a walk around Zuccotti Park

On all corners, and throughout the crowd, police in full regalia, with zip ties of the protester-detaining kind clipped to their belts.

A sign that reads "Water Board Wall Street." Later, three men turn these words into a chant. Which means that at least four protesters had little concern for the ethical twists contained in such an idea.

One block north, the belongings a person without a home. Blankets, shoes, and bags are stacked against an unoccupied wall, and keep mum as to if they sit there in protest or in simple statement of the facts.

loaves and fishes

Harrisonburg, Virginia hosted its first beer festival last weekend, further evidence that what was once solely an agricultural town has transmogrified into a sprawling but increasingly urbane community. Additional signs of change: a wrecking ball was diligently, if not effectively, dismantling one of the remaining downtown grain elevators; a food co-op, with food from over 100 local vendors and farms, is scheduled to open in June; and what was once the temporary office of the 2008 Obama campaign is now a cat and dog adoption center. (Although the Obama campaign may have had a tough time of it in this traditionally conservative town, it was a shrewd piece of real estate for the adoption center, which is located across the street from the children's museum).

According to the local paper, some 3,000 people showed up at the beer festival. The local newspaper is known in shorthand as the DNR, however, and its fact-checking department seems to have gone the way of the morgue, so I’m more inclined to follow the count of a friend who actually attended the event and estimated that she helped serve beer to some 2,000 individuals. The real accounting error, however, falls to whomever ordered the toilets, which numbered a total of eight and left the first annual beer festival with a bit of a loaves and fishes situation. My friend, who is not short on charm, bribed her way to the bathroom by promising free pours of beer to those who let her cut in line.

I am a reluctant event-planner, and am entirely sympathetic to the harried mind of any creature who takes it upon themselves to plan anything beyond dinner. (The low point in my career was the moment at which, having organized a dinner without enough food, set up tables in a mosquito-and-mud drenched field, and driven a 15-passenger van into a lamppost--with my boss in the passenger’s seat--my boss and I found ourselves heaving sodden and seeping garbage bags into a dumpster six feet above our heads, which, despite my desire to forget the entire affair, seared the scent of half-consumed salsa and queso forever into my olfactory nerve.) The festival's toilet-to-drinker ratio, however, does seem to reflect a gross neglect of cause and effect.

On the same day as the beer festival, New York City’s local rag reported on the state of the internally displaced persons camps in Haiti. It is a loaves and fishes situation most awful, for reasons that are deep and longstanding, and have as much to do with why the camps exist in the first place with why they still exist over a year after the January 2010 earthquake. In other words, it has much to do with unfulfilled promises; in the aftermath of the earthquake, the international community passed Haiti a basket brimming with the promises of billions, but which have proven, thus far, to be illusive.

In situations such as the IDP camps, United Nation standards proscribe 1 toilet to every 20 individuals. In Haiti, nearly one third of the IDP camps do not have toilets. In those that do, each toilet is shared by an average of 273 individuals. Other practicalities—shelter, water, security—are equally abysmal.

One of the most astonishing things about the miracles of Jesus is their earthly sensibility: wine for a wedding, food for a hungry crowd, calm for a choppy sea—not to mention Martha’s concern that, as her brother Lazarus was four days buried, there would be a terrible stench if they opened his tomb. Being Easter Sunday in a tenaciously religious country, many of those living in the IDP camps would have managed, somehow, to attend services in their Sunday best. The acts of earthly practicality required to do so may not be miraculous, but they are certainly acts of faith.

at Liberty Hall

I’ve been half in the world of hunting parties and coming out balls, having just finished two of Nancy Mitford’s books about the foibles of the landed gentry, crushed as they were between the demands of inheritance laws, modernization, and what would soon transform “the war to end all wars” into a prelude to the second. (In other words, it was a world in which one could sell a diamond brooch and use the proceeds to install central heating in a modest Oxford home.)

Physically, however, I’ve been installed in air-conditioned conference rooms, imbibing PowerPoints and limp hotel sandwiches. This summer I’ll be working for Teach For America for the third year, helping to manage operations for its Houston institute, one of the nine locations throughout the country where corps members begin their training, which includes four weeks of teaching summer school. Institute is often described as an intensive experience—many corps members are fresh from college and new to the classroom. The Houston school system is facing budget cuts this year, and is considering shortening its summer school program, which means that our corps members will likely begin teaching three days after their arrival at institute. Setting up and running an institute, therefore, is an equally demanding and rapid endeavor, and requires thick-agendaed weekends in hotel ballrooms named after the stars in the Texan mythology—the Sam Houston, the San Antonio, and Liberty Hall.

In the sepia-ed world of Nancy Mitford, the moneyed classes would host charity balls and donate funds to various improvement societies. Things aren’t very different today, although the ballrooms are used for conference tables and the ladies get nametags instead of dance cards. Teach For America publishes a quarterly alumni magazine, and reports the marriages and births among its prodigious flock, and in that sense, it isn’t unlike the society pages of both past and present.

To be honest, though, the metaphor only lasts so long, for although Teach For America is known for its recruitment at elite universities, its corporate backers, and its appeal to those wanting to fortify their resumes in pursuit of white collar jobs, its structure is far more complex. The selection process assesses the quality of one’s leadership, rather than one’s alma mater, and a considerable portion of funding comes from federal dollars and regional donors. Perhaps a more interesting discussion revolves around the timbre and tone of Teach For America’s recently revised core values, which emphasize the necessity of “transformational change”—that is, “expanding education opportunity in ways that are life-changing for children and transforming for our country.” Integral to this are four other values: leadership, diversity, respect and humility, and team (a better term may have been "community," but that sounds too much another word that starts with a capital "C" and spells political disaster.)

Teach For America is promoting this revised vision both within and without the organization, particularly through the publication of a new book by Teach For America founder Wendy Kopp: A Chance to Make History: What Works and What Doesn’t in Providing an Excellent Education for All. A word cloud analysis of the text would feature the words transformational, leadership, and change in large, bold font. The ideas aren’t particularly new to anyone familiar with the organization, but the revived sense of urgency and clarity is palpable. Perhaps, on the eve of its twentieth birthday, Teach For America has simply bought a set of new clothes, but I don’t think the development is solely cosmetic—there is a steely edge to its voice.

And thus those of us at the institute-preparation conference found ourselves at dinner in the aforementioned Liberty Hall, listening as Teach For America’s Chief Knowledge Officer, Steven Farr, spoke over the sound of 200 dinner forks clinking against hotel china. Multiplying outward, we will be responsible for training over 5,000 corps members this summer. We placed our white linens on our laps, and listened to Farr detail the development of the organization’s teacher training and assessment methods. Teach For America uses what it calls the “teaching as leadership” model to select and develop its corps members. Essentially, it contends that good teachers do what good leaders do: set a vision, invest others, and persistently work toward results. This is a large leap from the early days of Teach For America, when many such as Farr, who taught in Roma, Texas in the 1993 corps, hoped to “reach just one student.”

The world wars of Nancy Mitford’s days had their consequential and unintended side effects—among others, economic growth, increased opportunities for minorities and women, and revisions to socioeconomic expectations. There were, of course, many negative and direct effects of the war, which makes today’s possibilities—expanding opportunity through quality education for all—even more appealing. Maybe it’s a neoconservative idea cloaked in pantsuits and heels instead of furs and jewels. But there is a radical idea afoot: “It’s a broken world,” said Farr. “And the fact is, the leaders who are able to fix its problems are more likely to come out of Roma than the high school I came from.”

Spanish-speaking waiters were bringing cheesecake and coffee. Farr looked around the room in astonishment. “Oh wow,” he said. “I talked all the way to dessert.”

green valley is the place for me

It is not simply a sign of my frugality that the majority of the books in my library were purchased at the Green Valley Book Fair. What was once a small warehouse filled with heavily discounted publisher’s returns and overstock books is now a 25,000 square foot complex just south of Harrisonburg, Virginia. The book fair is only open six times a year, for 2-week periods; when not living in the area, I plan my visits around its schedule. Although it is a bit disheartening to go there as a writer—all those unwanted, and thus unloved books—I am delighted to walk off, once again, with an armload of $3 and $4 books. (Having just muddled through my first self-employment tax return, I also consoled myself that the bill will serve as a tax write-off.)

The titles are eclectic. If readers of Christian fiction aren’t watchful, for example, they might wander into the paranormal romance section, which is housed, however unintentionally, next to those texts that, although short on both content and theology, are buoyed up by misguided piety and the marketing efforts of the Christian publishing industry. You can also pick up a copy of Lolita, or Native Sun, or a Spanish–English dictionary, so it is safe to say that nearly everyone can to achieve literary contentment.

Today was opening day at the book fair, and the aisles were a crush of customers. It is a purely democratic affair, and it is fun to see what others carry about in their shopping baskets—Origin of the Species and a coin-collecting manual for one customer, Going Rouge for another. Two ladies had braved the crowds to buy children’s books and sundry items, presumably for their children or elementary-aged students. Upon entering the adult fiction and reference section, one groaned in distaste. “Oh, these are the reading books,” she said. “That’s not for me.” Her companion concurred, and declared that if she ever was to actually read such books, she’d get a Kindle. “It’s just too much to mess around with book books,” she said, and breezed toward the cash register.

reading, writing, 'rithmetic

In mid-February I attended Teach For America's 20th Anniversary Summit. Numbers, specifically statistics, have a simple, concrete heft to them, and were spotted and cited frequently throughout the conference. Teach For America's genesis story, for example, speaks not of seven days, but of the growth that has occurred since 1990, when the organization's founder, a then-21-year-old Wendy Kopp, launched a program with 489 inaugural corps members. In 2010, 8,200 of 46,000 applicants were selected to teach in 39 regions throughout the country. 

A few numbers, then, gleaned from the conference:

• Nearly 75% of students at the country's top highly selective colleges (146 of them) come from families at the highest quartile of the socioeconomic scale.
• 80% of low-income students are deeply impacted by an inability to afford college.
• Changes to the Federal Application for Federal Student Aid enabled 750,000 additional applicants to receive financial assistance for higher education. The IRS commissioner who worked to streamline the application process is a Teach For America alumnus.
• A friend of mine who taught in a low-income school in South Dakota reports that 10 of her former students are currently serving in the infantry in Afghanistan.

dream acts

During the time I lived in south Texas, stuck up right against the U.S.-Mexico border, I often experienced a deep sense of isolation and listlessness. Claustrophobia is not the correct term to describe it, for there were miles and miles of scrub brush, mosquito-laden lakes, and scalded highway. Surely part of this feeling was due to the overwhelming task of being a brand new teacher. But even though I came to love that space, slashed however haphazardly between two countries, I can still conjure that melancholy today. As a friend who grew up in Brownsville mused, life on the border meant you had "the worst of both worlds."

El Paso and Ciudad Juarez are located over a day’s drive upriver, and thus not synonymous with my life along the Gulf of Mexico, but I know well what landscape dance teachers Gemtria St Clair and Zulema Galindo work within. It is, of course, a landscape eroded by the steady northbound current of drugs, a current which roils and cataracts along the banks of the Rio Grande.

I recently wrote a story about the partnership between Gemtria and Zulema: Gemtria runs a dance program in El Paso, and has worked with Zulema to start a similar program across the border. This hasn't been easy. Things are so bad in Juarez that some schools have started teaching their sixth graders what to do when they hear guns fired; visa renewals don't come easily, it appears, for dance teachers trying to support community education programs. But there are some very good reasons why Gemtria and Zulema (and the organizations they work for) have decided to keep at it, one being that, as they mentioned in their interviews, they teach students who may never have seen a live dance performance, heard a full orchestra, or had the chance to perform in a play.

Some might think that this represents the distinction between one's income and one's interest in the arts; a distinction in which the arts become synonymous with the elite, and is clearly false. A very vivid distinction, however, can be found between the schools of the elite and those where dance, or art, or theater, or music, are cut in the name of improving math and science test scores. We forget to wonder what might occur if our future mathematicians and engineers, or, more accurately, low-level workers do not have ongoing opportunities to witness and explore music, movement, and the power of creativity.

Which is what Gemtria and Zulema’s dance programs, based upon the National Dance Institute curriculum, allow students to do. They use dance to inspire students to excellence and make them more curious about learning—including math and science. Students can dance out fractions, explore tempo, describe movement with adverbs, and move like water molecules. More importantly, the classroom techniques ask students to self-assess, meet high expectations, and act together in community—all valuable skills back inside the classroom, not to mention within a national economy.

odd jobs: a memory

My summer job in high school was driving combine on a grass seed farm. A grass seed combine harvests the crop by picking up a swath of grass and shaking the seeds loose. While monotonous, it's not a bad way to spend five weeks of summer--I listened to books on tape, watched the sunset six days out of seven, and pulled whatever pranks you can think of when you're bored and in possession of a CB radio. (I also got into country music and talk radio, including the religious stuff, where I learned that even on-air exorcisms have to break for commercials.) In the end, I was rewarded with what my boss thought the ultimate compliment: he told me I'd make an excellent farmer's wife.

Oregon state law requires that anyone under the age of 16 take a tractor safety course before operating farm equipment (that is, unless you are the child--or wife--of a farmer). Thus the first summer of driving combine, I spent three days at Linn Benton Community College, driving farm equipment around the parking lot and watching low-production safety videos. It certainly would have been more entertaining had I managed to talk to the boy who was generally acknowledged to be a local heartthrob, and was inexplicably enrolled in the same course. Instead, we independently endured the hours of videos that admonished viewers to "avoid the drive shaft" and "only wear a seat belt if your equipment has an approved rollover device." In between verses of their theme song, "Highway to the Danger Zone," they showed clips of what happens when loose clothing gets stuck in rotating machinery--at the last second, they'd switch the hapless farmer out for a leaf-filled dummy, which would fly around the spinning rod, spewing multicolored leaves and stuffing. Memorable stuff. For the sake of illustration, here's a similar type of movie.

at the Haitian Family Resource Center

My story about the Haitian Family Resource Center is here.

As I mentioned in a previous post, when I visited the center this past fall, I met Jean Bernard Blain, a musician who performed in the first ever Haitian Creole opera, which was written by his father, composer Iphares Blain. It is a testament both to the closely knit threads of Port-au-Prince and the limitless capabilities of my sister's friend Domingue, who seems to know about half of the city and is always up to about 20 different projects, that he too participated in the opera.