What is this life?

I feel unmoored. Nothing has happened to make me feel this way, particularly. I think it's the cumulative effect of everything. Not only does the entire world appear to be falling (further) into chaos and tribality, and the national situation seems unsalvageable, but Oregon is flooding (better than burning? maybe...), the political left is unable to stop tearing itself apart at any level, The Good Place is over, parenting a teen is the hardest thing, and I'm looking menopause right in the eye. Also, I'm still on the downward slope of the happiness curve.

My job, building on my last job, involves talking and thinking a lot about things that have to change - we have to build more densely in our cities, and we have to get around more without cars - but that are incredibly difficult for people to imagine changing. The way humans normalize things is staggering to me, whether it's normalizing purging and dehumanizing your enemies or normalizing traveling around at speed in a mostly-empty metal box that emits air pollution (that gives us heart attacks and cancer and alzheimers and learning disabilities and HAIR LOSS), messes up the climate, and crushes to death 40,000 Americans a year.  We are capable of accommodating and rationalizing so much. And pushing on it makes me feel exhausted. I'm not naturally inclined to activism; I like being a cog, and I don't like saying things that make people scrutinize me. (I love lecturing to passive, approving audiences, though - let me know if you've got one of those needing a speaker.) However, my personal theory of What We Need to Do (which is well-supported by research - I swear I am not making this up) can come across as wildly radical to normal people. Even the most liberal people mysteriously believe in a whatever-deity-granted right to free parking for eternity. And this makes me feel kind of unhinged all the time. It's totally possible that I SOUND unhinged a lot of the time. The other day I was explaining my theory of transportation systems to a person I had just met in a professional context, and he listened to me explain that a person who takes transit instead of driving to a destination, even if they go there for the most nefarious purpose, such as murder, has made a prosocial choice of transportation, and then he said "Do you say this kind of thing in public?"

So there you go. Unhinged, unmoored. However, I just want to say, please consider driving a little less. It was 65 degrees in Antarctica today. Maybe look into how you could get involved in local upzoning efforts, or maybe some advocacy around bike infrastructure. Bumblebees are going extinct. Ask city hall to dedicate right-of-way to buses instead of car storage. I'll let you off the hook about menopause, but you should definitely take the train next time.

Kids these days

I've been reading a book about how screwed millennials are, and what I'm gleaning from it* seems like it will dismally apply to Duchess and Skipper.

Also, Duchess and her phone. Ugh. She's constantly holding it and staring at it. Last night I made her turn it off earlier than usual, and she was such delightful company - she played a stupid card game with Skipper, manically and amusingly did a dance and voice interpretation of my uterus, and worked on a crossword with Cook.** I've missed her.

*Kids are having to work increasingly hard on training themselves and making themselves more valuable resources in order to compete with each other for increasingly unstable and poorly paid jobs. This is bad.
**I have fond memories of doing crossword puzzles with my friend in middle school, in the Eugene Maleska era. That's how I learned the word "ort."

Interruption

I told Skipper, who was deep in an enormous pile of library books, that I was going to the basement to exercise. "I'll be down there for about an hour," I said. "Okay," she said.

Half an hour later, I heard her running footsteps overhead, and then thundering down the stairs. I assumed something had happened, like maybe a package was delivered, or an injured pedestrian at the door needing help. "Mom!" she said, "listen to this awesome tongue twister! Two witches watched two watches. Which watch did each witch watch?" and then she ran back upstairs.

There's a huge stack of books on the living room floor, not all of which have tongue twisters. I've been putting a lot of books on hold for the girls lately, many of them unsubtle attempts to encourage them to recognize a variety of life experience by taking advantage of their baked-in a) love of reading and b) strong desire to empathize. Thumbs up from both of them for Number the Stars, Esperanza Rising and What the Moon Saw. Duchess liked Jazz Day. (Skipper independently checked out of her school library the books George and Wonder, and liked them both very much.) I put a library hold on The Hate U Give for Duchess,* but of course if it's in the house Skipper will read it too. This is a very privileged-educated-white-person approach (one that would be decried by my social-justice-focused coworker, who likes to tell me that "white women cry, black men die"), but I guess it's a starting place.



*Duchess asked me last year "Mom, the kids have been talking about Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. Which side should I be on?" 

Just a note

I was looking at the coverage of the marches today, and I got curious and went to the Fox News home page:

At first I thought it said nothing about the marches, and then I saw the little item on the bottom lefthand corner.

Here's the NY Times:

No wonder it feels like we're living in different worlds, when your standard media coverage (not EVEN your facebook feed) looks so different.

Anyway, Skipper and I are off to the Portland march. Don't look for us in the Fox news coverage; we won't be there.

Encouraging endorphin addiction at a young age

My moms group met the other day to plan the upcoming year of mother-daughter activities, and the conversation got snagged on weight and body image, as it tends to do when a bunch of thinky women start talking about parenting 8-10-year-old girls.

I've written a few times about fatness and parenting girls, and it's back at the front of my mind because I've been reading lately about research suggesting that kids who are overweight early are pretty much screwed with a lifetime of being overweight. I hope to set Skipper and Duchess up for a lifetime of physical activity in a way that will survive the travails of adolescence. I really don't know how to do this, so I'm casting around in the dark.

Luckily, Duchess really likes doing stuff with people. And she likes endorphins, so my current angle is to point out how great she feels* after she exercises. Which she does a lot; without exactly planning it, we have created a situation where she gets about an hour of fairly vigorous exercise six days a week. Plus, she walks miles and miles, like the rest of us. Oh. and PE twice a week, and recess.** (Though it's worth noting that even that level of activity, which is fairly high for her peer group, still just barely meets the physical activity recommendations for kids.) So that's all working pretty well for the moment. We'll see if it lasts. Even if it does, there will probably have to be a totally different angle for Skipper, because there always has to be a totally different angle for Skipper. Usually it's a strange angle.


*Expressed in a continual stream of happy chatter emitted while bouncing Tigger-like along the sidewalk all the way home.
** She's taken to playing basketball at recess. BASKETBALL!

More ranting

You guys! It's happening again! Not even two weeks into the school year, and I'm already finding myself weeping (WEEPING!) in conversations about the state of public education, and the way in general that we fail, as a society, to support kids. Ugh.

Miscellaneous:

• Duchess is missing her classmates who have gone off to the magic TAG school. She is once again on the top of her class, academically, and ready to coast along for another year of not trying too hard. I'm ready for another year of feeling sad about her schooling.
• I saw one of the Homework Club kids I worked with a lot last year. She's excited that this year she's going to be early to school instead of late every day, because a different adult is dropping her off. She's a decent kid. I want her to make it.
• A friend of mine has taken in foster kids who have some developmental delays - nothing serious, and it all seems like the consequence of early neglect, rather than inherent deficits. The little one, after just a few weeks, is making huge strides - she's still young enough that her elastic little brain can compensate. I don't know about the big one. I want them both to make it, too.
• I met a new parent at Duchess's school who actually transferred her kids there from another district on a No Child Left Behind waiver. (The receiving school has to accept the waiver, so she couldn't get her kids into one of the better PPS schools, but she still felt that getting into our school was a huge improvement from where her kids were.) She is amazed by the level of parental involvement, the quality of teaching, the attitude of the kids, and the general feeling at the school, and is thrilled to have her kids there. This reminded me that, in spite of my feelings of despair about Duchess's school, there are many, many, many (many) schools where kids are much (much) worse off.

After all the Talented and Gifted hubbub last year, we decided not to push to get Duchess nominated for TAG identification. However, this fall, I have reversed myself, and decided to go ahead and nominate Duchess. I had three experiences that led me to the decision. First, as part of my Big Volunteer Thing I've been doing at Duchess's school, I've been calling enrichment programs, and I spoke to a staffperson at one excellent, super-expensive program who said "Oh, we do lots of classes at your school, for TAG kids!" Second, I recently learned about a cool-sounding math class, offered by that very program, that took place last spring in mornings before school. Duchess would have loved it. It was only open to TAG kids, and it was free. Third, I had a conversation with a woman, a parent of older kids, who has worked with Duchess in school, and respects her reading and analysis chops. We talked about the ethical ugliness that is TAG, and her experience as a teacher and a parent, and she said "You've got to get Duchess identified as TAG."* So I went and picked up the forms. There's a nomination and testing process that will unfold over the year in some mysterious way. I told Duchess (from whom nothing like this can be hidden, as she is way more persistent than Harriet the Spy) that no matter how the test identifies her, we will continue in the conviction that she is awesome-identified.

It just all, as you (very well) know, makes me furious. Nearly every kid in the school would benefit from a cool math class at least as much as Duchess's TAG classmates. While the TAG screening test is explicitly designed to be accessible for kids who can't read English well, so in theory it's a great way to identify kids from all backgrounds who have intellectual aptitude, the fact is that the kids in Duchess's grade who are receiving TAG resources are all middle-class-or-richer kids. TAG resources are offered not just to TAG-identified kids, but also to kids identified as "TAG-potential" which means that they didn't get a qualifying score but had strong "advocacy" scores (as rated by their teachers and parents) and work samples. Guess which kids are likely to have strong "advocacy" scores and work samples? I know plenty of kids at Duchess's school whose parents, for many reasons,* aren't going to nominate them for anything and aren't supporting their homework and school activities to encourage them to produce strong work samples. Those kids would benefit from cool math classes as much as any kid. The program should be called Talented and Gifted and Having Pushy Parents.

And now I am a Pushy Parent, and I'm feeling pretty shitty about the ethics of being a Pushy Parent. I hate that I am trying to extract more resources for my own already-very-lucky child, out of a limited pool of resources. My kid has everything she needs to thrive, and I'm greedily grubbing for more, because I can, and because I want more for her. This goes against my belief that not only is it in our benefit to support all the children in our community, so that they will thrive in our community and make it a better place, but that we have a moral obligation to help them flourish. I go around and around on how to address this. I can't not try to get Duchess everything I can -  I'm a primate, after all, and this is a competitive world. As with most things, the current situation means that my refusal to take stuff for her just means more resources for OTHER privileged kids. But I have an obligation to do something about that current situation. I just don't know what, yet.

Anyway, Duchess is determined to be rich when she grows up, TAG or no TAG. We recently listened to a podcast identifying the most lucrative college majors. She listened to the top ten majors, and decided on naval architecture (#7, I think), as it is the best fit with her already-identified career hopes. She's going to be a naval architect during the day, and an author at night (writing great books while cuddled up with her husband and her Great Dane - she's fairly detailed in her planning). Skipper decided that she'd go for #1, petroleum engineering, since she has no strong preferences yet. I didn't say anything about how I feel about petroleum engineering; I'm pretty sure I won't have to worry about it. Of course, Skipper is also planning to have seven children,*** so she's either going to have to be rich or not work at all.



* Note the language. I've got to get her identified - I think that zeros in on everything wrong with the system right there.
**Stress, language barriers, cultural barriers, poor health, lack of time, and other factors, including the assumption that it doesn't make that much difference, which is the assumption under which I've been operating.
*** Duchess is holding fast to her determination to have no children at all. Having watched Skipper be born, she definitely doesn't want to give birth, and she says it's clear that kids are a pain in the butt. I feel kind of bad about this, as I'm the one giving her this impression with my apparently negative attitude about parenting, but it seems that Skipper has no such qualms.

BHT

Lately I have read this book and this book. This is problematic, because both books include appalling details about what goes into processed foods.  So now I have to stop feeding us processed foods.* Not that we eat a ton of processed foods,** but we do like cereal and crackers and things like that.  I don't think I'll be up for taking processed food out of our diets completely, but it seems worth at least cutting down.

I made up a batch of muesli to kick off my campaign, and it's pretty terrible. Duchess is appalled - she said "Mom, you have to stop reading!" I found a recipe for homemade bran flakes; we'll see how that goes.


*Processed in ways other than what I would be able to do in my own kitchen, I mean. I'm not talking about moving to a raw foods diet.
** Apparently we eat a lot less processed food than most Americans. My understanding of this was blurred by my daily experience of my Portland friends and acquaintances, all of whom do wholesome stuff like growing and canning their own tomatoes, and making farro salads for lunch. I live in a world where people apologize for serving you non-organic produce when you come over for dinner. I actually know a child named Kale.

Sick day

Duchess is sick. She woke up in the night complaining of stomach pain, which Cook and I assumed was gas or constipation. It's pretty hard, with Duchess, knowing if she's dying or just being very dramatic. She likes to look at herself in the mirror while she moans in agony. Anyway, we weren't terribly sympathetic, and I was very grumpy and tired when she finally threw up around midnight. I made her a pallet in our room, which turned out to be super-convenient when I could just reach over without even getting out of bed and hold her hair while she barfed in a bucket on the floor every two hours for the rest of the night.

Currently she's lying on her pallet (she drank a sip of ginger ale, fetched along with saltines and sport drink from the convenience store by Cook on a pre-work trip, and she promptly barfed it right back up), listening to a random story I dredged from the internet.* Skipper is playing with the pretend kitchen, organizing fake food and chanting "Too much, too fast! Too much, too fast, too much, too fast, too much, too fast..."**

Last night I went to a mandatory meeting for the language-immersion school a few blocks from our house. We entered Skipper into the lottery for their preschool program, which she would start in September. What I learned at the meeting is that the school community is much richer than Duchess's school community, presumably because parents have to lottery their kids in, and therefore are more likely to be well-educated and/or affluent.*** They have fulltime PE and music teachers! There is a teacher AND a teaching assistant in every kindergarten classroom of 28! Parents raise over a hundred thousand dollars a year to supplement staffing and materials! As I sat there listening to the principal, I felt both covetous and resentful on behalf of Duchess's school. Why should this public school have so much more good stuff than another public school less than a mile away?



* My tablet is reading to her, you see, while I ignore her. Technology is a great parenting resource!
** I don't think I said anything along those lines to trigger the phrase, but you never know. Actually, that's kind of Skipper's feeling about the world in general, so it may be a kind of protective mantra of hers.
*** If you lottery into a slot in the preschool program, your kid is guaranteed a slot in the kindergarten the following year, so you're more likely to get into the school than if you try to lottery into kindergarten. The preschool, however, has tuition involved, so if you can't afford to pay for that, you're screwed. (There are scholarships, but it's pretty easy to be too rich to qualify for those but still not have extra cash to pay for preschool. For example, if one parent is unemployed. Ahem.) This makes it even more likely that the kids entering kindergarten are richer than your average bear.

Proselytizing

Skipper asked Cook, who was preparing to go out to run errands, "Daddy! Are you going to ride your bike?" and he said "Yes," and she said "Good, because I really don't want you to make air pollution. I'm worried about the polar bears."

The future

Lately, between hopelessly submitting job applications, volunteering too much, not cleaning enough, and watching bad TV, somehow I keep finding myself reading articles about the new economy, in which adults need to be continually reinventing themselves, connecting with new people, learning new skills, switching jobs, etc. It's all so... dynamic. I am feeling the opposite of dynamic. I don't WANT to be dynamic.  I don't want to have to be selling myself on twitter and tumblr and foursquare and a million things I've never heard of just to participate in society. I don't want to be continually networking. I just want a steady job that I don't hate, and that pays more than the cost of childcare.* And I want to be able to retire before I die. (Assuming that is, that I ever get a job again. I may already be retired. Mission accomplished!)

This vision of an entrepreneurial world in which everybody is nimbly working the angles and positioning themselves for the next big thing  - I don't know, it sounds to me like a 20-year-old's** vision of a great place. People get damaged and set back all the time, and people are sometimes stupid and often stodgy. There has to be space for the cautious, the late adopters, the damaged, the sensitive - the rest of us. (Or maybe not!)  I'm having a hard time imagining what the world is going to look like in ten years, or fifteen,***** and I'm often afraid that it's just going to run over me and/or people I love.

On the other hand, the lesson I know I should have learned by now is to take things one day at a time. It has to be enough to be alive now, to be safe and warm and (mostly) clean, to know that we are secure, to have friends and family who will back us up when we need them. The kids are very effective at bringing me back to the immediate moment, with their demands and their dramas. This morning, for example, there was a big drama about a blister. I'd like to keep things in a state where a blister can be a big drama.


*If I had guaranteed access to cheap, good childcare, I would feel a lot more entrepreneurial. (Or at least as entrepreneurial as I am capable of feeling, which honestly isn't very.) Republicans, are you listening? Give me universal single-payer healthcare and decent affordable childcare, and I promise you I'll start a business. 
**Not me when I was 20, though, because even though I was oblivious, I wasn't nimble or entrepreneurial even then.
*** This also ties in to my ongoing perplexity about what skills and tools the girls need to acquire now to prepare for their adulthoods. Computer engineering? Hand-to-hand combat? Beekeeping? Robotics? Construction? Negotiation? Aeronautics? Sharpshooting? Beats the hell out of me. I am, however, almost 100% sure that it's not going to be musical theater, which is what Duchess is interested in at the moment. 

The time to talk about it.

After the shootings in Connecticut yesterday, I went to Duchess's school today to shelve books. (The part-time library assistant cannot keep up with the shelving on her own, and it's a very satisfying volunteer task.) The doors, which are usually unlocked between 8:30 and 6, were locked today, and the principal was working in the lobby, guarding the doors. The parents and staff with whom I spoke while I was there were very subdued and some were really upset.

Thursday night was the holiday singalong at the school, a much - beloved annual tradition. It was pretty great, without being unusual in any way, just a typical school event,  probably replicated more or less in schools across the country. The kids were grouped by age, and the tiny kindergarteners sang with enormous enthusiasm. All the kids, even the ones I don't like, were all lovely, full of life and joy.

I think everybody who ever reads this blog knows and shares most of my politics, and you all know how I feel about this. But all of my opinions about the urgent need for gun control and mental health supports are sharpened by my personal experience of my community school. Even a mediocre public school, with all its small humiliations, cruelties, and disappointments, is a place that is brimming with energy and hope and the relentless force of life in an absolutely non-ironic way. (Especially on the last day before the winter break.) Every time I visit the school I feel a little heartbroken by the ways life is going to crush some of these sparky, radiant kids, but today was the first time I felt heartbroken by the idea that somebody would take that life away entirely. So I'm feeling pretty angry about that, and flailing around a little bit to figure out what I can do. But mostly I'm feeling heartbroken.

Bad babysitter

Today I'm off work, and in charge of Duchess, Spruce, and O Blond. They're happily playing Playmobil in the basement (thanks again for the loan, Rock Star Uncle!), and I'm catching up on lots of minor things I have to and want to do. I've been reading the NY Times, for one thing, and look! I found an article that gave me a new way to think about the "skills gap" and labor, employment, education, and job training in the United States!

Yesterday Duchess attended a "winter survival, stealth, and archery" camp. They were outdoors most of the time, and it rained relentlessly the entire time, but apparently she had fun,* and she's very excited about archery now and wants to do the "Archery Apprenticeship" program they offer

*While I can't think of a single time that Duchess has not enjoyed a day camp or class of any kind, I was concerned that the weather, and the jury-rigged weather-appropriate outfit we put together for her, might make for a milestone disappointment. It didn't. It might actually take adolescence to kill Duchess's joy in stuff like that.

Talents

Duchess took the screening test for Talented And Gifted services last week, along with every other second grader in the district.

This year I've been thinking more and more about her academic needs. Her first two years of school, she seemed to be learning so much useful non-academic stuff that I really didn't bother to worry about what was missing. Plus, Duchess is bright, and very teachable, but it's not like she's sitting in the back of the class reading Foucault or teaching herself Mandarin or anything. She's sitting in the back of the classroom giggling over fart jokes, gossiping over who's being mean to whom, and doing mostly solid but often sloppy academic work. She's curious and pays attention, but she's not burning with intellectual passion, and she shows no particularly strong aptitude for anything other than talking incessantly.

This year, though, I'm starting to feel itchy about her school experience. So much of what they're doing is hammering on language skills, which are Duchess's bread and butter, and it all seems awfully easy. She's acquiring knowledge* and that's good, but I don't see her acquiring a lot of skills. And because so much of school is easy for her, she's grooving deeper and deeper into the habit of thinking that if something is hard for her at school, it means she's Not Good At It. She's having very little experience of tackling a challenge and working through it to mastery, so whenever she runs up against a challenge, she gives up. That really bothers me.

I volunteer at the weekly Homework Club at her school, and the kids who participate are all struggling in various ways with their academic work. One kid with whom I often work seems to be a lovely person - friendly, pleasant, well-behaved - but she struggles so hard to grasp ideas that I find it almost impossible to help her. I nudge her along in small increments, which is the way I'm accustomed to tutoring, based on the assumption that at some point she'll make the jump across the remaining gap, but she never makes the jump. We get to the answer, but only because all the tiny increments added up, and it makes me crazy that I can't figure out how to help her meaningfully. I can't figure out if she's just straight-up really limited in her intellectual capacity, or if there's something else going on here. Working with her reminded me of an interesting article I read recently, about doctors prescribing ADHD drugs to kids who don't have ADHD, but who don't have the resources to improve their academic performances another way. It's like spending your dollars on research to develop new cures for cancer instead of on preventing cancer in the first place - a very American approach to solving a problem, and it's really, really sad. I would guess that Adderall would make my frustrating Homework Club kid at least somewhat more likely to be able to grasp and master new skills, and since her academic experience isn't going to improve any other way, why not?

I imagine what it would be like to have Duchess in a class alongside this kid, and trying to teach them both. I don't know how you even begin to do that, but I can tell you that neither kid is being particularly well-served right now.** And while I'm looking into the kinds of services TAG-identified kids can get***, I'm also thinking about what it costs a school district to serve kids who are ahead of the game or who have potential to be really ahead of the game, and what those services cost the kids who are behind the game. I haven't yet heard any good solutions. And I have all sorts of cascading ethical questions, too, like what does it mean for the community as a whole if we decide to pursue transferring Duchess to a magnet school?**** What if every kid who was bright and/or advantaged transferred out of Duchess's school?

Then I remember that kids extract from life all sorts of things you don't expect, and fail to even notice some of the stuff you expect them to pounce on. Duchess is learning a lot, and so am I.We'll figure out some kind of jury-rigged solution for her, and continue to try to contribute to efforts to retrofit a system that serves every kid.

In other academia-related news, today I taught Skipper a few things about trees, and then felt very proud a few hours later when she shouted "Mom, that tree is DECIDUOUS!" She may stand around in public picking her nose with two fingers, but the kid knows her conifers.

*For example, one of the books in her book box now is about Area 51. She has many theories about aliens. For example, it's silly to think that aliens would inject people with anything, because how would they know about human biology?
**  I do not mean to disparage teachers here. I don't think it's possible, when you're teaching 28 kids by yourself, to meet all their needs, even if you're some kind of superhero.
*** While remembering that Duchess isn't necessarily going to be TAG-identified, because she isn't, in fact, a genius. And being TAG-identified in Portland doesn't actually mean you get any services - it just means that the teacher has to come up with a plan to meet your needs, which, depending on the teacher's interest level, could mean a little or a lot.
**** It's also worth noting here that one of my biggest objections to having Duchess attend a magnet school is that it would be a pain in the ass to get her there every day. Ethics, schmethics - I'm just lazy.

Cognitive exhaustion

One of the things that really bothers me about Mitt Romney (and George Bush, way back when) is that he clearly has absolutely no idea what it's like to be poor. He has never, ever, ever felt the kind of anxiety you feel when you have no safety net for your life. I liked this Wonkblog post about Romney's perspective on personal responsibility, which reminded me of my bus commute. I ride the bus with a lot of people who are much, much worse off than I am and one of the things I have learned from that experience is that yes, "the poor use up an enormous amount of their mental energy just getting by." It's insanely hard, being poor. The people on whom I eavesdrop on the bus have to do a tremendous amount of organizing, negotiation, and maneuvering, just to get through their days. 

I can see how easy it is to dismiss poor people as lazy, stupid, or irresponsible. I hear people on the bus talking all the time about bad situations they are in, or trying to solve, or trying to help somebody else solve, and they sound awful. Sometimes the situations they are navigating involve making terrible choices, like leaving your kids in the care of a person you don't trust at all, or taking up with a boyfriend who treats you like absolute shit. Those choices, though, often are the best one that they can make at the time, given their circumstances. The scary babysitter is free, which is all you can afford. The boyfriend comes with a place to live. I'm sure that many of these people, like many people everywhere, are stupid or lazy or irresponsible in some ways. But I recognize that they are under the crushing, unrelenting stress of trying to tiptoe (or sprint) across the wobbly, jury-rigged structure of their life every day without shaking something loose. Something shakes loose all the time - a babysitter gets arrested, a boyfriend leaves when rent is due, a job is lost, a car breaks down, a bus doesn't show up - and there's never anything left to try to shore up or improve that structure, because you're just trying not to be buried in the rubble. I think it's astonishing that anybody escapes poverty. I'm absolutely sure that if I was living like that, I would perform pretty badly. I doubt Mitt Romney would perform terribly well, either. I'm confident he wouldn't be rich now if he had been born poor.

Mitt and I have lived our lives in a cozy, safe place, where any entrepreneurial, "maker"-type risks we might take are cushioned by a net of family and social resources. It's easy to improve your life when it's already easy, and it's easy to believe that you are an impressive, success-worthy person when you can bring all your mental resources to bear on improving your life, instead of just surviving. I went to an East Coast boarding school, so I spent a lot of my adolescence in the company of people* like Mitt and George W., people for whom success came easily because of all the resources behind them. I don't think any of them realized that their success wasn't entirely, or sometimes at ALL, merit-based. (Lots of them went into finance, as it happens.) 

I don't think the country should have a president who can't even begin to imagine what it's like being poor, and who believes that if you're poor, it's because of your personal failure. 

* I'd like to note that my friends from high school are great people. I'm not talking about them, or the many other people at my high school who didn't take success or good fortune for granted. 

I think maybe we should just pay more taxes.

Lately I've been volunteering at Dutch's school quite a bit, on some seasonal activities. And what with the budget-slashing, I've been thinking about the way Dutch's school operates. This is how it, and many other public schools works:
1) The district provides the basics, which are getting increasingly basic.
2) Everything else - Friday Running Club, the Outdoor Learning Garden, the field trips, theorganization and subsidization of after-school Spanish and Chinese classes, the organization and subsidization of after-school sports and other activities, the book fair, the visual-arts teacher who visits for one week in the spring, classroom assistance for teachers, and a billion other things - is organized, funded, and managed by parents, mostly the moms.

After the upcoming cuts, every single enrichment element at this school will be provided by middle-class moms.   Our school community doesn't have a lot of very rich families, as far as I can tell, but it does have a decent reservoir of families who make enough money that one parent, almost always the mother, can stay home with the kids at least part time, and many of these caregiver are very capable, so they end up taking up a lot of slack at the school. It's getting to the point where The Moms are doing stuff beyond enrichment, into basic services, like organizing a crew of volunteers to paint and fix up the school bathrooms this weekend.

This is a lovely way to build community, but it's a terrible way to provide an education. You can't prop up a failing educational system on the backs of middle-class mothers. It's not fair to them and it's not fair to communities that don't have a large pool of families who can provide time and energy (or money) to the school.

There's some other weird stuff about it, too. It might be a good idea to have at least SOME of the stuff at school being planned and run by people who aren't middle-class (mostly white) women. (The only man on the entire school staff of 43 people this year is the lead custodian.) It also gives the parents who are providing vital services to the school a feeling like they kind of own the place. There's nothing wrong with parents feeling pride and ownership in the school, but it runs the risk of making other parents who aren't involved with activities at the school (for whatever reason) feel marginalized.

Anyway. I have to stop ranting; it's time to print out a whole bunch of stuff for my volunteer activities...

I can't bear it, either.

Dutch cried most of the way home from school today. Her music teacher (an energetic, generous, joyful woman who is, I suspect, the heart of the school) made the official announcement to the kids at an assembly today that she* will be leaving the school this summer. Dutch said her music teacher cried and her classroom teacher cried, and Dutch cried too. Dutch being Dutch,** she said "Mom, I can't bear it! I can't BEAR that she's leaving!" and I found myself fighting back tears, too. I'm sure Dutch would be just as sad if her beloved teacher was retiring, or voluntarily leaving for another job, but I wouldn't be, and I'm guessing nobody else in the school community over the age of 10 would be. But I think that a lot of other parents and school staff are shedding tears over this loss.

Obviously, we CAN bear it, and it will still be better than many schools in the world, and better than no school.*** But it feels really sad, and weighted with more meaning, like Everything Good is Going Away.


* and therefore not only music classes, but also the 5th-grade band, the 4th-grade drum group, the holiday community sing-a-long event, and probably more other stuff I don't know about...
**Sentimental and extremely fond of drama in any form.
*** I guess. Though I think we may be reaching the point where I really could provide a better education through homeschooling. Actually, I fear that keeping Dutch at home for a carefully-planned curriculum of playing complicated pretend games with Skipper, arguing with me, coloring, and lying around reading books about horses would provide a better education than what she's going to get at school next year.

This is a crappy way to grow citizens.

We got the news today that Dutch's school will be cutting its PE teacher and music teacher for next year. The remaining cuts are not yet confirmed, but are likely to be reductions to the school counselor, librarian, and reading specialist positions, for a total reduction of 1.3 FTE between them.

I don't know what that means to you, but I think it's staggering. These cuts bring the school down to almost bare bones, and there's every reason to expect that the following year the bones will be cleaned down to classroom teachers, admin staff, janitorial staff, and cafeteria staff. That's all. No art, no music, no physical activity, no extra support for kids who need it. I can't see how they'll cover teachers' planning time; I have to assume it'll involve students watching a lot of movies. I don't even see how they'll supervise recess, honestly. Maybe they'll cut that, too.

I also assume that every family at Dutch's school that has the money to send their kids to private school will at least seriously consider doing so. Those kids will leave, and what remains will be a community without deep pockets from which to fund-raise to cover any extras, and a population of kids who really need the resources they can no longer have.

What kind of society is this? I guess this is what anti-tax people want. I don't understand why, though. I just don't get it at all. When people say they want to shrink government, what kind of a future do they see? One in which stuff like sewer/road/water/parks/etc infrastructure is built and maintained only in rich communities? One in which only rich people's kids get anything good? Is that really what they want? Have they thought this through AT ALL?

No jetpacks.

Portland is getting a bike-sharing system, and while I have issues with it, I'm getting pretty excited about the potential short-term future of urban transportation systems. I imagine Dutch in 10 years,* preparing to go out with friends - she'll pick up her Mobile Device Of Some Kind** and tell it where she wants to go, and it will tell her the best way to get there. But it won't give her driving directions. It'll tell her where the nearest available bike or car can be found (maybe a commercial car or bike share vehicle, or maybe a peer-to-peer share vehicle, parked in somebody's driveway,  available for instant rental by MDSK), the location and arrival time of the next bus, the location of the nearest available cab or jitney or whatever.... Maybe she'll grab a bikeshare bike and ride it to the light rail station, where she'll dock it and hop on the train.

It's going to be great, you guys. Of course, there's going to be a lot of stuff about it that's going to piss me off, and I'll be sure to be grumbling about how much goddamn time Dutch and Skipper spend hunched over their MDSKs,*** but we're going to get so much closer to having really flexible transportation options. If the Republicans don't screw it all up.


* This scenario assumes that society doesn't collapse, and that Dutch has a safe home and a reasonably healthy social life...
**which will be able to do a billion things that I can't even imagine...
*** and of course if we've moved toward massive 20-lane highways filled with driverless cars, I'm going to be REALLY pissed.

The "Principal's Coffee" should be called "Your Monthly Reminder That Education Is Not A Priority in This Society, Now Go Home And Cry"

Dutch will enter 2nd grade with a school budget reduced* from the previous year by 3 FTE. She entered 1st grade with a school budget reduced from the previous year by 1.5 FTE. I'm guessing that Skipper's 2nd grade experience will entail a classroom of 50 kids, one teacher, and a school year that's 100 days long. Music? Art? Library? PE? Attractive inside and outside spaces? Recess? Individual attention?  That's for rich kids.


*Technically, it's only a cut of 2 FTE - the third FTE is the result of having to spread the school's resources across more kids without getting any money to pay for the extra teacher required to prevent the 4th grade from having classrooms of 40 kids. You know. Do More With Less.

Dustin Finney's bike

I went to a traffic safety public meeting tonight, and Dustin Finney's bike was there. Dustin Finney' mom was also there, just a few blocks away from where Dustin was killed last year.

At the meeting, the transportation staff talked a little about Level of Service, which is the way that engineers measure how "well" a road is operating. It measures how long it takes a vehicle to travel a given distance. If there's congestion, the Level of Service deteriorates. The goal  is to get as many cars as possible along a road as fast as possible. Other stuff, like, you know, KILLING PEOPLE, or, say, making pedestrians walk a long way to get to an intersection that isn't terrifying to cross, is secondary. (Though, to be fair, Portland is trying to de-emphasize LoS as the prime measure of effectiveness. The staff who were there are really serious about traffic safety.)

Anyway, that's not exactly what happened to Dustin Finney. But what happened to him is an environment that allows cars to go fast. People are stupid, and if you let them go fast, they do. And sometimes they get drunk and go fast, and kill somebody. Or they look down to finish a text, and kill somebody. Make it easy and convenient and quick for people to drive, and that's what they do. So let's NOT make it easy. Let's make it a little bit harder, because I never want to see another bike that looks like that.