Week
This week was a pretty good one—it contained a BOGO burrito
day in honor of teacher appreciation week (have you bought target gift cards
for your kid’s teachers? Because we have! (nailed it)). I also booked us a houseboat in Brooklyn on
airbnb for our upcoming east coast trip (will it be the best or worst vacation
risk we’ve taken? ...only time will tell!).
In less than a month, we will dash off well before the conclusion of our
end-of-year responsibilities in order to attend the wedding of one of our
dearest friends from college, hang out with my favorite brother and his family,
and spend a few days in NYC (the shiny apple).
I’m pretty excited about this trip, as it will afford me the opportunity
to see Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, do a food tour of the lower east side,
and visit the big FAO Schwartz with a genetic descendent (among other
things). Will it be a hot, sticky
proto-swamp while we’re there? The
houseboat has air conditioning (#1 requirement for houseboats), so I feel a bit
indifferent about this question (and our impending entanglement with a NYC high
pressure system).
Work
I’m participating in a work committee that I really dig—it’s
all about aligning all content areas through a book that is mandatory at each
grade level. So, for example, you read
the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and in your history class, you discuss the
book in the context of the great migration after slavery, in your religion
class you discuss the book through the lens of the moral universe of the
medical community and American culture.
In science, you talk about cells, cancer and toxins. It’s a great model of holistic education and
I signed up to go to a Holocaust workshop this summer to learn about the
curriculum (Facing History) that inspired this thinking/our school. I’m really into it because it feels like the
interconnectedness of everything (EVERYTHING!) just sprang into focus. One of the major concepts within this
curriculum is the idea of the “we” and the “they” and how it completely
saturates our culture. People with
Harvard sweatshirts advertising themselves to everyone they pass, the wearing
of uggs, the Prius. Symbols everywhere
that are meant to convey something about your “we-ness”. It really resonates with me, as a person who
has been in we-circles (at least academically) and now works in a profession of
theys (at least in silicon valley). It’s
also such a disgusting part of American culture that we first want to know what
people “do” and then their education. We
want to establish our baseline we-ness or they-ness before we proceed to listen
to them talk for two seconds. Anyway,
the workshop should be fun (future rants forthcoming!). I also see the we and they that is inherent
in how we treat the environment (shipping barges of trash to Mexico, using more
resources, on average, than any other earth citizens), which might inspire
future work projects?
Summer
The only big summer plan I have is to spend some time in
Boulder learning about NASA’s MAVEN mission, and then visiting Moab, UT, where my
newly-minted river guide friend will take me on (I assume) some level 1
rapids! I’m actually really excited
about this, the summer of (mostly) being in SJC. I have reluctantly come around to the notion
that there are some years that traveling with a kid is just not in the best
interest of anyone involved. This summer the local saltwater baby pool will be
frequented, as will the local Sweet Tomatoes and move theater (diaper days are
back!). Theo will be in preschool 3
days/week, which means I will have some personal time/space to finally read and
work on those home projects that fall by the wayside during the year (future
project blogging forthcoming!). I’m
terribly sad that I am not going to be spending any time in the MS Delta this
year. There are days that I feel about
that place like Roy and his mashed potato mountain in Close Encounters of the
Third Kind. I want to be there so bad
that I am almost brought to tears. I
think of ideas for crazy culturally-based science education PhD projects (teaching
osmosis through koolickles and assessing it's usefulness relative to traditional projects?) that necessitate being there for extended periods
of time. I contemplate whether or not I
could leave my family behind (like Roy in the UFO) to be in the thick of the
Delta for a sabbatical year (if my school gave sabbaticals, which it does
not). To say it left a lasting impression
would be an understatement, I guess.
Natan will be in Mexico for a month as an NEH scholar, which
is incredibly awesome. Since the funding
for the NEH seems to be in constant peril, I think it’s great that he’s going
to do one this summer. I’d envisioned us
all down in Mexico, but as the past few months have progressed, it just seems
silly to try to take Theo down, without any babysitters, children’s museums or
general kid relief. I have a feeling we’ll
be down again when Theo is older, since Oaxaca is sort of Natan’s mashed potato
mountain!
Warning: rant imminent
Infuriating thing: Any mention of and/or interest in “disruptive education”. Said phrase usually comes from someone who
has paid a lot of money for a professional degree, in order to get a high
paying job and then (of course) imbued with a renewed sense of expertise and
entitlement decides that they would like to apply their business principles (with
an accompanying litany of meaningless jargon; i.e. “disruption”) to everybody’s
favorite punching bag, the classroom! I
find it irritating when people have ideas (theoretically, of course) about how
much “better” education could be if we’d just put a little technology in
there! (MOOCs are BS and anyone who
thinks otherwise hasn’t taken one.) They
went to school, after all! They know
what it’s about and how much it sucks!
Never mind that their interests don’t go as deep as actually devoting
their time to the field of education (it doesn’t pay enough, you know, and it’s
not a flashy job by American cultural norms.
U.S.A. forever!). Let me tell
you, if there is one thing I know about education, it is that people who think
school sucks are speaking ignorantly from within a bubble of privilege. Oh yes, standardized testing sucks and there
are things about school that are unfair and disconnected from the real world,
but I would wager a lot of that happens in financial institutions as well (that
have the privilege to not struggle with a lack of money to do things like buy
TP for the bathrooms). Really, a
school’s function is as a community. It
is a place where kids from chaotic lives (and there are so many) find order and
predictability. It is also a place where
kids learn how to interact with each other and do that collaborative work that
businesses love their employees to feel comfortable with. It is a place where they are taught about
evolution, science and technology when their parents are uneducated. It is also (at least at my school) the place
where the seeds of the future worker they are to become are lain. Public school, in particular, is the place
where kids with learning differences can go when the fancy private schools
won’t accept them because they have an IEP. They are mechanisms of social justice and cannot
be “shaken up” and “made better” without a significant investment of capital,
unions and the utilization of models that work elsewhere (which, unsurprisingly,
usually involve the diversion of money to the poorest kids). “Disruption” via technology is meaningless
business blather (busiblather?). I guess don’t get me started on this topic?!
Pictures!
OK, lastly, some pictures from spring break (in that
precious window of about 24 hours when Theo was on the mend and I was on the
way down, but not yet incapacitated).
We took our nephew to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk (and thanks to The Lost Boys, I will always and forever love this place). My sister-in-law is over my shoulder.
Theo conducts his business while enjoying some fruit slices (he can eat five clementines per sitting like a true champ).
