In Cars

Being in and around vehicles was, at one time in my life, a relaxing thing for me. I had a stressful job I loved and then grew to hate - and through it all, the one time I didn't have anyone nudging me, asking me to do "just one more thing, baby," or just giving me some kind of hell when things were going badly was when I got into the car, sat down, blasted the radio, and put the pedal to the metal.

It's probably helped that no one has put impossible time constraints on my ETAs to this very day ("You HAVE to get this package there in ten minutes!" when, in reality, it takes twenty minutes, has never been slapped on me), and, when I have to be somewhere at a certain time, I plan accordingly.

A memorable midweek trip I once had to take with members of my Yiddish chorus had us traveling from midtown Manhattan to a place in New Jersey to perform, and we had no choice but to muddle across the Hudson River (well, actually, under the river via the Holland Tunnel) during rush hour. The chorus members I ferried to Jersey and back couldn't believe how calm I was the whole way. I've simply learned over time that I can't do a thing about traffic, so there's no point in getting crazy over it. It felt better to chat with my passengers during the 45 minute wait to get in the tunnel than it did to agonize.

All of this was well before I had to reckon with things happening inside my car, though. These days, stuff going wrong under the hood seems guaranteed to put me on the road to bursting a blood vessel or two. If my mechanic hadn't just told me how incredible my car is even after all the times it's been repaired, I'd be a perfect candidate for a padded room. I'd give anything for one year - one measly year - without anything more serious than an oil change.

This is what it means to be a mother with some part-time jobs, a child in a school that is not in the neighborhood, and some after-9-to-5 activities because, by God, I'm still a person despite the parenthood and all: I have to drive. An adage of fairly recent vintage - "Only degree I need when I have a child is a driver's license" - is so damn true it hurts. It hurts even more when the car isn't working, your mechanic is in the next city, and it takes a good day or two at least for your car to simply be looked at. And my husband wonders why I want to scream when a single warning light flicks on on the dashboard display...

Before I had a family, this wasn't a horrible cross to bear. It could even be funny.

My first car needed a ring job so badly it shouldn't have been funny. It was held together enough, however, that I still drove it, adding a quart or two of oil every few days just for good measure. A trip to a local oil change place proved that I needed to take it to the shop for something far more serious - with the hood up, one of the greased-up guys put the transmission in gear and took in my face as I saw the entire engine block nearly jump out of the car due to a broken motor mount.

Towing my car? There wasn't much point to that if it was still drivable (and I didn't have Triple-A service), so I drove it. "I couldn't believe it," my ex-boss told me after she followed me across the Huey P. Long Bridge to my then-mechanic's garage in Avondale. "Smoke's pootin' out the back of your car from all the oil burning off, the engine coulda fallen out right there on the bridge, and you STILL drove that car like a bat outta hell!"

Duh. It needed the repairs. "It was a quart low," the mechanic's wife/office manager said to us after the engine was secured and the oil was no longer burning. My ex-boss and I guffawed in unison. "It's always a quart low!"

This week...things are different. The "low oil" light blinked on and things went to hell. Within 48 hours, I had to add ten quarts of oil. Monday morning found the dashboard lighting up like a slot machine as the car hit bottom. True to form, after adding a few quarts, I drove it to the mechanic's with my pal Edie following me. I wasn't mortified when I was told I probably should've had it towed, but I hated having to call my current boss to tell her I wasn't coming in.

Two days after I get the car back, it has to return. There's no driving it once it massively overheats after ten minutes on the road. There's only me, forcing my husband in an instant to pick up my son from school and take him to his baseball game. There I am again, waiting over an hour for the tow truck to arrive. And once more, when I beg Edie to pick me up from the mechanic's for the second time this week and she tells me I need to find a good mechanic who lives much closer to my house.

I hate that I can't do anything except ask the people close to me to rearrange their lives for a 16-year-old car's occasional ailments. I hate that all of this is still cheaper than getting a new car. I hate that I don't have a job that pays well enough so that these troubles are less worrisome - although, the way this car's going, I'd have lost that kind of a job by now.

Just give me a working car for a year, I say. And a good traffic jam.

Anything but this.

Spring Thing

A softball team made up of 9-10 year old girls is wearing the team shirt pictured below this season. We in New Orleans don't have a sense of humor to go with our sense of outrage over Roger Goodell's penalties from on high? Don't say that to these girls and their parents.

I'd like to see the NFL trot out a cease & desist letter to the local kids' sports organization over the Saints Bounty Hunters and their use of Saints' mascot Gumbo on their shirts of - get this - "Vegas Gold." If they do, it'll only show that Saints fans can't even own their indignation.

As for my son's baseball team, they are busily putting the "tie" in their team name (Tigers) thus far. Two games, two tie scores. We'll see how this marathon weekend of games treats them...

Psychopath Day

I've got to give it to the New York Times for their perverse sense of timing here.

“In the beginning, I thought it was us,” Miguel said, as his two younger sons played loudly with a toy car. “But Michael defies logic. You do things by the book, and he’s still off the wall. We became so tired of fighting with him in public that we really cut back on our social life.”  

 Over the last six years, Michael’s parents have taken him to eight different therapists and received a proliferating number of diagnoses. “We’ve had so many people tell us so many different things,” Anne said. “Oh, it’s A.D.D. — oh, it’s not. It’s depression — or it’s not. You could open the DSM and point to a random thing, and chances are he has elements of it. He’s got characteristics of O.C.D. He’s got characteristics of sensory-integration disorder. Nobody knows what the predominant feature is, in terms of treating him. Which is the frustrating part.”  

 Then last spring, the psychologist treating Michael referred his parents to Dan Waschbusch, a researcher at Florida International University. Following a battery of evaluations, Anne and Miguel were presented with another possible diagnosis: their son Michael might be a psychopath.

Happy Mother's Day! Is your child throwing terrifying tantrums one minute, eerily rational and charming the next? Welcome to a world where your progeny has no empathy!

Still, (Dr. Paul) Frick (of UNO) acknowledges that it’s not yet clear how best to intervene. “Before you can develop effective treatments, you need several decades of basic research just to figure out what these kids are like, and what they respond to,” he said. “That’s what we’re doing now — but it will take a while to get real traction.”  

 And there are other challenges. Since psychopathy is highly heritable, Lynam says, a child who is cold or callous is more likely to have a parent who is the same way. And because parents don’t necessarily bond to children who behave cruelly, those children tend to get punished more and nurtured less, creating what he calls “a self-fulfilling prophecy.”  

 “It reaches a point where the parents just stop trying,” Lynam said. “A lot of the training is about trying to get these kids’ parents to re-engage, because they feel like they’ve tried it all and nothing works.”  

 Anne admitted to me that this had been her experience. “As horrible as this is to say, as a mom, the truth is that you put up a wall. It’s like being in the army, facing a barrage of fire every day. You have to steel yourself against the outbursts and the hate.”

Sure, I say it time and time again: children are a crapshoot. The raising of children is no easy task. My own depression and anxiety made the prospect of having kids worrisome for me on that level alone, forget the whole day-to-day grind of basic child care. It turns out that my husband and I rolled the dice and came up with a sweet, bright child who has ADHD. It hasn't been until recently that I've begun to reconcile myself to this fact of his and our lives. He has thus far gone an entire school year on medication and the changes at school have been wonderful for the teachers to behold.

But trying to raise a child with no empathy whatsoever? At a time when the whole prospect of it is, in the minds of most, reserved for one of two extremes - those of, as mother Anne says in the article, "a Nobel Prize winner or a serial killer?" When what really happened at Columbine High School could be largely written up to the psychopathy of one of the perpetrators? It's scary, really.

Initially, I was angry that such an august publication had decided to run with something like this on Mother's Day, for crying out loud. I was wondering who was ambushing this Hallmark card holiday when WWNO chose to air this episode of This American Life and I caught the tail end of it near the end of the day. Was all of this cosmic revenge for Joan Crawford's actions or something? Really...


Really, this wasn't that big a deal, though. What was a bigger deal was hearing about parents who were getting help, psychiatrists and psychologists who were treating this disorder with a great deal of decency while trying to get to the bottom of what makes those without empathy tick, and those who were less scientific about it all but no less interested. The very idea of being empathetic to those with mental illnesses and disorders is very new; that of being empathetic to those who would have no clue of how to return those feelings - who, at best, would fantastically mimic their outer manifestations - is still not easy to come to grips with. I don't know if we'll ever get there as a society.

Until we get there, though, the front lines will, as always, be the parents of these children. They deserve a great deal of empathy and assistance. Especially the moms, who, despite a greater division of labor between moms and dads in most homes, still do most of the work.

Stories like the one the Times published only drive home that, now more than ever, every day is Mother's Day.

Our Own Fun

I told Dad the other day how much attending the JazzFest cost.

"Ohh, no. Locals have been priced out. Only good for the tourists and the rich," he said.

"Yep."

"Well, it'll probably tank, then, like the Newport Folk Festival did. The people there finally got fed up, so it died."

Dad wasn't very accurate on this one, actually. Though it did die after a melee ensued during a Dionne Warwick performance, of all things, it returned after fourteen years and is still going strong.

Dad was also wrong about something else, and it's a common mistake people who don't live here - or who haven't been around here long enough to understand - tend to make.

The JazzFest, despite all the locals' kvetching over what an overpriced juggernaut it is these days, is a ways from tanking. It's too entrenched a part of this city's selling of its culture to die just yet. Many musicians trying to get somewhere here still position themselves locally as JazzFest performers or not-yet there. It takes books like Michael Oliver-Goodwin's, and especially Jay Mazza's recent publication, to put that into perspective. Within a few decades, music went from being something New Orleans as a whole merely tolerated publicly to something that is a serious economic engine, and JazzFest was a major vanguard in that transformation.

As for whether locals will mount some kind of major offensive against the Jazz & Heritage Foundation, that's not happening, either. What contributed to the rise of Mardi Gras as an economic engine applies to JazzFest - if you can't entirely join in in one way, you go off and do your own thing. This is a creative city at heart, and people are more likely to bring back any energies they could spend grumbling over past JazzFests into other sorts of fun. It wells up in other organized mini-festivals like ChazFest and Noizefest, in craft tables & performances at places near the Fair Grounds like Liuzza's By The Track, and it resides in the collective ability so many have around here to gather some folks together and serve up a good time just absorbing the atmosphere around the track. There's no sound-proof barrier around the place yet that I know of.

Hence my answer to him...

"Well, Dad, people around here will make their own fun. If they're kept out of JazzFest by the prices, they're more likely to turn around and do something else that's just as good, if not better, without spending that money."

Pause.

"I guess you're right." he said in a low voice.

Update, 9:11 PM: Thanks to ale{atori}c, we've got a clear graph as to how much JazzFest prices have jumped. Sure, they ran at an embarrassing financial loss for quite a while (hippie-esque vs. capitalist origins rearing their head? The specter of George Wein, a founder of Newport Folk, lingering over it?), but there probably should be a locals discount to keep some sort of goodwill going...unless the argument is that picking up tickets from the Ticketmaster at the Superdome ahead of time is locals' discount enough. In which case...fine. Locals keep voting with our dollars.

Here Comes Girls

I am simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the HBO show that's premiering tonight.

Entitled Girls, it's not meant to be Sex and the City despite their both being set in New York City - for one thing, the ages of the women in Girls are far younger than those in Candace Bushnell's fantasy Manhattan. These are just-out-of-undergrad women trying to find their places in the overwhelming environs of real life. Along the way, many less-than-stellar decisions are made, which is possibly why they are still just "girls."

I was in the same place the characters of the show were not too long ago - busting my buns working three jobs just to live two stories above a fish store in Brooklyn, in a room the size of the bathroom in my first apartment in New Orleans. Many decisions were made then, good and bad, that ended up bringing me down south - who to associate with and who to drop like a hot potato, what was going to sustain you long-term and what wasn't, when to keep plugging and when to just give it up. I lasted nearly three months in the rat race that was NYC, not counting the nadir: that month and a half I was at my aunt's place trying very hard to get jobs so that I could get out of her hair. Another low point was working a register at Dean & Deluca in Soho for three days before quitting because the catering jobs I was getting were netting me three times more money per hour - the nice yet stern Indian man in charge of the cashiers turned darkly furious as he yelled at me over the expensive groceries that he never wanted to see my face in the store ever ever again. I'm curious to see how the Girls will get tossed about job- and career-wise, not to mention some of the family conflicts. Relationships with the opposite sex, though? Of COURSE crappy decisions will be made. I more or less stayed celibate, too damned exhausted to even talk meaningfully with guys, forget dating. I could only dream about sex, when I could dream.

I am repelled, however, by some of what seems to be running through the most popular comedies today that star women, and I doubt that they are signs that things are being "equalized" between the sexes. I don't know that we have reached the point where female characters can screw up just as badly as men can without some major consequences being built into their stories, and without "redemption" including a relationship of some sort as in the movie Bridesmaids. It's kind of what comedies such as The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd and Ally McBeal tried to do yet didn't really succeed at: presenting women as people that don't have to be complete airheads or complete superwomen, all one thing or all another. Also - women of color, of other nationalities, of other creeds, anyone? New York is full of those women. Perhaps no one wanted to attempt that for fear of offending any of them. Or, more cynically speaking, they just didn't sell. Not much proven entertainment value.
________________________________

So I did watch it. Let's hear it for the trustafarians of every generation. I am so, so glad I had the sense to decide not to come home and, especially, not to ask my parents for a damned thing. Yes, I sound like a crusty elder about to tell anyone within hearing how many miles I had to walk round-trip to get to school. I'm just very happy the internet wasn't as huge as it is now - it would've given me something else to go insane over when I was trying to work.

Will I watch it again?

Probably.

Why subject myself to such a painful thing?

Something in me still feels like these unformed characters. Where will they go? Will they continue to let everything beat them down? Is there still something to be learned from basic naivete and naked ambition (or is it naked naivete and basic ambition?) Or will this all become yet another cautionary tale for women writ large? It's a trainwreck, a car wreck across the highway that, unfortunately, I'll be rubbernecking at like most others as I pass it. Because every terrible mess is different.

Update, 4/16: Came across a phrase from critic Glenn Kenny referring to Lena Dunham's film Tiny Furniture that encompassed many of my misgivings about Girls' premise: "...it does represent the Cinema of Unexamined Privilege, let's face it." Yep, following in the footsteps of Metropolitan, Francis Ford Coppola's short(er) film Life Without Zoe, and - one that dates me some - Reality Bites.

In the interests of examining my own privilege, my parents did pay for my health insurance and the charges on one credit card that I rarely used. There was no way in hell I was going to try to lobby for total support from them after college, though - I felt somehow guilty that I was still getting the insurance and the credit card from them. It was in large part what made me uncomfortable when I met people like the guy who had a storefront in Soho that clearly was not doing well selling his wonky glassware. I asked him if he was at all worried about that state of affairs, and he blithely replied,"Oh, I'm not worried. My family won't let me starve."

The guy was definitely drinking too much delusional opium-pod tea.

A New Phase - And More Of My Brain Cells Die With It

One of the final assignments in my son's LEAP workbook was all about mathematics, full of the type of multiple-choice queries he'd been working on for the past few years in his enrichment courses - only he'd had to work on similar-type questions for the past couple of months.

"Moooom, can I take a break?" he asked me a few questions into the assignment.

"How many questions have you completed?" I asked.

"Five."

"How many more do you need to do?"

"Ummm..." he mused, then counted what he had left. "Eleven."

"Do three more and then you can take a break." I said.

The kid reacted as though I were imposing some sort of exquisite torture on his most sensitive body parts. And, of course, I probably was participating in a form of torture by acquiescing to the boredom that, for him, was seemingly endless studying for the state standardized test.

What's even more insane is that he doesn't take the damned thing until NEXT SPRING.

I'll admit, there have been many changes for me recently. I'm a few months into a new job, ending an old one (but staying kind of on tap in case it picks up again) and fine-tuning getting back on antidepressants I thought I could do fine without (I can't. I just can't.). In the middle of all my mishegoss comes the latest phase in my son's development: turning up his nose at what little homework he has, giving the nine-year-old equivalent of the finger to some increases in that homework - like the LEAP language, math, and online work - and all of this getting mixed up in the blender that is his ADHD.

He forgot to do LEAP assignments twice in the past few months. Both times he was made to write a note home to me that he willfully forgot about it - both notes were signed by his teacher AND the school principal, and I was supposed to sign the notes and return them to school. Call it the effects of my depression and anxiety that haven't been fully neutralized by the Effexor yet, but I was furious.

Do you really want the schools here to improve? Do you support the current high-stakes testing reforms? Then think long and hard about this: the career of my son's very, very good teacher, the careers of many other teachers in the school - indeed, the very life of the school - depends on the brains of 9-to-10-year-old children like my son and how well they react to the mind-numbing exercises the little guy has been trying to avoid for the past few months.

I'm tired of yelling at him. I'm tired of giving him Concerta just to get him to do his work (it tends to clear his mind a little more, which simply helps him work out craftier ways to try to avoid doing it). I want to shove this exam and all of the prep that is being imposed on these children someplace where the sun doesn't shine - but Louisiana gives no public school parents an option to get their children out of taking it. We're not flush enough to go for private school and I'd no doubt be institutionalized trying to homeschool him.

So I worry. I worry that this kind of "study" will get him hating school for life. I worry about the kids who will have to endure testing in second grade (it's coming). And I worry about something else...

I posted on Facebook recently how frustrated I was with the attitude the little guy had with his regular schoolwork of trying to skate by on doing it, but with expending as little effort as possible in the doing.

Dan's sister replied on the thread, "Sounds like Dan as a kid."

Great. I'm living with two ADHD people in the same house. No wonder I need medication to cope.

Give Us All Some Breaks

I've talked about my admiration for The Oxford American a few times before on this blog and on Humid City. I am in awe of its history, of the content and contemporary talent it's been able to amass over the years, of how it has become the Southern magazine that has been able to rise above the trials of scrambling for another publisher, the tribulations of having had a substantial amount of money embezzled out from under it by a former employee, and the hassles of having to relocate to Conway, Arkansas (as a former boyfriend's magnet from Conway once proclaimed, the OA's home these past few years is "halfway between Pickles Gap and Toad Suck," which could be construed as being pretty damn hillbilly Southern - don't strain your ears too hard listening for the banjos).

Problem is, I think, after all this time, OA editor Marc Smirnoff needs a break from writing the editorials in his own magazine. A big break. Just before this year's Southern Music Issue, too many of his blatherings of late have left me with a feeling that he was simply rambling in a head-scratching way. What was the point? At least the music issue kept him fairly focused...and then this takedown of Garden and Gun magazine comes down the pike. There's a degree to which it was written to reassure himself of the rightness of the mission he embarked on in founding the OA in the first place - and I don't dispute the rightness of that mission - but I do question the vitriol Smirnoff pours into his diatribes against G&G, throwing in references to its larger-than-OA's subscription numbers and its luring Roy Blount Jr. away from his regular column in the OA, then circling back to a salient, important point about glossy, good-looking magazines like G&G leaving the thorny subject of race out of their focus on surface matters and a literal whitewashing of what the South is really like. It all makes me grateful that Smirnoff only really vents his spleen like this in print once every 20 years - and it saddens me that it takes his being vehemently against something to light writing fires like this under his butt. At least the content of OA overall hasn't suffered...

_______________________________

Via Twitter, something else to think about:

Andre Perry

finished up meeting with technology leader who flatly said there is too much politics and drama in #publicschools for to include his child

 Let's first get one thing straight: if you become a parent, and you care, there's going to be a certain amount of politics and drama involved in damn near anything you do for your children, whether it's which school you will have them attend, which extracurricular activities they'll be involved in, even - to a certain extent - which friends they have. It's why any decision to even have a child should not be taken lightly.

Now that that's out of the way, let's discuss perception vs. reality...and not just in New Orleans public ed, though the decision by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to back diverting public money to vouchers for private schools is bad enough. 

While I was up in New York celebrating my grandfather's 90th birthday, my grandma, a longtime teaching veteran in her neighborhood public school, was appalled at the massive, splashy teacher ratings article published in the Rupert Murdoch-run New York Post this past Saturday that was erroneous and mean-spirited. Check the criticism of it here and the stuff the numbers don't say. My husband took one look at the numbers and, statistician and high school alumnus that he is, assumed that the standardized test scores students got were attributed to their homeroom teachers, which, in lots of cases, are not the teachers doing most of the instruction for the tests. Also, if all you've been teaching as a public school instructor is English, what's the point of giving you a math score? These teacher numbers ending up saying little more than, "You teachers are the bad people ruining our schools, and even if these numbers are completely, utterly wrong, at least they will be on record and someone will deny you a job shaping young minds because of them."

Grandma had a few questions about charter schools for me and how they operate in New Orleans. I had to tell her about the charters' semi-autonomy and how it doesn't help them pay for things like busing kids to their schools. I'm glad I hadn't heard about Lafayette Parish's lunch program payment woes before I talked with her. The trends in public education right now are for the state to assume less responsibility for educating the children that live here, and that usually means the few dollars that were going to education in the first place are being cut to fractions of cents. When even Leslie Jacobs is questioning the ultimate efficacy of voucher programs, not to mention whether voucher students will be subject to the same state testing despite their private school attendance, one has to wonder.

So yes, there is a lot of drama and politics involved in public education these days, because so many want to fix it so damned badly. If Bobby Jindal and the lege in Baton Rouge have their way, even more drama and politics above and beyond tuition payments and possible beefs with teachers and administrators over the direction of your child's education and well-being will be seeping into the private schools. 

I wonder how that tech leader Andre Perry spoke to will like them apples?

Invitation

It's that time of year again. The time when we are holed up in our abode on the gray brick road, pretty much paraded out - as we are only a block and a half from the parade route - but would like nothing more than to feed our friends, old and new, as they go along their merry way on Mardi Gras. For whatever reason, rabbits seem to be the thing since my last Saturday's adventures in Abita Springs (more on that soon), so here's the invite. At the very least, it provides you with a place to pee on Mardi Gras day.

You are Invited to the 6th Annual Carnival Ball of

The KREWE OF PANCAKES AND SYRUP

“the krewe with the edible doubloons”

Where: Our House (email me at liprap2@netscape.net for details)

When: Mardi Gras Day (that’s Tuesday, February 21, 2012) from 8am until noon, or whenever Leigh kicks you out

What: Pancakes, and lots of ‘em (and syrup, too)

Who: You

Why: for the fun of it

Krewe Fees: We’re supplying pancakes, syrup, coffee, milk, juice, and probably Leigh’s homemade king cake, so bring whatever else you want to share.

Honorary Krewe Royalty: King… Manny Flapjax

Queen… Belle June Waughful

Need to get in touch with us? liprap2@netscape.net

* food disclaimer: pretend you keep kosher and please bring something other than pork, shellfish, catfish, or anything that mixes milk and meat in the same dish.

“Religious” disclaimer… We started this because we like pancakes, always make too many of them, don’t want to give up our parking spots for Mardi Gras, and like company. This has absolutely nothing to do with the Christian tradition of observing Shrove Tuesday or “Pancake Day” by making and eating pancakes, which we didn’t learn about until a few years ago.

In the past week, I won tickets to this event and decided to drag Dan to it.

So we headed to the Quarter, where finding a parking spot we didn't have to pay an arm and a leg for was nearly a serious drag until my parking karma held against some staggering odds... Just you try to fit into a parking spot you have patiently waited for, one that is only an inch or two larger than your car, while an NOPD squad car has pulled over a cab that has been caught in the act of jumping the curb and straddling the sidewalk to try to pass you as you wait for the spot to be freed up. I did my best to head into this very tight spot without bumping the fenders of the cars in front and behind me for fear of the cop turning on me next and issuing some sort of citation after he'd finished with the cabbie. I still can't believe I did it.

What we also couldn't believe was the note the previous occupiers of our parking spot left for the car behind us, one that rudely told off the driver of the car for parking right up on the bumper of the first car. Dan yanked it off the windshield for fear of the driver returning, thinking it was we who left the note, and then deciding something bad had to happen to our car. It is a must to protect good parking karma, you see.

We headed into the king cake tasting, had a large amount of several different bakeries' worth of Carnival pastry, and then we came across Larry Ragusa. That's right.



He told us all the other king cakes were crap next to his. He then said something to me that recalled this night's experience...and something in me put on a stone face and said, okay, I'll try it.

Yes, that's a king cake with a layer of salami and olive salad in it.

Dan had a huge piece and got a baby. I had a bite and nearly gagged. "It's a muffuletta with frosting is all," Dan said. All I know is that it's one of the answers to the question of "when is a king cake no longer a king cake?"

We learned a little later that we'd been spoofed...but context is everything. The filmmakers brought the Ragusa-style king cake as a joke, but they'd put it on the table next to the Manny Randazzo's and before they knew it, the second of the Ragusa's had to be brought out. Never underestimate the omnivorous nature of New Orleanians' palates was their lesson that night.

I managed to shoe-horn the car back out of the spot (the driver of the car behind us had still not returned) and as we parked in a nice, roomy area by our curb, Dan jokingly asked me if I thought I had enough room.

"I don't know," I replied. "I think the driver of the car behind us has to learn how to park."

"HEY, no name calling." Dan said as we both giggled.

I've described this video to others before. It's a blast from my glassworking past, the film shown to us all as, first and foremost, an example of what NOT to do in a glass shop. We giggled at the pipes flying through the air, exclaimed over the lack of protective eyewear, and were overwhelmed, in the end, by the poverty that hung over each and every shop visited in Firozabad.

I can't believe it's on YouTube now.

 

The two things that distinguish most studio glass shops in modern first world countries from the times when the Romans began to gather hot glass on the ends of metal pipes and blow it into various shapes, I was told, are the usage of compressed air to cool specific areas of a glass bubble and the usage of propane torches to heat specific areas of a glass bubble. All the rest is more or less unchanged.

Watch Glass India, though, and the third world seems to be still fully encased in the amber of Roman times.

Motivate Me

Locally, our alternative weekly has been mostly milquetoast on the subject of public education "reform" and privatization in the schools - cover stories in the past few months that tout an education think tank and two education reformers, one of whom got censured by the AAUP for de-tenuring Tulane faculty in the wake of the levee breaches (which was not mentioned in the current article) aren't exactly examples of a critical look at education at work. The closest the Gambit gets to any critical stance of privatization is in the publication of a two-part article by Lisa Rab on the Mavericks high schools in Florida, a series of schools that has relied on a matched set of smoke and mirrors - technology and location, all publicly funded - that have collapsed under intense scrutiny of the corruption that dogs their very existence and their m.o. Forget that the Gambit won't turn a similarly critical eye on what is happening right in its hometown...what jumped out at me from part 2 on the Mavericks schools was this:

Part of Mavericks' problem may be the teaching model: Parking troubled kids in front of a computer and hoping they'll learn — instead of watching the latest Kardashian viral video on YouTube. Research shows that for virtual learning to work, "Students need to be very self disciplined and have supportive environments," Miron says. "If they're not self-guided and self-motivated, then it's gonna be a hard match."

Yes, Louisiana does have a virtual classroom - an entire virtual school, in fact. There are good reasons to take courses online - I myself have taken some college-level courses online - but I question the level of commitment to learning kids under eighteen will have when plunked in front of a screen and keyboard. And I'm not the only one:

I’d like to consider (an electrical engineer-turned-high school math teacher's) more fundamental idea, which is that technology in schools can be, in many ways, more a distraction than a solution.  

 “The problem is that I’ve found that all these things that are purported to improve student learning ignore the number one factor in student success, which is the student’s attitude toward learning and motivation,” wrote my new friend the math teacher.  “The truth is that if students are motivated to learn, they will learn, pretty much regardless of the specific format or technology that is used in the lessons themselves.  Conversely, if a student is not interested in learning, the details of how lessons are presented, technology, etc. don’t matter very much…the student will find whatever way is available to avoid learning…they may socialize with their neighbors, or frequently ask to leave the classroom to go to the bathroom, or simply try to tune out and take a nap during class.  Thus, while we focus on how teachers teach, I’m finding that the real key to student success is not so much how you teach but how you go about motivating students to want to learn, and how the systems you use in the classroom help support and encourage students to succeed even when they are not intrinsically motivated by the subject.”  

He’s correct. In an ideal world students want to learn and teachers want to teach and the two meet in a common space where knowledge is transferred. Except how often and how well does that really happen?

Robert Cringely goes on to address the use of technology in education further in two more articles that are a good read - one of which states that for technology to really motivate the student to learn, it must function as a hired companion would, on a one-on-one responsive basis with each student. I keep imagining that kind of relationship as going something like this:

"Hello, TeacherBot, how are you today?"
"Doing fine today, Leigh. Let's talk about the effective use of titles to your posts..."
"Aw, do we have to?"
"There's nothing like an effective title to draw your readers in, Leigh. This is a learning experience."
"But...but..."
"You keep repeating a part of the mammalian anatomy. We aren't discussing that subject right now."
"Teach, if this were up for publication, then yes, I feel a title would be warranted, but I see this as more of a diary."
"Your entries are public, Leigh. Readers make quick judgments these days. A title must grab the reader and make the reader want to peruse your writing further, thus giving your work some proper attention and a chance for it to get more feedback and then more readers for your next effort."
"Oh, well, when you put it that way..."
"Leigh, it is a worthy exercise. I'd put the sarcasm away as well, if I were you."
grumble...mumble..."Okay, let me get to work..."

Ah, motivation. The Holy Grail of teaching. Motivated students will follow you everywhere and simultaneously challenge you at the same time to keep up with them and stay a few steps ahead - but only if you as a teacher are willing to go there. It is a two-way street.

Even before privatization cranked into full gear here, it was tough finding motivated teachers - low pay didn't really compensate for the long hours, the many out-of-pocket expenses, and the largely inadequate facilities many teachers had in the New Orleans public schools pre-8-29-2005. The testing manias, the rage for TFA-ers over certified, diploma'd teachers, and the low pay plus little-to-no benefits make the atmosphere for motivated teachers even more stifling in the traditional public schools and the charters. A move towards Mavericks-style setups here in Louisiana would only work if the old GIGO was taken into account - that is, "garbage in-garbage out." From both the student end AND the teacher's end of the virtual classroom, if you throw garbage at each other, all that will come from it is a virtual landfill. The one-on-one via PC is not close to perfect unless embraced fully by both student and teacher...and I don't think we're even close to that situation in many of the traditional teacher-student relationships, much less the virtual ones.

I have no problems with technology being used in concert with a traditional teacher-student learning situation. Replacing the traditional entirely with technology, however, isn't feasible and should not be advisable.

There have been many hints and allegations that there might be more of a push from within the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to make entire K-12 schools virtual. Good for the students? It's probably only good for the state's coffers.

If that does actually come to pass, it would be a huge mistake atop the many others BESE is intent on making.

Update, 1:50 PM: Just to add to the tech in education debates:

From Twitter the other day:

Me: "Can we opt the kid outta the iLEAP?" Dan: "Don't think so. Property values in #nola depend on how well he does." Me: 8-P

It's not that I don't think the little guy will do well. On a personal level, I am annoyed at the miscommunication over what page he's supposed to be doing in the iLEAP workbooks and when it's due, sure. I just wish it weren't taking away the good time he spends really learning and getting enthusiastic about it - even the teacher commented on how much he enjoyed a recent lesson on volcanoes, something he'd been jazzed about when I picked him up from school one afternoon.

A recent carpool incident:
"Mom, I've got some baaaad news."
"Oh, well, what's the bad news? (aka, what iLEAP homework sin did you commit today?)"
"Well, they're having another fundraiser...next week...at the skating rink."
My 92% healed ankle throbs a little more than the dull rug-burn-under-the-skin feeling I have these days.
"Oh...uh...huh. When is it?"
"Next Thursday night."
Whew, choir practice night!
"Oh, I don't think we can go anyway, honey."

He then proceeded to read me the skating rink's liability policy, which was just what I thought - go into a crowd of people wearing your own personal set of eight wheels and break your bones at your own risk, with a "tough toenails" for emphasis somewhere in the fine print. Hey, the kid only stumbled over a couple of words. Not bad for a third grader.

One other thing I really appreciate when driving to the new location of the school? The nice man on Paris Avenue near Vista Park who waves enthusiastically at every car while walking his dog in the mornings. "Who are you waving to, Mom?" "Just wave, okay???" Thanks for the welcome, sir, whoever you are.