Half Changed World

In general, when the boys are watching TV, T. lets them alternate choosing what to watch (from the menu of shows that we approve and have TiVo’d).  I sometimes follow that pattern, sometimes tell them that if they can’t agree on something, there won’t be any TV watching.

Lately, D has figured out that he can improve his bargaining position by offering side deals, or bribes.  So, tonight he offered N one of his water bottles for choosing Tom & Jerry over Max and Ruby.  N happily accepted.  Yesterday the price was a nickel.

I’m not sure why this bothers me.  Both boys were happy with the deal, and neither one gave up something irreplaceable.   (D has other water bottles; N will get another chance to pick a show in a day or so.)  And they’re learning how to negotiate without our intervention, as suggested in Siblings without Rivalry.    But I still feel like something’s wrong with this picture.

A short post, since Logan airport was fogged in last night, and I wound up taking the overnight train home and not getting much sleep.

While I was sitting around Logan waiting to see if my flight was going to be canceled, I finally got to watch Little Children, which I had out from Netflix.  I’m not sure it quite came together as a movie, but some of the individual scenes — the pool scene with the sex offender, the book club — are so perfect that they were almost painful to watch.  (The sex scenes are also sufficiently graphic that I was more than a little uncomfortable watching them in the middle of a crowded airport.)

I read the book of Little Children shortly after it was released* and I spent much of the movie comparing it with the book.  Sarah and Brad are both more convincing characters in the book, and their relationship is far less about the sex.  (In the movie, they’re struggling to keep their hands off of each other from the beginning; as I read the book, they’re lonely souls looking for companionship, and are themselves surprised when it turns into something else.**)

I think that the narration in the movie, which I hated, is an attempt to include some of their internal monologues.  But the balance between the Sarah-Brad plot and the Larry-Ronnie plot works better in the movie.  Watching the movie made me want to re-read the book to figure out exactly what they moved around.

* I had to read the book — a) one of the main characters is a SAHD, and b) I took a writing class with Tom Perrotta in college.

** I still hate the plot contrivance of having Brad always use a double stroller even though he only has the one kid.  No one would use a double jog stroller if he didn’t have to.  They corner like a constipated elephant.

Someone on one of my email lists posted a link to WalkScore which is a google maps based site that attempts to measure how walkable a neighborhood is, mostly based on the proximity of various places you might want to go (stores, schools, parks, etc).

Our new house scores a 25 out of 100, right between not walkable and driving only.  I think that’s probably fair, although my subjective rating is mostly based on the things that didn’t make it into their scoring system.  There are a bunch of things we go to that are within a mile, and they seem to assume that people won’t walk that far.  I’m happy to walk that far, but I’m not willing to cross Columbia Pike other than with a stoplight, even when there’s a marked crosswalk.  D’s elementary school is about 1/2 a mile away, but there’s no sidewalks for part of it, so the county provides a bus.  Lots of things are in biking distance, although I’m not sure I’d be willing to bike the places I won’t walk, and the hills are brutal.

Our old house scores an 83, which I think is about right, maybe a bit low.  The first time I entered the address in NYC where I grew up (a week or so ago), it gave me a 97 or 98, which seemed like proof that you couldn’t get a 100 using their algorithm.  But I just tried again, and it spit back a score of 100, so I guess they fixed that glitch.

I’d love to see some analysis of the distribution of the population of the US across their index.  My guess is that no more than 5 to 10 percent of the US lives in places that score as very walkable (70 or higher), and that probably 1/3 of those who do live in New York City.

I wanted to pick up on Dave S’ last comment about the role of peer groups and selection in schools. There’s no doubt in my mind that KIPP schools and their like have a real advantage over the local public schools in their areas, in that their students have parents who value education enough to send them to KIPP.  That doesn’t mean that they’re not providing value-added — in most cases, the local schools were failing with those exact same students.  But it does mean that if you extended the school day at all high-poverty schools and otherwise copied the KIPP model, you probably wouldn’t get the same results.

And our old school suffered from negative selection — it’s not just that the parents hadn’t made a deliberate effort to send their kids there, but that any parent who didn’t want their kid to attend it could opt out.  And this was true long before NCLB, since it was a "focus" school and Alexandria schools allow parents to opt out of any of the focus schools (as well as out of the schools with a year-round calendar). So there was a real shortage of involved parents.  For example, when the school finally acknowledged that D’s class was having a new teacher in February, and invited us in to meet her, I was the only parent to come to the event.

Some of this is about class and race — JHAA’s student population is 80 percent low-income and 92 percent non-white, and that alone would scare off some white-middle class parents even if it were the best run school in the city (and it’s not).  (See this paper for a discussion of how parents "may prefer poorly run schools with good peer groups over those
that are more effective but enroll worse students" and The Failures of Integration for data on how rare it is for whites to live in majority non-white areas.)

But from listening to people around the neighborhood, I think that highly involved black parents were even less willing to send their kids to the school than highly involved white parents.  With a few exceptions (including the PTA president), they were less confident that their kids would do fine academically regardless of the problems with the school, and so less willing to take chances. 

Alexandria’s wealthy enough, and supportive enough of education, that the school had plenty of resources even without the support of an active group of parents — it’s not like DC, where PTA fundraising supports things like music teachers.  But I do think the lack of a core group of involved parents makes a difference, in things from the availability of volunteers to pull events together, to the amount of energy that teachers need to spend on maintaining order in the classroom.

I don’t know what can be done to reverse this pattern — just raising the test scores won’t do it.  The district for the school is so spread out — some say gerrymandered — that very few people see it as their neighborhood school.

****

On a related note, we just registered D for his new school.  As proof of address, they wouldn’t take utility bills — they want to see the deed to your house, your rental agreement, or a notarized letter from the owner or leaseholder that you live there.  I’d never heard of such a policy.

Inspired by Hornby, I’m going to write about whatever it is I’m actually reading, even if I don’t have anything earthshattering to say about it.  And this week, what I read is The Jane Austen Book Club, by Karen Joy Fowler.  I didn’t especially love it, although it was good enough that I read it in a few days (even with Hornby’s advice to stop reading books that you’re not enjoying ringing in my ears).  I have to admit that 2/3 of the way through it, I was still flipping back to try to keep the characters straight in my head, which is never a good sign.  But I know other people who liked it, and it got a truly glowing Washington Post review, so I guess it’s a matter about which rational people can reasonably disagree.*

One of Hornby’s running jokes in his Believer columns is that they won’t let him say anything nasty about the books he’s reviewing (although he seems to have won an exception to that policy for The Dirt.)**

I was reminded of the wisdom of such a policy last week when I discovered that not only had Jo Walton read my discussion of Farthing and alternative history, she linked to it from her blog.  This isn’t the first time that a writer has read/commented on my post about a book she wrote — thanks to the wonders of Google, mentioning someone by full name is a semi-reliable way of getting their attention.  I’m not going to only write about books I adored, but it’s a good reminder not to write anything that I would be ashamed to have the author read.

* I’ll offer a prize to anyone other than my husband who can identify the source that this is a reference to.  I’ve got a stack of review copies that I’m willing to give away.  (If no one gets it by next week, I’ll reveal the answer.)

** Oh, Genevieve deserves a prize too for explaining the title of Housekeeping versus the Dirt to me.  Give me a way to contact you if you want something.

Here’s the latest cartoon for my office’s caption contest:

Vote here for your favorite caption.

***

One of my friends said that she thought the cartoon was anti-working parent.  I can see where she’s coming from — the idea that the baby is being neglected because the parents are so busy.  But that certainly wasn’t our intent.  We thought of it more as a comment on non-family friendly work environments, and how frazzled parents are as a result. (Heck, even with T. home full-time, I still often feel like we’re running a relay, passing the parenting baton as we race past each other.)

These cartoons are an attempt to be lighthearted about serious subjects, to start conversations outside our usual wonkish circles.  But they’re inherently a bit ambiguous, with potential for varying interpretations — someone told me she thought one of the captions in our first contest was anti-immigrant.

The New York Times ran a bunch of letters in response to Judith Warner’s column on the Pew report about work-family preferences.

Of the 5 letters:

• 2 pointed out that many older workers also want part-time work as an alternative to working full-time or retiring all the way;
• 2 noted that fathers might want to work part-time as well to spend more time with their families; and
• 1 made Joan Williams’ argument that discriminatory treatment of part-time workers should be treated as sex discrimination under a disparate impact argument.

So it’s not like we’re out on the radical fringe here.  But while the Times will publish these letters, none of this ever seems to make it into the articles themselves.

On a related note, the New America Foundation is busily arguing for removing responsibility for health insurance and retirement from employers, and creating what they call a "citizen-based social contract."  One of their arguments is that if everyone has access to these benefits independent of their jobs, more people will be able to work part-time and spend more time with their families, develop small businesses on the side, etc.  I do think it would help, but not as much as they suggest.  As Jennifer has pointed out here before, Australia does have national health insurance, and they have many of the same issues over part-time jobs that we do here in the US.

It seems like talk about divorce is popping up on a bunch of parenting blogs, from RebelDad to the Business Week Working Parents blog.  I just don’t have the energy/time right now to write the long thoughtful post I want to about divorce, so I’m just going to put out some links and initial thoughts.

The main point that I want to make is that the number that often gets tossed around about divorce rates — that 50 percent of marriages end in divorce — just isn’t true.  It was a projection based on looking at what if the increase in divorce rates in the 70s continued at that pace, and in fact, the divorce rates have fallen since then.  Moreover, the most significant trend is that the divorce rates have fallen much faster among more educated individuals than among less educated individuals.

For example, of the women with at least a 4-year college degree who
married between 1990 and 1994, only about 17 percent were divorced
within 10 years.  For women without a HS degree, the figure is nearly
40 percent.  I don’t think either the decline in overall divorce rates since the
1970s or the increasing class gap in the rates has penetrated into the
general consciousness.

[For those of you interested in the research: Here’s a powerpoint presentation by Steven Martin that goes through the analysis, and here’s the full paper of his research on the "divorce divide".  And here’s a paper by David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks that talks about it in the context of single parenting more broadly.]

I think it’s a good idea to think about the future and to take risks into account when making your choices. But I don’t think the Leslie Bennetts of the world are doing people a favor by trying to generate hysteria over the risk of divorce, especially for highly educated women.

I picked up this book in the library because of the title.  As longtime readers of this blog know, I’m mildly obsessed with how people think about housework (as opposed to being obsessed with doing it, which I’m clearly not).  And then I saw it was by Nick Hornby, and figured that it was worth reading.

Well, the book has nothing to do with housekeeping.  It’s about books.  Specifically, the full title is Housekeeping vs. The Dirt: Fourteen Months of Massively Witty Adventures in reading.  It’s a compilation of Hornby’s columns for the Believer, in which he lists the books he’s bought in the past month, what he’s actually read, and chats a bit about them.  And to pad the book out (it’s still only 150 pages), there are excerpts from a few of the books that he discussed and particularly liked.

It’s great fun.  I’ve suspected from reading Hornby’s novels that he’d be great fun to hang out in a bar with, but now I think he’d rise onto my short list of people I’d want to be stuck on an elevator with.  I’ve read a few of the books he discusses, but have never heard of at least half of them. He makes me want to read most of them, but doesn’t make me feel guilty for not having done so.  (And in fact, in the preface, he makes a passionate case for reading books that you think you’ll like, not books that you think you ought to read, or worse, books that other people think you ought to read.)  And he freely admits to buying books and then never quite getting around to reading them.

And Hornby’s got a sense of humor that appeals to me (although the recurring joke about the editors at The Believer censoring his columns wears thin).  He writes about hunting down a book that he thinks his son will enjoy "only to be repaid with a soul-crushing enthusiasm, when I would have infinitely preferred a polite, mild and temporary interest.  Needless to say, I won’t be taking that sort of trouble again."  In discussing Candide, he notes that "if ever anyone lived in an age that had no need for a savage debunking of optimism, it is us.  We believe that everything everywhere is awful, all the time.  In fact, Voltaire was one of the people who first pointed it out, and he was so successful that we find ourselves in desperate need of a Pangloss in our lives."

So, in honor of Hornby, what stuff have I been reading?  Well, Harry Potter, for one.  I bought it Saturday afternoon and finished it over the weekend, mostly by staying up far later than I should have.  I have to admit that I kept reading in part because I wanted to know how it ended, but mostly because I wanted to be able to hang out with my blog friends and hear what they thought of it.  And I’m in the middle of an excellent mystery called Case Histories that I had never heard of, but found on the book swap shelf at work .

(I just noticed that Hornby actually mentions Case Histories, but all he says about it is that it’s set on streets where he used to live.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about a couple of bloggers lately.  I’ve never met either one in person, but their posts have gotten under my skin.

Flea, at One Good Thing, wrote a pair of posts this month about her family’s experiences with poverty, bankruptcy, and nearly getting arrested for money laundering.  As she notes,  she didn’t post about it much while it was going on.   She left enough slip that regular readers could tell that they were having some trouble, but I had no idea how bad it had gotten.  (For what it’s worth, Flea is my nominee for most likely to write that Great American Health Insurance Novel that Phantom Scribbler suggested.)

Meanwhile, a month ago, WhyMommy at Toddler Planet was posting about her mother-in-law’s surgery for breast cancer.  Less than a week later, she was reporting her own breast cancer diagnosis.  She’s been posting regularly about what it’s like to have chemo, her feelings, plans, and more.

As I said, I haven’t met either of these women in person.  I don’t know what they look like.  It’s not likely, but WhyMommy could be the woman behind me on the grocery store line.  Or, more probably, that woman has her own set of issues on her mind — a shadow on a x-ray, a teenager failing all her classes, overdue bills, yet another miscarriage, a parent who doesn’t want to go into a nursing home but needs more help that she can provide, a job that may not be there next month.

No one gets a free pass through life.  And people don’t have flashing signs over their heads that tell us what they’re dealing with. So it’s probably safe to assume that who ever you’re bumping into, they’re probably having a hard day.