blogalicious: Eve of disaster

Whelp, an awful lot has happened since I last blogged. I left this space feeling like I wanted to debrief our family summer travels, and now look at us. Inauguration eve, and I guess there’s no better time than now to jump back in? I will be teaching tomorrow, dutifully drowning out thoughts of the ceremonial beginning of the end, in favor of making many small decisions all day long (aka teaching, the hardest job I will ever have). We’re studying water quality, and teaching anything about the environment is just downright depressing these days. After the election, I gave an impassioned speech to my students about the importance of understanding the science of the environment in times like these, when morally bankrupt rich people hem and haw in front of congressional committees, blissfully lacking in empathy or conscience. The truth is that it’s hard to be optimistic when you wake up anxious and feel as if the world is made of madmen who see black where you see white. I’ve been to the parts of Mississippi that are the subject many stories and grew up in the racist milieu of the white people who voted for Trump (SEMO and Arizona, for the win!). Those places seemed safer when the government was a step ahead of them, forcing them into the present—like they’d eventually get there, to more education, compassion, worldliness. Now it doesn’t seem possible, like they’re just going to eat up anything with needs that are not their own. Ever since we visited MS, I’ve been pestering Natan to move there as school psychologists, and make our careers about school change in places that seem unchangeable. I don’t have that dream anymore. Now I worry about my kids more than anything, and want desperately for them to have a social safety net and a sense that the people in charge have a moral compass. I don’t want their sense of the world and right/wrong to be based on chasing money. I don’t want every single freaking moral decision that is made to be supported with some “economic argument”. What about making policy because it’s the right thing to do to help people? There is a toxicity to our culture/political system that I can’t handle right now as a parent. I’m just trying to make their life experiences happy and removed from the greater culture. We have a while, still, where we are able to shelter them, and that at least gives me some comfort.

Life is super busy right now for us, and it feels like I might not be able to blog much while I’m in this big career change. It’s much harder than I realized to be working, in school, and have kids. Within each of those spheres are a million little responsibilities and tasks and I feel like I am never without something to follow up on, scan in, or deal with. We’re in transition right now as a family—Theo’s going to school next year, Charlie will start preschool, I’m taking full time classes for the next year and a half, Natan will be taking classes for a while. All the moving parts have so many levers to make them work. It’s maddening. I miss blogging, and writing out my thoughts, but I have very little time to do anything these days.

Brief summary and some pics

I finally got to write a paper on The Wire, an activity I didn’t realize I was craving! I did an analysis of Dukie from a bio-psycho-social perspective for a social work class (that I otherwise did not enjoy). The paper was fun, though. In conclusion, the stabilizing benefits of the school system are not enough to make a difference in the lives of kids who lives and communities are chaotic.

I also wrote a lot about early childhood education, which always causes an existential crisis in a fan of the enlightenment and rationality such as myself. I mean, there are amazing longitudinal and latitudinal datasets available that support the economic benefit of universal pre-K, especially for those in poverty. Nobel Prize winning work, even! Yet, here we sit as a country debating its merits. It boggles the mind. It likewise drives me crazy when I’m in any meeting where technology in the classroom is being discussed. I mean, there is actual data to support school-wide policy decisions!? Why is anything being “discussed”? Can we not just look at what works and do it? The answer is no, we cannot, because we like the sound of something and think it would be fun to try, data be damned.

But I digress, Theo is really into Pokemon Go. We take lots of Poke walks and he likes to stick eyeballs on things and call them Pokemon.

Charlie is walking, but not talking, and is smitten with Natan, his favorite parent. He broke his thumb in a fall out of the crib (November was horrendous on so many fronts), but got used to the cast fairly quickly.