The Absence of Discussion

I admit I was pretty skeptical about Survivor breaking up the initial tribes by race when I first heard about it. But then I was singularly intrigued. I had seen enough years of Survivor that I had faith in the intentions of the show's producers, and now that the show is around halfway done, I think my faith has been justified. The racial element of the show has been handled with sensitivity and reflection by the producers and the participants.

In fact, I'm a little disappointed that the tribes didn't stay segregated longer. They mixed them all up just a few episodes in, causing the "controversy" to die down and taking away another great opportunity (and a a very popular forum) for America to confront its racial demons.

"Before we gave up on integration, we should have tried it," wrote Jack White, a columnist for Time magazine, nearly ten years ago. I think it's interesting that so many people got so upset about contestants on a reality TV show being separated by race when the real reality is that much of our society is that way. Maybe Americans didn't want to confront how separate we really already are -- and now they don't have to.

Last week, we were asked as a staff what the achievement barriers are for our students in English language arts. I commented that, among other things, the fact that our students are ethnically, socioeconomically, and linguistically segregated and isolated is a significant barrier. Another teacher replied that while being poor and living in a predominantly Spanish speaking community were factors, he didn't think being separated ethnically had much to do with it at all. You wouldn't expect a school that was 95% white, he said, to be low achieving, just because those kids are ethnically isolated, so why should a bunch of Latinos, just because they go to school with a bunch of Latinos, be any different?

I understood the point he was trying to make. But take this excerpt from Jonathan Kozol's must-read book The Shame of the Nation:

"Even many black leaders," notes education analyst Richard Rothstein, weary of the struggle over mandatory busing programs to achieve desegregation, "have given up on integration," arguing, in his words, that "a black child does not need white classmates in order to learn." So education policies, instead, he says, "now aim to raise scores in schools that black children attend."

"That effort," he writes, "will be flawed even if it succeeds." The 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education) decision, he reminds us, "was not about raising scores" for children of minorities "but about giving black children access to majority culture, so they could negotiate it more confidently... For African Americans to have equal opportunity, higher test scores will not suffice. It is foolhardy to think black children can be taught, no matter how well, in isolation and then have the skills and confidence as adults to succeed in a white world where they have no experience."

Hence the idea of separate being inherently unequal. In fact, when I first started teaching at Garfield, increasing the diversity of our school was one of our explicitly stated "master plan goals" though it never received any attention. When our first charter expired at the end of the 5 year period and a new charter was drawn up and renewed, the goal of increasing diversity had been dropped altogether. The topic has never been brought up since.

The Proposition Song

The length of the voter information guide got you down? Can't sit in the bathroom long enough to read it? Just listen to this song instead.

h/t Nanodudek

Can't Have Nothin' Nice

Last Saturday I took the admissions tests for Mensa. Unlike my previous attempt, I was not a week early. I was 35 minutes early.

When the entire credibility of your organization is based on the professed intellectual superiority of your membership, there's a lot of pressure involved, one would think, for Mensa activities to be so well planned and so well thought out so as to leave the participants in awe. But rather than being awe-full, it was awful (I'm so clever... they ought to let me in based on that alone).

Actually, to be more precise, it was ALL FULL. As in cramped. As in too many people showing up. As in 16 people. And the organizer, WHO IS A MENSA MEMBER, only brought 8 tests and had reserved a room for 8 people, despite the fact that the Mensa web site specifically stated that the Redwood City testing site was walk-in registration friendly.

Quite the conundrum. We had all been waiting outside the library since 9:30, which is what the web site said to do, only to find that THE LIBRARY DIDN'T OPEN UNTIL 10:00. Which is, of course, something I discovered last week during my premature Mensa attempt. But I figured that since the testing was actually going to happen, there would be a Mensa member present outside the library to let us fill out our registration forms and pay our $30 to get a chance to be in their exclusive club. In fact, the testing coordinator had even emailed me telling me to show up at 9:30. And so I did. But the aforementioned testing coordinator, WHO IS A MENSA MEMBER, didn't even show up until 9:50, and she, lamely, waited outside the library with the rest of us until they opened their doors at 10:00, which, surprisingly, is what the sign on the library door said would happen.

So we get inside and the testing coordinator, WHO IS A MENSA MEMBER, says there are far too many people there to take the test and could some of us please wait until next month to take the test in San Francisco or Campbell. Nobody budged. She continued to berate us, saying that she had only received notice that 6 people were coming (I was one of those 6) and that the others would need to leave because the room she had reserved at the library was just too small for all of us to fit in comfortably and it would just get so hot in the room with that door shut. "Can't we just keep the door open?" I innocently inquired. Scrambling to recover, this woman, WHO IS A MEMBER OF MENSA, said she would HAVE TO shut the door during the test because the testing room was near the computers with software for English learners and we might be distracted "by people talking loudly in - *slight look of disgust on her face* - Spanish."

Amazingly, 8 wannabe geniuses took the bait and left.

So on to the tests we went.

The first test was 50 questions with a time limit of only 12 minutes. My #2 pencil blazed across my page as I performed mind-bending feats of mathematical and linguistic logic. Well, not exactly. It was pretty straightforward, but the time crunch made it difficult. I like to check my answers and do everything twice, but the format of the test made that impossible. The testing coordinator said we wouldn't finish and I got through about 44 of the questions. I was feeling pretty good about myself.

The second battery of tests, called the California Test Of Mental Maturity, quickly deflated my pompous a$$. The first test was about opposites. We were to look at a picture of something and then choose the opposite of that picture from four other pictures. The sample question, which as you know is supposed to be incredibly easy to just give you the gist of how that test section will work, showed a picture of a white cowboy hat. The answer choices were a beret, a blender, a hat made out of a newspaper, or a black cowboy hat. The answer, to no one else's surprise in the room except mine, was the hat made out of the newspaper. For the next five minutes, I struggled to find pictures that were the opposites of skirts, brick walls, and meat thermometers. What the hell is the opposite of a meat thermometer?!?

Once all was said and done, we received a free Mensa pencil for our efforts. I need to score in the top 2% of either test to qualify for membership, and I'll find out the results in 6 to 8 weeks.

The next day, Sunday, I, SOMEONE WHO WANTS TO BE A MENSA MEMBER, tripped over my brand new $1200 laptop (yes, it was on the floor; yes, I fell asleep on the floor 6 nights in a row last week; yes, that's pathetic; no, actually it's pretty comfortable), kicking the lid shut and shattering the LCD screen. The cost to replace it? About $600.

Can't have nothin' nice!

Because he likes me

A year and four months ago, A., M., O., and E. stepped out of my classroom for the last time as 5th graders. They were moving on to middle school. All four of them were genuinely sweet, nice boys. One of them was academically not too shabby. Another had a lot of room for improvement, but he had a foundation to build upon. The other two were newcomers. One had arrived from Mexico in December, the other from Guatemala in March. Their literacy skills even in Spanish were really, really low, so learning English was a slow, painful, arduous process for both of them. They hadn't made much progress. But, again, they were all nice kids, their futures full of challenges but also promise.

A year and four months later, they were all sitting in our director's office, tears streaming down their faces and the faces of their parents, as they were interrogated by sheriff's deputies for vandalizing eight teachers' cars, causing thousands of dollars in damage. The consequences so far? Five days of out of school suspension and a date in juvenile court where the judge will be asked to award compensation to the teachers involved.

In his written statement, M. admitted scratching my car. He wrote that he knew it was my car, scratching it with the metal end of his pencil, but because he likes me he did it very lightly. O., seeing this and disapproving, told him to go back and do it again, harder this time, and so he did.

On the other hand...

On the one hand, teaching is full of moments that make me laugh and warm my soul.

When a student mistakenly said "pray heat the oven," well, that's just comic gold. So is the time when J. said that, because her mom had hit her little brother and left a mark, CPS had to come and take her brother to the "foster farm." Don't worry - he's back now and mom learned her lesson. But "foster farm"? That's brilliant.

On the other hand...

One of our 7th grade students keyed the cars of at least eight teachers on Friday, including mine.

Densa

What do you call it when you show up at the local library for Mensa testing, to see if you qualify for membership in the elite club of rather intelligent people, and nobody's there because you got the date wrong and you're a week early?

Funny? Sad? Ironic?

So here I am, trying to qualify for Mensa to prove to myself that I am still an intelligent person (having to remind 5th graders to start sentences with capital letters, showing a kid for the hundredth time the difference between a capital P and a lowercase p, and asking them "How do you spell 'I'?" because they spelled it "A" again can, over many years, cause you to question your own sanity and abilities), and I show up on entirely the wrong day.

Makin' Blog Titles Ain't Easy

I know, I know... you're all experiencing withdrawal due to the weeklong drought of blogs. So here's your fix.

Pam was up here this weekend! We went to the air show at Fleet Week and saw the Blue Angels fly in tight formation literally about 200 feet directly over our heads. We also found other things to fill up the time while she was here.

I also have many excitin' thangs on the horizon to report.

First, my street hockey team is looking FANtastic. See how I wrote "fan" all in capital letters? That was purposeful. Mainly I did it because as the coach, I am also a fan, and by golly they're a fun team to watch. We're 4-1 and tied for second place currently. We've had two great tests of character so far, and we passed both with flying colors. In the first, we went down 3-0 right away, within the first 5 minutes of play. But did they give up? Nope - they held the other team scoreless for the next 40 minutes and ended up winning 4-3. That's a sign of a championship caliber team - that die hard spirit, that unwillingness to give up. The second test was last week when we played in the rain. Everyone was slippin' and slidin', and we were getting great shots on goal. I mean, REALLY great shots. Shot after shot. It was raining shots (hehe). But nothing was going in. But they kept at it. They didn't get rattled or frustrated, even when we went down a goal. They just kept shooting and they starting finding holes. We won that game 4-1. I like my team. I also like how when we arrive for games, the other teams, inevitably all boys, look at our team which is 1/3 girls and scoff, and by the end of the game they just stare in awe because my girls are hands down the toughest players out there.

I have also taken the first steps to get our school newspaper off the ground. I've published a school newspaper the last three years during summer school and I've always wanted to do it during the school year, but I've never had either the time or a plan. But the Journalism Club has now met twice and has 28 members. Look for the first issue to be out by the end of the month.

This Thursday I'm taking a blues harmonica class. Apparently in just 3 hours I'm going to learn how to play the blues on a harmonica. Just 3 hours? Well, that's what it says. It's just that one class, no follow-ups. With the current levels of most of my students, the blues is just the right genre. I'm just astounded every day by what they don't know - once again, I'm not just teaching 5th grade stuff. I have to teach 4th, 3rd, 2nd, and in some cases even 1st grade stuff. How you can you be only 10 years old and already be four years behind? Yeah, I got the blues.

This Saturday I'm taking a test to join Mensa. That's very elitist of me, I know, to even attempt. But it's something to do. For $30 and a couple of hours of my time, I can give myself a chance to be part of an organization that really is quite ridiculously presumptuous. But I've always wanted to try, and so I am.

November is coming up and you know what that means - novel writing! You might remember my novel writing escapades last year. I'm going to give it another go. This time, Mark is also joining me in the lunacy of it all.

I also just accepted a position to be the math instructor for an after school program for girls. It's a program that provides academic support to 5th grade girls and mentors their parents in how to check in with teachers, how to keep their daughters organized, what classes they'll need to take in high school to be ready for college, etc. The program will follow the girls through the end of 8th grade. I'll be teaching them two days a week and some Saturdays using some hands on math program developed by the Lawrence Hall of Science.

So in my last year at Garfield I'm looking to go out with a bang.

Le Tour de Menlo: Le Results

Of the many, many hills that tortured me during the Tour de Menlo (see my previous blog), two of them had the option of being timed (the aforementioned hill that was so steep that I was poppin' wheelies and the final hill, Melendy). If you wanted, you could give a race official a card at the bottom of the hill, have it time stamped, and then scurry off as fast as you could up the ascent and give your card to an official at the top of the hill. Just for the heck of it, I did that. I did not realize, however, that I was setting myself up for embarrassment, as the times have now been posted on the race's web site.

Of the 50 riders who submitted times for both hills, I came in 50th with a combined hill climb time of 66 minutes (26 on the first hill, 40 on the second), "right behind" Eric Vicenti, a 14 year old, who had a combined time of 50 minutes. The best time? 27 year old Jesse Bastide who got up both hills in a total of just 16 minutes. My buddy JLO finished with a very impressive total of 30 minutes.

According to the results page, each hill was about 1.4 miles long. Traveling 2.8 miles in 66 minutes means I averaged about 2.5 MPH. That's 83 times faster than a snail, but about 4.4 times slower than a domestic pig, so it's a mixed bag.

So what was I doing in all that extra time? Well, standing on the side of the road, slumped over my bike, and cursing the course designer, mostly. I would get to a point where my legs would just burn, quickly followed by a complete lack of feeling in my legs, quickly followed by an inability to make them move anymore, and then I would dismount, feel like I was going to pass out, let the blood return to my head, take a swig of water, sheepishly look down the hill to see if other riders were going to see me resting, and then get back on again, deciding that if I could just make it to that next fire hydrant up there, I'd reward myself with another rest. And so I'd hop back on, grimace at the pain in my crotch as I planted myself once again on that damned seat, and pedal for all I was worth until the oasis that was that fire hydrant, and then the process would start itself all over again.

To my credit, there were about 170 riders in the race, which means 120 didn't even bother to have their climbs timed. I also know a bunch of riders did the 30 mile course and not the 50, and I am consoled by reminding myself that I didn't walk a single step of those hills. But still - I don't like seeing my name on the bottom of a list of results for anything.