Medical Religion

another case of the court stepping in to remove a child from his parents for their choice not to treat the child's cancer with chemicals and radiation.  in this instance, the family is actually Catholic, not a religious belief that i can remember hearing about previously in connection with the refusal of Western medicine.

another case of Western medical religion being the established religion of our capitalist country.  those who make the money make the rules, and this is apparently all the more true when the commodity being controlled is the youth - as youth who don't consume, are less likely to grow up to be adults who consume. 

oddly enough, while religion doesn't excuse this family from chemotherapy or radiation treatment, and in fact has led to a warrant for arrest of the mother, religious reasons are perfectly acceptable as the reason of choice for the continuation of male genital mutilation.

Some Older Rants and Ramblings on Education

10/01/07

Sucking the Life

out of every American child.  That is the job of school as far as I can tell. Useless, for the most part, except to class students and teach them the parameters of their boxes.  Why do I do this?  Who knows?  I thought it was to serve, but I can't serve the Man, and I'm not violent enough to overthrow him, and I'm not tenured so I don't stand a chance in an head-on collision.

Of course, to make tenure, I'd have to become more apathetic than I am.  And probably become a better teacher than I am, too.

At any rate, I can't leave because I can't sacrifice the youth of my neighborhood and the world to the corporate takeover and racist monopoly that is public school, but I can't stay and remain sane or happy or even angry enough to keep up the good fight.

3/30/08

We the People

My anger and indignation does nothing to change the status quo or to move my students to action.  They acquiesce in their passivity at their lot, accepting of the piped and patented dreams of Hip Hop Star, Super Ball player, super model.  Even their more realistic aspirations of daycare provider, pediatrician, or barber do nothing to change their embargoed neighborhoods, the slanted news of their fragile grip on social acceptance outside their Southside hoods.

Test prep and "good" scores, even if – on the off chance – they improve the students' ability to read, do not manage to make the students read politically.  And "right" answers don't improve job ability, don't change policies, don't stop kids from having kids and sucking tainted sustenance out of the government bottle.  Rather than promoting the breast and providing for the community within the community by the community, our schools ship out the most promising and break the rest.  Assimilation of black pop culture into the mainstream allows for an amount of marginalized existence by the upcoming generation, a false promise and empty hope of participation in a country and politic whose "people" still use rhetoric to exclude with plural pronouns.

4/07/08

Lack Lustre

I can raise my expectations and offer AP courses, but I find the lack of discipline still a thorn in my side.  We have to demand respect to give respect, and as with all teenagers, one misstep and our integrity as adults and white and people in power is questioned.  

            As it ought to be, possibly.

            But that does not make the ensuing chaos any easier to teach in, or the noise and quieter, or the playfulness any less violent.  Introducing excerpts from King or Ghandi, Baker, Souljah, El-Shabazz, Baraka, Common, Kenye, Nas, Jackson, Obama…  All lack luster speeches and ancient happenings in the stop action, never-ending ad that is the excitement of drive-bys and juke parties, new Nikes every few months to stay up with the Joneses.  Teachers don't change the world here, and our students may make pop culture on a daily basis, but they don't make much of a world worth passing on to their kids.

4/11/08

We Are Jaded

We come and complain there are no bagels in the breakfast spread.  Coffee and 100% juice, fresh fruit and pastries is not enough for us.  There is indignant disbelief where there are no meals provided.  We do not enter the school cafeterias regularly or decry the food pyramid slop that our kids and students are offered twice a day for their duration in our institution, though.  Nor do we do more than shake our heads in distanced pity when snow days go unused because "too many kids get fed at school."  Is this because we are paid employees and want our fringe benefits?  Or is it because our students do not complain loudly enough and why should we do it for them?  Or because we have no more time to devote, the most basic of Maslow's hierarchy overlooked for drill and kill on Bloom's?  Or is it because we pick battles we face daily, and our absence in the cafeteria necessarily precludes us from joining in the fight to feed our students well enough that we would eat with them?

            We clap apathetically, lackluster at the young students performance.  Their vignette of Ceasar Chavez touching, but old hat for us.  We collectively sigh, whisper amongst each other for the next interesting bang, too many biding their time and checking their watchers, waiting for the moment when the CPDU forms come out and we can leave.  How many are counting down days to summer?  Freedom…paid days of vacation…No students…Quiet…  The politics and intrigue of school left behind for twelve short weeks.  Are we something different than our students, the way we hold ourselves aloof and above our young charges?  Or are we but an older model of the same mold?  Our disinterest because we see our own younger, hopeful selves continually quashed by our own hand each day we enter the classroom and perpetuate this institution of school?

 

Oh!  And we are jaded!  There is nothing new to us.  Pay it forward has become a Hollywood hit with big blue eyes and a ten-year-olds plaintive voice, the dying hero.  It is tragic to teach the same program day in, year out, to lose the newness of an idea and forget that every child has an intense yearning to ask original questions and be answered as though she is the first, unique one to ask.

Child Soldiers

In Chicago, between September 2007 and December 2008, 508 students were shot. That's more than 1 per day for those who don't want to do the math.
Violence is a rampant disease in the urban centers of this country, and all we get are new assault rifles for the police. Weapons that can shoot precisely up to 2 miles, through walls and cars. Because the police are pulling these same weapons off the streets at the rate of more than 1 per day. 1 assault rifle, 1 injured or dead child. How many more children will be injured or killed with the police now legally carrying these weapons?

Violence is not something that humans tend toward naturally. Not in a killing kind of way. Of all the moms I know who mother boys, they say hands down that their boys figure out how to make guns or weapons out of anything, even in pacifist homes. But they all say that this violence is not the same as the numbness and deliberate killing done by and to the children on the streets of Chicago. That type of violence has to be deliberately inculcated in children so that they might be used as soldiers on the streets.

Yes, violence is something that is taught. And it is not an easy lesson to swallow, as our natural instinct is to survive unscathed -- flight first.

While the media and the police feed the population the idea that bigger weapons and more protections are needed on the streets of the urban landscape, I can't help but see footage from our own nightly news sources, as well as various African and South Asian countries when this is brought up. Children hand-cuffed and led by the dozens into paddy wagons. Children scattering into the night as one in their midst holds a hand gun. Children holding guns aimed at tanks. Children planting hand made mines as the finely outfitted soldiers bear down. Children starving and surviving as they have been taught in order to outsmart and outlive the government whose guns and numbers are bigger.

No, bigger guns are not what we need. Might does not make right, and right cannot be enforced through the use of might.

What we face is patriarchal and hierarchal society, in which those on top get to the top by standing on those on the bottom. In order to rise, then, those on the bottom have to learn and use the tactics they see used by the oppressors. And while the US may have a pretty vision and a value system upon which we claim our moral high ground, it has been proven repeatedly that our words are just words, that we don't walk the talk, and that our citizenship will never be all inclusive in an egalitarian way. As long as we prefer to let might make right, to let our education system stigmatize and label us into classes, to perpetuate a caste system based not only on money but on the color of skin and the straightness of hair and the use of certain dialect, we cannot possibly expect that our children will be anything but soldiers in this war we wage against ourselves. It doesn't take a degree and statistics to see that our wars "on Poverty" and "on Drugs" are just economic fictions, created to boost some while keeping others in their place at the foot of the pyramid.

Our children are soldiers, fighting to get a pair of boots. Boots with which they can pull themselves up with, with which they can get a good grip on the heads and backs of those they will have to climb up and over in order to reach the top.

Family

I look at recent photos of siblings from one side of my family, and find that i don't know who they are.  they aren't the kind of boys and girls and women who would stop me on the street or in a room and beg my introduction.  they don't look deep-down happy to be themselves.  they just don't look like people like me.

whatever that means.

i look at old pictures of my children and friends, my lovers and houses, and i find that this conglomeration of differences makes up a mosaic that depicts me.  these are men and women, boys and girls who have come and gone from my life willingly and loved.  in various shades of happiness and alone.  people who have become sisters and brothers, daughters and sons, lovers and mothers to me.

exactly as those are meant to be.

and so i find that family is something that is created over time and choice, not something that is born by blood. 

Polyamory

Well, i thought i had a lot to say about this topic, but Wikipedia, for once, seems to have summed it up rather nicely:

"The defining characteristic of polyamory is belief in the possibility of, and value of, multiple romantic loving relationships carried out "with the knowledge and consent of all partners concerned."[1] What distinguishes polyamory from traditional forms of non-monogamy (i.e. "cheating") is an ideology that openness, goodwill, intense communication, and ethical behavior should prevail among all the parties involved. Some consider polyamory to be, at its root, the generalization of romantic couple-love beyond two people into something larger.[2]
"Polyamorous relationships, in practice, are highly varied and individualized. Ideally they are built upon values of trust, loyalty, negotiation, and compersion, as well as rejection of jealousy, possessiveness, and restrictive cultural standards.[3] "

Which means that the only thing left to ask is why is this such a problem? why are people so upset with the notion that love grows, rather than constricts? why do people grasp so greedily at those they care about or are attracted to, shutting the door to the possibility of being loved by more people?
i can't help but come back to the poem by Marianne Williamson:
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
...Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?"

and as she concludes, it is when we finally open our eyes to our own possibilities, let go of our fear of ourself, that we begin to free not only ourselves, but everyone else around us:

"...And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

it's a shame that liberation is seen as a cause for alarm and a signal to run to gather up arms. liberation is a celebration, and should be welcomed with open arms.

school buses and little kids

have i mentioned how much i hate racism? how much i despise our racist society with its' ingrained and deep-seated habits and racial profiling? with its' prevalence of reverse racism? - which just proves again that we're a white supremacist culture because even the term "racism" normalizes whiteness. this time i hate racism because of the hate inculcated by parents in their young children. our only hope for salvation would be to teach tolerance and extend the social networks of our children to include children of other races, let alone other cultures, classes, sexes, gender norms and sexualities, politics...
instead of equality, however, we teach superiority. instead of providing tools to our children for those times that they will encounter racism, or sexism or ageism or classism or ..., we teach them to build walls and separations. when we are caught in the public view with our less than tolerant ways - or our children make us look less than tolerant - we either take up the beleaguerd battle cry of reverse racism or smile tightly and take our kids home and skin them alive, reminding them what racists surround us and to keep the family's racism under wraps. what lasting impressions we leave.

and just for the record, my white daughter enjoyed all people until the African-American kids on her first grade bus pulled her hair and called her "white" and refused to sit with her because of her color. and once she got over that, it was a black girl who told my daughter that she would whip her, and not mind if my daughter was killed, since our white ancestors had whipped and killed her black ancestors anyway.

racism is a two-way street, people. we cannot overcome it by continuing to hate.

mie sue!

mie sue mie sue mie sue!! the two year old yells as i flip her from one side of my lap to the next. once she is settled, i see that her slipper is hanging by a toe. she giggles: mie sue! and flips her foot so the slipper abondons its' desperate hold.

i would giggle with her, but i have just pulled her slipper back on and her shirt back down, and her back is scaly still. eczema. inwardly i cringe, as though my thoughts of cookies and candy today are enough to trigger her reaction. i think of so many other young children i have seen, particularly girls, with skin grey and peeling from total consumption by eczema. that these children are seen with snack bags of chips or candy hanging out of the corner of their mouths only makes me all the more certain that the trigger is sugar.
which would mean that it is mostly likely outrageous outbreaks of candidiasis, systemic thrush, rather than simply eczema.

simply eczema. huh. that's like saying the baby has colic.
what the baby has is pain somewhere that the adult can't figure out - stomach, esophagus, throat, intestines. or possible a highly sensitive child, or introverted child, who is overwhelmed and trying to release that pent-up anxiety. or just plain over-tired, since over-tiredness so often masks itself as rowdy, hyper-active behavior before crashing into spasms of crying.

of course, it is pure blasphema for me to say that sugar is what prompts my daughter to scratch her back bloody and for her elbows to crack. it's much more kosher to say that she is allergic to herself and go out to buy steroids for lifelong treatment of symptoms. since we all know how safe steroids are, and how likely it is that the body would genetically mutate itself to want to destroy itself. but my route not only cuts out BIG-Pharma, it cuts out the poor corn farmers and all of the middle men in between who produce those tasty junk foods, snacks, and time-saving packaged meals.

i couldn't help thinking about all of these connections when i saw the yahoo! news heading today about how sugar-free schools have seen immediate improvements in test scores. hm. maybe candidiasis affects the ability of children to concentrate and learn by demanding that the body consume low-protein, high-sugar meals that rob the body of staying power. or maybe the removal of sugar inadvertantly removed HFCS from a portion of the children's diets, and the lower doses of mercury meant the return of full brain capacity. either way, i'll make sure that i have mie sue somewhere on hand the next time i reach for a bag/box/carton/bite of sugar so that i can flip it upside my head as a reminder of all this.