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.”

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.

the name game, or, cooking kevin's bacon at six degrees

I met Ethan Casey at a talk he gave last winter for the Pakistani Students Association at the University of Michigan. Todd Shea, who founded Comprehensive Disaster Response Services after the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, was supposed to speak at the event. Shea was in Haiti, however, coordinating relief efforts after the earthquake that hit Haiti just weeks before.

Casey has written two books about Pakistan; he met Shea through their mutual connection to the Pakistani American community. Casey, who funds his self-published books through pre-orders and donations, is now working on a book about Haiti. His father co-founded a nonprofit organization in Haiti when Casey was a teenager, and Casey traveled frequently to the Caribbean as a result.

About the same time I attended Casey’s talk, I met one of my editors in person for the first time (we’d corresponded by email). I mentioned the event, but being in the habit of forgetting names, I couldn’t recall the name of the speaker. My editor, however, quickly informed me that he’d been there too, for not only did he know Casey, but they’d written a book together.

All this is to say, as both Casey’s words and Shea’s actions affirm, that the membranes between life in X [Pakistan] and Y [Haiti] and Z [America] are very thin and should be handled with the proper care and reverence.

My review of Casey’s latest book on Pakistan is here.

in memory

My father attended high school in the mountains of northern India. I grew up on the stories of this time: chasing soccer balls down the mountainside, feeding monkeys, holiday hikes, contracting dengue fever (this recounted by my grandmother), meeting the Dalai Lama—and trying to shake his hand. Tantamount to all this was his departure: After he graduated in 1965, my father, five of his classmates, and one set of their parents drove across Asia, the Middle East, and into Europe to meet a ship bound for New York. My father helped build a rooftop carrier for the station wagon so that they could fit all eight passengers in the station wagon. The carrier was held down by metal clamps and body weight—somewhere among his Indian bangles, carved ivory lamps, and jade cuff links, my father has saved the one C-clamp that made it all the way to Amsterdam.

By the time I was old enough to understand the magnitude of such a journey, and to wish I could repeat the trip with my father, I was old enough to realize the near impossibility of doing so. Indeed, the route became impassable not long after the Volkswagen drove it, when the Cold War seeped into the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and American foreign policies tested sovereign hospitality throughout Asia and the Middle East.

It’s this road trip I’ve kept in mind while working on a book review of Ethan Casey’s Overtaken By Events. Casey, a freelance journalist, spent six weeks traveling around Pakistan in the early spring of 2009, arriving shortly before the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team. He’d come to follow up on a book he’d written in 2004 about a semester he spent teaching journalism in Lahore. Both books lack a certain sophistication of style, but certainly not of effort or intent, and in that sense they are the type of reporting I would wish to gather on a Eurasian road trip with my father. Overtaken By Events, writes Casey, is an on-the-ground narrative, the “kind of book that rarely gets written about Pakistan, and one I felt the country needed and deserved.” While he realizes that it is impossible to not write about politics when writing about Pakistan, he doesn’t think it necessary to always address them directly. Instead, he “made the contrarian decision to write about everything else and to let the politics seep in.”

Tragically, the politics have seeped into my father’s own stories, as we learned that his good friend, Dan Terry, was one of the ten aid workers shot and killed in Badakhshan Province last week. Terry and his parents were three of the passengers in that overstuffed station wagon over 40 years ago; it was on that trip, my father recounts, that Dan Terry fell in love with Afghanistan. He lived and worked in the country for over four decades, supporting aid groups and community development projects. He spoke Dari and Pashto, and was deeply knowledgeable about the country and its people. I can imagine the joy with which he summitted the 16,000-foot pass the medical team traversed while on their way through the Hindu Kush.

Growing up, his name—always the first and last together—carried the lush air of adventure and far off places. We saw him rarely, but his name lived large in my father’s, and many others’, esteem. Earlier this week, a writer for the Afghanistan Analysts Network recounted that in 2000, Dan Terry was jailed for overstaying his visa (he was working in one of the rural areas, and paid scant attention to the calendar):

He went off good-naturedly, seeing it as a rare chance to have the time to learn Pashto. He was released from prison after a couple of weeks and then re-arrested after the authorities decided he had not served enough days. He arrived back to the prison to cheers from his fellow inmates who were now newly-found friends. He finally emerged with tales of beatings and the hardness of the lives of those he had come into contact with.

While it remains unclear who killed Dan Terry and the other aid workers—be it Taliban, loosely-linked insurgents, or bandits—to read the Taliban’s declaration of responsibility is to peer into the scaffolding of their propaganda: Their false claims that the group was proselytizing and distributing Bibles demonstrate their willingness to torque a massacre into political gain. Terry was a man of faith and peace; both of which led him to a life in service of the poor—a life of respect for a people and country he deeply loved. Whoever the killers may be, it is proof that they value power and violence over the lives not only of Dan Terry and his fellow aid workers, but of the very people they chose to serve.

Both Dan Terry and Dr. Tom Little had requested to be buried in Afghanistan; alumni from my father’s high school hope to raise enough money for Terry’s wife and three daughters, who were raised in Afghanistan, to attend the burial.

articles of free speech

What happens when tongues and feet vie for space in the oral cavity:

half a grand idea

Shortly after the January 12 earthquake in Haiti, the U.S. government announced that Haitians living illegally in the United States could apply for temporary protected status, which grants permission to work legally in the United States.

It was a reassuring move on two counts: it showed that the Obama administration recognized the informal supply lines that run through Western Union service stations—it is estimated that 1 to 2 million Haitians live outside their country (half a million of who live in the U.S.) and send $1.9 billion to family and friends back home annually. This was the second reassurance: temporary protected status could provide better job security and thus a steadier stream of funds to those in Haiti.

But the money orders and the checks are written in slim, double-or-triple digit amounts—according to the Inter-American Development Bank, the annual monthly remittance is $150. It is a number nothing short of miraculous when considering the cost of rent and food in, say, New York City versus the wages paid for the type of work that most legal employees avoid.

And thus it appears that government foresight is a bit myopic. It costs nearly $500 to apply for temporary protection status. Waivers are granted, although eligibility is based on meeting criteria such as providing “a list of all assets owned, possessed, or controlled,” “your monthly essential expenditures for each of the three months prior to the filing,” and “your monthly gross income from all sources for each of the three months prior to filing.” Presenting such information would be a hassle for any individual, let alone those who likely live much of their life on U.S. soil explicitly off the books and under the table.

According to the New York Times, the Department of Homeland Security reported that thus far, less than 35,000 of the estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Haitians living illegally in the U.S. have applied for protected status. Aids groups are petitioning the government to it easier to apply for a waiver.

For those who qualify, one wonders what happens when the 18-month protection period ends. Often, aliens apply for renewals, and this seems to be the proposed plan for eligible Haitians. But with the tumultuous history that marks U.S.-Haitian relations, one can understand why many Haitians living illegally in the United States might feel there are better ways to spend $500.

awry

I have thought more than once this week of the times I quoted Burns to my students, wondering if the care I spent explaining how language could evolve from gang aft agley to oft go awry made me neglect the underlying lesson. 

And thus, after an afternoon session on hold with Delta (Northwest has now merged with Delta…), and an evening with Spirit (You can book one of the big front seats. Did you know that Spirit offers Spirit snacks and drinks? Spirit offers snacks and drinks!), I am trying to remember the lessons easily forgotten. How my indignation, righteous as it may be, is oxygenated by life in a place where we expect airlines to contact us in a timely fashion regarding canceled flights. A place where $500 plane tickets can be purchased with little forethought, and are guaranteed some degree of recovery. A place where letters can be written, questions can be asked, and it is not unreasonable to expect a reply.

Certainly, this is not black and white. I am still waiting for an answer as to why it might take a week to inform a customer of a canceled flight; as well as why one airline may fly, but not another; which also spurs the question: In the temporary absence of competitors, is it merely good capitalism for an airline to increase its fares, or might that carry a hint of crime about the starched white collar?

One needn’t travel outside of the United States to learn that what often gives money its strength is the convenience it can buy. Yes, dear choir, I hear your robes rustling, and so here is the lesson of gang aft agley: My record for trips to Haiti is now 1 in 3. The frustration of such a record pales, however, with details drawn during the 10 days I have managed to spend there. The assassination attempt, suspiciously political, that remains unsolved after 10 years. The long journey to the capital, merely to obtain a drivers license. The hours spent studying for a high school exam written in French and not one’s childhood tongue. The impossibility of paying for the apprenticeship required to become a lawyer.

Did you know that Spirit Airlines sells snacks and drinks?

the voice that launched a thousand ‘whys?’

Helen Thomas was in Ann Arbor this evening for a brief reading. (One man at the post-reading Q & A reported that he’d seen her at a restaurant earlier in the day, the exact location lost under Thomas’s quizzical gaze and his growing embarrassment. “Maybe it was someone else,” he mumbled, although with a profile as distinct as Thomas’s, this is hard to imagine.) Southeast Michigan, going through a bit of a Nazareth complex these days, is happy to claim her—the daughter of Lebanese immigrants, she was raised in Detroit, and proof that, although the Detroit Free Press no longer lands on stoops seven days a week, and the Ann Arbor newspaper does not come at all, yes, good journalists can come out of the Motor City.

Thomas, born shortly after the conclusion of the War to End All Wars, began reporting from the White House on Kennedy’s first day in office, and, not coincidentally, on each and every war that followed. Of today’s, she unequivocally condones withdrawal. “George W. Bush wanted to be a war president,” she said, pausing for a very trenchant silence. “And he was.” As for President Obama, she wishes him to have more courage—an improvement we might wish upon all our psyches, although certainly one most critical in a man about to send 36,000 more troops into a land war in Asia.

nightmares are relative, i suppose

Ask nearly any teacher about the teacher dreams. Their eyes will grow wide, and they'll nod slowly. They will recount the nightmares: Their classroom disappears. They are unprepared. They lose their lesson plans. They are possibly unclad. T–, their honorary student-from-hell, is—somehow—the principal. Their third period class pulls off a coup d'etat.

The nightmares often appear in August. Perhaps it is the moan of school buses, shuddering past the house on practice runs. Or the prodigious advertisements for mechanical pencils and Mead notebooks and My Little Pony Trapper Keepers. Something slips into the subconscious and worries the pedagogical nerves.

The nightmares lay in wait. I shouldn't have been surprised when they appeared last month, even after two years away from the classroom. Relax, I said, banishing visions of T– and gum-slathered desks. There's no school for you this year.

But that was before the brouhaha over the President's speech, which he will be delivering tomorrow to students across the country. I'll be heading to a nearby school, for one big voyeuristic round of watching-the-students-watch-the-speech. The brouhaha is a story for another day; tonight I'll dream of English class and brown bag lunches, not-so-secretly delighted that even this year, I get to go back to school.

wonky wishes

I have sighed many times over Joan Acocella's writing--a sigh of desperate admiration. In a recent New Yorker article on the rise of overparenting, Acocella makes a succinct and astute observation:

No Child Left Behind: that sounds like the expression of a democratic wish. More likely, it was the product of an economic wish--that America not be left behind by India and China.

If one has any doubt this truth, let me show you the latest language on the need for a successful education system--it is tinged with a fear of losing our accustomed world order. Battalions of foreign students breath down our necks. We must devour our math and science textbooks not because their content might help us unlock the beauty and power of scientific and mathematical theory, but because a country that can't add can't calculate tax breaks for U.S. corporations; a country that can't reason through science experiments won't own the means of energy production. In the new era of xenophobia, it's not that we can't imagine a world where resources are freely shared, but that we can imagine it all too well--we see that it means we might have to give things up.

Of course, like most selfish impulses, it's wildly illogical and will, at some point, come to a diseased and deadly fruition (known in Texas as shooting oneself in the foot). As Adrienne Rich observed:

Universal public education has two possible--and contradictory--missions. One is the development of a literate, articulate, and well-informed citizenry so that the democratic process can continue to evolve and the promise of radical equality can be brought closer to realization. The other is the perpetuation of a class system dividing an elite, nominally "gifted" few, tracked from an early age, from a very large underclass essentially to be written off as the alienated from language and science, from poetry and politics, from history and hope, an underclass to be funneled--whatever its dreams and hopes--toward low-wage temporary jobs. ...The results are devastating in terms of the betrayal of a generation of youth. The loss to the whole society is incalculable.

Writing this in 1997, Rich was specifically referring to tracking, which has passed out of vogue in its most blatant forms. But regardless of this, we must remember that tracking was merely a symptom of a larger fear-plagued motivation--a motivation that remains just as viable in 2008 as it did during the Cold War.

Relatedly, the connections between George W. Bush and the testing companies were made years ago, but this remains an excellent article about the other economic wish that drove the development of No Child Left Behind. If there is one quality I will allow G.W.B., it is that he seems to know how to have fun. But I am befuddled by his cronyism: based on their inane curriculum and testing materials, the friends that made millions off NCLB appear to be the dullest of people.

the varied carols I hear

Times Square on November 4: it is perhaps one of the few times the Square is full of native New Yorkers. We are celebrating not the fall of a new year and soon-to-be broken resolutions, but something real, something hopeful, something that requires Walt Whitman and a few good yalps.

An NYFD firetruck attempts to navigate the throngs. Our eyes on the screen high above the vertex of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, we part slowly. The driver begins to tap on the horn, syncopating the blasts, and we join in: "O-ba-ma! Yes we can! O-ba-ma!" We wave as they crawl by. One fireman, suited up, arm on the windowframe, puffs on a cigar.

zip codes

Last year I tutored at a school in Brooklyn. You could see the Empire State building from the classroom, but life still seemed far removed from "the city"—although one student surely had studied the subway map more than once, he was shocked to learn that the East River flowed half a mile from his doorstep. "There's no water around here," he insisted.

Now I work within a few blocks of the familiar Empire spire, at a charter school in Chelsea. The sixth graders have made multi-page, multi-colored reports on their neighborhoods: Gramercy Park, the West Village, the Lower East Side; their projects are more developed than a number of high schoolers' I've seen. It's a magnet school for readers and writers. When they finish tests they pull out hardbound sketchbooks and begin doodling. Last week the seventh graders held a raucous impromptu debate on disposing of nuclear waste. (As precocious as they appear, I must say I am glad they aren't calling the shots on that piece of policy. Some of them hardly quibbled over the pitfalls of shooting plutonium into space—one trigger-happy girl had a disturbingly detailed plan to deposit it on the moon.)

When I introduce myself on my first day of work, a few classes break out in applause when I tell them I'm studying journalism at New York University. Many of them are members of the newspaper club, which is anxiously awaiting publication of its first issue. The newspaper's political writer, a bespectacled sixth grader, tells me it should hit the stands by Election Day. “Election Day?” asks the boy beside him, although a second later he knocks the palm of his hand on his forehead. “Oh yeah! Obama!” He raises his hand in the air, and his tablemates lift their hands in solidarity and simultaneously cry, "Obama!" The original instigator, a slight boy with cornrows, grabs my wrist and tries to push it in the air. Seeing as the city has forbidden public school teachers to promote candidates, I resist, but can't help telling him, "Obama wants you to do your homework."

They ask which publications I want to write for. I mumble something about the New Yorker, and they bob their heads in recognition. One girl raises her hand: "My friend's dad is the music critic at the New Yorker," she says.

"Sasha Frere-Jones?" I stammer. She nods. I ask if she ever read his pieces. Sometimes, she says.

Later in the day, a boy comes over and asks if I want to be a journalist or a teacher when I grow up. I tell him I used to be a teacher and now I’d like to write about teachers. I say nothing about my age or state of grown up-ness.

They may need some clarity on the nuclear issue, but at the very least, they are generous.

why I wish I was still teaching English

Sarah Palin et al. do not [currently] have their red pens on the education policy of the nation, but the vice presidential candidate has provided at least two day's worth of lessons.
Poetry

Diagramming

Today's vocab word: public

Just in case I wasn't partisan enough in my prior post (warily! warily! I say to you):

According to the New York Times, Senator McCain announced that "the federal government should play a limited role in public education."

If not a government (for the people, by the people) who then shall regulate the public school system? Will the government (that faceless entity) whittle away its hours with the private school system?

“Education is obviously not the issue Senator McCain spends the most time on,” said Lisa Graham Keegan, a former Arizona education commissioner and McCain adviser. Oops--not anymore.

paling in comparison

Well, we all know who Tina Fey will be spoofing for the next two months (I'm being optimistic here).

Why do I feel like they're trying to tug on the heart strings of my double X chromosomes?

When CCR sang "I ain't no fortunate son," I don't think they were arguing for the senators and governors and representatives to march their children and past experiences down the corridor to the sacrificial alter [ahem]. I don't think this is what Biden and Palin and McCain and Obama intend, but the specters of a child with Down syndrome, sons in Iraq, x & y chromosomes, melanin and a tortured body flit about the campaign speeches and television ads.

how cool will it be!?

Currently, barackobama.com opens with a nice graphic and the sweetly rhyming phrase "Who Will Be Barack's VP? Be the first to know." Us Virginians and pseudo-Virginians are crossing our fingers for Governor Tim Kaine. And we're eagerly awaiting the news. It's just a bit unfortunate that the slogan sounds remarkably like an ad for a home pregnancy test.

And just in case you aren't obsessively checking the NYTimes for the announcement, the campaign can send you a text as soon as the decision is made:

Barack is making his decision and will be announcing it any day now. If you haven't had a chance to text "VP" to 62262 pull out your phone and do it now! How cool will it be to know before it's announced by Wolf Blitzer, Katie Couric, or some other news outlet?

Um...I want to know too, and yes, before Katie reads it off the teleprompter. But is this how the campaign thinks we want to be spoken to? Barack, he's so cool! I agree, but please--I'd like a little substance with my exclamation points.