. And God bless the United States of America.

Make it go away

1) Mediocrity in Education. Settling for scores instead of learning.
2) Small-mindedness. The framework that understands that students need more time in school because of circumstances beyond their control and yet won't agree to it.
3) Arne Duncan and his clone in DC and NY.
4) Obama's refusal to be bold and brave. Sometimes you need to take a stand before you reach across the table and lose your choice.
5) Biden's silence.
6) Postings that say NY will lose the most jobs this year.
7) My union's belief that because teachers look tired that we're useless. With that, my union's love of unchecked capitalism which, of course, makes no sense.
8) The silence of parents when their schools close.
9) The feeling that nothing matters, anyway.

When I think of Tom.I think of a night,
When the earth smelled of summer
And the sky was streaked with white,
The soft mist of England Was sleeping on a hill.
I remember this, And I always will...
There are new lovers now
On the same silent hill,
Looking on the same blue sea.
And I know Tom and I are a part of them all -- And they're all a part of Tom and me.
--Intro to "Hello Young Lovers" Rogers and Hammerstein's The King and I

The formal restraint of a prepared memory -- the story you tell everyone, the face you wear, the closing and unclosing of the hand and then the resolve to leave off there has become habit. There aren't any friends who knew me when...not where I work, so I am this new character. A ragged, but nevertheless, a type -- the mistress of bedeviled children, religious in her belief that somewhere in eternity, her joy remains intact.

Dar Williams - When I Was a Boy

Re-posted: the lyrics are clearer.

Shuffling off to Buffalo

They were joking that soon the place would be a Dunkin' Donuts. "That's a pretty big Dunkin' Donuts," said the cashier, a young woman maybe 22 years old, trying to project confidence that her store was not closing -- yet, anyway. As I walked through the glass doors of Virgin Records on Fourteenth and Fourth avenue, a junkie, his wool hat taped to his skin by sweat, balanced on one foot, haggling with the security guard. I couldn't hear what he was saying. No one could -- he was just mouthing words with no sound. People shifted, weaving a bit. "Where to go?" "Another store full of sales? To the movies?"

On line at Thirteenth street and Third avenue, the face on the man directly in front of me was raging. "Come on, already," he mumbled, but he knew not to scoff too loudly at the customer currently at the window because the crowd on line was with the guy. You could feel the sympathy in the quiet way we all listened. "I'm sorry, but those passes are only good on Mondays." "You mean they're not for weekends?" "No. They are only for Mondays." "Where does it say that?" "It does not say that, but that is the rule. We only honor those passes on Mondays." "So, I can't use this?" "It is only good on Mondays." Three couples ahead of me, the negotiator pressed his head against the air and gave the cashier one last look. "Okay, so let me have two regular tickets." He pushed his eyes downward into his wallet. The frustrated gentleman ahead of me sighed. Meanwhile, in back of me, a couple discretely put their passes away and left the line. I decided I didn't want to sit for two hours and continued ambling along, feeling for the lift that used to come from walking through Manhattan at night.

I had decided not to just take a walk in my sluggish Brooklyn neighborhood because it makes me claustrophobic. There are only a few people out after dark, stores are mostly closed, and walking by rows and rows of houses just makes me feel alone. So, I got on the subway and got off at Union Square hoping to join in the energy of people hustling, drinking coffee, shopping, looking for movies, plays, music and chatting. People on their way to have fun are very easy about letting others brush in and out of their conversations. If they're confused about which way to go, I often just jump in with directions. The other night a group of teenage boys wanted to go to Chinatown, but also seemed to want to stay put in Greenwich Village. "What do you want to go for?" It turned out they were looking for some cheap jewelry. Since they weren't looking for brand name knockoffs, I directed them to the many sidewalk shops on eighth street and to K-Mart. "If you just want anything, you don't have to go to Chinatown." Frankly, they could've gone to their local store, but the purchase had given them an excuse for to get away from their suburb and themselves. They were extremely gracious and they smiled from the bottom of their hoodies until their noses. The boys had told me that they liked being on the street in which we stood because there were so many young people. "NYU," I said, but no flash of recognition shone through their pupils. They went off speedily after thanking me, bouncing in their sneakers toward a troop of people in their teens and twenties hovering around Astor Place. As they left, I realized they had heard about bargains in Chinatown, but not one of the city's major universities. A party school, no less. Was my city better known as a discount warehouse than a place to get drunk and have sex?

Though I'd never gone to Chinatown to shop in my 40 years in New York, my friend Karen had gone with one of her friends and her pre-teen and teenage daughters to look for high fashion look-a-likes. I remember especially Karen telling the story of being whispered to by this ethereal Chinese woman while walking with her friends on Canal Street. "You looking for Prada?" After she nodded, the woman led the group down a staircase into a basement full of handbags. Karen enjoyed the fact that the woman had approached her and not the others because she seemed to delight in making her the offer -- like it was a special gift. However rehearsed her manner may have been, the moment of connection between the two had been giggly and sweet. This was the kind of experience that made Karen feel happily like she was visiting from another planet and she should be alert to silly and striking possibilities.

My trip into Manhattan on Friday was torridly grey, in stark contrast to that memory, and to my encounter a few days before with those kids. I'd met those boys in the afternoon and there were students and people on their lunch milling in a quick pulse. The scant crew walking around as the sky became a thick, drab navy, were mostly just watching each other, not out of fear, but restlessness. Like me, no one seemed to have a particular destination in mind and the stores stood helplessly--every window was full of signs announcing huge sales and muzak bounced like a wave of tennis balls into the crowd slowing it down. For some reason, the soundtrack to Mamma Mia was being played and replayed without a break -- as if a back up sound system kicked in as soon as the other stopped so that there would be no silence.

When stores in New York go out of business or have huge sales to raise cash, usually, they get very loud. They blast their sound systems so that their announcements can be heard for miles and husky men with red faces are hired to call to passersby whatever phrases they think will get people into the store. "Cheap lingerie, Mama. Make your boyfriend happy tonight....Or your girlfriend. Whatever makes you happy. God loves everybody." The preacherly tone often builds. "Just trying to help my brothers and sisters out, now. Stop cursing and do something positive. Buy your mother and father something." And if you happen to lock eyes with the speaker in a pause, he will wish you a good night, a safe trip, or tell you that god blesses you. For some reason, it feels honest and warm even though he's said it to thousands of people and their dogs and he's shouted it a few times at passing cars. It's like listening to a false prophet -- the intensity with which he believes in the power and possibilities which could result from his ideas can shake you, even when you and he know the premises themselves are false.

But those men were nowhere this early evening. Paper signs hung like loose coats leaning over the ocean of glass while the relentless, cartoon-disco continued its manic bounce. There was no one trying to catch your eye and people were mostly talking about the fact that the Village was not very crowded for a Friday night. Only the teenagers felt comfortable just getting a drink somewhere. One or two restaurants were packed -- not the cafes -- but the macrobiotic places, the juice joints and The Dumpling Man. If you were going to spend your money, it was going to be on small, healthy-feeling items.

People were silently measuring the worth of the items at the stores, sale or no sale. "Will I really use this? Why? Sure, I've always wanted it, but I've spent a long time without it." I needed to buy something for my class and I picked up a cheap, literary-ish, former bestseller for the ride home. "I've got to get a new library card," I thought as I let myself soak in the bed of icy wind, soothing my joints. I could've walked for hours, but there was no life to look at and I was unwilling to carelessly stop somewhere for a coffee or to fake drinking a beer. (I can't drink, it makes my stomach dry and raw.) No one was interested in hanging out, and that, besides the funereal quality of the passion-free music, was what made the streets unsavory. We were all tourists and we were going home as soon as we hit our marks on the map. Only the journey was not novel, but completely without awe. I felt faceless, and I was because I had no sense of my own identity. My job is in limbo and everything is consciously day-to-day.

There was an empty row of seats on the "N" train, but I vaulted toward them anyway as there was no way I could've managed standing for even part of the way home. Walking down the stairs, I became dizzy from the unfulfilled need to get out of my own head for a few hours. When I leaned forward and lifted my book from my backpack, I saw the word "Pray," etched on the door. A few years ago, before they made it illegal to take pictures on the subway, I'd taken quite a few shots of similar carvings saying things like "Worship God" and "Go to Church." In Manhattan, they are etched on public phones, bathroom stalls, kiosks, ATM machines and traffic poles as well as train cars. Does this happen everywhere else?

But, I hadn't seen these messages for a long while. The aggressive attack on graffiti in New York had erased them along with the bubbled lettering of people's names which used to proliferate on the granite. So, I was suprised to be faced with this word, scratched into the metal, chastising me. I had a picture of the same message in ink in my collection at home, but the letters were longer and thinner in the one facing me.

Who does this? Who has the time to take a key (the usual implement) and dig into steel with enough power to create curves, not just lines up and down? The person who engraved the one I was looking at, unlike the one pictured, chose a spot about six feet from the floor. Someone tall whose hands had a wide and muscular wingspan.

Perhaps it was an out-of-work barker so disgruntled by the fact that business was so bad that it hadn't even created part-time work for extra gravediggers, he defaced the door with god-like rage.

Just for the record

This economic crisis was created by businessmen like Bloomberg and not civil servants.

Even as a hunter, he is a philosopher

Dar Williams - When I Was A Boy FRFF 2008

This song reminds me of Karen

The all around talented...

Happy Holidays

Things are okay. My principal and AP have been very supportive and my two babies have been cuddling me round the clock.

So, here are some warm and fuzzy pictures of my warm and furry guys.

When there is no redemption

Last Thursday, I was asked to stay late to keep the boundary between two of the schools in our building secure. It wasn't very difficult and I found most of the students understanding -- one even told me that he knew that our students created too much noise when they got out of gym and that was why we were trying to re-route them out of the other school's territory. One student slightly pushed me out of the way, but then he apologized. He didn't quite understand the rule itself, but he knew he handled himself incorrectly.

Then I got on the bus going home.


There's a wonderful little middle school a block away from my high school and I wait for my bus at its entrance. The girls were yelling at a boy who had broken up nastily with a girl. I joked with a stranger about how seriously these little kids took their relationships. Thinking back now, I actually DIVORCED my first boyfriend in the fourth grade. I got on the school bus and said that everyone who was my friend had to sit on one side of the bus, and his friends had to sit on the other. Most of the bus crammed into my side and my former boyfriend was nearly alone on his side. I remember him, all swallowed up by the green vinyl seats, crying.

The boy, in the middle school drama I witnessed also fled the scene and the B8 bus arrived, crammed with passengers, to my dismay. For the first two minutes of the bus ride things were fine. Then we stopped in front of my high school. I avoid getting the bus there because most of the seats get taken at the middle school. As it turned out, on this night I was standing anyway. A group of MY students got on the bus and I smiled at them and even joked that I had the "enemy" cap on (I was wearing a baseball cap with the initials of one of the other schools in the building.)

One very tall girl with a space between her front teeth began the chanting of "BAT, BAT, BAT, BAT." Then I was called a "snitch" and my every move was commented on. "You get people suspended," said the tall girl. I tried to explain that I don't -- but I stopped. It seemed, perhaps, not a good idea to dispel the belief that I had the power to do something I can't actually do. Truthfully, I only document student behavior and reach out to parents. Once or twice I have recommended someone be suspended, but my suggestions weren't taken. The chanting of "Bat, Bat, Bat, Bat" and the comments continued. I stood still, reading my book and at the next stop, I got a seat and continued to read. A student asked if I was reading the Bible. Several students said that I was "tight" (which means tense). This continued until the students got off of the bus. This was about twenty minutes.

At one point, I did say that I could call the police but that the students were "just not that important." I wanted them to understand that my life would go on despite their escapades and, sadly, that I didn't care about them as much as they thought. They didn't get it.

The next day my class went miserably. (I only have one on Fridays. The rest of the day I am a dean.) The subtitles on West Side Story didn't work and my students couldn't follow the language without them. I tried fast forwarding between active scenes -- the big fight, etc. Nothing. Students were talking and talking. Then a security guard knocked and asked me if I would take in a student kicked out of another class. This was a student who had harassed me weeks ago, but with whom I no longer had problems. So, I said, "okay." She joined in the talking with her group of friends and they became more vociferous and aggressive. One of them accused me of being "in love" with a female student because I had laughingly commented on her goofy outfit. (Friday was also "wacky tacky" day.) When they left, the girl I admitted called me "Ms. Dyke" and when I went after her in the hallway to tell her that she had just committed a hate crime, she said she didn't care about my "gay ass."

The girl was suspended. I wanted her arrested but was discouraged from doing so.
I've never been gaybashed verbally before. Sure, the same girl used to call me "Mr. Kay" but I never took that in the same way.

When friends of the same girl came into the Dean's Office for something and I asked them what they wanted, I heard one girl outside yell, "Oh no, no!" and the girls left. They weren't embarassed; they were indicating that they would take no help from me.

My first instinct was to asked to be transferred -- which won't happen. I have never felt unsafe before in my career -- not this way. I might have felt that one student was aggressive toward me, but for academic reasons. No one ever really showed me complete and utter hatred.

not another website...

Recently, I've heard that the UFT is trying to put together a kind of website for teacher resumes. First, I think that this action misses the point:
TEACHER RESUMES ARE OUT THERE. PEOPLE SEND THEM OUT. PEOPLE AREN'T READING THEM. PUTTING MORE OUT WON'T HELP.

Second, I think this wastes resources which need to go elsewhere:
TEACHERS NEED TO LEARN HOW TO HANDLE THE LEADERSHIP ACADEMY PRINCIPALS AND THEIR INTERVIEW STYLE.

TEACHERS NEED TO PUT MORE PRESSURE ON THE UFT TO PRESSURE KLEIN INTO HIRING US.

OR, we had all better brace ourselves for careers as ATR's -- at best.....