Category Archives: tell me something good

Waiting For Superman: A Review Essay

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?

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My Hippie Education, Or, Somehow I Survived My Gen X Childhood

Education is a hot topic currently, coinciding with the fact that we have an over-achieving president (of whom I’m proud). I am convinced he’s secretly Asian American despite an outer bearing that’s African American in appearance.

It’s also a topic of huge interest to me now that Hiro Protagonist is officially a first-grader.

Recently I’ve had to come to grips (somewhat reluctantly) that my son has a strong sense of numeracy. When he was about 3 years old, he asked me what odd and even numbers were. I showed him with my tented fingers how ‘odd’ means one left over from a double, and ‘even’ means a double. He had a period at four years old where he was enchanted with the idea of ‘googolplex.’ One time he asked me to draw out all the zeroes in googolplex, and we got pretty far before I had to quit and say it was time to go to bed. Then, just to make my life harder, I showed him what googolplex was written as an exponent.

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A brief moment of wondering if it would fit in our hatchback.

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Excuse the iPhone autofill typos

It’s a Halloween jack o’lantern piƱata. Last year’s was so plain in comparison, and I still thought it was the second coming.

This year, the awesome includes ears, pointy nose, a jutting chin, and a wart on said chin. Plus hair.

We love it. Can’t wait to stuff it with goodies (half candy, half pumpkin-shaped erasers, etc).

The Kindergarten Chronicles: That *Other* School, Chinese School–or a Soft Gentle Kick in the Pants

We were lucky that our son took to kindergarten like a duck to water. He literally skipped home from school with me after the first day, and said, “Mama, that was the funnest day ever!” Day two yielded the comment, “That was the second funnest day ever!” Etc. (I was pleased but also a little skeptical….I wanted to say, “Pace yourself, kid, you’ve got a minimum of 12 and probably 16 more years to go.” But hey, take your little victories where you can get them, right?)

(Also, can I confess that we’ve had unbelievably smooth sailing with regard to homework, getting up in the morning, and so forth? I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. He loves his reading homework–it’s usually the first thing we do when he comes home. I’m embarrassed to say it, but he’s asked me for more math homework. We’re doing simple addition and subtraction now, whenever he asks me for it, often two or three times a week. And we live a five minute walk from his school, so he can literally roll out of bed, get dressed, and have breakfast and be out the door. What a change from last year and the 60-75 minute long drive to get to his preschool. I tell you, we are just out of this world lucky.)

Hiro Protagonist making flashcards

Hiro Protagonist making flashcards

It was the other school I was worried about. Those of you who send your kids to Hebrew school or Ukrainian school, and so on, will know what I’m talking about.

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One of 3 Fire-Orange Dragonflies Who Live at Our Pond

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Spiral Tendrils on the Vine, Luscious Fruit So Divine

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Aside

“A Women of Color Trifecta This Week? Sotomayor, Chu, and Benjamin.”

Snow Leopard is Omnipotent (And I Don’t Just Mean Apple OSX)

“Snow Leopard’s spaceship is so fast, it can speed out of a black hole.”

“Snow Leopard can do FTL as quick as you can blink your eye.”

“Snow Leopard is the best, first Jedi knight. He trained Yoda and all the other jedi knights. …There was no one who trained him.”

My son never had a transitional object when he was tiny. I never gave him a binky–or rather, he never took to it.

I had quite a large collection of stuffed animals that my mother refused to keep in a shrine to me in their house, so the stuffies lived at mine. And yet Hiro Protagonist refused to play with very many of them. Of the few who were good friends, he never felt compelled to carry them around, sleep with them, or bring them with him to places.

Toward the end of this school year at his hippie preschool, however, he had his eye on a stuffed crab at the book fair. When we got there at the end of the day, some other child had purchased it.

Hiro P was disappointed. I felt slightly depressed, like the tiny inability to supply him with this one small thing was indicative of a larger failure to meet some other need. (Crazy, I know, but that’s just typical parental-flavored crazy. You try to breathe and make the incident small and insignificant again.)

Anyway, Hiro P being a sensible sort chose a leggy feline with a white stomach, spots, magnets in his forepaws and feet, and a short nap to his fur. He was, as you can imagine, a Snow Leopard.

The cat doesn’t have any other name.

He set about building Snow Leopard a house made from a shoebox. (It’s decorated with sparkly pipe cleaners and glitter. Can you say that about your bed? Didn’t think so.) It has a rather large hole cut into the top, for ease of entry.

And before Hiro P goes to bed every night, Snow Leopard gets placed carefully in his box and the cloth that cleans my glasses (embellished with a few Sharpie doodles) acts as his blanket. His friend Baby Harp Seal sleeps next to the bed, with a semi-circular scrap of plastic over him. (Baby Harp Seal is a water animal, see, so requires a waterproof blanket.)

Snow Leopard has gone to birthday parties with us, he’s watched Hiro P swim by the pool, he’s enjoyed the smells and sights of the Vietnamese restaurant and the taco truck where we’ve eaten dinner or lunch.

Snow Leopard is a suave, debonair and definitely worldly cat.

Most importantly, Snow Leopard seems to lack any weaknesses. I know I’ve certainly tried to think up ways to thwart his Jedi powers, but every single one of them failed. HB has been similarly unsuccessful, and his grasp of ion cannons and blaster guns and light sabers far exceeds mine.

No, Snow Leopard is even more powerful than Hiro P’s young summer camp friend YM’s “God.”

YM told Hiro not to say “Oh my god,” because it was disrespectful to You-Know-Who. So far Hiro P thinks god is a silly idea (his words) but he was far too polite to tell YM that.

So Hiro P plays a little with Snow Leopard before he goes to summer camp in the mornings, and a little before he goes to sleep.

And I, for one, am glad he has someone so powerful who can help him make this transition from old school to new, from old friends to new. Because I am finding this process a little rough myself.