modern medicine

In a few weeks my friend E- will complete her contract as an ICU nurse at an East Coast hospital. After one of her night shifts earlier this year, she came home at 8 a.m. and slept until the afternoon. When she awoke, she sat on her couch, bleary-eyed and exhausted, and told me how she'd spent an hour crawling around the morgue—literally climbing in the machinery, fumbling with broken equipment—in an attempt to move a DNR patient who died after spending two months in the ICU. "I hope this is my worst job ever," she said, and went off to work another night shift.

diarie gastronomica

triptych

three recent sights; one infuriating, one baffling, one dear:

+ "I am voting for the chick!" signs in the hills of Augusta County

+ hay bales in Manhattan

+ the P.S. 11 farm market, manned by four eager elementary school students

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

broken window theory, all shook up

Says the wonderfully subversive Banksy:

"I came to New Orleans to do battle with the Grey Ghost, a notorious vigilante who's been systematically painting over any graffiti he can find with the same grey shade of paint since 1997. Consequently he's done more damage to the city than any category five hurricane could ever hope to achieve."

some extra reading

New York University lost it's "Dream School" status earlier this year. To Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford. Pshaw. A New York City true-blood reported that she had no problem working on her doctorate because life at Princeton was so boring all there was to do was watch spiders cross the windowsill.

Things still happen at fourth-place schools, however. Thanks to a hefty tuition bill, a prime location, and great connections, my ninth--and hopefully final--alma mater is good at wrangling guest speakers. Some other journalism class got Gay Talese, but I'm not holding any grudges.

Earlier this week we heard from David Grann, a writer for The New Yorker who has a book coming out early next year. In preparation, may I recommend the following pieces as a brief sample of his work:

Giving 'The Devil' His Due--for those of us who need another reason to make our blood boil over U.S. relations in Haiti

The City That Fell In Love With the Mob--oh me oh my oh: look what went on in Ohio

My professor, who is a friend and colleague of Grann's, reports that Grann will frantically declare he doesn't know what to write about next, and then comes up with something like this: The Chameleon.

just a spot by the sea

for those, like my mother, who are better people when there are mountains afoot and the ocean crashes on the proper side.

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.

Hey, teach

I think Teach for America slipped Obama some of their Koolaid. From a speech in Dayton, Ohio:

A while back, I was talking with my friend Arne Duncan, who runs the Chicago Public Schools. He was explaining how he’d managed to increase the number of kids taking and passing AP courses in Chicago over the last few years. What he said was, our kids aren’t smarter than they were three years ago; our expectations for them are just higher. Well, I think it’s time we raised expectations for our kids all across this country, and that’s what we’ll do when I’m President of the United States.

Actually, it's probably the influence of ED in '08, an advocacy group focused on education reform. They share a number of philosophies (and former alumni) with TFA, many of them reflected in the candidate's speech.

A few things I worry about:

The overenthusiastic push for charter schools--just because competition works for grocery stores does not mean it should work for our country's intellect.

Focusing on new teacher recruitment, if it is at the expense of retention and stimulating career development. (Stimulating is key here--I don't mean those teacher in-services with smiling motivational speakers and PowerPoint slides. You don't know boredom until you've sampled a few hours of one of these. Unless, of course, you've wallowed through a week of state testing.)

The underlying theme of competition. Yes, we need a knowledgeable workforce, and I don't wish this country into the Dark Ages. But there is something suspicious in lines such as "When the story of our time is told, I don’t want it to be said that China seized this moment to reform its education system, but the United States did not." I hope it merely reeks of rhetoric.

But these things worry me too:

High school sophomores counting on their fingers.
Seventh graders unable to write in complete sentences.
The junior who slapped her chapter book shut in frustration, unable to understand the words and old enough to be embarrassed.

I could go on.

This is not about competition. It's about dignity.

I admit I've tasted the Koolaid too. I suspect some batches contain Nutrasweet--synthetic and ultimately unsavory methods that create more problems--but it sure is better than dying of thirst. Let's just not forget to hold each other to our high expectations.

Prince Phillip

One last bit of non-New York color, before my life is completely ensconced in Manhattan's fall foliage: check out Phillips Seafood Festival Buffet, of Ocean City, Maryland. We did, but only externally--one of my traveling companions sampled the fare on an earlier trip to this lovely coastal town and suggested we dine elsewhere (in her defense, the visit was not of her own volition).

Phillips is an endless expanse of fried seafood and it's sundry companions (crab legs, french fries, and, I'd imagine, copious amounts of tartar sauce and ketchup). Unfortunately, and yet somehow predictably, it's not very good.

Despite its culinary failings, Phillips is world-renowned. This is what you do when you go to Ocean City. Afterwards, you can stagger down the boardwalk and ogle women in gold-lamé bathing suits. Or, as two women we observed coming from Phillips did, you can call friends and relations on your cellphone, click on the speaker phone (so as to capture the muddy Atlantic surf) and tell them "We're just calling to to brag that we just left Phillips!"