Öğretmen

I’m here.

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I’m taking the month of August off from blogging (if I can bear it - but I think I can) to think about whether I want to continue at all. For about a million reasons. It would be lovely to go back to anonymity, or mostly-anonymity, but probably very difficult. I’m not sure I have anything new to say. More importantly, I’ve had some insight into what it’s like to find yourself or your workplace described on a blog that you didn’t know was being written, however the details may have been handled, openly or in disguise, positively or negatively, fairly or unfairly, subtly or bluntly. I am no longer certain what’s ethical, especially when writing about work, about other people, about other people’s children… What I perceive as stories fundamentally about me - about my experiences, challenges, fears - do seem to others like stories about them. How do you handle that when you’re not a journalist, just a friend, a colleague, an acquaintance? How do you handle that while still being true to what you want to say? I’m someone who writes starting from the details; I wonder what it would sound like to make all the details so vague as to give nothing away. I wonder if I would even want to read it any more, let alone write it.

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Apparently, school districts are reducing instructional time in subjects like science, social studies, art, and PE to make more time for reading and math instruction. Really?! Who knew?! Honestly, blogging is starting to feel like so much deja vu…

I still think that, especially after the earliest grades (K-2), cutting these other subjects is counterproductive and shortsighted. I’d like the next version of this study to examine the demographics of the school districts in relation to how much time they cut from subjects besides reading and math. My hypothesis is that high-poverty schools are probably doing the most crisis management, turning the school day almost entirely over to math and reading. And yes, those kids are behind, and yes, math and reading are the foundation on which other subjects build, but in the end, I suspect that this solution simply widens the gap - perhaps there are gains in math and reading, but at the cost of the students falling behind in other subjects which are important for success in high school and access to higher education. The rich get an enriching, wide-ranging curriculum, and the rest get math and reading, reading and math.

I strongly believe that science, social studies, art, and even PE can be taught in a way that meaningfully reinforces students’ reading and math skills and adds interest and inspiration to their school days.

But what interests me here is Spellings’ response:

According to the new survey, the average change in instructional time in elementary schools since the law’s enactment has been 140 additional minutes per week for reading, 87 additional minutes per week for math, 76 fewer minutes per week for social studies, 75 fewer minutes for science, 57 fewer minutes for art and 40 fewer minutes for gym.

In a statement, Secretary Spellings said the report’s scope was “too limited to draw broad conclusions.”

“In fact,” she said, “there is much evidence that shows schools are adding time to the school day in order to focus on reading and math, not cutting time from other subjects.”

While she’s probably right that schools are lengthening the school day, there seems to be an element of complete denial in the face of evidence here… I mean, schools are reporting spending less time on science. Less time is less time, even if you lengthen the school day as well.

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in an election for which some people changed their holiday plans to be at home (voting is compulsory and computerized and there are no absentee ballots). During the one day I was in Istanbul between vacation in Europe and returning home to the US, I saw that the city had caught election fever. The streets were festooned with banners and flags - it looked like every store was having opening day - campaign posters were plastered everywhere, and parties handed out flyers, gave speeches, and even blasted music in the main square. It must be an exciting time to be in Turkey… some say that the secular state is at stake, others say that real democracy is at stake… oddly enough, they’re not necessarily on the same side. Here’s an interesting illustration, the Young Civilians, a group that uses humor to challenge the status quo. The Turkish Daily News reports that “there are no exit polls and there is a ban on reporting results until 9 pm” (that’s 2 pm here in NYC). Can you imagine the US banning exit polls and early reporting of results?! (A link from Erkan Saka’s blog says that sale of alcohol has also been banned for the day, by the election commission).

Update: Preliminary results show the AKP easily leading, with a bit less than 50% of the vote. The BBC reports that the AKP was predicted to take 47% of the vote, which would easily win it the majority of seats in parliament. Their interpretation?

The early election was called after the generals warned that Turkey’s strict secular system was in danger and the army was prepared to step in to defend it. But now that ballot boxes have been opened, early results suggest many Turks do not see the AKP as a threat after all, our correspondent says.

But to me, the results say that while it is true that many Turks do not see the AKP as a threat, the opposition is also deeply divided and lacks a galvanizing candidate (sound familiar?). There are a dozen parties, the two leading opposition parties (MHP and CHP) winning only about 15% of the vote apiece, and 8 others garnering less than a percentage point! I don’t know how different these parties are from each other, or whether there would have been any chance of a single opposition party drawing these voters together to oppose the AKP, but it’s clear that as many Turks do not support AKP as do…

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Instead of just destroying them or dumping them somewhere unseen, the Hungarians preserved many of their statues from Communist times. Statue Park is pretty far outside of central Budapest. We visited in the afternoon after a visit to the House of Terror, a museum located in the building where torture and interrogations took place under both the Hungarian fascist regime (Arrow-Cross) and the communist regime. To citizens who lived in fear of their government, their neighbors, and even their own family members, these statues must once have imposing and intimidating. Statue Park displays them while denying them power. Their arms are raised to clear blue skies, they exhort no one to work harder for the state, they say what they have to say to empty fields.

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after all those weeks of fantasizing about the variety of cheeses, about brie and cheddar and feta and gruyeres and mozzarella and all the others that aren’t kaşarli and aren’t peynirli… and thinking about the places I was going to eat, the Ethiopian Thai Chinese Indian Italian Japanese restaurants that I love… I managed to get some sort of “homecomers diarrhea” the day after I arrived. After despairing that I am turning into a 55-year-old man with back pain and a box of Pepto in my bag, I finally gave in and took Cipro yesterday. So far, so good… but it’s kind of put me off my celebration of all things spicy and made me realize that I don’t know a single restaurant in NYC that serves bland, digestible food… but, on the bright side (assuming you’re not looking at it from the point of view of my wallet) I visited New York Cake and Baking Supply yesterday - one of those old school New York stores that’s just tables, bins and shelves full of specialty supplies. They have a reputation for grouchiness - which I didn’t experience - and the white-haired man working in the office has probably been there since 1972 when his dad handed him the keys… I spent gobs of money and now have three sizes of cake pans, a cake tester, cooling racks, a cake divider, pastry bags and tips, two special spatulas, parchment rounds, and any number of other treats for my kitchen. And cooling on the racks are two cake layers made using different egg substitutes. I’ll share the verdict on flax seed versus commercial egg replacer after they’ve been frosted and tasted…

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Having just carried an IKEA box on the subway from the East Village - where I bought an un-opened secondhand kitchen island - all the way to not-quite-Inwood, and its thin plastic straps having finally snapped only a half-block from my house, I can say that it isn’t New York in a physical sense that makes coming home so hard to do. I haven’t forgotten how to get from A to B or how to appreciate the other riders’ antics - and after one night of lying awake hating the noise and the orange half-light that shines through my windows even at 3 am, I can sleep right through it again. I walked through my old neighborhood noting the new and the old, feeling a little like Charlie having just arrived at the chocolate factory but also like I was just coming home again from a weekend away. Both. And it isn’t jet lag, I mean, maybe it is on a really deep level, but after two days I found myself sleeping at the normal times (if you can call the way we live our New York weekends normal) and tired for the usual reasons, not the expatriate ones. So why is it, that underneath all that good-to-be-home seeing-people-again this-is-where-I-belong hereness, the voices in my head that tell me I’m all alone on this Earth just keep getting louder and louder? I’m going to put that kitchen island together and hope that there’s some sense of solidity and maybe even a little peace to be found in it.

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Street sign, Budapest.

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I picked up Valentine from my friend’s house this afternoon.  She pretty much flipped out when we tried to put her in the carrier, left a few giant holes in my skin, and had to be wrapped in a towel before we could get her inside.  She continued to flip out the whole trip to my house - in my sister’s car - complete with heavy breathing, pitiful meows, a lot of shaking, and a murderous look in her eyes.  But now she’s been home only 5 minutes and she’s wandering around, exploring everything.  She’s not a hider, when it comes right down to it.  She’s pissed as anyone would be at being lifted from her comfortable life, taken on a terrifying journey, destination unknown, and all this by someone who essentially abandoned her a year ago: but now that she’s here, she’s out and about, checking out the new territory.  I like that in a cat.

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