TLG has been teaching himself to sing, OLC has been practicing writing and a little Spanish, and StrongBaby has reached the dancing-on-the-coffee-table stage of babyhood.

I’ve been reading off and on; just finished Thomas Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed. I liked this quote:

Many of these “thinking people” could more accurately be characterized as articulate people, as people whose verbal nimbleness can elude both evidence and logic. This can be a fatal talent, when it supplies the crucial insulation from reality behind many historic catastrophes.

It reminds me of what I told MFH about an NPR program we were listening to in the car: “These people think they’re smart, but they’re not!”

I don’t entirely agree with Sowell in this book; conservatism has had its own misguided crusades, and most of our present ills have bipartisan roots.

I’ve also been doing some sewing off and on: two tablecloth skirts done, two to go. More than a year ago I was given a better sewing machine than my crotchety old one, and I finally took the time to figure out how to run it. Still, I don’t find sewing particularly relaxing.

I noticed that the city charges as much in fees on our electric bill as the state does in sales tax–effectively a double sales tax. We’re already paying for one new stadium via sales taxes here, and it looks like we’ll be paying for another one soon. This is the time of year when the “half of all Americans pay no taxes!!!” articles start to come out, and it is simply not true, or at least truly not as simple as the headlines try to make it sound.

I’ve also started to notice that I am one of the oldest moms with babies at the parks and playgrounds. I’m starting to wonder how many of my high school classmates have become grandparents already. Last year, I somehow miscalculated my age, and even now I keep thinking that I am a year older than I really am.

I’ve been thinking about writing some fiction, and it has been comforting to learn just how much some novelists have incorporated elements of their personal experiences into their stories. Julia Nunes’s “To the Damsels: Run” song (the sound isn’t the greatest since this is a live version) keeps running through my head; more for a character that I’m thinking up than for me:

I can’t be saved,

I’m not so frail

Fighting my battles tooth and nail

Searching for truth to no avail

I’ve been tweaking household routines since we moved, and it has occurred to me that Wash Laundry and Put Clean Laundry Away really need to be two separate tasks on the chore list.

TLG and StrongBaby recently celebrated birthdays. StrongBaby likes to sit on the bottom step of our kitchen stepstool, and use the second step as a table. It seems like TLG has been two years old for most of his life, but finally he has made it to three.

“There was a sense the district was a confederation of schools as opposed to a school system,” said school board Vice Chairwoman Jean O’Connell. “There needed to be more central control in the delivery of instruction.”

DDoA points out how the socialists prefer top-down control by unelected bureaucrats, but St. Paul is largely dominated by liberals anyway.

The district also charged a task force of administrators, teachers and parents with fine-tuning the district’s managed instruction plan. Among its first orders of business this fall: scrapping the term “managed instruction.”

….the managed instruction team renamed itself the aligned learning task force….

DDoA mentions the rebranding of ill-favored educational fads for another go-around.

Richard Ingersoll, a nationally recognized expert on teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, said adopting scripted curriculums and rigid lesson formulas can prop up novice and struggling teachers. But it also demoralizes and drives out a district’s most creative educators.

“You can’t treat education like a supermarket,” he said. “Kids aren’t products. They are living, growing beings, and they vary.”

DDoA makes it clear that the conversion of human children into commodities (laborers) has been the actual aim of our educational system for many decades now, and that applying manufacturing methods and quality standards to this process has been going on for quite some time.

I’m tempted to call managed instruction “No Teacher Left Behind”–the rotten teachers get a great deal of handholding, all they have to do is hit their marks and say their lines, while the good and great teachers get shackled into a mind- and soul-numbing routine, with no freedom to exercise their gifts. St. Paul Public Schools certainly seems to be doing its best to make sure no one gets a really good education there. (Mitch has occasionally posted some first-hand experiences with St. Paul.)

MFH and I were discussing our public school educations. I could, off the top of my head, think of at least ten outstanding teachers that I had; he could only remember one or two. In my school system, even the bad teachers could teach, it was more their personalities or their teaching styles that I didn’t like.

Also, I recall my government teacher, by the sixth period of the day, delivering his lecture in all sorts of politically incorrect accents. Making him teach from someone else’s script instead of his own wouldn’t change that.

The BEEP coalition roundly won the school board election. Last night we were driving around, and went past a gated community of huge houses, with a big manned gatehouse and iron gates; over the top even for our area. “Those people are in our school district,” MFH commented.

StrongBaby is now in 12-month clothes (almost seven months old) and is starting to try to cruise.

(NYT article)

There has been a huge local controversy for more than a year. The demographics of the suburb, as it ages out of its first wave of suburbanization, are shifting to largely empty-nesters and immigrants; the immigrants are not evenly distributed across the district, being clustered in low-income and subsidized housing, which is putting some of the elementary schools in jeopardy of not meeting NCLB standards, in an otherwise very highly-ranked school district. Overall, enrollment is on the decline, particularly in the most-well-off areas–leaving some elementary schools well below capacity.

The recently departed superintendent’s and current school board’s solution was to reconfigure the elementary schools to K-6, and redraw the boundary lines for the elementary schools to better distribute low-income students, and students in general. There is a slight wrinkle in drawing the lines: it is slightly illegal to bus students around on the basis of race, so as a proxy they have been using the Free and Reduced Price Lunch population, which is about 20% of the student population in the district (where the median household income is greater than $90,000).

The boundary change process was handled very poorly. The superintendent claimed that there was good communication with the community; no, there wasn’t: we never heard anything about it until everything was pretty much decided. Surely parents of potential future students are stakeholders, too. It has been very divisive: Rich whites are aghast that their children will have to go to school with poor, brown immigrants; they live in the $uburb$ to avoid that very thing. Some of these parents have put together a Facebook page and (I think) also a non-profit organization, and once threatened legal action against the district. The number of local students open-enrolling into the next district north has increased by one or two hundred, which is apparently hurting the district in the pocketbook a bit. I don’t know that the immigrants had much input into the process at all. (The Somalis at least have chosen to address their part of the achievement gap by opening their own after-school tutoring program. Good for them.) Poorer whites (us) are offended at being treated like pawns by both the rich whites and the diversity-oriented school leadership, merely for living in the wrong socioeconomic niche, even if for the right reasons (like being able to stay home with one’s children, or to get one’s children out of Minneapolis and into a better school system). My immediate neighborhood got divided up among three different elementary schools; if OLC were going to school, she would be literally going the extra mile, each way, every day, for no damn good at all as far as spreading the diversity goes.

My opinion is that sooner or later we are going to have to come to grips with the realities and consequences of our demographics, and stop obscuring the real issues. How many times recently have I read discussions of poverty or achievement gaps in Minnesota that contained nary a mention of immigration?–In a state that is bringing in refugees by the tens of thousands every year. This school board fight is only a microcosmic example.

The local newspaper, which opposed the boundary change, has been running a long series of interviews with the school board candidates. Very interesting.

So I am watching this phenomenon (second-hand) a little more carefully than most news events. Probably it will be shown to be premature, and ineffectual, but it may also be an early step toward the right track.

I’ve about had it with both the Democratic and the Republican party lately–the Democrats ignore personal responsibility (it’s always The Man’s fault), while the Republicans ignore systemic injustice (how are all those hippies supposed to “Get a job!” when we are several million jobs short in this country right now??).

The United States has a confidence problem: a nation long defined by irrational exuberance has turned gloomy about tomorrow. Consumers are holding back, businesses are suffering and the economy is barely growing.

There are good reasons for gloom — incomes have declined, many people cannot find jobs, few trust the government to make things better — but as Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, noted earlier this year, those problems are not sufficient to explain the depth of the funk.

As if this just happened last week.

The author attempts to link the economic downturn solely to the drop in housing prices by a “wealth effect” decline in spending directly correlated to the decline in value. I’m not sure why the author totally ignores the drop in the values of retirement savings, another component of wealth. Also, our leaders have tried to bolster our economy with incredible amounts of taxpayer money. They have not succeeded.

It remains the prevailing view of economic policy makers that economic activity will eventually return to the same trajectory as before the recession. Mr. Bernanke and others have said that they see no evidence of any permanent change in the economy. Previous bouts of economic pessimism, as in the early 1980s and early 1990s, went away once growth picked up.

The depth of the funk is directly correlated to the depth of De Nile exhibited by our irrationally exuberant leaders. :eyeroll There is no way out of this mess but through it, and no way through it without coming to grips with Reality. The trajectory before the recession was steepened by a huge, overinflated bubble. And this was only the last bubble in a whole series of bubbles. We still have a couple more to go. The transition to an economy not based on bubbles is a painful one, and one that we have postponed for far, far too long.

There is also the unending growth of our bloated government and financial sectors to consider…Occupy Wall Street is only a small demonstration of the growing unrest.

Yes, builders and stonecutters and granite countertop installers and pool supply dealers and appliance salesmen are doing very poorly in this economy. Their income depended on an expanding housing bubble. That is gone now.

My only gloom about home prices is that they still aren’t low enough for me yet; there’s nothing affordable but meth houses around here.

The striking thing about the book is the diversity of experiences. Partly because Terkel took a very broad cross-section of society to interview, but also because not everyone had a hard time during the Great Depression. Some people managed to do very well; others rarely had two dimes to rub together. Some people were miserable, while some people had a good time even without any money. Some people had already been poor before the Great Depression, but others had a great deal more to lose, and many of them did.

There was also a broad diversity of character manifested in the hard times: from incredible charity to incredible corruption. It brought out the best in some people, and the worst in others.