It’s a question that parents keep echoing as they search for the right school for their children: Why can’t every school be good? Why isn’t this as easy as sending my kid to the neighborhood school?
I could read it achingly vividly in the parents’ faces in Waiting for Superman. It was painfully clear in their hopeful optimism as the families of five likeable children underwent a lottery to enable their kids to attend various charter schools, and in the faces of weeping kids who didn’t get into a school that could help them fulfill their dreams.
And here’s the biggest trouble I have with in-demand charters, especially ones that have a high rate of success in helping kids from poor backgrounds: how do you get rid of the lottery when the scarcity of a good “free” school is what undergirds the free-market demand for the scarce resource (a successful school)? A wait-list means desirability/demand, and a wait-list ensures that the public charter school won’t “go out of business,” so to speak. Despite the immense good that’s done by these schools, inequality is baked into the selection process in a way that it’s not for public schools, which must accept all within its district borders. Why can’t the successful charters take what they’ve learned and convert back to or import it back to public schools, where all are accepted? Do you see the logic of what I’m saying?
My kid’s favorite program right now isn’t on TV, it’s on YouTube: Robot Astronomy Talk Show.
It’s produced by NASA-JPL’s educational arm. It’s on whenever he wants to watch it, we can pause at any moment so I can explain (or try to explain with help from Google) strong nuclear force versus weak nuclear force, there’s actual astronomy to be learned from watching the show, and while the content is pitched a little higher than what my 5.5 year old son can truly wholly understand, with repeated watchings and explainings, he actually grasps quite a lot. He loves the silly robots with delusions of grandeur. The special efx are also pretty good.
My kid also loves the Space Spitzer shows, which star a female space scientist who travels with a more benign, if snack-obsessed, version of IR-2, the power-hungry host of Robot Astronomy Talk Show. (More about IR-2 and Irrelevant Astronomy here.)
I think it’d be perfect if PBS picked up RATS as one of its shows. If it happens, you can send the finder’s fee check right here.
Now, anyone who’s the least bit familiar with my blog knows that I generally think watching tv is like being stuck in traffic. It’s time out of your life that you never get back. Was it spent well? That’s kinda up to the person trapped inside the car. Just like the map is not the territory, the toy you played with in the car on the way somewhere is not your final destination.
Basically, I believe that any medium can be a total waste of time if used excessively (intertubez, oh bewitching siren you, you’re included in that). For example, I see how my parents, especially, are now that they’re retired. Having lived in suburbia, they fell into the habit of watching the evening network news, then watching whatever’s on til the 11 o’clock news, then going to bed. Six hours of tv a night, 42 hours of tv watching 7 days a week–that’s practically another job if you define a job as a 40-hour/7 day occupation! SE-DEN-TA-RY. Suburbia plus tv equals not healthy, physically or mentally.
So now that it’s clear I’m a total scold and wet blanket, probably the last one you’d talk to at a party, certainly someone you’d never go dancing and have mojitos with (your loss–I’m an excellent dancer and silly drunk), I should come totally clean and confess: We. Don’t. Have. Cable. TV.
Yes, we live in Los Angeles, and We. Don’t. Have. Cable. TV.
I know, I risk deportation from this fair city for a confession like that.
Don’t worry, we’re not staring at a black&white with actual knobs you have to turn over here. We have a newfangled HD digital flat panel tv. We watch dvds on it, if we watch it at all.
Can I just express for you the joy of *not* having my delightful, intelligent, loving, bubbly, focused, intensely curious 5.5 year old constantly bug me for product X?
Are there words to convey how ecstatic I am that Hiro Protagonist does not walk around parroting the latest snarky kid saying, complete with eyerolls and copping other attitude all up in my grill that some child on tv does?
Am I pleased my kid has not yet learned to whine, “I wanna watch tv”? That day is coming, but the longer I can push it off…
We love to watch things on…Youtube.
Pingu, for example:
You know why I like that little clay penguin? Because he’s a gateway drug to the glories of WALLACE AND GROMIT. Hallelujah. Now that is some cultural product shot through with awesome.
Youtube is free, program schedules are irrelevant, there’s no commercials, and I can do the equivalent of make a mix tape from Youtube vids for my kid. We can watch some Robot Astronomy Talk Show then watch the real shuttle launch, or maybe footage of a moon landing. We can chase our curiosity across whatever Youtube and Google have to offer. (I’d never allow my son to do this unsupervised, however. There are hard-edged, profanity-laced mashups of even the most innocuous clips out there. Parent, beware.)
Best of all, it is well nigh IMPOSSIBLE to go to a store and buy merch that ties in with much of what he sees. Even PBS has their universe of affiliated toys and tchotchkes. I mean, that’s fine, children will always want to feel surrounded by friends-as-toys and that often means character-laden clothes, sleeping bags, lunchboxes, whatever. But sometimes it’s nice to just step out of that entirely.
And while it’s as natural as breathing for Americans, myself included, to buy the experience by buying the t-shirt, sometimes I think it’s not so bad to lack that option. Like the cool Lego star wars animation you saw? Try recreating your own at home. Build it, figure out stop-motion animation, etc. Forget the t-shirt, how about getting your hands dirty experimenting with what you saw?
A media critic famously labeled tv a lean-back experience and new media a lean-forward one. In general I agree, but how about turning off the screen altogether and getting outside?
Or–gasp–try picking up a book?
These are all the attitudes I carry toward watching tv. Huz and I have been tv free for years. We save it for special events, like President Obama’s Inaugural Concert, the Inauguration itself, the Olympics, the Tour de France (for huz), or the Oscars. And even then, when we watch, we re-discover how irksome it is to watch commercials. We also realize how noisy and busy-seeming tv is.
So it wasn’t automatic for me to embrace even public television, even when I know I can trust what’s being served up to my kid.
Investigating PBS’ offerings was new to me. It hadn’t really occurred to me to do it.
Recently I attended a little PR event held by PBS at our local public tv station, KCET. (It used to be a film studio in the early days of Hollywood, back when DW Griffith filmed in Griffith Park and was based in Silver Lake.)
The purpose was to let blogging moms know that PBS has a number of shows that are educational, commercial-free, and vetted by numerous children’s math, science, and literacy consultants so when your kids 2-5 years old watch them, the experience isn’t brain rot. Instead, kids often learn quite a bit from the programs.
In which all the narrative memes of my life converge in one conversation, and I’m told by my huz that I’m exactly like BSG President Laura Roslin. Was I just insulted?
Hiro Protagonist goes to school with a little girl who started out, charmingly, as strong-willed, bossy, and sweetly impertinent. Over the course of three years, she’s become something of a Mean Girl. A little girl who makes other little girls miserable and screams at them and holds them hostage by threatening to withhold her friendship. You’d think she’d be happy in her Alpha Girlhood, but as so often true to ABC After School Special form, I think she’s deeply unhappy. HB picked up HiroP from spring camp one day and reported that Mean Girl was lying face down on the playground surface, not looking up, not playing, not smiling, not inviting any other children to play, not seeming as if she wanted to get up any time soon. It seemed she’d been that way for quite a while. No one approached her or spoke to her, not even the kids who are usually in the same class as her during regular school days, not to mention spring “camp.”
Recently, her anti-social acts have included twisting/breaking the WALL*E gibbet off HiroP’s croc. And: possibly laughing and running away. HiroP used his words to tell her to stop, but she didn’t. I was annoyed. If I see her, I may say something to her. (What, I’m not sure.)
I reassured HiroP that he’d done the right thing. I also told him that had the regular staff been on duty for spring camp, he could count on them to enforce a little justice. But they weren’t, so not to blame himself for Mean Girl’s mean behavior.
* * * *
Earlier today, HiroP conducted a lengthy interrogation with me as to the nuances of the various Furious Five. In case your child is too young/old for Kung Fu Panda, the Furious Five would be: Crane, Monkey, Mantis, Tigress, and Viper, plus the titular hero of KFP, and Dragon Warrior himself, Po the Panda.
HiroP: What do you like best about Crane?
Me: Crane makes it look easy–he makes fighting look like dancing. He’s powerful AND graceful. That’s harder than it looks.
HiroP: What about Mantis?
Me: Mantis is fast. Sometimes, speed is the most important. It’s possible to win by being the fastest. Not the best or biggest, but the fastest or first.
HiroP: Monkey?
Me: Ahhh, Monkey. Monkey is very interesting because with him, it’s a mind game.
HiroP: Huh?
Me: You remember when we got Monkey’s backstory? [This is Los Angeles, parents use terms like 'backstory,' and 'throughline' when talking to our children.] How did he make trouble and fight with the villagers?
HiroP: He pulled their pants down!
Me: That’s right. He didn’t beat up his opponents, he embarrassed them. He humiliated them! [Explanation of 'humiliation.'] So you see, he overcame them not by force, but by knowing something about his opponent.
HiroP: Monkey was treated the same way. When he was a little monkey.
Me: Yes, that’s right. But as he grew up, he realized that everyone has vulnerabilities. Not only physical ones, but in your personality, the way you think.
A long silence as HiroP took this in.
Me: Like, if Mean Girl comes at you again and tries to mess with you, you can say, “[Name], stop!” And if she keeps doing it and laughs, you can say, “[Name], if you keep doing that YOU WON’T HAVE ANY FRIENDS. So stop!”
…This is where, when I related the story to HB just now (HiroP at his grandparents’)–
HB: Ahh, the old Psy Ops maneuver…
Me: “And that might bring her up short, because it’s true that she doesn’t have any friends. And she knows it.” I think he took it in.
HB: Oh, and so that’s where she hauls off and knocks him one.
Me: No, I don’t think that’ll happen. Besides, if she does, HiroP has the moral authority to defend himself. It’s okay for him to open up a can of Tigress (whupass).
HB (laughing): Shock and awe?
Me: Hey, not at all–if you don’t even TRY to establish diplomacy or brinksmanship, then you have no moral authority whatsoever–no legitimacy–to use force yourself. None at all. In this case, I advised HiroP to use his words–strategically. Go all Monkey on her. She’s the aggressor!
HB (laughing more): Unbelievable! You…in Battlestar Galactica, you’re President Roslin.
Me (one of the last people on the planet who doesn’t watch BSG at all): WHAT?? What’s that supposed to mean? I really want to watch now.
A friend notified me of a women’s current affairs segment that would be addressing the concerns of retiring APA women. She asked me to blog about it, so here we are:
When I was in my twenties, my mother gave me a book about saving for retirement. Did it snap me out of denial? I’m sorry to say it didn’t. At the time I was a graduate student and the opportunity to make more than $9,000 a year (or what I’d make as a graduate assistant) seemed impossible.
Still, I appreciated her wisdom and while I wasn’t able to take advantage of her message then, I’ve gotten much better about managing my affairs now. And seeing the statistics about Asian women’s longevity in “To the Contrary,” I understand her concern. We live longer, on average, than women of any other ethnic group: 86 years. That extended lifespan also means we get caught in the sandwich generation longer: 21 years to nurture a kid to semi-self-sufficient maturity, but then a very long stretch where the aging parent in the generation ahead of us needs more and more care. Or, consider when we ourselves become very aged and have a lengthy period of often complicated health needs.
I liked how the issue was broadened to include a strong push in support of social security from two longtime Asian Pacific American activists who participated in the roundtable after the main piece. But, shockingly, I actually agreed with Linda Chavez’s point that extended family structures are important to Asian and Latino families and have an impact on the resources APA senior women have as they age. (I disagree with Chavez on her “English-only” stances and general overall conservatism.)
And maybe had the segment been longer, it could’ve explored how cultural traditions supplement or augment the usual mechanisms of the social safety net. For example, if 28% of APAs rely on social security as their sole source of income after they retire, does that mean there’s a greater incidence of poverty for APA seniors?
This was implied but not clear from the story; the statistic about $250,000 lost over a lifetime to “unpaid” work like caregiving was sobering. And I think getting a clearer picture of how much and how reliably retired APA women can turn to their families helps illustrate the kind of poverty APA women may face. Are their families there for them?
Do Asian families still take their elders into their homes as the younger, American-born generations age and become more Americanized? How do sandwich generation women in limited-English families cope with navigating the social security system on behalf of their elders? Do some very low-income APA women have little to no social security support because of the type of work they did (garment/piece labor) or because they immigrated in mid-life? What are their challenges?
Another thing I’m really curious about is if the divorce rate for APA women of retirement age has increased at all. There are cultural dimensions to this too–the “Taiwan [insert Asian country here] divorce,” where perhaps the man permanently “returns” to the nation of origin, perhaps to care for or even start another family, and the woman is left to her own devices or must support/rely on her children. In all of this, no divorce papers are filed. Or, is the “American” institution of legally-granted divorce gaining greater acceptance among older APAs? To what extent does a reliance on one’s children reduce the need or initiative taken by APA senior women to have greater financial literacy? (This kind of goes to Irene Natividad’s point and the overall financial health of the family.)
As we know, divorce (and obviously, becoming widowed) is often an impoverishing experience for women, and I’d imagine just as much among these older APA women.
If I had to sum up my reaction to the segment, it’s one I have of most tv news and current affairs programs: I want to know more. I feel the brevity of the piece is a tease to motivate the viewer to do their own digging, but at the same time I often feel like the brief filmed news pieces could themselves contain more information. And that was a nine minute-long segment, an eternity in television journalism!
Several weeks ago, HB and I went to see “the Swedish vampire movie,” LET THE RIGHT ONE IN. It was appropriately moody, creepy, and if anything the frigid Swedish setting underscored how a small community already predisposed to avoid the cold further huddles inward from fear–thereby ignoring the ravenous stranger among them. Much of the film takes place in a working class set of undistinguished apartment buildings, and it was a little puzzling to me why we kept seeing establishing shots of the dead-eyed windows in soulless building after building (okay, the master shot, got it, I know where we are already). Then I realized the filmmakers were probably trying to say something about the density of people versus the ability of a vampire to live and hunt among them without detection for a long while. So much for Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the panopticon.
In a nutshell: victimized by bullies, Oskar befriends a strange girl (Eli) who moves into his apartment building at the same time as a series of savage ritual killings circles in on his hometown. Oskar’s friendship with the girl and discovery of the killer spurs him to shed his victim role for another, not necessarily liberatory one.
I liked the film because it made me think about how the cycle of sexual abuse resembles vampirism–every perpetrator was once a victim. It’s a particularly hideous form of contagion. That metaphor wouldn’t have occurred to me had I not seen it through the lens of the film. And seeing blanched Scandanavians against a white wintry landscape was an interesting visual way to experience blood and bloodlessness.
But I hated the novel because it added depravity without insight. To say more would be to spoil both film and novel, but I will say that I’m an old fogey now, and gratuitous depravity or violence isn’t tolerable or shocking as it may have been to me when I was younger. I think this is because as I get older, I become more aware that anything that can be imagined is unfortunately probably happening in real life to a real person, to a much worse degree somewhere in the world.
So there you go. I disliked the novel because
I have become a horrible, literalist scold
everything should serve story; the extraneous, shocking, and horrific must justify their existence in the story even more
if you try to shock me, you’d better get serious epiphany mileage out of it or I’ll resent what you’ve done as an author
It’s interesting to observe how the film shares the same DNA as the novel, but in some rare cases, as with this one, improves upon it. LTROI the film succeeds because there are natural obstacles to having your child actors perform certain acts, and I think in this case the restraint forced upon the filmmakers was a huge improvement on the novel. We got much more by implication in the film than by the novel’s so-called superior depiction of inner states.
The other problem is that I don’t find the novel particularly well-written. It reads like early Stephen King. (He’s become a better writer in recent years, IMHO.) It’s sprawling, goes for easy shock effects, dances at the edge of the worst kinds of darkness in human endeavors with seemingly little redemptive thematic return, has a few too many characters, and offends by sometimes being dull.
So there you have it. Sometimes the discipline and efficient story demands of a movie can be a huge improvement on a shaggy, shambling novel. And yes, I’m aware the screenwriter for the film was the novelist.
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