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.

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.

my head is shaking, but the ground is not

Eighteen-year-old Genevieve Blain says that after the earthquake, she prayed every day for New York. She left Haiti a few weeks after the January 12 earthquake—her family had tourist visas to the United States—but there are still times when she feels like the earth is shaking. “My head is shaking, but the ground is not,” she says.

I met Genevieve at the Haiti Earthquake Family Support Center, an operation supported by a triad of church-based programs in New York City. The center, which opened just six days after the devastating earthquake hit Haiti, offers a variety of legal and social services to Haitians throughout the city.

Genevieve and her parents visited the center to continue their application for deferred action status, which essentially guarantees a stay from deportation while petitioners file for residency, work, or citizenship benefits in the United States. While this program is generally restricted to extreme cases, in July, US Citizen & Immigration Control announced that it would consider applications from Haitians who arrived in the country after the January 12 earthquake. Temporary protected status (TPS), a separate program granting temporary immigration status, is limited to Haitians living in the United States prior to the earthquake.

There are many, like the Blains, who arrived on tourist visas or as a guardian for a U.S. citizen child. Unable to work or, in some cases, attend school legally, they often rely on friends and family for lodging and financial support—a difficultly compounded by the challenges of life in New York and its small apartments, thin paychecks, and $2.25 bus and subway fares.

Genevieve wants to study medicine, maybe at The King’s College, but she first needs to study English so she can pass her TOFEL exam. She spent her last semester of high school in Miami, where she got her first C. She was bored, she said—the classes were so much easier than in Haiti, so she stopped paying attention. Equally astounding was that many of her classmates knew Creole—“my Creole!” she exclaims.

“I wasn’t like this in Haiti,” she says, looking down at her jeans, which are tighter than she would like. Her mother and father go out, but she doesn’t have a key to the house they share with her uncle and his family, so she mainly just sits inside, “watching SpongeBob.”

In Haiti, Genevieve’s father taught music at the National School of Art. He plays violin and piano, and was joyfully reunited with his violin after a friend brought it from Port-au-Prince earlier this summer. “For days, it was, ‘Oh, my violin! My violin!’” says Genevieve. Still, says her father, he cannot play. “I am not ready,” he tells me. “I feel too bad.”

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.

and the rats of Little Rock

Driving into Little Rock, these are the first things you see: road signs for Little Rock Air Force Base, billboards encrusted in glittering diamonds, advertising engagement rings of the weight that truly signal commitment, or at least 10-year payment plans; and a 1st Pentecostal Church so large it seems to have sucked the 2nd and 3rd churches into it's footprint.

My sister works as a technician at a local research site, where she runs tests on the Ts65Dn mouse, whose 16th chromosome resembles mutations found on the 21st chromosome of an individual with Down Syndrome. The research she assists with has found that what is generally viewed as a lack of work memory in those with Down Syndrome may actually be a delay in learning: The Ts65Dn mice demonstrate an increased ability to execute trials after ongoing and repeated practice.

One of the trials she runs take place in 12 x 12 boxes; the mice are trained to activate one of three NPH (nose-poke holes—perhaps the most delightful acronym I have encountered) after hearing its affiliated tone.

It costs approximately $100 to purchase and train a set of Ts65DN mice. They are housed in a quarantined section of the research site, and fed pellets according to their trial schedule (they’re kept at 80-85 percent of their body weight, in order to incentivize them to complete the trials, which reward them with drops of milk.) My sister pulls out a “mouse pie” from the cupboard, which is a plastic round sectioned into 12 spaces, for moving mice from their cages to the trial boxes. “I just transfer mice, that’s all I do,” says my sister. She prefers working with the rats, who are less inclined to bite and run away, even though both species are the culprit of workplace oddities such as having a tail swung into one's mouth during a transfer.

The Ts65Dn mice are housed in the same room as those undergoing methamphetamine tests. “Why is meth appealing?” asks one of the posters in the lab. “It’s intensely rewarding…for awhile.” The meth mice are underweight and visibly agitated; they gnaw on the metal bars of the cage and look generally crazed. My sister isn’t supposed to publicize the fact that she works on animal trials. Occasionally someone from PETA or another animal rights organization organizes a protest or applies for a job in an attempt to expose what they view as cruel research methods. “Mice have saved more people than #911,” reads a poster in my sister’s office. “They’ve been involved in most every important medical discovery in this century.” (I believe this was referring to the last century.)

Over half a century later, Little Rock Central High School is still as beautiful and formidable as it must have appeared to the Little Rock Nine. Their names are etched in benches surrounding a reflecting pool at the base of the stairs. My mother throws a penny into the water, and all is still except for the broadening ripples. If anything, the most seismic shift is the demographic somersault that occurred between 1950 and today: Little Rock Central lies south of I-630, in that part of the city that everyone has told my sister and her husband to avoid. This is the translation [you have to click on the image; the lighter the color, the greater the white flight]:

White flight 1960-2007

And then it was down to Houston, with a slight detour to Gurdon, Arkansas, after the Queen Mary stalled out on the highway, twice. Despite two cell phones and internet service, it took a desperate call to my father to send the tow truck in my direction, all of which was worth it when the tow truck driver climbed out of the cab and told me: “Our guy in the shop talked to your daddy.”

After a 20-minute tow and 5 minutes under the hood, they found the problem: The battery had shaken loose in the heat and southbound highways. “Who put in your battery?” they asked.

That would be my daddy.