(no subject)

after a solid week of lovely, gorgeous, balmy weather in the sixties and seventies we are getting a nice soft rain. we are at that stage in spring just before the leaves are full and only the daffodils are blooming (which i finally have some of this year!). my windows are open to let the fresh, wet air mingle with the smell of the incense i have burning. in a few days the lilacs will bloom and there are lilacs EVERYWHERE in minnesota. huge lilac trees around at least 4 houses in every neighborhood. the whole world smells good and looks beautiful.
one of the things i love most about living here is that after a long, hard winter, spring comes out in a desperate, vibrant, aromatic rush - like the world just can't wait to be reborn.
it is a reminder to me that hope is found in sudden unexpected places and that our lives can change in a minute. no bad time will last forever. and every lovely one must be cherished.

politics and education

so i finally got off my ass and took a look at the positions of barak obama and hillary clinton....and honestly, i thought i would really be persuaded and like obama's views. and i did....until i got to his positions on education.
now some of what he has to say about this is fine....but my big problem comes from his position on HOW he thinks about improving schools....he wants to use more standards and tests to do it.
as someone who has worked in the school system and seen how much a teacher's creativity plays into whether or not students are interested in learning - and how having to teach to standards and tests limits that creativity - i am emphatically against this direction of improving schools. i think our emphasis on testing and standards is part of what is hurting our school systems. teachers are often treated as baby-sitters and dis-empowered by parents every which way from being able to do their job well. not that it is always the parents fault. if you are too poor to move out of a neighborhood where gangs are a threat and your kid is too scared and focused on fear to learn well - that is not the teacher's or the parent's fault. and certainly there are kids with the resilience to do well under extremely strenuous circumstances.
but i think there is a problem with the expectation that we CAN standardize learning. education is NOT business and it is ineffective and unreasonable to think about it that way. sure, you can have some standards for quality of teachers, but the fact is, not all kids are created equal. kids can have a hard time learning and many learning disabilities go undiagnosed. many learning disabilities go hand-in-hand with giftedness in other areas, so that dumbing down the class creates boredom rather than the hoped-for success. this is one way kids slip through the cracks that testing and standards worsen instead of fixing.
another problem is that when kids don't learn at speed, they are often passed even though they do not meet the educational standards of the next grade. they know less than their peers and can fall even further behind because they don't understand the basics they need to continue. we can blame teachers for this, but often teachers are passing the kids because they fear that the emotional damage done to the child by being held back and forced to learn will A) do worse damage to their progress than being advanced and B) potentially turn them into a bully because they are larger than the other kids - and therefore damage the chance of other kids to learn by creating a fearful environment. it is really a damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don't situation. it would be nice if every kid advanced this way could be held for mandatory tutoring after school, or if anti-intellectual parents could be curbed from encouraging their kids to under-achieve. but there are all kinds of legal problems that come up when these potential solutions are attempted.

education is NOT business. in a business you can get rid of all the less-than-standard raw materials that will not make a good end product. but our government guarantees education to ALL children in this country, not only the ones that are college material, or that care about school or that have the resilience and support to overcome their disabilities and obstacles. children are not blueberries or wood or steel. we cannot scrap them if they do not meet our standards -nor do we have the right to judge them worthless. they are human beings and we need to quit treating them as though they are merely numbers.
i object to hillary clinton's strong position regarding gun control, but it is less important to me than the type of investment we make in the education and treatment of our children. barak obama will have to look for votes elsewhere.