11D

Spreadin' Love 421

Does school size matter?

This apartment is so New York. Great mix of funky with industrial. I just love the interactive gadgets, which show the before and afters in the Home section.

Will the Real Obama Please Stand Up?

"We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect."

David Brooks's column on the two image of Barack Obama was very good. He writes that the left and the right have constructed their own two-dimensional cartoons of the president and neither conforms to reality. The right describes him as big-government liberal who uses slimy Chicago-style methods to rule. The left describes him as an intellectual too willing to compromise and dither.

Neither image is correct, says Brooks. "The fact is, Obama is as he always has been, a center-left pragmatic reformer."

Brooks praises the president for his achievements, including in education. 

Take education. Obama has taken on a Democratic constituency, the teachers’ unions, with a courage not seen since George W. Bush took on the anti-immigration forces in his own party. In a remarkable speech on March 1, he went straight at the guardians of the status quo by calling for the removal of failing teachers in failing schools. Obama has been the most determined education reformer in the modern presidency.

Brooks was enamored with Obama since the early days of his campaign. It's good to see the love hasn't died. It's also good to read critiques of the information cocoons that we live in.

Our Cellphone Rules

Last Christmas, after much internal debate, we got Jonah an iPhone. He joined the 20% of American children who have their own phones.

With two kids arriving home at the same time, after-school pick up was complicated. Jonah and I needed to confer about getting home on snowy days, and he needed to tell me about spontaneous review sessions with his teacher. He had been agitating for one for ages, because his friends had them. We decided on an iPhone, because I was getting one, and we could put both phones on the same phone plan.

On hindsight, the iPhone was too much phone for Jonah. He didn't need access to the Internet or apps or anything. A cheapo model would have been better, but you can't take back a Santa present (without just cause), so we have to live with it.

Our town had a well publicized scandal last year. Middle school girls sent pictures of their boobs to their boyfriends using the school's e-mail system. The boys thoughtfully shared those pictures with the rest of the community. The school was in danger of prosecution for distributing child pornography, since the photos were distributed through the school's mainframe.

This wasn't an isolated incident. A  girl who lives down the block received pornography on her cell phone from a disturbed boy in her class. Through the grapevine, I heard about harassing text messages and other garbage. 

Knowing about these problems, we established certain rules for its usage. 

We told Jonah that if he gets an inappropriate text message or photo, he had to tell us about it immediately. If he told us, nothing would happen to him. If he got something and didn't tell us, he would lose the phone.

How would we know if he got something that was inappropriate? We told him that we would read all his text messages and e-mail conversations. We read these message on his phone or on the AT&T website. We explained that anything sent via the Internet is NOT PRIVATE.

This is actually a lesson for everyone. Information can be forwarded or accidentally sent to the wrong person extremely easily. Workplaces are increasingly reading all Internet communication, because they are held legally responsible for the content of these communications. One off-color e-mail in the workplace can be cause for immediate dismissal. Former friends or boyfriends can post private information on the Internet, which future employers will find. It's stunning how many teenagers do not know the important rule that one should never post pictures of your boobs on the Internet. Ask all those former American Idol contestants why that's a bad idea.

We also had to put in major parental controls on that iPhone. Without the parental controls, Jonah would have access to wonder apps, including The Sex Positions Game and 69 Positions Lite. 

We took off the YouTube app, because a search for SpongeBob can easily lead to a homemade film of Spongebob doing unspeakable things to Patrick. There are no parental controls for YouTube.

We also had to establish certain rules about phone etiquette, including one should not text, while your grandparents are visiting. Never text at the dinner table. No staying glued to the iPhone for more than five minutes, unless you're Mom and the Oscars are on.

With those rules and some serious parent controls, we haven't had any problems. I've checked out his texts. It's mostly he and his friends laughing their asses off over the creative use of the word "fart." He did get a text from a precocious girl in his class that said, "I love you. Only kidding." Jonah was too horrified and confused to deal with it, so I wasn't that worried.

Technology has increased the difficulty level of parenting in many ways. Most parents don't know how to tweak the programs to protect their kids. They don't know that they need to regulate its usage.

Jobs and Jobless

It's 6 am, but we've all been up for hours around here. Steve woke up at 2 stressing out about a crisis at work. At 5, he gave up trying to sleep and just took the bus into work. I got up with him partly out of sympathy and partly out of perverse perkiness. I've got an extra hour to plan out the day.

Now that I'm home, I have to be super disciplined or the day degenerates into mindless Internet surfing. I've finally got my writing project for the year in focus. I even made a chart with goals and a status column and everything. Getting published is a huge, long shot, but I really have no alternative. So, I'm keeping at it, even as the inner demons laugh.

A few days ago, I heard about another friend who was dropping out of academia. His seven hour commute was killing him. So, he was looking into teaching at private schools in Manhattan. After a tough morning of self-doubt, I googled "private schools Manhattan teaching." After a few errant clicks, I somehow ended up at the jobs section on Craig's List.

Craig's List didn't have any jobs that I was interested in, but that didn't stop me from blowing an hour skimming ads. One woman is looking for a "humble nanny" to watch her five kids, clean, and make dinner every day between 3 and 8. Any "humble nannies" out there? The woman made sure to describe herself as a "professional mother." I bet she would be a joy to work with.

There has been a lot written about how this is a jobless recovery, ex. the Atlantic Monthly article. My friends, impractical types who majored in the liberal arts in college, have been hit especially hard. There are no editing jobs, no writing jobs, no public school jobs, no part-time jobs, no jobs for musicians, no academic jobs. Even lawyers can't find work. While Wall Street was able to pay back their TARP money last year, the mood there is still pretty grim. Nobody is hiring, and stress levels are high.

Joblessness is slowly grinding away on society, as people work through their savings or go on food stamps Those with jobs wake up at 2 in the morning with stress -- this is not a good time to be on the job market.

Are things going to get better soon? Phone calls from friends are full of doom and gloom. Maybe things will get better when the crystallized dirt on my front lawn finally melts away and it's time to plant my tomatoes. Maybe we'll have to wait until next year.

Eye Candy

I've recently been accused of objectifying men, because I embedded the Old Spice commercial. "I'm on a horse." Today, I'll let Jimmy Kimmel do the dirty work for me.

Spreadin' Love 420

It's nice to see a woman with curves in Hollywood, even if they don't translate to the doll. 

An interactive map of the best coffee in NYC. I would love to open a proper coffee house around here. 

Mo Ryan reviews last night's Lost episode. 

Glad to see than Ianqui's doing the daily two-mile run, too. She points to an article in the Times about the evils of sitting at a desk.

"I Tickled Aide, but That Was All, Massa Says" Oh, there was such wonderful snark on Twitter last night regarding Massa's tickle fights. LIfe is so good.

Mid-life Crises

I just finished reading Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia and joined the ranks of millions of other middle-aged, Starbucks-swilling, gym-going readers. Good Lord, I hate being predictable. At least I didn't read it for a book club.

Eat, Pray, Love is the memoir of Elizabeth Gilbert. Flush with book advance money, Gilbert runs off to Italy, India, and Bali to recover from a soul crushing divorce and a turbulent rebound-boyfriend. She goes to Italy to learn Italian, to India to learn how to meditate, and to Bali to meet up with some shyster medicine man that she met on a previous trip.

Memoirs ask a lot of their readers. Not only do you have to like their writing and their tales, but you have to like the authors as people. You sort have to be friends with them. Gilbert is a hard person to be friends with. She's rather self-involved. She devotes pages and pages to the task of figuring out which word might embody her entire essence. Ariel Levy recently wrote, "one generally doesn’t indulge another person’s emotional processing at this length unless the jabbering is likely to conclude with sex."

She's also a drama queen who takes four years to get over a divorce. I cross the road to avoid people like that, because they just talk about themselves for hours and hours on the phone and never ask you about yourself. Four years is a long time to brood about a divorce that you instigated. I've had some bad break ups in my day, but nothing that took four years to heal. The worst break up required four months of grieving and a summer with a sliding-scale shrink on Central Park West.

While waiting for my appointment one afternoon, I overheard some guy in the waiting room saying that he described himself as someone who hung around in circles with people who were friends with Uma Thurman. In other words, he defined himself as a friend of a friend of Uma Thurman. He really needed his sliding-scale shrink. /tangent

Still, there is something of value in this book. Even for a non-yoga person like myself, her descriptions of life in an ashram, Balinese culture, and the lives of expats were fascinating. She certainly had a marvelous adventure traveling around the world to remote corners of the world. She lovingly describes the off-beat characters that she meets on her travels.

Gilbert also taps into the desire that we all have to cut ourselves loose from responsibilities and mundane routines and to sidle up to a bar in Key West. No mortgage, no job, no after-school pick ups, no piano recitals. Just a backpack and passport. Sound good, huh? Even better than that.. How about a whole year where you do nothing but think and write about your own mysterious inner-workings? She's a self-indulgent hippie. 

I have a weakness for hippies though. In this area of the country with driven elites and their three-car garages and status symbol boots, it's refreshing. And, maybe by the end of the book, I even became friends with Gilbert.

Spreadin' Love 419

"First of all, anybody who at the age of 60 calls himself Sting is an idiot."

Betty White is too damn cool.

New research finds that women who regularly consume moderate amounts of alcohol are less likely to gain weight than nondrinkers and are at lower risk for obesity.

I've been meaning to write a post about Bush and how he improved his image in the past year by keeping his mouth shut. Someone should give Cheney that memo. Stanley Fish talks about Bush's improved image.

the new shelton wet/dry. Too hipster for you, bucko.

(I'll be back soon. Really.)

Spreadin' Love 418

I'm not quite myself this morning, so just some linking for now.

Harry B writes about teacher preparation and responds to a great article on the subject in the NYT magazine. I'll do my own post later today.

During a state and local political class at Mercer County Community College, the professor discussed the practice of "double dipping" and pointed to a local sheriff who was collecting a pension of $85,000 and a salary of $129,634 for the same job. As the class was in session, a student texted the sheriff to inform him that he was Exhibit A. The sheriff flew over to the college, marched into the classroom, and hauled the professor into the hallway for a scolding. He made the professor apologize.

That's the way we do things in New Jersey.

Personal Blogs

Penelope Trunk sent out a tweet that two agents called her about a post that simply listed her old posts chronicling her relationship with her farmer-boyfriend.

I know Trunk is supposed to be a business blogger, but she's not. People don't read her for her advice on networking. They read her because she talks about her flings with her co-workers, a miscarriage at work, or fights with her in-laws. Trunk is a personal blogger and is increasingly distancing the blog from her business.

I wonder if having a super popular, personal blog does weird things to your life. Do you create drama in order to gain blog fodder? Does it force you to create a narrative and connections between the random events that happen in life? Does it push you to get off the sofa with a box of Mallowmars and the remote control? Do personal bloggers have more fun?

Squeezing Lemons

Writing is certainly death by a series of small cuts.

I think someone famous said that, and I should be giving him/her credit, but I'm too lazy to google it.

I finally finished off a project that I've been wrestling with for the past month. It took me one week to get up enough energy to finish off the last two hours of edits. I just HAD to do a load of whites, because nobody had any underwear. I just HAD to write some blog posts, because they were on VERY IMPORTANT issues. I just HAD to make Moroccan salted lemons, because they were a KEY ingredient in a recipe that I wanted to make. Then I needed to make another batch of Moroccan salted lemons using an entirely different system, because I wasn't sure if the first method was correct.

Honestly, I don't even know what Moroccan salted lemons taste like. And I won't know for another month, because that's how long it takes to make Moroccan salted lemons. They have to sit in a jar full of salty lemon juice for a month before they are done. And, yes, I had to go out and buy the correct kind of jar for those Moroccan salted lemons.

I squeezed about twenty lemons this week. All to avoid two hours of edits.

I have no problem spitting out rough, typo-ridden first drafts. Evidence A = Apt. 11D. It's all the neatening up and tying together arguments and clarifying that I find so tiresome.

Sigh.

Well, it's done and now I'm celebrating. First, there will be loud music on the stereo. Second, there will be a flowery, rushing-the-season sort of dress. Third, there will be a car trip into Manhattan and some meat eatin' at Virgil's. Lent be damned.

Genius

(stolen from Dooce)

Butter and Uggs

Steve and I have been in deep discussions about moving to a town with a better school system. The school system in this town is pretty good, but I went to one of top public high schools in the country and I hate to give my kids' a second-best school. The downside to moving would be a much smaller, uglier house and a community of rich, spoiled kids.

Right now, my kids have zero stress about stuff. Their friends wear Payless sneakers and jeans from Old Navy. Jonah never comes home agitating for clothes or fancy vacations or expensive haircuts, because his friends don't have that stuff. It may be a girl-boy thing. I'm not sure.

Since we have moving on the brain, I've been quizzing other parents about their schools and communities. One woman in a nearby fancy town said that ten year olds get made fun of for wearing Children's Place clothes. The kids somehow know which t-shirts came from which store.

My buddy in Cold Spring Harbor told me that she had to get Uggs for her six year old daughter, because the girls formed an Uggs club and wouldn't let the other girls sit with them. She also told me that every kid had to have a Butter-brand sweatshirt ($100) or else they were not cool. All the girls in the town have three pairs of Uggs, the Butter sweatshirts, and two North Face jackets. (Vomiting a little in my mouth.) 

I really do love that my kids are unconscious of status symbols. I'm not sure if it's worth losing that innocence in order to gain a better school.

Grafton's Review of Menand

A couple of days ago, I pointed to Tony Grafton's review of Louis Menand's new book. However, my reference was too brief; Grafton's piece really needs attention.

Grafton writes that Menand is completely right about the problems with academia, but faults him for his bloodlessness. Menand does not truly capture the abuses that happen in graduate school and post-graduate school and how many smart, creative people are chewed up in the system. Grafton writes,

The humanities need reform because their traditions are confining and their job market is a catastrophe, but reform cannot mean surrender, or dilution. It means finding out how to do what the scientists have already done: how to combine the rigor of tradition with experiment and innovation--but without replacing hordes of underpaid adjuncts with hordes of underpaid post-docs, as the scientists have. More generally, it means finding creative ways to make life instructively hard, for a few years, for the broadest range of talented people of all sorts and conditions whom we can educate and then employ productively and decently. What makes reform urgent is the passion, the erudition, and the intelligence of those whom the academy is now failing--the sheer destruction of talent and love and energy, of the traditions of deep learning, over which we humanists are presiding. The masters of the next generation are still knocking on our doors, but most of them find themselves too busy speeding down the freeway to their next campus, grading stacks of papers, and worrying about their debts to learn as they wish to learn and as we need them to learn. They are missing from Menand’s cool, lucid, and limited book, as they are from so much of what is thought and written about us humanists in these bad days.

Grafton, an avid reader of academic blogs, describes the problems so eloquently that I found myself licking old wounds last night.

As happy as I am in my new post-academic stage of life, I still have to be very careful to not go to "the bad place" where I beat myself up for wasting twenty years in academia, for the zeroes on my social security statement, for the student loans bills that still arrive ten years after graduation, for the publications that I wrote but don't have my name on them, for all sorts of past injustices.

The morning run will improve things.

Diane Ravitch's Switcheroo

“Nations like Finland and Japan seek out the best college graduates for teaching positions, prepare them well, pay them well and treat them with respect,” she said. “They make sure that all their students study the arts, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages, the sciences and other subjects. They do this because this is the way to ensure good education. We’re on the wrong track.”

-Diane Ravitch

Random TV Notes

Check out Mo Ryan's review of the last episode of Lost.

Presently, two shows on TV have characters with Asperger's Syndrome: Parenthood and The Middle. It's great, because finally TV is portraying a delightful, mildly affected kid and not the robotic, autistic kid who kills his family. Finally, autism isn't scary anymore. Whoo. Parenthood premiered last night. We liked.

The best commercial on TV:

Workout Gear

Now that I'm on a running kick, I'm going to bore you all now and then with exercise posts. Evil laugh.

I've got my running bag packed and waiting by the front door. I'm heading out in five minutes, but first a quick post on what's in the running bag.

The running bag is essential. If you're searching around for a running bra or ear phones, there's less of a chance that you'll actually get to the gym. All the components need to be order and ready for a quick exit of the house.

Here's my formula:

Running pants. Right now, I like Gap's loose fit capris. (They don't seem to have them online.) The color lasts longer than the Old Navy version. I'm also not ready for the tight version.

Running bra. Only Champion.

A museum T-shirt. Men's size medium.

Sneakers. Only Saucony.

A bottle of water, earphones, and a fun bag.

Here are more tips on how to start a running program.

The Monorail to WiiLand

Ian: "Mom. I want Wii Play."

Me: Well, your birthday is coming up. That could be your birthday present. Would you like that for a birthday present?

Grunt.

No. I have a better idea. How about we give you a box of itchy shirts and scratchy pants?

Nooo. I don't like itchy shirts and scratchy pants.

How about a box of mushy bananas and cold fish sticks?

Nooo. I don't like old food.

How about Jonah's stinky underwear and holey socks?

Nooo. Mom, I like wii.

How about a box of doggy poop? That would be good, too.

laughing.

No, wait. Even better... You want a Barbie's Dream House, right?

No. That's for DB.

OK. Well, it's time for bed. It's time to take a boat to Dream Land.

No. I want to take a monorail to WiiLand.

That's fine. Take the monorail, sweetie. Good night.

Conflicted Conservatives

John Sides recently blogged about conservatives and spending. Despite being ideologically in favor of spending cuts, when asked about specific government programs, conservative are reluctant to cut funding to those programs.

Here's his corrected graph:

I supposed his findings aren't earth-shattering. Spending went up during the Bush administration. Reagan wasn't able to eliminate programs that he hated, specifically the Department of Education. There's always been a gap between the reduced spending rhetoric and actual practice.

His graph was most interesting for the ranking of what conservatives are most willing to cut - aid to foreign countries and anything that helped poor people and kids. Law and order matters are the most popular. Social security was also important to them.

I was itching to see a comparison of policy priorities between liberals and conservatives.

Comparing Middle Schools

A new study on effective middle schools has just been released. (Cursor down to the bottom to download the report.) The research was conducted by EdSource with several reputable researchers on board, including Michael Kirst. They looked at 303 middle schools in California; half served middle income students and half served low income students. (via Joanne Jacobs)

Controlling for student demographics, they found certain commonalities in the high performing schools. The high performing schools identified student disabilities quickly and provided services. They prepared kids for demanding high schools. They had goals for the students that could be measured. Adults were held responsible for meeting these goals. Curriculum and instruction were closely aligned with state standards. Effective leadership by the superintendent and principal was critical. Also important was parental involvement.

Significantly, they found no correlation between successful schools and modes of instruction or organization of teachers. In other words, collaborative learning and styles of math instruction made no difference in student performance.

Harry had a great post a few weeks ago about the importance of bringing research on education into the schools.That's why I forwarded this study to our local middle school principal and the school superintendent. I suggest that you do it, as well, along with a friendly little FYI e-mail.