In this week's New Yorker there is a piece on Skid Row in Los Angles. (I would like to link, but it isn't online, boo. "Letter from Los Angles: The homeless get their Hollywood Closeup." Dana Goodyear. May 5th 2008. The related blog). Dana Goodyear's article talks about how life on Skid Row has changed and improved since Lopez started the articles three years ago.
When I moved to LA three years ago, I found Skid Row to be one of the most disgusting, scary and inhumane places I had ever seen. It was a tent city of up to 5,000 homeless people: overwhelmingly people who suffered from mental illness and drug addiction. It was a mini city run by mini drug dealing war lords. Think the Superdome during Katrina meets the scene in Batman Begins when all the people get let out of the insane asylum. Once, while driving by myself during the day, I got pushed into Skid Row by a series of no left turn, no right turn, bus only, stop lights and one way streets. I was really scared. Being there was like when you are at a stop light and there is a weird crazy looking guy panhandleing, and you lock the door real fast. Only there were like 35 guys who looked like that, walking around, hitting each other, walking toward my car, falling over, drinking and smoking. I watched two really dirty homeless women with huge pupils start to make out and then sort of fall down on each other into a puddle of wet garbage.
That this could exist in a city as rich as Los Angeles in a country as rich as the US was on my top five reasons that I could not live in LA and be happy. Also on that list was the responses when I told people this, ranging from total apathy to outrage that homeless people all moved to LA. Most memorable was a women I did yoga teacher training with. She told me that she was really upset about it; her clients didn't want to buy million dollar condos that overlooked the homeless. Then she said that she wanted to improve the homeless situation in LA and that was why she was becoming a yoga teacher.
Reading the comparisons of Skid Row three years ago and Skid Row today, I am so impressed with what Steve Lopez has done, so impressed with the power of activism. I just hope that in my own life I will successfully channel my outrage and anger into positive change.
30 April 2008
Jet Lag Sucks
And so does trying to recover in Holland.
If the best remedy is to go out in the sun, what is a girl to do when there is no sun?
If the best remedy is to go out in the sun, what is a girl to do when there is no sun?
Falling Down the Stairs: A Story in Three Acts
Act One
On Monday, it was raining outside so I wore my rain boots to school. Because of the rain, the stairs were slippery. While walking down the stairs to class, I slipped and fell down about 6 steps. And it hurt. Alot.
I thought, maybe these rain-boots should have better traction; they are rainboots, after all.
After I "landed" at the bottom, what I wanted to do was sit there and cry, and check for broken bones. However, two people behind me saw it all, and were all like: "Are you Ok!"
Crying with an audience sucks more than falling down the stairs. So I had to get up. Ugg.
Then, the dude behind me was all: "I always say, its better to go slowly down the stairs and be late to class than to fall."
If I hadn't been working so hard to hold back tears and to get up off the stairs, I would have said something really sassy to him and called him an a**hole. Because, really, he was/is one.
The girl told him that probably that was my policy, too, and that no one intentionally falls down the stairs. Oh, you think.
Act 2
Then, I spent all afternoon feeling sad that there was no one to show what was sure to be an awesome bruise.
The next morning, the bruise was totally gnarly, as expected, so I refused to let this opportunity pass. While doing a little photo "seating" for my butt, I took some time to notice how nice it was. We never think to look at our own butts, but we should, especially while we are still young.
Despite the urgings of P, I am not going to publish photos of my butt here.
However, I would like you all to take a moment to remember the scene in the 1998 World Cup when the French Goalkeeper was injured and they exposed his butt to spray some sort of liquid bandage on it. That was really a great butt. I've been mediating on that image throughout my own trials. Its helped.
Act 3
I went running and it really hurt to run, because of the giggling of my bruise. But, the alternative was to go home and study, I pushed past the pain in my bruised bum and ran on. Then I woke up the next morning and could barely walk. Apparently, while "compensating" for the bruise I strained my inner thighs.
Ain't them the brakes!
On Monday, it was raining outside so I wore my rain boots to school. Because of the rain, the stairs were slippery. While walking down the stairs to class, I slipped and fell down about 6 steps. And it hurt. Alot.
I thought, maybe these rain-boots should have better traction; they are rainboots, after all.
After I "landed" at the bottom, what I wanted to do was sit there and cry, and check for broken bones. However, two people behind me saw it all, and were all like: "Are you Ok!"
Crying with an audience sucks more than falling down the stairs. So I had to get up. Ugg.
Then, the dude behind me was all: "I always say, its better to go slowly down the stairs and be late to class than to fall."
If I hadn't been working so hard to hold back tears and to get up off the stairs, I would have said something really sassy to him and called him an a**hole. Because, really, he was/is one.
The girl told him that probably that was my policy, too, and that no one intentionally falls down the stairs. Oh, you think.
Act 2
Then, I spent all afternoon feeling sad that there was no one to show what was sure to be an awesome bruise.
The next morning, the bruise was totally gnarly, as expected, so I refused to let this opportunity pass. While doing a little photo "seating" for my butt, I took some time to notice how nice it was. We never think to look at our own butts, but we should, especially while we are still young.
Despite the urgings of P, I am not going to publish photos of my butt here.
However, I would like you all to take a moment to remember the scene in the 1998 World Cup when the French Goalkeeper was injured and they exposed his butt to spray some sort of liquid bandage on it. That was really a great butt. I've been mediating on that image throughout my own trials. Its helped.
Act 3
I went running and it really hurt to run, because of the giggling of my bruise. But, the alternative was to go home and study, I pushed past the pain in my bruised bum and ran on. Then I woke up the next morning and could barely walk. Apparently, while "compensating" for the bruise I strained my inner thighs.
Ain't them the brakes!
26 April 2008
Math: American's suck at it, but maybe it isn't our fault
This article was in the nytimes most popular email this weekend, and I sure enjoyed it. But not as much as this article from the New Yorker earlier this year.
The latter is an exploration of how the mind learns math, while the former considers the possibility that American education has been working under some possibly erroneous assumptions.
Current popular opinion is that if you teach students math in the context of everyday life, they will be more engaged in it and therefore absorb more. This gets to be pretty frustrating when you get to algebra, because the whole point of algebra is to learn how to transfer from the concrete to the abstract and back. So its really a hard sell to students that they are going to use this on the weekend, at the mall. (On a side note, they totally will use fractions and decimals, so why the f haven't they mastered those? There was a quiet joke inside the math department that maybe if the school didn't crack down so hard on the drug dealers, then at least we would have a few students who could do fractions)
I recall watching a math coach answer the everpresent, "When are we ever going to need to know about parabolas?" with "Headlights of luxury cars are made from parabolas." Delinquent student Katie was thinking: "Ok, so parabolas exist in real life, but do you need to know the math to turn on the light switch? Isn't that just like 'flip,' their on?" While, simultaneously, total math dork Katie was thinking, "Headlights aren't really parabola because they exist in three dimensions." Of course, the student was enjoying the attention and being polite (for once), therefore furthering the math coach's belief that this totally lame "real world" example really could engage students.
But when it came district testing time, it was apparent that these meager methods were failing to reach or to teach the students. (Those of you who just said to yourselves, "Yeah, somebody was failing to teach, Hold your tongue!) Which brings us to the nytimes piece, and my favorite line: "Dr. Kaminski and her colleagues Vladimir M. Sloutsky and Andrew F. Heckler did something relatively rare in education research: they performed a randomized, controlled experiment."
No one bothers to really investigate educational research technique. In my short tenure as a math teacher I learned to teach all sorts of theoretically opposed methods, each proven to be most effective. How is this possible?, you ask. They were all tested on academically inclined students in small classes. Hmm. Maybe academically inclined students in small classes who are then given even more attention from being in a pilot program is always do well.
And maybe Asian students will always do well. Wait... what?! That is why the New Yorker article is so great. Asian students are good at math because it is easy to count in Chinese. That is just so awesome, it totally lets us off the hook. And since I read it, I've felt pretty vindicated every time I used a calculator for basic arithmetic.
Maybe now I should write a math curriculum and sell it for millions to a big school district (yes, strangely enough, our poor, struggling inner city school districts pay millions for untested curricula). I will drop long division and multiplication tables and replace them with calculators and clear rules on how to write algebra. I mean it might not test any better than what we have now but I bet I could totally get a grant from Texas Instruments to write it.
The latter is an exploration of how the mind learns math, while the former considers the possibility that American education has been working under some possibly erroneous assumptions.
Current popular opinion is that if you teach students math in the context of everyday life, they will be more engaged in it and therefore absorb more. This gets to be pretty frustrating when you get to algebra, because the whole point of algebra is to learn how to transfer from the concrete to the abstract and back. So its really a hard sell to students that they are going to use this on the weekend, at the mall. (On a side note, they totally will use fractions and decimals, so why the f haven't they mastered those? There was a quiet joke inside the math department that maybe if the school didn't crack down so hard on the drug dealers, then at least we would have a few students who could do fractions)
I recall watching a math coach answer the everpresent, "When are we ever going to need to know about parabolas?" with "Headlights of luxury cars are made from parabolas." Delinquent student Katie was thinking: "Ok, so parabolas exist in real life, but do you need to know the math to turn on the light switch? Isn't that just like 'flip,' their on?" While, simultaneously, total math dork Katie was thinking, "Headlights aren't really parabola because they exist in three dimensions." Of course, the student was enjoying the attention and being polite (for once), therefore furthering the math coach's belief that this totally lame "real world" example really could engage students.
But when it came district testing time, it was apparent that these meager methods were failing to reach or to teach the students. (Those of you who just said to yourselves, "Yeah, somebody was failing to teach, Hold your tongue!) Which brings us to the nytimes piece, and my favorite line: "Dr. Kaminski and her colleagues Vladimir M. Sloutsky and Andrew F. Heckler did something relatively rare in education research: they performed a randomized, controlled experiment."
No one bothers to really investigate educational research technique. In my short tenure as a math teacher I learned to teach all sorts of theoretically opposed methods, each proven to be most effective. How is this possible?, you ask. They were all tested on academically inclined students in small classes. Hmm. Maybe academically inclined students in small classes who are then given even more attention from being in a pilot program is always do well.
And maybe Asian students will always do well. Wait... what?! That is why the New Yorker article is so great. Asian students are good at math because it is easy to count in Chinese. That is just so awesome, it totally lets us off the hook. And since I read it, I've felt pretty vindicated every time I used a calculator for basic arithmetic.
Maybe now I should write a math curriculum and sell it for millions to a big school district (yes, strangely enough, our poor, struggling inner city school districts pay millions for untested curricula). I will drop long division and multiplication tables and replace them with calculators and clear rules on how to write algebra. I mean it might not test any better than what we have now but I bet I could totally get a grant from Texas Instruments to write it.
quote of the week, more
Earlier this week I sent out an email called "quote of the day." Many people responded and told me that I should put it on my blog. I'm not sure if they were saying that it was really interesting and I should publish it, or if they meant that now that I have a blog I have no excuses for filling up their inboxes with this crap. Either way, here it is.
20 April 2008
19 April 2008
New York has Papal Fever!
And I got the T-Shirt!Well maybe one of the t-shirts, there were several.
My favorite one depicted the Pope blessing Yankee Stadium. Now was that the new Yankee Stadium or the old Yankee Stadium? Because if it was the old one, is he gonna come back next year for the new one? Or is that just going to be a very dated T-Shirt? Either way, I was jealous, and my jealousy was twofold:
no. 1: I didn't see him blessing Shea Stadium, boo.
no. 2: I want a shirt. I love all things both sports area and Catholicism related. Boo. (My favorite of the many things in this catergory was last year's Rosary Bowl: Pray for Peace People)
Furthermore, who knew that a Pope Parade would be so much like Eeyore's Birthday Party? There was a drum circle. Yeah. A catholic group from New Jersey had a whole lot of drums and guitars and they just kept singing "Hallelujah," rhythmically. Also, it was beautiful weather and there were soo many people out with like beads on. People had huge banners and hand painted signs. Some of the signs were pro-God and others were pro-birth control. Both sides seemed totally stoked to have their not-so-private audience with the Pope, as he passed on 5th Avenue, in the Popemobile.
Of course, I never got my bag searched once on the street in Austin. And I guess no one was wearing body paint for the Pope. So we can also put both of those in the "different from Eeyore's Birthday" pile.
In conclusion, if the Pope comes to your town, it is totally worth the commute downtown, regardless of your stance on the whole God issue.
17 April 2008
Welcome
Some of you may already know what I have just recently come to fully appreciate: I am a loud girl with opinons. So, welcome and enjoy the show. Come and see what life is like as a gutterballer.
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