COLLEGE PREP!

Bucolic Academia 

So now my son is receiving mail everyday from a variety of colleges and universities. He has apparently gotten on college mailing lists from taking his PSATs as practice in his sophomore year of high school.  Some are simple letters with a personalized code created just for him. This, the letters claim, will provide him with a customized cyber-experience of the school.

                                                                                                     Taking one of these cyber tours reminds me of a trip my husband and I made to the ruins of Chichen Itza in Mexico.  Deep in the heart of the Yucatan peninsula are the ruins of an ancient Maya civilization that disappeared without a trace. According to historians, the city was gradually abandoned some time around 1200. 

Look at the steps on the left, amazing eh? 

It is a large pre-Columbian archaeological site, which entered the popular imagination in 1843 with the book Incidents of Travel in Yucatan by John Lloyd Stephens. About 20 years later Edward H. Thompson, US consul to the Yucatan, spent over 30 years studying the ruins. The most famous is the Temple of Kukulkan (the Maya name for Quetzalcoatl), a step pyramid built for astronomical purposes. During the vernal and autumnal equinox at about 3pm, sunlight bathes the western front of the pyramid's main stairway. This causes seven isosceles triangles to form imitating the body of a serpent 37 yards long that creep downwards until it joins the huge serpent's head carved in stone at the bottom of the stairway. 

At this 6-mile square site you’ll also find The Great Ball Court, about 500 feet by 220 feet where violent and bloody games were held. At the base of the interior walls are slanted benches with sculpted panels of teams of ball players. In one panel, one of the players has been decapitated and from the wound emits seven streams of blood; six become wriggling serpents and the center becomes a winding plant. 

The secrets of the ruins, we were told, would be explained to us that evening in a fantastic light show created for English speakers. And so, in that evening’s haze in a jungle abuzz with all kinds of critters and fragrant with the scent of tropical flora, we climbed up on the ancient stone steps of the court where losing teams of ancient times were slaughtered for defeat.  

The tinny sound of Mexican music, from speakers on the field, gets us started. Flashing colored light beams imbedded throughout the stadium illuminated the ruins like a 70’s disco in Queens. I anxiously awaited the man in the white sharkskin suit with the Mexican accent to DJ the event and give us dance lessons.  Instead we are treated to a pre-recorded tape of a heavily accented reader providing the highlights of Chichen Itza with the flash of colored lights synced to his reading. 

Unfortunately it was obvious that the reader did not speak English, although that was what he was trying to do. The only word, besides a stray preposition here and there, that we could understand was Chichen Itza (cheat-zen-neat-za). I deduced that he was reading from a transliteration; a recreation of text phonetically created for the reader which does not include the proper inflection or syllabic emphasis or emPHAsis.  My husband and I were laughing at this point because it was completely ridiculous, but for the $40 admission fee. 
                                                                                                                                                                   So now my son and I go on these college cyber-tours in which there are personalized notes and audio/video segments where my son’s name is mechanically inserted much like our tour of Chichen Itza. 


Other colleges send colorful brochures depicting ivy covered buildings and autumn leaves inducing in his mother, a jolt of Love Story, where do I begin --- with the attendant sound track. But to my dear young 16-year-old son who has yet to understand that institutions of higher learning use the same marketing techniques as diet colas, the ones with the colorful brochures look like terrific schools to him. We recently received one of these from someplace like “Schluboygen Eastern College” It had a great looking brochure.


“Oh, mom. That looks like a great school.”

“Yes indeed it does look like great but it’s 3 hours from the closest airport, there are no Chinese restaurants or kosher delis in the neighborhood and no one outside of a 50 miles radius of the campus has ever heard of the place. But you’re right sweetheart, it does LOOK like a great school.”

So how does one select the right college? I remember the process from my own childhood as daunting. I had a well leafed through edition of Barron’s Directory of American Colleges that I spent hours combing through. There was one rule my mother made and I had to obey, the school could be no further than an eight-hour drive from home. Naturally I chose the school that was 8 hours away from home. As far as I was concerned, the less scrutiny my mother had over my collegiate activities, the better and the closer I came to breaking her one rule, well that was a good thing too.

I know people who chose a college because they were chasing a love, guys who selected a school because of their basketball or football teams and others who chose a college because one of their parents had attended, even if they had completely different interests. In retrospect, my 8-hour reason certainly seems just as immature and stupid as any of these so I understand my son’s selection by brochure.

Faced with the prospect of paying over $50,000 a year for my child’s undergraduate education is reason enough for us to make a thoughtful and informed decision.  Money may not or never grow on trees but it will take killing a forest’s worth of paper for his college education. I hope to use those resources wisely.

Outing Teachers

The Joy of Teaching...ouch! 

The world of public school education is finally getting the attention it should have been getting all along. After all, what could be more important that the education of our children and their children? Unfortunately, bad press is not better than no press -- and that appears to be all that public education can garner these days. Up to now, it has been taken for granted that our public schools would do their job, there would be good and bad teachers that our children would somehow deal with as we did, and they all would go off to college and find their way in the world.

But we live with a public educational system designed to produce compliant factory workers for jobs that no longer exist. It has continued without structural change for over 70 years and now the United States has fallen well behind other nations who have chosen to modernize and update their own educational institutions. The irony is that, as a society we work to maintain the stability of our institutions yet education, for which the knowledge base changes as rapidly as the changes in our technologies, needs to be fluid and innovative. How do we institute change when our institutions function best when stable? Whose responsibility is it to implement, evaluate and manage the change needed?  Who gets held accountable? 

Research conducted on how we learn and how the brain functions has provided so much valuable information for educators that it cannot be ignored. Countries like Finland and Cuba (!) have made dramatic changes to their schools and the results are in. Their students are better educated than ours because they have modernized and improved their schools based on this good research. 

One great example is the notion of looping.  In Cuba, students stay with the same teacher from first to third grade. This reduces the learning curve that every classroom teacher in the United States needs to make every September as they begin to understand where each student’s strength and weaknesses lie. This allows differentiation (the right level of challenge directed to each student) to commence effectively from the first day of school. The student and their families build a stronger and more comfortable connection to the teacher and the young learner has stability and understands the expectations and style of the teacher. By the end of third grade, each student is reading and writing up to his or her potential. Interesting, eh? 

But back here we appear fixated on what goes on in the classroom and not with what needs fixing with the system. Teachers are the new pariahs. Our Governor, the future President Christie, has proposed that teacher’s income be tied to their performance as measured, in good part by the results of standardized tests. So then I have to ask, who’s minding the standardized tests? Who is deciding what should be measured and how? 

Recently my son, a high school sophomore and my own favorite lab rat, spent several days taking the NJAsk and provided for his mother, the perfect illustration of why using standardized tests, as they presently exist, is a huge mistake.  Understand that I am not against evaluating and rewarding excellence. I am not against teachers, like everyone else in workforce, earning their raises based on individual performance, but I am against using the tools we have now for this purpose, no matter how you may configure the data. Here’s why: 

For the Language Arts portion of the test he was given two different writing prompts on two different days. The first was a photograph of a digital clock from which he was supposed to create a story. This is just the kind of challenge that my son likes and he came up with a crazy three-page story of international intrigue involving defective clocks that blow up if you set the alarm for 12:00. 

Smart Aleck Kid

The next day he had a prompt where he was asked to argue for or against mandatory after-school tutoring for students who earn below a certain grade. He’s a teenager, knows he has no control over what happens in school, is sick of taking these tests and thought the topic was “bullshit”. He wasn’t interested in writing a persuasive essay (which the test was presumably asking him to do) and only wrote one paragraph. 

Should his response upset me? Should I care that he knows that these tests have no bearing on his grades and doesn’t care about them? Should I want a child who just does what is asked without question? What will the results of these tests show about a student who responds to one prompt and not the other? How will his response potentially affect the evaluation of his teachers?

Most importantly, what do the test designers think this shows? How do you establish a baseline response for this kind of test? How might a good student respond to this versus a struggling student who may very well be angered or upset by the reminder that they would be affected by the adoption of this policy? 

If you think for one minute that responding to these NJAsk questions are all an exercise in intellect, you would be very mistaken. The brain of a teenager operates based in the limbic system, which controls our emotions. This is why so many teenagers make so many poor decisions and can be so challenging to teach. They feel before they think and how they feel affects what they think. 

So while teachers are being held to more exacting and demanding standards, shouldn’t the tools used to evaluate them undergo the same kind of scrutiny? 

Coming from years of corporate America I’m accustomed to performance reviews and believe individual teachers should earn their raises like everyone else in the world. Why should we allow poor teachers to continue inflicting their students? Research indicates that it can take up to 3 years to undo the damage inflicted by a bad teacher.                    

But if the annual NCLB tests (they have different names in each state) were created to determine the learning and skill level of a student as a tool for the teacher, why are teachers not demanding that the tests be repurposed as a tool to measure incremental learning year to year?  Educators all understand that assessments must provide valid measures that align with their purpose. 

So, using concepts discussed as far back as 1989 in Stephen Covey’s great 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, it is clear that the tests need to be designed with the goal in mind not measuring student learning but measuring teacher effectiveness. 

Educator Grant Wiggins, creator of Understanding by Design (UbD), an innovative tool to assist in creating dynamic lesson plans, asks to what extent do assessments provide fair, valid, reliable and sufficient measures of the desired results?  Can we really think that a test, that might take a day or two, can measure the impact of a teacher? What about the teacher who has a higher percentage of struggling students year after year? Do we hold them to the same standard and if not, what is measured?         

Christie’s changes including providing tenure by examining standardized test scores, classroom observations and school-wide student performance. But without proper oversight, this will just turn into another effort llke the dismal George Bush NCLB that only enriched the coffers of test writers and textbook creators. 

ETS which writes the GRE (for Grad School), Praxis (for teacher certification), TOEFL(to teach English to foreign speakers), AP tests (for high school students), and The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America's students know and can do in various subject areas is currently working on The Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project. The objective is to determine what measures predict the biggest student achievement gains; the MET project will give teachers the feedback they need to improve. In addition, a greater understanding about which teaching practices, skills and knowledge positively impact student learning will allow states and districts to develop teacher evaluation systems that will help strengthen all aspects of teaching. 

The results of this study combined with another classroom observation tool will be publishing their studies in the winter of 2011/2012. 

So Governor Christie, what precisely are you proposing be used to measure teacher effectiveness when the country’s largest educational test creator does not yet have the answers?  

FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD

The temple of fresh food

The other day while shopping at Whole Foods, the place aptly named since it can eat your Whole paycheck, I ran into a friend of mine I hadn’t seen in quite a while.  She’s a very talented artist and teacher and incredibly modest as well.  I’ve been to a number of her shows in New York City and taken a number of figure drawing classes with her as well. She is, as they say, good people.

We chatted a bit as one does with friends who are missed, about the time passing too quickly, updating one another on our busy lives, our husbands and children and in her case, grandchildren reaching milestones and then some.

She happened to mention that her adorable grandson, now in first grade, is attending a particularly interesting New York City Public School on the lower eastside in the heart of Chinatown. He spends every Monday through Friday in school until 5:30pm, in large part because he is learning Mandarin.  The parents who participate, contribute on top of whatever is received by the city of New York to fund the program.

In this multi-global world, seriously starting to master Mandarin in the first grade sounds like a smart idea. In fact, when I told my husband about it that evening he replied, “Good for him. He’ll be able to communicate with our future masters”

So if what he says is true, in my minds this all begs the question – Will Chinese people seek out American cuisine on Sunday nights when they too, don’t feel like cooking?  Do I detect the aroma of a business opportunity?  I believe McDonalds is hoping so.

My husband and I are both good cooks. We love good food and I take no small measure of pride in my collection of cookware. I’m a firm believer in quality when in comes to my pots and pans and chefs tools. They include an international cavalcade of brands with Braun (appliances) and Wusthof (knives) from Germany; Sabatier (tools), La Malle (copper and tin bake ware), and Robot Coupe (the father of the Cuisinart Machine) from France: Paderno (amazing stainless) from Italy and of course Amercia’s own Cuisinart brand. There’s more but you get the idea.

Chef Boy-ar-dee

I also have a rather extensive collection of outstanding cookbooks as well as years of back copies of Gourmet, Cooks and Bon Appetit Magazines. All of which are being culled for their most memorable recipes into my new electronic recipes card collection on Bento. The program is pre-formatted for the user to fill in the blanks with typical recipe data including the prep time, ingredients, now many it serves, and directions. Since my household has gone gluten-free in the past 18 months, my favorites and regulars have evolved to reflect this change. 

Chef Chef

But I am also conducting this electronic transfer for other reasons #1 I don’t want to end up on “Hoarders”. #2 My son has requested a cookbook from me before he leaves for college. I’ll just copy his favorites to a disc and he’ll be good to go and #3 I just love using my laptop in the kitchen instead of a cookbook. It plays music while I prep!  I embrace technology as best I can.

Chef Nathan

But I have nothing on Nathan Myhrvoid, the former CTO and chief strategist for Microsoft who cashed out his millions in 1999 and decided to pursue his passions without the need to actually earn a living. Nathan is 51 years old, holds a Ph.D. in theoretical and mathematical physics from Princeton and did a postdoctoral fellowship with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge and he loves to cook. Nathan is not just interested in the “how to” of cooking; he’s interested in what has been called “molecular gastronomy”.  So you may know how to make a hollandaise sauce but he wants to understand why it works. That’s the physics of cooking and what intrigues Nathan.

I share this as his new cookbook hits the streets. It is a six-volume set with over 2,400 pages, retails for $625, and weighs over 50 pounds. Entitled, “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking”, Nathan will make you look at cooking in a whole new way.  No novice to the professional kitchen, he moonlighted in the kitchen of a leading Seattle restaurant for two years. He has hundreds of patents issued and pending and is supposedly a world champion barbeque chef. This month there have been articles about Nathan in both Wired and Time Magazine.  He’s clearly a modern renaissance man.

Nathan has, according to the experts, perfected the French Fry. All it takes is two hours of prep and voila! perfection. Oh, you’ll also need ultrasound equipment to cavitate (create bubbles) the water for 45 minutes on each side of the potato slice, a vacuum chamber and deep-frying equipment that can be precisely controlled. Other recipes call for centrifuges and rotor-stator homogenizers. The $625 cookbook is the smallest investment required to cook like Nathan.

One of my favorite tales involves the egg. A group of his chefs (he employs 20 in his kitchen) were working on a part of the cookbook involving thickeners.  They were determined to unearth everything food scientists knew about how eggs cook. It took two weeks of experimentation but they were then able to produce a graph, which provided temperatures and the ratio of egg to liquid to plot anything from a firm Flan to a runny Crème Anglaise. You can’t find all this information in just one place and that’s just one of the over 1500 features in Modernist Cuisine. You’ll also have to purchase some new staples for your pantry, like liquid nitrogen.

Most new cooking techniques and tools; the microwave, the pressure cooker, the crock pot, have been accepted because they have made cooking easier and faster but Nathan believes there should be techniques and tools that make food better by cooking more precisely.

For those of you who may be interested in learning more about the wizardry of Nathan Myhrvold, I have some good news. His cookbook is being offered on Amazon for a mere $450.  If you’ve got the $100,000 or so on top of that for the upgrade on your kitchen appliances, I say go for it and then invite me over to sample your perfect French Fries.

What's in a name? or The (D)Evolution of George

George the Curious

My first encounter with George was as a mischievous monkey who enchanted his yellow hat-wearing owner. The escapades of this early embodiment of George were hits with the under ten set around the world. Though he spoke not a word, his compassion for balloonless children, children in hospitals and other disappointed by life’s seeming inequalities painted a moral picture with charming illustrations of smallness being no limitation to heroism. H.A. and Margret Rey, authors and survivors of the modern century’s most horrific chapter knew all too well about man’s cruelty to man.  First published in 1941 after the couple escaped from Hamburg with the original Curious George manuscript on their backs, it’s no wonder they chose a simian as hero.

George the General 

My next George appeared in grammar school when I learned about the father of our nation. General George, a very tall Virginian, had an aristocratic bearing in spite of the false wooden teeth he required. Many myths were crafted to show his humility and honesty, traits that have not been extolled too frequently by our country’s leaders. Coming from the state with the wealthiest, most erudite and educated colonists only enhanced George’s natural appeal and talents as leader. Offered the job of king, this George turned down the position in favor of one more suited to a country of disparate members. His choice, in light of the deposition of friend France’s leaders a few years later, appears prophetic. Clearly no job is worth actually losing your head over. 

George the Quiet 

My third George was the quiet one. In the go-go sixties Sir George was the balladeer of the mop-headed number one boy band from England. His mumbled, hesitant and self-effacing persona provided a counter to the froth of Paul, the goofiness of Ringo and the tortured soul of John. It was hard to imagine how he ever garnered the attention required to actually have one of his compositions included in any of these quartet’s compilations. Yet - Here Comes the Sun, Something and While my Guitar Gently Weeps, are critical to any Beatles ‘collections. The victim of a brutal home invasion, before the fanzines and paparazzi, he was actually allowed to recover in quiet dignity. It wasn’t until his solo career that I actually paid attention to him at all. He seemed to silently slip away from all of us at only 58 without rancor or scandal, so unlike an icon. 

George the cypher

George the fourth was a creature unlike his predecessors. He too wore the mantle of U.S. President but rather than the rakish possessing style of Washington, this George seemed cast out of smoke and mirrors. His rather sanguine and colorless persona, his privileged upbringing and Ivy League pedigree transported to the wide-open ranges of Texas made for a strange mix.  He was a hybrid of Southern laid back and New England shrewd. Then there were the years playing cloak and dagger, heading up the CIA. I was discomfited rather than calmed by his presence in the White House. 

George the Magazine

George then morphed into a glossy political magazine named in honor of the General who became the first president. Cindy Crawford posed on the cover as our midriff-bared leader, in keeping with the airbrushed treatment of American politics. The astoundingly handsome son of Jack published George. Some year’s later, right after John Jr. had passed his bar exam, he rode his bicycle past me as I stepped outside my apartment building on Bleeker Street. We were both on our way to work in the crisp of autumn’s early morning, just the two of us in a neighborhood usually too noisy and congested to sleep.  Even wrapped in his sweater and scarf, he was easily recognizable. George the magazine may have failed to impress but I can assure you that exquisite John did not.  

George of the Seven

My life was filled with other George’s as well. There was the George who dared to speak the seven forbidden words.  A huge career was launched with this small collection. And then there was the two dimensional George, swinger on vines thwarted always by the unforeseen tree.  

George the Tan

One other George comes to mind, he of the tan. I only include him to share an amusing anecdote. I was staying in Beverly Hills on a business trip and I walked over to Rodeo Drive for an early Saturday morning breakfast.  I sat at an outdoor café sipping my $7 orange juice and nibbling my $12 croissant when who should drive by in his caramel colored Rolls Royce with the top down but none to wear  than George the tan.  His complexion and auto body paint were a perfect match. 

George the Reborn

George, the reborn was next.  Witnessing his puppet show administration (surely the strings were being pulled by someone else…) his disingenuous humility and sheer lack of ambition was disturbing.  After reading the commencement addresses Hillary and George gave at Yale University in the same year, I shook my head in wonderment at how we could have elected someone who showed such disdain for the value of academia. His creation of NCLB, the dysfunctional but highly profitable national program still in place, demonstrated just how little he understood about the process of education but did about payback. 

George the Best! 

Of course I have saved the best, the ultimate George for last. While my delineation is not necessarily sequential, I have chosen the velvet voiced George to conclude my list.  He is the George who inspires strangers to wear tee shirts proclaiming themselves to be his wife. He is the George who inspires comparisons to Cary Grant. And if his beauty and grace were not enough, he is also the George who cares about the enormous dire poverty in the world and the rights of the disenfranchised. He is the George who has an endless series of graceful and demure beauties on his arm at all industry functions. We are comfortable with his serial monogamy, which allows us to fantasize about his slippers beside our beds. He is masculine and beautiful and he is George.  

Oscarama!

I just spent the last hour soaking in the tub while reading the latest edition of Entertainment Weekly from cover to cover.  It is the issue devoted to all things Oscar, that most coveted piece of American produced hardware; the ultimate trophy.  Every year at this time, my attention is riveted to Hollywood and all that glamour. Academy Award night is the one night a year where I watch television for six hours straight.  Don’t even try to call me; I won’t answer the phone.  I may tweet a bit or stop by Facebook to see what kind of snarky remarks my clever friends may make, but that’s it. Oscar and the fashion cavalcade command all my attention.

I must admit that the prognostication of winners by the entertainment writers and editors who probably have not seen all of the films seems a bit presumptuous to me. It clearly doesn’t stop any of the news outlets in fact, from having an opinion about the films and who deserves and will win. I can do just as good a job of judging that which I have not seen and so I will. 

For the purposes of brevity, I will only comment on the films nominated for best picture.  I will divulge to my readers which films I have seen or not and suggest that none of my commentary or evaluations be used for determining how to vote in your local Oscar pool if you are actually interested in winning.  My projections are for entertainment purposes only. 

127 HOURS

To be clear, I don’t want to see this movie.  To see where someone has put their arms where it doesn’t belong will remind me too much of the times I put my mouth in places it doesn’t belong, as in – Oops! That just fell out of my mouth -- I shouldn’t have said that.  I also just don’t think this is going to win because Danny Boyle won last year for the fabulous Slumdog Millionaire and he’s not going to win with this one. It wasn’t even shot overseas.

BLACK SWAN 

A film about a bunch of crazy ladies makes me crazy and feels eerily familiar to me.  I like the idea of another ballerina based movie being recognized since The Turning Point with looney Shirley Maclaine and feisty Anne Bancroft was just annoying. Billy Elliot was about a young man so it doesn’t really count, but I don’t think it has the gravitas to win. 

INCEPTION

For the spinning hallways and dizzying plot, this kaleidoscope of a film kept me guessing, mostly about how this movie could possibly end. The notion of invading dreams was a swell one. Avatar, or as we call it in our house, Dances with Wolves meets Pocahontas in Fern Gully, won three (Art Direction, Cinematography and Visual Effects), and I think this film should do at least as well. The director, grumpy Christopher Nolan, isn’t nominated so I don’t think it can take Best Picture. 

THE FIGHTER

When Marky Mark became Mark Wahlberg and ditched his Calvin’s, he was making a very smart move. As a young man, Mr. Wahlberg was charged with attempted murder, pleaded guilty to assault, and was sentenced to two years in jail, of which he served 45 days. He’s obviously figured out how to channel all that aggression. I personally find Mark to be a very reliable actor. I even saw M.Night’s awful The Happening and while it was a really bad movie, Mark tried his best to make it work. Christian Bale is no softy either. It’s hard to believe he’s Australian after you see him in this movie. Melissa Leo has been a personal favorite of mine since her Homicide days. The big surprise in this cast is Amy Adams. But it’s another Boston Movie and the win for Scorcese’s The Departed was too recent for this to take Oscar home.  

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

There are lots of complaints this year about how there are no Academy Award nominees of color but what about Lesbians?  How long have they been neglected in Hollywood? 

Alternative families are all around me in my neighborhood so I think it’s great that Hollywood finally caught on. I loved this movie and wrote about it in a earlier blog entitled: Gene pool, Cesspool—The Kids are All Right.  I think Annette Bening should win for her performance but I don’t think the film has the technical or historical drama to carry the day. 

If you would like to read more about this film and then some, please go to:

http://suburbanfamiliar.blogspot.com/2010/08/gene-pool-cesspool-kids-are-all-right.html

THE KINGS SPEECH

Colin Firth is completely adorable and is the closest to being named my make believe boyfriend of all the film nominees (Sorry George, but you’re not in a nominated film this year.) and so it would be really terrific if this movie wins. Geoffrey Rush is always brilliant and Helena Bonham Carter is absolutely my favorite. She’s beautiful and wacky. If she knew me, we would be great friends. It has the-real-story historical-person-faced-with-personal-adversity going for it. Also, a British accent gives this movie points because it makes everyone sound so such much more intelligent than most Americans even when they stammer. 

THE SOCIAL NETWORK 

I like playing on Facebook so I’m not all that surprised that someone decided it would make great fodder for a film.  Since this is the only movie nominated this year with a cast that includes minorities (How could you shoot at Harvard without Asians?) it gives this film, in an all white year, additional points.  Aaron Sorkin is as smart as David Mamet and then some so while I haven’t seen the movie yet, I think it’s a real contender. By the way, if you haven’t seen the South Park episode about Facebook, you should.  

TOY STORY 3

I love Woody.  He’s the best male role model for young men out of Hollywood this year. He has heart, smarts and wears blue jeans without the sag. His buddy Buzz Lightyear shows how men can be friends without getting all soupy about it. It is a great celebration of Man-love of the highest order and the story and animation and performances are first rate. I’ve seen all three of these films and they just kept getting better and better, the opposite of most sequels (remember Godfather III?) and for that alone it should win something but since a friendship like this could only exist in cartoonland and Hollywood has never awarded an animated film the best picture award, the film makers will have to be content with best song -- because I love Randy Newman. 

TRUE GRIT

The Coen brothers don’t want to win for this one so they won’t.  They don’t want to become part of the Hollywood mainstream and even though this film has made more money than any other of their films, it was also rated PG-13.  They seem to be more suited to R rated genre. I think they want to remain outside and edgy and we like them there. 

WINTERS  BONE

Since I live in the Northeast and have been snowed in and going stir crazy so there is no way I would vote for a film with Winter in the title.  Ask me about this in the Spring, maybe after I’ve actually seen the movie and we don't have all this snow.

So that’s my rundown for this year’s Oscar Best Picture nominations. Please feel free to submit your own projections. Everyone can and does do it. 

I got Cabin Fever!!

Mommy is it summer yet?

My poor cat has cabin fever. In fact, she is so disoriented by the unnatural, glaring bright light of snow, that she sits at the doors leading to our great backyard and cries inconsolably. When a door is actually opened, she trots right up to the doorframe and she sees that  -- Nope, not summer here. Defeated, she falls down to her tummy and rolls on to her side in pitiful submission. She looks as sorrowful and disappointed as a cat possibly can. 

There is something both sad and hopeful in her behavior. Sad, because I don’t believe she really understands that we are going to be submerged in this snow for many more weeks. Even the seats of our backyard swings are hidden in the drifts and it’s only January. Yet it is hopeful too because she believes with all her little cat hopes, that one of us will soon open a door which leads to summer. She can then bask in the warmth of the sun in all her calico glory.  She heats up like a fuzzy hot water bottle and then hides in the cool grass playing ferocious tigress with the bugs. She has already given up on the birds. They’re too fast. She is a lazy queen and a vicious bug hunter. It’s an interesting duality.

This morning I languished in bed with the cat, half listening to the radio, basically avoiding facing another frozen day. When the alarm goes off at my home, you never know where in the conversation you may enter. It’s tuned into an NPR station so it may be political, philosophical, or pop culture musings. This morning it was someone talking about the value of asking a politician running for office, which of their opponent’s ideas or platforms they most agree with.  It was just a piece of the conversation that I arbitrarily entered but I’ve been walking around all day thinking about that snippet of audio. I am a big believer of things happening for a reason.  I was meant to hear that snippet. So, all day long I thought about how well we understand one another and how important that really is.


If we were to ask those seeking office where they saw commonality with their opponents; wouldn’t it be an interesting way of seeing how reflective and articulate, how negotiable, how open they might be to discussion and compromise?  Wouldn’t it also help us understand how well informed they were on their opponent’s position?

I do like the idea of knowing how far apart our leaders are --but I really like the idea of making sure our representatives really understand one another, at least as well as I understand my cat and her hopes for summer.

ABOUT FACE (Book)

Our new obsession

It is a wondrous and curious thing to be part of a world where changes in technology dramatically and instantaneously impact how we live.  Sometimes I feel like whoever is in charge has their foot on the accelerator and we are traveling faster and faster into an unknown and unknowable future. How would I ever be able to explain a cell phone or the Internet to my long gone and very gregarious Nana Sophie (who I do hope to see again in the next world…) or the new eCigarettes to her brother, my Great Uncle Milton, who never was without his trusty aromatic cigars?

Consider this; we recently gave my 82 year old mother a MAC and an internet service so she could watch the exercise videos her bone specialist has posted for Seniors on his website, as well as weekly updates and advice.  This is, I would submit, the contemporary and future reconfiguration of paying house calls and providing rehabilitation services on-demand by the medical profession. It’s rather astonishing and efficient. Now if we could just get my mother to remember how to navigate to where we’ve put these bookmarks on her computer. It is clear that the Internet is for the young and more intellectually flexible. 

Young Person of the Year

As proof, Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, a very young man, wears the mantle of Time Magazine’s Person of the Year because of his electronic creation, Facebook.  Clearly this phenomenon has expanded and confounded the notion of friendship. Facebook friendships may or may not be with your closest friends. (I have several near and dear who continue to avoid this site like the plague.) Facebook friendships may or may not reconnect you with people from your past. It has made it easier to maintain and establish connections with others, with people you may remember fondly and with people who were a part of your life when you and they lived or worked nearby or together; even with the people next door. It’s all how you choose to play on the Facebook playground.

For example, a simple press of the button indicating you like something someone else has posted gives the recipient an acknowledgment, as in --you matter to me. A lovely and easy way to show --I value what you value; a what makes you feel good makes me happy – and I think that’s a good thing.  We generally don’t give ourselves enough pats on the back for what we accomplish.  Now we can provide them for others in an instant. 

"Poke your Grandma, Kyle"  Classic irreverent South Park
You have 0 friends  -- Season 12 Episode 12 

I also like the poking feature. It’s a way of playing tag on Facebook’s Playground, the most egalitarian game ever invented and you can play this kind of tag all day long and never get tired or winded. 

Danger Zone

For a while, I was really caught up playing Farmville, gifting my cyberneighbors with cows and trees and planting and harvesting crops to optimize their yield and value. Once I had amassed over $2 million Farmville dollars, it all become rather pointless to me. It stopped being fun spending money on virtual things. I abandoned my farm, but no animals were actually harmed in my doing so. 

I briefly waited tables and served up a bizarre menu of choices in Cafeville and then became part of Yo-ville, a real-time interactive social game where you can eventually inhabit a palatial estate, wear the hippest clothes and continuously redecorate your pad.  Along the way you can shop and tour the town, interacting with strangers and admiring their sense of style, visiting the homes of friends and in general just be an electronically social person. You could do all this while still sitting on your couch, wearing your pajamas. 

Help me, Dr. Drew

All of this pointless activity became the great black sinkhole of Facebook and I found myself fallen like Alice, into a new make-believe world from which there seemed no escape. Clearly I had to wean myself off of these games and find a more productive use of my electronic time. I had to admit to myself, I was addicted.  Could I possibly need to check in with Dr. Drew? (Would I get to meet the golden-throated Ted Williams, formerly homeless beggar, who has so much to come clean for, but appears destined to fail?) I have to confess, I am a visual junkie. If it moves, I’ll watch it. That’s not to say that I don’t have taste or a critical eye. I am selective, but initially easily seduced.  

The result of this withdrawal is what you see before you – this blog. I decided that I certainly might be a entertaining as earning a virtual cow or serving virtual spaghetti, at least I hope so! I’ve also learned to pepper my words with pictures that I hope provide my readers with respite from my ramblings.  Facebook now serves as one of the major portals to my very own imaginary electronic playspace. Thanks to you, my readers, who come week after week to play on my playground. 

Tag, you’re it.

I is learning

Makes me think and laugh

I have not wanted to post a new blog this week because I’ve been too overwhelmed by the events in the world around me.  I felt the need to let things settle down a bit before I chose to be reflective, as is my wont.  Initially my dismay was local in nature but after this weekend the events in Arizona make the local crisis pale in comparison. It is just a very sad, senseless tragedy. I cannot possibly be as eloquent as John Stewart was on Monday evening’s broadcast so I direct my readers to his website to see for themselves. (As an added bonus, stay tuned for his interview with the wonderful Denis Leary.)

http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/mon-january-10-2011-denis-leary

Makes me laugh and think

For those of you who reside beyond the parameters of Montclair New Jersey, this is perhaps not of immediate interest but I ask you to read on and have faith. This is about all of us and our future. My fellow townies may be as dismayed as I by the proposed (dare I utter it) closing of two schools in our district due to very real budget constraints.  The estimated shortfall in our town is in the $6 million range. The problem locally is compounded by problems in the state and our newly elected Governor Chris Christie. 


Before you stop reading here because you assume that left-of-center I will embark on a tirade lambasting Christie's policies, his politics, his vacation in Disneyworld, you may be surprised by my more measured and hopefully thoughtful response. Governor Christie has inherited the mess that is public education in New Jersey.

I would first say that I am greatly dismayed by the tone of the conversation this debate about public education has taken both locally and nationally. Civility please. But somehow it seems to be OK for the general population to be treated and spoken to as if we were ignoramuses, incapable of understanding the complexities of bureaucracies, the complexities of education. We are spoken to as though we will naively accept sound bites as panaceas to problems in public education that have existed for decades and require innovation, leadership, scholarship and an exposure to public scrutiny unparalleled in public education’s history.
                                                                                                             That is a big part of the problem. Most people, who work in the education world are unprepared for, even offended by those who dare to encroach on their playing field. Many believe the public cannot possibly understand what life in a classroom means. I understand their dismay. Those who are on the front line, the classroom teachers in particular, are being treated just like the poor and middle classes are being treated by our new Congress. They are being made powerless again. They are being held accountable for failures that begin at home, in a bloated, outmoded system they didn't create.                                                

One need look no further than the disastrous No Child Left Behind legislation, created with NOT one classroom teacher on the advisory committee.  This legislation written by a crew of Bush cronies in the Educational Publishing world wastes millions of taxpayer’s dollars every single year. There is no national standard or oversight. AYP (Annual Yearly Progress) is measured differently in each state.  An eighth grader in Texas performing at an advanced proficiency level in Language Arts is not performing at the same level as an advanced student in New Jersey; which has one of the most difficult tests. So what are we actually measuring? Is anyone paying attention?  How can we possibly suggest that this is somehow a measure of a classroom teacher’s performance?

Education is our Future, writ large.
Why should we have less than the best?

There’s also another way to look at this situation in the muddled state of New Jersey.  First let’s talk about the way the state public education is structured in this state. New Jersey is ranked 9th in population with, according to the 2010 Census, 8.4 million residents.  The 10th ranked state and closest to New Jersey’s count is Georgia with 8.2 million residents. Now consider this fact. The state of New Jersey has 601 School Districts, each with it’s own superintendent earning at least $125, 000 a year plus benefits. Our own earns over $200,000. Districts are basically towns so while Newark has a superintendent overseeing 39,440 public school students, a town like Essex Fells also has one with less than 1200 students, which is less than the number of student’s in Montclair High School. That represents $75,000,000 a year in salaries alone for just the superintendents. Georgia, with a slightly lower population, has 182 districts or about $23,000,000 in salaries to perform the same job that is done in New Jersey. Does it make sense that we spend at least $50,000,000 more for a overseeing comparable number of students?
                                                                                                                Yet the discussion locally as well as in the news about the state is the focused on the pension and salaries of teachers.  I understand that Christie recently fired 7 county superintendents, another layer on top of the district superintendents and that seems like a smart move to me. That decision represented another estimated $1,000,000 in salaries alone per year paid by taxpayers in New Jersey.

                                                                                                             We don’t need more layers; we need the best teachers in our classrooms being lead by the very best principals with smart and innovative superintendents. But do we really need three times as many Superintendents in this state as Georgia?
                                                                                                            The cost of public education does need to come down, property taxes are ridiculous in this state, but shouldn’t we be having conversations about the structure of the system in this state? If sacrifices and cuts are to be made, shouldn’t we examine the whole system from top to bottom?  I’m not singling anyone out in this. I’m not suggesting that Superintendents aren’t needed -- but at $50 MILLION dollars more per year than Georgia?  Really?