mr. clapper yo clap

Re-discovering the wicked awesome records from the J. Geils Band lately. One favorite moment from Blow Your Face Out:


Peter Wolf hollers “Do it to it in Detroit City, let me hear you” and the band starts hammering, with Seth Justman starts pounding the piano, Magic Dick plays a wild harmonica solo. Then Peter Wolf says “Baby, baby…baby don’t leave me” and the Detroit crowd goes wild knowing it’s Motown, it’s their song, it’s their city…

in the country will have something to say about yesterday’s article in the New York Times on Teacher Preparation. Like most folks I was annoyed.

My biggest issue with the essay was that there was no sense that the purpose of education remains contested. Defined here, teaching is about improving test scores, something you can measure. You can easily judge whether or not teachers can improve scores. But such an approach ignores all of the structural factors that shape student lives and assumes that they are irrelevant if teachers could just teach better. And it ignores the things I want teachers to demonstrate to children, including my own:

humility: the ability to fail and keep trying

curiosity: the desire to keep learning

creativity: the willingness to try lots of different approaches to problems

I’m not sure these can be quantified, although I’m sure there’s someone out there trying.

It looks like the trash bill is going to go before council. I’m thinking I’m going to write to the Mayor and say:

Listen, I’ll happily pay the bill when you can demonstrate that the slumlord all-stars who own half of the homes on my block, whose home addresses range from Lower Merion to Gladwyen, who have nearly defaulted on several of their properties, have paid their bill.

The Mayor understands, even banks on, the folks who do the right thing while failing to address why so many neighborhoods continue to fall apart. Landlords get a pass, year after year.

I was talking to my son about a conversation the Cedar Park Neighbors are sponsoring, a conversation designed to elicit community thoughts on what Baltimore Avenue might look like in the future. I mentioned it to him because it’s been politicized, as some folks apparently felt threatened by the potential of a process where stakeholders might discuss the future of the Avenue. It’s hard to explain fifty years of class struggle and racial politics, but before I could begin, my son declared:

“Dad, it’s pretty easy: first, you rebuild the houses. Then, you get some people to move in.”

further evidence of why five-year olds rule. Reminded me of this recent essay at the NYRB about children’s imaginations and their moral development.

I feel for Mayor Nutter, I really do: there is no money and City Council simply won’t take on reforming the wage tax or real estate assessments and his own office can’t seem to make folks pay taxes. Few residents will accept service cuts of any sort, the loss of jobs depletes the wage tax kitty, and tax deadbeats create massive holes in the budget.

But charging for trash pick-up? My house of four, where we carefully recycle, where we collect batteries, light bulbs, and computer accessories to bring to the recycling center, where we compost as much as we can…each week we put out a single can of trash that’s not even full. Pretty much the only time we put out two is when I fill our second barrel with the trash and leaves that are blowing all over the street.

Meanwhile, the various landlords around me put out three to six packed barrels each week. Hardly seems fair that we’d all be charged the same thing, particularly when I’ll be the loser who actually pays the tax while the others will let it go.

(I understand that a weighted system would require an enforcement division that simply doesn’t exist).

Update: Ronnie Polaneczky says it all here.

Lucinda Williams to your kids, who’ve just begun to put the meaning of lyrics together. We’ve long listened to “Sweet Old World”, but this morning, as we made our way past Six Blocks Away, which they love, not least of all because while he may be heartbroken, he still works in a donut shop, and into the other songs — He Never Got Enough Love, Pineola — and I’m in the position of trying to explain what it means when “mama ran off” or “his very own gun” or “found him lyin’ in his bed.”

Still, better than listening to the Wiggles.

Friday afternoon, as I was sitting in a seminar pondering how I might write an editorial based upon my research, I failed to realize that Bob Herbert had a piece in that morning’s Times describing the need for new school buildings.

The only thing I might have added would have been a paragraph or two outlining the ways in which new schools could be used to re-make portions of the educational landscape and the inequality that characterizes American education. Why not guarantee federal funds to districts that want to use school construction to integrate communities or who want to erect multi-use buildings that can provide both education and jobs? Hard to imagine what such a bill would look like or how you’d close loopholes, but it seems like a decent way to address the issue of infrastructure, which as we all know, is forever crumbling.

The guitar riff from Nasty Dogs and Funky Kings…

I liked this editorial/book review, as it stresses things that I find important about teaching (I’ve never read any of Newkirk’s books…I guess I need to). To wit,

What teachers need is each other. We need to be sharing and discussing student work, bolstering and supporting each other through the inevitable failures, collaborating in manageable small communities, inviting each other into our classrooms. We need to witness daily the great teaching that is already going on inside our buildings.

This idea of co-creation is the hoped-for change that will sustain me through the years beyond 2010: that teachers may one day wrest control of their work from others. If it happens, it will happen by bits and pieces, but it is the most important “good idea” I cling to in this time of very bad ones.