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I’m OK, the fam’s OK, everything’s OK. Cleaning up our front yard and the block has been our highest priority, not blogging.

And I can’t get into mine. You know when you see me here, there’s a 70-30 chance my blog is fucked up.

Loki’s post expresses much of what I’ve been thinking about the latest evacuation and Lord David and Bigezbear posted the comment I and others have wanted to see—if you want me to get out of harm’s way, don’t act like each breeze is a tornado or that the lovely social services we are so spoiled by on a normal basis will be ripped out from under out feet if we do not fucking obey. I’m a rational person with a young child and 3 cats to protect but after this episode, I feel James O’Byrne:

And by Tuesday afternoon, this city was as safe as it needed to be. Indeed, all those tree branches and debris would be picked up and stacked neatly on the curb by lunchtime on Wednesday if people had been allowed to come home.

I fully appreciate the risks of letting my family stay. But I have to weigh that risk against the alternate risks, of getting trapped in an endless evacuation traffic jam, of being stranded on a highway far from help, of not being able to return in a timely manner, to secure our property and come back to as much of a normal life as possible.

New Orleans is my home. I love it, and I choose to keep living here. But if you are a public official who wants me to leave for the next storm, then you have to hear what I am telling you. It’s time to rewrite the contract.

After a few hours of packing, moving plants, securing lawn furniture and potential projectiles, clearing out the fridge and deciding what hurricane supplies to take with or leave, we tore out of here Sunday morning with important papers, food we couldn’t afford to buy twice and needed to eat while exiled for who knew how long the way Nagin et al were talking, The Girl, suitcases for an exile that could be 2 days or 2 months, 3 cats, a couple paintings and my grandfather’s rare Jazz Begins album. Two of these cats are relatively old, one going on 16, the other about 14 or so though he walks older. The oldest cat’s hysteria began immediately and culminated about 45-50 minutes into our 8-hour evac drive in a complete emptying of her bowels. Yes, that smelled worse than it sounds. I didn’t handle the transfer of this cat, damp, hysterical, moaning and yowling, to the clean carrier and I didn’t clean the shit with a handful of Wet Ones. [I have a spouse who really loves me.] The not-as-old cat descended into panic about 30 minutes into the drive and became a panting, drooling mess. And I was pissed. I was going to find a new job, I was moving to Chicago, I was never coming back, I’d burn my house down first, smelling cat shit and wet with cat drool, this is exactly why I was hoping not to have to evacuate in the first place—2 old, hysterical, causing-multiple-messes cats, anxiety, flashbacks, indigestion, sitting for hours, living out of a suitcase and other bags for an undetermined amount of days with the prospect of completely and permanently losing my job if the city flooded again. I didn’t need it. I’ve been tired for 3 years already. My reserves are gone.

By hour 5, all 3 cats were calm and either sleeping or near enough sleep for us not to care.

The ride back looked promising with the oldest cat quickly settling into low-pitched, deep-in-the-throat moans instead of shit. The not-as-old cat, panting and drooling, 45 minutes into the return from exile shit on the floor mat under The Girl’s feet. Then he climbed onto her crossed legs and left a turd on one knee and some smears on the other. For the 2d time in 3 hours, The usually-nonplussed Girl was near tears. I cleaned her and the floor mat with the last of the Wet Ones. And got stoically into the car because at least we were going home and could start the 2-day process of cleaning our yard and street. I was too tired to be pissed.

By hour 5, all 3 cats were calm and either sleeping or near enough sleep for us again not to care.

My mother’s house 3 years post-Floods.

BTW: The next person I hear or news story I read calling this Gustav episode a vacation, I will get a gun and start shooting. “Going postal” will be nothing compared to what I do. Nothing happened to my house but I was homicidal standing in line listening to Magazine Streeters’ blithe and cheery conversations about their impromptu vacations, their Internet connections, their need for coffee after waking at 10 am—I’m still ready to vomit bile over that. Maybe I need to move.

My place is on what we call high ground around here. In a pinch, I could take a long walk to the Quarter. For Gustav, in hopes of riding it out before Nagin got that hysterical sheen to his bald head, we bought water, ice, canned foods, crackers, crunchy snacks of the sweet and salty variety, extra toilet paper and paper towels, paper plates even, batteries and flashlights like you would not believe. And 3 huge bottles of wine. I have most of that left, including 1 bottle of wine. Before we stress the cats, The Girl, and ourselves beyond repair again, I will really have to think. And hard.

G Bitch
NOLA

photo courtesy of dsbnola, used under this Creative Commons license

The potential number of adjuncts needed is not a good sign.

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Two Years and One Day Later—August 2007

Four Years and Two Days Later—August 2009

When I was teaching, I thought that many of my students’ ideas about and impressions of teachers came from childhood and had that veneer of invisibility parenting has when you’re on the receiving end–clean clothes appear in drawers, cooked food put on the table, empty ice trays filled, glasses and plates suddenly clean and stacked in the cabinets. Students do not see class preparation, the number of books or articles you read, the notes you take and throw away just like The Girl rarely sees me totally sweating the details of motherhood. (Well, mostly rarely.) So my students were baffled, some even offended, when I was busy or couldn’t (or wouldn’t) grade their 2-weeks-late paper right away or they had to wait 2 weeks for me to fill out a recommendation form. They thought I was just dissing them, that I sat in my office looking out of my ivy-framed window arranging for maid service and ordering cases of champagne and Prada (or whatever the hell they talked about and carried) bags from Neiman Marcus. Their ideas of being a professor were insultingly simple-minded and student-obsessed, like children who cannot conceive of their parents as anything but parents and are shocked to find they like, for example, Justin Timberlake or Twinkies or crashed a few cars in their day. Parenting is hard. Teaching is also hard. And much of that hard work is done out of the presence of the recipients. If it looks like you’re working too hard, you lose face and effectiveness. Like some of the best writers look like they could never make a mistake, typo or bad sentence. We do not see the 500 discarded pages, only the 200-or-so that end up published. If it looks like you’re working or trying too hard, you’ve failed.

I heard Matt Roberts’ commentary on Morning Edition after dropping off The Girl. Like many new teacher recruits before and after him, he quit. His principal told him not to see it as a failure but it is hard, he says, for him not to. He wanted to be part of the change and recovery, he wanted to “make a difference,” he wanted to be part of the healing and rebuilding of local schools and, by extension, the lives of our (yes, our) children. But something didn’t click, couldn’t work long term. Matt was being too hard on himself by listing the on-the-ground, day-to-day problems of life here as “excuses,” even though it did make a nice frame for his commentary and gave a nice little chime at the end. Unremediated schools, blocks upon blocks of unremediated houses, rents and insurance rates that have doubled or tripled or more, what money the metro area has coming to it unfairly distributed or just held up in squabbling–these aren’t “excuses,” like you don’t feel like going to the store with your mother, but realities, harsh ones that do have negative effects and pretending they don’t or aren’t supposed to or attributing it all to personal failure is counterproductive enough to drive people mad (as in insanity), distortingly angry and/or out of the region entirely. We do no one a favor by asking for superhuman tolerance, work, faith, turning of cheeks or eyes. Matt says New Orleanians are “sick of…excuses.” We are sick in general. And looking around, there are blocks and blocks of reasons to be and remain so for quite some time.

graphic: nola.com/Times-Picayune

Teaching is hard. Only students, the recipients, think it’s easy. And in a “system” with this many challenges, even more, amazingly, than before The Floods, teaching is even harder. No amount of youthful or mid-career-change enthusiasm mutes that. And in challenging school systems (much less a “system” like this one), turnover is high. Like others, I am quite happy about the influx of the young and energetic, the dedicated and devoted but I do not believe that this influx will somehow be immune to turnover (and that turnover can take 3 days or 2-3 years) or will somehow solve it.

Concentrated poverty poured challenges on the Waverly community [a struggling Hartford, CT school] but spared Marlborough [a more successful suburban CT school]. Semisaints like Lois Luddy [3rd grade teacher at Waverly] and James Thompson [principal of Waverly] bore it brilliantly. More ordinary people stumbled, tripped, fell, and quit (Eaton 275).

We cannot assume or unwisely hope that this influx is full of semisaints. Some people will stumble, some sooner than others, some later than others, and some of those who stumble later will take some folks with them in one way or another. That’s not an excuse but a reality. You can prepare for reality but not excuses.

Also see:

Teacher Attrition: A Costly Loss to the Nation and to the States, August 2005 (PDF)

Among teachers who transferred schools, lack of planning time (65 percent), too heavy a workload (60 percent), problematic student behavior (53 percent), and a lack of influence over school policy (52 percent) were cited as common sources of dissatisfaction.Many teachers who see no hope for change leave the profession altogether. While it is true that teachers of all ages and in all kinds of schools leave the profession each year, it is also true that

• the rate of attrition is roughly 50 percent higher in poor schools than in wealthier ones;
• and teachers new to the profession are far more likely to leave than are their more experienced counterparts.

Teacher Turnover Leaves Void in US Schools, August 27, 2007

Some educators say it is the confluence of such retirements with the departure of disillusioned young teachers that is creating the challenge. In addition, higher salaries in the business world and more opportunities for women are drawing away from the field recruits who might in another era have proved to be talented teachers with strong academic backgrounds.

“The problem is not mainly with retirement,” said Thomas Carroll, the president of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. “Our teacher preparation system can accommodate the retirement rate. The problem is that our schools are like a bucket with holes in the bottom, and we keep pouring in teachers.”

The commission has calculated that these days nearly a third of all new teachers leave the profession after just three years, and that after five years almost half are gone – a higher turnover rate than in the past.

Eaton, Susan. The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin. 2007.

In 1994, just two years after the Sheff trial began, Professors Amy Stuart Wells and Robert Crain of Columbia University’s Teachers College reviewed decades of studies on longer-term outcomes of desegregated schooling. Wells and Crain wrote in their conclusion, “Beginning with the aspirations of high school students and ending with tangible results of black adults’ social networks and participation in the work force, our analysis has attempted to trace the path of perpetual segregation and isolation, pointing out the various junctures at which the cycle can be broken by black students who have access to information about better education and occupational opportunities and who are less fearful of whites.”

Ten years later, in 2004, Amy Stuart Wells and her colleagues released findings from a qualitative interview study of more than 500 adult graduates of desegregated high schools. “Our central finding is that school desegregation fundamentally changed the people who lived through it,” Wells wrote. “Desegregation made the vast majority of the students who attended these schools less racially prejudiced and more comfortable around people of different backgrounds.”

In a rigorous statistical study, desegregation in Texas schools was strongly associated with higher achievement among black students and had no statistically significant effect upon whites. This led the study authors to recommend more housing desegregation programs so black families could move from isolated, high-poverty neighborhoods into more diverse schools.

Meanwhile, a growing body of research indicates that students from low-income families simply do better academically in predominantly middle-class schools. (Studies also show that the same is true of middle-class students.) Findings such as these have led the Century Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research think tank, to consistently argue that “the best way to improve education would be to give every American schoolchild the chance to attend a middle-class public school.” (Former Connecticut governor Lowell Weicker, a Sheff supporter, who is also a former Republican U.S. senator, chaired the Century Foundation panel that made the recommendation.)

It appears that an increasing, though still quite small, number of school officials agree with the Century Foundation’s conclusion. In 2000, officials in the 101,000-student Wake County, North Carolina, district adopted a combined racial and economic integration plan. Under the policy, each school enrollment would have no more than 40 percent poor students. There has been no rigorous statistical study of district policy, but school officials have publicly speculated that increased test scores may stem, at least in part, from a reduction in concentrated poverty. At the end of the 20th century, several other school districts began experimenting with racial integration plans or as an alternative to race-based policies. These include St. Lucie, Florida; San Francisco; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Greenville, South Carolina; and Brandywine, Delaware, among others.

A study of elementary school students in Madison-Dane County, Wisconsin, found that for each 1 percent increase in middle-class enrollment, low-income students improved .64 percentage points in reading and .72 percentage points in math. For the typical low-income student, this would mean that moving from a school with 45 percent middle-class classmates to one with 85 percent middle-class classmates would mean “a 20 to 32 percentage point improvement” in the low-income student’s test scores. Researchers in Denver, Colorado, in Maryland, and in Escambia, Florida, report positive relationships between a student’s attendance at a middle-class school and his or her achievement.

Despite the small successes, economic school segregation, like racial segregation, is on the rise, according to the Century Foundation’s Richard Kahlenberg, the intellectual father of the economic integration movement. One Century Foundation study projects that economic segregation will increase in all but 6 states between 2000 and 2025 (345-347).

Eaton, Susan. The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial. Algonquin: Chapel Hill, NC, 2007.

Also: Desegregation #3, Desegregation #2, Desegregation

No, it’s not a joke or oxymoron. Though it does sound like a pipe 10-foot-water-bong dream…

In no society are women treated equally yet. I believe strongly that if women are not full participants in society, the society does not advance the way that it could. And if women are denied their rights, it affects children, families and the entire social structure. ~ Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Feb. 2009

pic: openDemocracy under this Creative Commons license

A Howling in the Wires: An Anthology of Writings from Postdiluvian New Orleans

Look at that third paragraph. One sentence does not lead into the other. The number of applications has what to do with what exactly? Something is missing.

And you can guess that informal “Dear Tracie” was a match to gasoline.

Page 2:

This is only one side of the conversation. I’d like to see Washington’s letter to Pastorek et al.

Hint.

You know who you are.

_____

pic from thestandard.org.nz

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