Half Changed World

I spent a couple of hours yesterday knocking on doors for the Commonwealth Coalition, which is the main group that is organizing against Virginia’s anti-gay marriage (or anything that might vaguely resemble gay marriage constitutional amendment).

Mostly we were IDing voters on our side to target get-out-the-vote efforts, but we were also trying to raise the issue for people who might be undecided or not have heard about the measure.  Our strategy was mostly just to hand people the full text of the amendment and ask them to read it:

BALLOT QUESTION NUMBER 1

Question: Shall Article I (the Bill of Rights) of the Constitution of Virginia be amended to state:

"That only a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this Commonwealth and its political subdivisions.

This Commonwealth and its political subdivisions shall not create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance, or effects of marriage. Nor shall this Commonwealth or its political subdivisions create or recognize another union, partnership, or other legal status to which is assigned the rights, benefits, obligations, qualities, or effects of marriage."?

That second paragraph is so overreaching that you could just see the gears turning in people’s heads as they read it.

Here’s an ad that makes the same point.

***

I tivoed the Webb-Allen debate this morning but haven’t watched it yet.

I’m saddened to hear of the passing of Ann Richards, who was a bright light among politicians, full of good spirits as well as what Anna Quindlin called "a sense of fun, irreverence and general cussedness."  I hadn’t known until I read her obituary that she got her political start working for Sarah Weddington, of Roe v. Wade fame.

I see the President managed to say nice things about her, even though they were rival candidates for Governor of Texas, and Barbara Bush never forgave her for her the "born with a silver foot in his mouth" line*.  (In retrospect, it’s hard to believe that people complained about Bush Sr’s lack of articulateness — his son makes him look like an orator and a statesman.)

I had the chance to talk to Ann Richards on the phone once.  I had been helping interview candidates for a job at my old office, and I noticed that Richards was listed as a reference for one of them, a young woman who had worked in her law office while attending the LBJ school.  So I immediately volunteered to call her.  I left a message explaining why I was calling, and later that day Richards herself called me back.  Her first words about the applicant were "isn’t she just the cutest little thing?"  I thought this was hysterical, even though I’m sure the applicant would have cringed if she had known.

***

In writing this entry, I wondered whether Richards had said the line about Bush "being born on third and thinking he hit a triple" as well as the silver foot line.  It looks like credit for that one goes to Jim Hightower.  The best discussion of this appears to be a digression in the comments to this old post of Brad DeLong’s.  Google also taught me that the silver foot line was used as far back as 1966, and Heather Booth applied it to Bush a few weeks before Richards did.  But Richards did it on television.

***
Molly Ivins on Richards.

I can’t find the blog I read earlier today that had some great photos of Richards, so here’s an assortment via google images.

I was really pleased to pick up the paper yesterday and read that Harvard has decided to stop its early admissions program.  Yes, it’s just one school, and yes, as other school admissions directors were quick to point out, it’s easy to take the moral high ground when you’ve got little to lose.  (Harvard could easily select just as qualified a class out of only the people it rejects each year.)  But I do think it changes the terms of the discussion when it’s not just people looking in from outside who say "the current system is rotten" but also a major inside player.

James Fallows laid out the basic argument in the Atlantic five years ago, in a story called "The Early Decision Racket."  His major points were echoed by Harvard’s president in announcing the decision:

Mr. Bok said students who were more affluent and sophisticated were the ones most likely to apply for early admission. More than a third of Harvard’s students are accepted through early admission. In addition, he said many early admissions programs require students to lock in without being able to compare financial aid offerings from various colleges.

What Fallows also explained — and neither the NY Times nor Washington Post stories covering Harvard’s announcement picked up — is how the growth of early decision has been driven by the US News and World Report rankings of schools.  The more of your slots that you fill with students who have committed to attending, the fewer total students you need to admit to produce a given size class, and the more "selective" your school appears.  (And Fallows should know where the bodies are buried — at one point, he was in charge of the rankings.)

Non-binding early action programs — which is what Harvard used to have, and several of the other very prestigious schools have — aren’t as pernicious as early decision, but I think dropping early admissions entirely sends a much stronger message.  Maybe US News should award bonus points to schools that don’t have early admissions.  (I’d love to see the rankings go away entirely, but they’re a huge moneymaker for US News, so I’m not holding my breath.)

Update: Princeton joins in.

So I finally got around to reading Caitlin Flanagan’s To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife.  I sort of felt that it was my obligation, given the topics I cover on this blog.  I shouldn’t have bothered.  I’d read most of the essays that were adapted into the book, so there wasn’t much new here.  Moreover, Flanagan seems to have thought better of some of the most over-the-top lines in the essays; while I agree with the substance of the move, it takes away most of the elan in her writing.  And elan and a willingness to make breathtaking leaps are pretty much all that Flanagan ever has going for her.

Most notably, Flanagan now describes her Atlantic essay, "How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement," as "a convoluted and slightly insane cover story on the topic [social security benefits for nannies] for a national magazine."  The most infamous line from that piece — "when a mother works, something is lost" — has migrated into the preface, where Flanagan transforms it into a platitude:

"What few will admit — because it is painful, because it reveals the unpleasant truth that life presents a series of choices, each of which precludes a host of other attractive possibilities — is that whichever decision a woman makes, she will lose something of incalculable value."

I also don’t remember reading in the original article Flanagan’s description of summoning her nanny when her son was throwing up.  Flanagan writes that Paloma would

"literally run to his room, clean the sheets, change his pajamas, spread a clean towel on his pillow, feed him ice chips, sing to him.  I [Flanagan] would stand in the doorway, concerned, making funny faces at Patrick to cheer him up — the way my father did when I was sick and my mother was taking care of me." 

If it had been there, I can’t believe that any of us would have taken Flanagan’s attempt to claim the moral high ground as worthy of anything but snickering.  (I’d love to hear her try to explain why hiring someone to pick nits out of your kid’s hair is "perilously close to having someone… come in and service my husband on nights when I’d rather put on my flannel nightie and watch Dateline NBC" but calling someone to change him out of his pukey PJs is not.)

Overall, the main thing that jumped out at me reading the collection is how much better a writer the late Marjorie Williams was than Flanagan.  Compare these lines:

"The slip of paper [her 11th grade report card] was not a testament of past academic glory, only of a hard new fact: there was no longer anyone in the world who loved me enough to save my report cards and school pictures and Christmas poems.  I wasn’t anyone’s daughter anymore." [Flanagan]

and

"Yet still there are moments when it stops me in my tracks to realize that I will never peel an orange the way my mother once did for me.  And sometimes those moments are too much to bear." [Williams]

Or compare the "few will admit" passage above to Williams’ tart: "On a personal level, and as a matter of social policy, we often seem to be waiting for the No-Fault Fairy to come and explain at last how our deepest conflict can be managed away."

So, go read Sandy’s review of Flanagan, and then go read The Woman at the Washington Zoo.

It was grey and drizzling in DC today.  I told one of my colleagues that I was glad it was overcast and, without hesitation, she said "not another perfect blue sky."   Moxie says the sky was bright blue in New York, just like five years ago.

Some links:

• Photos at Vanity Fair, via Bitch PhD
• Kristie at The Dish on what it was like to work at 2 World Trade.
• Fred at Stone Court on the politics of 9/11 observations.
• RJ at Procrastinet on his September 11.
• The Onion: NYC Unveils 9/11 Memorial Hole.

I hope no one is offended by the inclusion of the Onion piece.  After September 11, for a long time I had this poem taped to my office door.

A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.
A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.
A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.
And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.
He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.
-- Yehuda Amichai

There’s been a series of interconnected posts around the blogosphere on how concerned parents should be about less than perfect schools, and I wanted to pull them all together.

I think my post on Debunking the Middle Class Myth started it off, at least in this round.  For anyone who’s new here, here’s more background on what we’re doing, and my worries about our choice.

LizardBreath at Unfogged linked to my post, writing:

"Now, some schools with a poorer student body are objectively worse, but they’re worse largely because of the middle-class flight. And the degree to which they’re worse seems to me to be wildly exaggerated — the inner-city immigrant neighborhood school I send my kids to is great."

The discussion there is up to about 300 comments.  Bitch PhD picked up on one of those comments, and recommends to nervous parents:

Try the school you’re afraid might be mediocre before you move out to that more expensive suburb, and see if it’s really actually better than you think for the particular personality of your particular kid.

This is essentially what we’re doing. 

But then Jackie at Esperanza responds:

I want the girls to be in the same school from kindergarten through eighth grade, because switching schools was very hard for me….  I really want my girls to start a school next year and not leave it again until they leave for high school. I want that security and stability for them, because losing it was very difficult for me.

I understand where she’s coming from, and agree that I’d rather not keep moving my boys around.  And if D was less socially gifted and adapatable, I might be less willing to take this risk.  But I’m quite confident that he won’t be traumatized if we move him in a year or two. 

SuperBabyMama also picked up on Bitch’s post, commenting that it’s reassuring to know that she’s not the only one stressing about school choices.  (And I really hope that her daughter thrives at her new school.)

I think this whole issue ties back to the point that I was trying to make on Monday, about how hard it can be to give up on being a perfect parent.  Knowing that the local school is less than perfect, how can I justify sending my kids to it?  Well, everything comes at a price.

If we opted out of our local elementary school into another one, D would have to ride the bus every day, which would eat into the time he has to play and do other things.  It would be harder for us to be involved with the school.  His friends would be less likely to live nearby, making casual playdates harder.  If all of his friends lived near each other, they might be less likely to make the extra effort to get together with him.

If we moved into a different district, it would almost certainly mean that we’d be further away from public transit.  My commute would be longer, and I’d have less time to spend on everything from being with the kids to reading to volunteering.

There are some really nice private schools in the area, but they’re really expensive.  We could maybe afford private school for one kid on my salary, if we gave up on the idea of saving for retirement.  It’s pretty hard for me to see how we could afford it for two (although we’d probably qualify for financial aid).  T could go back to work.  I could try to find a higher paying job.  And D would probably feel poor if he went to one of them, because many of his classmates would be better off.

None of these are inconceivable sacrifices, but I’d rather not do them if I don’t have to.  But it’s almost unheard of for an upper-middle-class American parent to say "Yup, my kid’s not going to the best school possible, but I think he’ll be ok."   

*******

More for the roundup (I’m going to keep updating this as long as I keep finding relevant posts):

• Jody at Raising WEG has a post on her family’s choices and a reaction to an article recommended here.
• Jennifer at Penguin Unearthed reports in on school choice, Australian style.
• Eileen Gale Kugler comments on my post about her book.  Cool.
• Amy at Mamazine is also settling for okay schools.
• Dawn at this woman’s work writes about deciding based on your values, rather than your goals.  (Not responding to the other posts in this series, but relevant anyway.)

The NY Times had an article this week (written by a friend of mine, as it happens) on how young children learn from television.  In particular, the article discusses a study that found that the more that children interacted with the television characters — Blue’s Clues is cited as particularly well-designed — the more they learned.

On vacation last week, I heard N shouting as he tried to open the heavy sliding door on our rental house.  It took me a minute to figure out that he was saying "Abre!" just like on Dora the Explorer.  He also loves to make a gate across the entry to our kitchen with his body, and make us do knock knock jokes before he’ll open.  So, yes, I’m sure he’s learning from television.  But I still cringe when we go to the bookstore and he shouts with his enthusiasm about finding books with Dora and Boots.  Why don’t you paint a scarlet "TV" on me while you’re at it, kid?

In spite of the bad rap that TV gets, I’m not convinced it’s bad for small children as long as it doesn’t replace reading.  A report came across my desk today about mother-toddler bookreading in low-income families which confirmed that reading to kids promotes language development.  As the abstract of the study says, "Path analyses show reciprocal and snowballing relations between maternal bookreading and children’s vocabulary."

One minor finding of the study is that moms are more likely to read to their first-born children than to later ones.  That should not come as a surprise to anyone who has more than one child.  I’m sure that younger children are also exposed to more television, and in particular, more non-educational television (e.g. D sure wasn’t watching KimPossible when he was 2).  I wonder if there’s a way to use that fact to improve research on the effects of TV on child development — most current research is flawed because it can’t distinguish between the effects of TV on children and the effects of having parents who allow or don’t allow lots of TV watching.

I’m not worried about N in any case.  We’ve been reading a lot of In the Night Kitchen lately, and he’s been walking around reciting long passages from it.  He particularly likes "I’m not the milk, and the milk’s not me.  I’m Mickey!"  Except that sometimes he says it as "I’m not the milk, and the milk’s not me.  I’m N—!"   or "I’m not the milk, and the milk’s not me.  I’m D—!"  and then he sneaks a peek over at D to wait for his reaction. 

Today’s book is Debunking the Middle-Class Myth: Why Diverse Schools Are Good for All Kids, by Eileen Gale Kugler.  It was recommended to me by a reader of this blog. Kugler is a parent whose children attended Annandale HS in Fairfax, one of the most diverse schools in the country, and she one by one she knocks down the myths that make parents fearful of sending their kids to such schools (e.g. the best schools are those with the highest test scores, diverse schools aren’t safe, etc).

I agree with most of Kugler’s overall points, especially her argument that that many of the people who are the quickest to dismiss diverse schools are the ones who haven’t set foot in them.  But I can’t say that I feel particularly more encouraged about our local elementary school after reading the book.  First, I’m not sure that it counts as diverse by Kulger’s standards, as it’s about 80 percent one race.  Second, Kugler is careful to say that "well-run" diverse schools can provide an excellent education to all students, and I’m not sure that our school qualifies as well-run.  (This isn’t a knock on the new principal, just on the lack of continuity.)

Overall, the major problem with the book is that I’m not sure who the audience for it is.  I have trouble imagining anyone reading it who isn’t already convinced of the value of diversity.  And the chapters on what school board members, superintendents, principals, teachers and parents can do are pretty simplistic.

***

Oh, yes, D did start kindergarten today. We did manage to get out the door on time (and I even made pancakes.)  His teacher is an older man with a ponytail who talks to the children in a very soft voice.   D was annoyed that it was pouring this morning when we walked him over, but was happy to sit down in the classroom and say goodbye to us.  In the afternoon, he didn’t tell us much about what they did today, but didn’t have any complaints.  (When I noticed that he had only eaten one of the two cookies I packed in his lunch box, and asked him why, he explained that by the time he finished his sandwich and the first cookie, it was nap time, but he didn’t seem particularly upset about it.)  In his backpack, we found a stack of forms to fill out and return (and yet another version of the supply list).  So far, so good, I guess.

***

I just read Sandra Tsing-Loh’s interview on the Atlantic online, which includes this wonderful quote illustrating Kugler’s point:

"I found that once we actually got to public school, everything I’d been told about it was wrong. That’s because we’ve gotten to the point now where in my social class—the media class in big cities—not one person I know professionally sends his or her kids to public school. So nobody actually knows what it’s like anymore. So they’re telling each other about a land, like the North Pole, which no one has set foot in."

I’d love to hear anyone in LA’s reaction to her "Scandalously Informal Guide to Los Angeles Schools."

In her comment on my post about my tri, Trishka wondered: "I don’t know how you manage to do all that you do — work full time, have two small children, volunteer, and to train for a triathlon on top of it."

The short answer is that I do it by not trying to be perfect at any one of the things I do, let alone all of them, and with a lot of help from my husband*.  This doesn’t strike me as that radical a concept, but it occurred to me that maybe it is.  In her comment on Landismom’s open letter to moms who have left the paid workforce, Mary Tsao wrote: "I couldn’t do the crazy busy lifestyle anymore. I didn’t feel I was doing any of my jobs (mom, wife, worker) to the best of my ability."

I’m willing to admit that I’d probably be better at my job if I didn’t have as much else going on in my life.  I’d do more reading in the evenings and more travelling.  And I wouldn’t have afternoons where I just found out that the principal of my kid’s school resigned and spend half my time emailing around to try to learn more.  I don’t think I could love my kids more than I do, but I could be less frazzled, have more time to spend in their classrooms or just hanging out, bake cookies more often. 

But I don’t think I’m short-changing either my boss or my kids.  At both work and home, I feel like I’ve got a good grip on what’s necessary, what’s nice, and what’s icing on the cake.   (For example, in this household, reading a story at bedtime is necessary; a bath every night is icing on the cake.) And I’ve got enough flexibility at both ends, that I’ve never felt like I’ve had to sacrifice something that’s necessary, and often — although not always — get to do the nice things too.

Running provides a good analogy.  I know that I’m a far better runner when I run 20 miles a week than when I run 5 or 10.  And I’m a better runner when I run 40 than when I run 20, but the improvements are more subtle, and only really matter if I’m trying to set a personal record or to qualify for Boston.  And above about 50 miles a week, additional training becomes counterproductive — my body starts to protest, and there’s a real risk that I’m going to injure myself. 

There are people who are happy focusing all their energy in one part of their life; I’m just not one of them.  Barbara Sher calls people like me "scanners" and has a new book out called "Refuse to Choose! A revolutionary program for doing everything that you love."  For years, I’ve been carrying around two quotes from Composing a Life, by Mary Catherine Bateson:

"Composing a life is a little like making a Middle Eastern pastry, in which the butter must be layered in by repeated folding, or like making a samurai sword, whose layers of differently tempered metal are folded over and over."

. . . and this:

"It would be easier to live with a greater clarity of ambition, to follow
goals that beckon toward a single upward progression. But perhaps
what women have to offer in the world today . . lies in the very rejection of forced choices: work or home, strength or vulnerability, caring or competition, trust or questioning. "

"We see achievement as purposeful and monolithic, like the sculpting
of a massive tree trunk . . . rather than something crafted from odds
and ends, like a patchwork quilt, and lovingly used to warm different
nights and bodies."

*Amended to acknowledge, as Laura pointed out, that I also get an enormous amount of support from T, who is at home with the kids.  I was not meaning to downplay his role in keeping this family going, or to suggest to anyone who feels that she’s in over her head that the problem is her perfectionism.  I recognize that with special needs kids, inflexible jobs, or lack of family support, something may well have to give.  I wrote this post because I’m fascinated by how hard it is to admit that doing lots of things means that I’m often not doing the best at any of them.   And in particular by how hard it is to let go of the idea of being the "perfect mother" — even when there’s another parent at home.  This may deserve a post of its own.

I can’t figure out how to handle my to-read pile at work.  If I leave it in one undifferentiated mass, I never get to the bottom of it, and important things get swallowed up.  If I go ahead and file things, I forget about them because they’re out of sight.  If I file them but make a list of what I want to read, I’m afraid I’ll spend all my time futzing around with the list and never getting anything done.  If I make lots of piles, it works until I get busy with something else, and then the piles run into each other and I’m back where I started.

And then there are all the emails I get with links to reports that I might want to read.  When I click through, and determine that I am interested in something, but it’s not the highest priority thing for me to read right then, what should I do with the email?  I wind up doing this multiple times with the same emails, which I know isn’t efficient.

And this is without even getting into the pile of books next to my bed.

What do you do, dear readers?  Does anyone have a strategy that really works?