Tag: education

BARACK OBAMA, JUDITH WARNER, EXPLAINING HISTORY TO KIDS: MRS. HAMER AND JACKIE ROBINSON

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A dear friend sent me this New York Time column by the sometimes controversial Judith Warner.  In it, Warner muses about the cosmic change we all know came last Tuesday, and her young daughters’ seeming inability to understand the magnitude of what has happened.

“Look,” we said, pointing to the headline “Racial Barrier Falls.” “This is huge.”

We labored to make them understand that their world — art that day,
and orchestra, and Baked Potato Bar at lunch — had irrevocably changed.

But how can you understand change when you’ve only known one way of being?

They were happy because we were happy. They rose to the occasion in
that bemused way children do when adults tell them what they should
feel. They were glad to be rid of George W. Bush and to be saved – for
now – from the specter of Sarah Palin.

Of course one of the reasons for this is that, for younger people, unless they’re well-briefed, it is less of an earthquake.  They know we believe that they are part of something wonderful, but they don’t know as viscerally as we do the terribleness that came before.  It was easier, 30 years ago, with my own children.  They went to a pretty progressive elementary school where Martin Luther King Day was a cornerstone of the winter curriculum.  In the first grade they learned about the kid across the street who wouldn’t play with him, and of the pain that caused.  They watched Eyes on the Prize more than once in class.  When we settled on annual giving, their vote was for the United Negro College Fund.  Their babysitter told them stories about not being able to go into Virginia smoke shops to buy a candy bar, about the scary cruelty that was her childhood.  It came from someone they knew.  It wasn’t history, it was their friend’s life.

But they’re a generation or more older than Warner’s girls and, growing up in Manhattan they knew more, and heard more, from people for whom it was more immediate.  There are fewer of those people now, as Selma and Montgomery fade farther into history.   It will take more work, more commitment by schools as well as parents, to help these small people understand what has happened.  Work worth doing though, I think.

As I’ve thought about this, I’ve recalled that my parents never completely described to me the impact of the Depression on their lives.  They were, I later learned, enormously affected but there really wasn’t a way to explain it – at least for them.  They had suffered too much.  It drove me to study Depression history in college, when much of what I’d wondered about became clear.   That was a sad landmark instead of a proud one, but it’s also about troubled experiences difficult to communicate.  A challenge either met or avoided.

I agree that one way to help younger people understand the wonder of what has happened is just as Warner described it.  Let them be “happy because we’re happy.” Explain as best we can.  Personally though, I’m not against a little indoctrination: the story of Dr. King’s lost playmate, or Jackie Robinson or Fannie Lou Hamer or Rosa Parks (there’s a kids’ song “When Rosa Parks Sat Down, the Whole World Stood Up”) or Charlayne Hunter-Gault.  And the question I used so often:  “How do you think you would feel if that happened to you?”  From the known to the unknown, the familiar to the unfamiliar, just like any other lesson.  Allow the natural compassion of a loving child to emerge, and their sense of justice and wonder will not be far behind.

SAD NEWS; SENATOR TED KENNEDY

Teddy_3Catherine Morgan, star of stage, screen, (well not really, but she should be) and (yes this is true) blogs including Political Voices of Women, has sought posts on the news that Senator Edward Kennedy, seen here with Senator Barack Obama, whom he endorsed, is suffering from a malignant brain tumor.  It really is a sad thing.  People make jokes about the Senator, some of them really cruel, as I discovered while searching for images for this post.  And he’s made mistakes, including those surrounding the tragic events at Chappaquiddick.

But as a great speaker and legislator, he’s used his talents to be a champion of the “downtrodden” and many of the rest of us, for over 40 years.  Coal miners, civil rights advocates, children who need better schools, American who need access to health care, soldiers in Iraq and veterans of every war and dozens of other causes; he’s been a mainstay of support for them all, often when not too many people were willing to be.

Since he lost his two brothers, President John Kennedy and Senator Robert Kennedy, to assassins, he’s also been the protector of their children:  JFK’s two, John and Caroline, and Bobby’s eleven. He’s buried John’s son and two of Bobby’s.  His own son Edward contracted bone cancer and had a leg amputated at the age of 12.  Kennedy himself nearly died in a plane crash in 1964.  And there’s plenty more; take a look at this Wikipedia entry on the “Kennedy curse” which left him with burdens of care for so many.  Weddings, illnesses, even funerals, it was he who was there for them all.

When I first came to Washington, I was a very young researcher in the CBS News Washington Bureau.  Because I was so young, I was assigned to call the Kennedy “boiler room girls” – campaign workers who knew the young woman who had died in that car in Chappaquiddick, Mary Jo Kopechne, to see if they would talk to us.  I called.  All of them.  Every day for a year.

Every day for a year they took my call.  Every day for a year they were polite, gentle and silent on the subject of the crash.  And so they have remained.  Since I know many other people who have worked for Teddy and shown a devotion and loyalty seldom seen in public life, I am not surprised; that’s how people are in the Kennedy universe.  It says a lot about the Senator and his family and the sort of commitment they inspire.

When I think of the Senator though, it’s not any of that I think about.  Or of the fact that he can be hilarious, self-effacing and very kind to those around him.  My strongest, and most unambiguous memory, is of his eulogy at the funeral of his brother Bobby* in the summer of 1968.  You’ll see why.

*This is audio accompanied by cover footage; I couldn’t locate any video of the speech although I remember it vividly and can see it in my head.  Can’t get that up on the Web though, at least not yet.

BLOGHER COMES OF AGE WITH ITS OWN INTERVIEW WITH BARACK OBAMA

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As you know, I am a very loyal supporter of BlogHer and a great admirer of its three founders, who have built a community of respect and honesty, humor and warmth that is a treasure to many of my sister bloggers and to me.  At last year’s BlogHer conference much was made of the absence of presidential candidates, even though they’d all been invited AND even though we were in Chicago, where Yearly Kos (now called Netroots Nation) was happening in literally one or two days, and all the Democrats came there.  It was if the "little ladies" were just not worth the trouble.

So it’s very exciting to see Barack Obama sit down with BlogHer’s Erin Kotecki Vest and answer questions submitted by the BlogHer community.  No headlines, but a broad survey of topics with sound, thoughtful and well-expressed responses.  This is a landmark moment and I’m so proud to be a BlogHer and a small part of its universe.  Watch it for yourself.

WHO WANTS HILLARY? WHO WANTS BARACK? WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE? WHAT’S AT STAKE?

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You really need to read this guest post at Political Voices of Women, Catherine Morgan‘s remarkable combination of editorial and aggregator.  There are links there to more than 400 women who blog about politics  – and guest posts.  And (full disclosure) yes, sometimes that includes to my work.  But I digress.

On Wednesday, April 23, just after the Pennsylvania primary, Slim, whose blog is called No Fish, No Nuts, was Catherine’s guest blogger.  Slim’s post, which first appeared on her blog, wrote a loving but sad analysis of the Clinton supporters at her county convention where local Democrats elected their delegates.  Listen to this:

Obama’s voters are looking toward Obama as a standard
bearer, as a point man for the change they want to see in the country.
Hillary’s supporters, at least the older women among them, are voting for their
surrogate: because they want to see a woman in the Oval Office before they die,
and because they themselves were denied so many opportunities for advancement
in their own lives.

 

I do not doubt that they also desperately believe in
Hillary Clinton, but their investment in her goes much deeper than politics.
Hillary Clinton is proof that they had it in them all along, the fire, talent
and creativity, and they could have been leaders but for the glass ceiling that
seemed to rise only inches a decade.

Slim also wrote that she was reluctant to offer these observations but that given polls showing many Clinton supporters saying they will vote for McCain if Obama gets the nomination, and some the other way around, she felt that times were so desperate that she had to weigh in.  In her view, "We cannot afford another 4 years of war, debt and economic stagnation,
the prescription of a McCain presidency. So we Dems cannot allow
Clinton voters (or for that matter, I add, Obama supporters if it goes the other way – though they report this feeling somewhat less frequently) to take their ball and go home come November."

To that I say "amen!"  I was a member of the "Children’s Crusade" that was the 1968 anti-war presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy.  We worked like demons through New Hampshire, did so well there that it was considered a win even though, technically, we lost, then saw Bobby Kennedy enter the race against us.  We persisted, as did his supporters, until his assassination in June of 1968.  After that, many of his supporters joined us, working still to try to elect a president who would stop the war.  And then.

The riots in Chicago.  The nomination of Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson’s vice president and for way too long a staunch supporter of the war.  And then.  Many, many of my colleagues and friends indeed picked up their footballs and went home.  To stay.  Not only did they not work for Humphrey – that would have been very hard after what had happened in Chicago.  They didn’t even vote for him.  Or vote at all.  And that, my friends, is how we got Richard Nixon.  Which is how we got Watergate.  Which is how we got Jimmy Carter– who made such a mess that we got Ronald Reagan.  Who took apart so much social safety net, environmental and regulatory and other federal function that we thought more was impossible.  Until we got George Bush.  Who decimated much of what was left, including much of our hope.  Until now, when we have two candidates who stand for so much.

Of course that’s simplistic, but what really really upsets me is that every time we educated activists, in our righteousness, take a walk because things aren’t perfect, we aren’t the ones who get hurt the most.  People who are poor, whose kids go to bad schools, whose unemployment insurance runs out too soon, who no longer can afford even in-state tuition or, for many, community college tuition, to say nothing of HEALTH INSURANCE (an issue which reaches up into the middle class) — and of course the war, where low-income people do most of the enlisting…these people are the ones who are hurt the most. 

We let our singular perception of what’s perfect become the enemy of the good – or at least better than bad – that we could help to bring into being.  It’s infantile.  It’s sad.  It’s shameful. And unless all of us in the blog universe who feel this way make a lot of noise and take lots of friends to lunch no matter WHO gets the nomination, it’s going to happen again. 

Thanks to Slim for her great post that inspired this rant.

IN JERUSALEM: A CHILD AT THE WALL AND OTHERS IN SCHOOL

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We leave Jerusalem for the airport in two hours and I don’t even know if it’s worth going to sleep.  It’s almost midnight here and and cab is coming at 2 AM.  So much has happened that I’ve been too tired to write most of it down.  I guess I’d better chronicle it somehow though. 

This was one of my favorite moments of our trip.  It’s almost dawn at the  Kotel (Western Wall of the old Temple) and a young boy and his father prepare for morning prayers.  This day is the first that he will "lay tefillin "– wear the special prayer objects on his arm and forehead to follow the commandments by placing reminders on the arm and "between thine eyes" – on his forehead.  They’ve chosen to celebrate this very significant pre-Bar Mitzvah moment in the early morning – a sunrise service where the Amidah – a critical prayer – is recited just as the dawn arrives.  A loving and very impressive family of four girls, two boys and two remarkable parents, they all joined to offer moral support and presence to someone they love as he takes this first step to what I guess you’d call "religious adulthood." 

I know the photo is blurry but I don’t like to show faces of other people’s families — they deserve their privacy.  I just want you to know how lovely it was.  An animated and intelligent young man, his father at his side – his sisters, mom, cousins, friend – and a couple of us — watching him make his way.  I told his mom, whom I very much admire, that it was a privilege to be there.  Probably sounds like hogwash but it isn’t – watching all this take place as the sun rose to illuminate us all was a true blessing. 

Of course we couldn’t watch everything because much of the ceremony took place on the "men’s side" of the mehitza (divider between men and women) where we weren’t allowed to be.   We peeked through fence dividers though, so we did get to see a bit.  I’ve been living a fairly observant, Orthodox life for a couple of years now, moving forward month by month, holiday by holiday, and I continue to be amazed at the levels of intolerance I manifested before I learned about observant life from the inside.  Days like this one remind me of how much of the world we can’t judge without living it – or at least being willing to come along as others do.  This day was a perfect example of that.   

Reshit_cropped_nursery_school_with_
That same day, a cousin of the family at the Kotel invited me to visit the school her kids attend – K-8 – near the town of Efrat, on the grounds of a kibbutz called Rosh Tzurim.   
Founded by an amazing woman named Noah Mandelbaum, it began as an effort to accommodate a single Downs child by mainstreaming him, along with a special teacher, in a "regular" classroom.  It was so successful that within months she had 4, then 6, then finally, so many  kids that she launched a school where such mainstreaming would be policy.  This photo shows the school in action.  There are many classrooms for Downs, autistic and other developmentally affected kids study alongside the rest of the class.  I didn’t want to take photos there and distract them.  In this nursery class is another phase of the program.  The young woman whose back is to us is fairly seriously compromised but she is permanent staff in the classroom and is learning to be a preschool aide able to get a job and work outside the school.  That smiling girl in the blue sweater is today’s "guest" – another child with serious developmental issues who will work in the classroom for the day.  The program helps these young people find a place of their own in the world – and teach all the kids at Reshit School the value of every human person.

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This is Noah, the school’s founder.  Surrounding her is part of the farm where every child – "normal" and otherwise, works each day – together.  You can see the colors, the free-form murals – all the stuff that reminds me of schools we all dreamed of in the 60s.  In many ways the tone of this school is similar – but this is a real "put your money where your mouth is" environment.  Parents have to believe that the things their kids learn here are more important than super-competitive environments where the only standard is how far their children are from the next step on the ladder.  Learning to be moral, caring human beings is an actual mission here.

The kids are pretty free (it’s kind of Summerhillish), across ability spectrum, and the curriculum is designed to allow each to learn in her own style at her own speed.  When I asked Noah about kids like mine, who had needed and appreciated structure, knowing what was going to come next, her reply was startling in its good sense.  Basically – and I’m paraphrasing here – the idea is that "for some kids, especially more intelligent ones, that may be true.  But for kids with less ability it is especially important that they learn to live without an institutional structure every minute because the world doesn’t have that kind of structure – and the world is where they will have to live." By the way, after years of fighting with the educational establishment, Reshit has been designated a model and its efforts to mainstream all kinds of kids will be emulated in schools throughout the country.

I have more to write – about exploring ancient tunnels under old Jerusalem and more – but this is enough for now.  I’ll try to have the rest in a day or two.

HUNDRED DOLLAR LAPTOP: ONE PER CHILD – AN UPDATE

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The One Laptop Per Child project is an exciting one; I’ve written about it before; that November 3rd post garnered a remarkable level of traffic.  On Christmas eve, another story appeared.  Here’s how it starts: 

Laptop Project Enlivens Peruvian Hamlet Dec 24, By Frank Bajak  [this is also an AP photo]

ARAHUAY, Peru (AP) – Doubts about
whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the
morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children
got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago.

These offspring of peasant families
whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops – people who can ill afford pencil
and paper much less books – can’t get enough of their "XO" laptops.

At breakfast, they’re already powering
up the combination library/videocam/audio recorder/music maker/drawing kits. At
night, they’re dozing off in front of them – if they’ve managed to keep older
siblings from waylaying the coveted machines.

"It’s really the kind of
conditions that we designed for," Walter Bender, president of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff, said of this agrarian
backwater up a precarious dirt road.

You can read the rest here.  It’s popping up all over the place.  The state of Maine has had wonderful results in its efforts to distribute laptops to junior high kids, too.  You don’t have to go into the developing world to see the value of universal access, even in places where it may seem far-fetched unless you know the machine and its capacity.  Here’s more.

More resources:

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)        http://laptop.org/

OLPC Wiki                                  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Home

Nicholas Negroponte at TED          http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/41

60 Minutes piece                          http://60minutes.yahoo.com/segment/69/one_laptop_per_child

 

JERUSALEM DIARY 2.0 DAY SEVEN

Soldiers_lunch_with_guns_2We had four hours of class this morning and two of Hebrew this afternoon so I’m making this short.  Just know that the Pardes classes were once again remarkable.  It’s hard to explain spending two hours over a Torah concept but today our great teacher, Rabbi Reuben Grodner, brought us a eulogy that a revered rabbi and teacher Joseph B. Soloveitchik gave for the wife of the Talne Rabbi, another major force in his community.  The purpose for reading it, Rabbi Grodner said, was to demonstrate this pioneering rabbi’s understanding of the value of the moral and intellectual leadership of women, as well as men.  He also founded Maimonides School, the first school where girls and boys could learn Talmud together  – and for women, learn it at all.

Anyway it was very exciting as was the rest of the day.   I took the photo you see here on a tony Jerusalem street called Emek Rafaim -a combination of Soho and Columbus Avenue.  These young soldiers were doing security patrols and stopped for lunch – so their ever-present semi-automatics were in their laps (look just below the table edge.) 

What I’m trying to demonstrate with these daily security photos is NOT that Israel is dangerous because it really isn’t, unless you go to disputed areas, but that this is what life is like here – that people make their way and raise their kids and go to the movies and jog along the Old City walls, and these folks protect them as they do.  When I think about what we complain about at home — well — ever since 911 people have complained that the president never asked us to make sacrifices and we subsequently don’t have the same investment in the outcome.  If you want to see the kinds of quiet courage that emerge from shared responsibility, this is one place to look.

JERUSALEM DIARY 2.0 DAY SIX: LEARNING HEBREW ON A SUNDAY IN JERUSALEM

Cafe_hillel_security_1_blurHere’s your security photo for today – a little blurry-artsy because I took it through a window at Cafe Hillel on Emek Rafaim late Saturday night.  Most of the men who do restaurant and store security prefer not to be photographed so I’ve been shooting through windows while at a table inside. A friend who reads this blog has, a couple of times, emailed me to remember that the guards are here to keep us safe.  I think she believes I’m complaining by posting these daily photographs.  On the contrary – I just want to show you what it is like to be an Israeli in 2007.  This is the least of it but it’s so universal and so visible that it seems a good example.  So.
Now on to today.
OrlyThis is Orly Ganor, the founder of Ulpan-Or, the extraordinary school where we’re learning Hebrew.  A charismatic visionary, she’s created a very exciting way to learn the language (that includes audio – and a very positive attitude) and we’re really benefiting from it.  We’ve worked with her and several other young women who are stunning as people and teachers. 

Today Shira Carmel, who will be the Ani deFranco of Israel very soon, taught both Rick and me. She demonstrated that in the right hands, even the alphabet can be fun. It’s difficult to learn a new alphabet at my age, but she showed me something quite valuable about learning to read and although it’s been partially debunked, most of it emerges from "urban legend" to probably true.  If you read a paragraph where only the first and last words are accurately spelled you still make sense of it intuitively because you know the words.  When you learn a new alphabet you can’t skim along like that or you make mistakes (which was what I was doing, big  time) because you can’t trust any of your assumptions of what the next word, or even letter, will be.  She convinced me to really sound out each one.  I discovered that after several tragic failures at trying to learn to read this ancient language I MAY actually do it!  I’m irrationally excited about it.

ONE MORE THING – Because – as usual on this trip – I’m really really (really) tired!  I’ve written quite a bit here about Mea Shearim and forgot to post this picture of a sign in the window of a tiny story there.  So here it is.  More tomorrow.
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IF YOU CARE ABOUT EDUCATION – OR THE FUTURE – OR TECHNOLOGY – WATCH THIS

This link arrived from someone I deeply respect as a person and an educator.  Remember that it was made by current college students.  What do we think?