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Cramming
One of the annoying things that happens when you become a (nominal) grown-up is that you find you have to have (often) be interested in things that make your eyes glaze over even as they freak you out. All things about taxes fall into this category. And now as a parent I can add "all things about school." It is lousy, because of course one cares deeply about one's child's education and wants to be a good sport about everything. Across the country we are in the habit of moving into neighborhoods that are in "good" public school districts and even at the preschool level there are all sorts of panics and waiting lists and anxieties.
So things in New York have gotten terribly confusing and here is a piece from this week's New York Magazine that details the absurdity and difficulty New York City is currently having with public school enrollments. Kindergarten admissions is up. up, up and there are nowhere near enough kindergarten spots available-- not only at the "good" schools, but across the board in some neighborhoods.
If ever a bureaucratic institution was crying out for a documentary to be made about it, the New York City Department of Education is it. When I read articles like this, I think about Frederick Wiseman's long, hypnotic movies on other urban (often NYC) institutions (they're hard to see, but if you can catch Law and Order, Hospital, Central Park, Welfare or Public Housing, you'll get a fascinating look at how these civic structures functioned-- I use the past tense because most of the movies I've listed were made quite a while ago).
The system at the moment is so convoluted and frustrating that parents have been marching on City Hall with some regularity since February (when the reality of all of the overcrowding predictions finally hit home when kids were officially denied spaces at schools).
This is happening in different ways all over the country. I think the New York City version of the problem is unique because the system is so notoriously problematic and because the mayor fought really hard to take control of the Department of Education and everyone is wondering what sort of success or failure this will be for him.
Anyway, it isn't exactly a thriller (unless you're holding your breath trying to figure out what will happen to your kid, school-wise) but it is tense. For my part, I'm happy that this isn't a kindergarten year I need to deal with. I don't believe all will be resolved when I do need to face the music.
posted by Elise at 9:25 AM
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Sounds Like...
My children, a bit late to television, have been playing catch up a bit. Felix watches various programs on the "Noggin" channel that his friends got tired of well over a year ago. This doesn't bother me particularly, because, with the exception of the Max and Ruby show (so annoying and where are Max and Ruby's parents anyway-- you can see them in the family portrait over the living room sofa bu they never stop by, although given what an officious priss Ruby became and how unspeakably irritating Max is, it is hard to blame them) I don't mind these programs. The songs tend to get stuck in my head, but that's probably inevitable in this sort of programming. (Beware Wonder Pets for earworms.)
Anyway, Blue's Clues was on the other day and suddenly I felt quite haunted. It took a while to put my finger on it, since there was nothing about the episode that warranted this weird feeling (making banana bread) until I pulled my head out of the newspaper and realized that there was a lot of theramin in the soundtrack.
Years and years ago, I caught a terrific documentary about the invention of the theramin, its creator's love affair with the woman who mastered the instrument, and all sorts of cold war intrigue. If you have a chance to see Theramin: An Electronic Odyssey, and you do because it is easily available, try it and see where the Beach Boys got the weirdness underneath the fizz of "Good Vibrations."
Purists may prefer to hear Clara Rockmore, mistress of the theramin, working some of her magic.
posted by Elise at 4:23 AM
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Too Precious For Words
While walking in one of the several neighborhoods I frequent the other day, I spotted a lovely new toy store. It was only a few days old and absolutely exquisite.
All of the toys were handmade (or looked handmade) and the whole place was decorated with some sort of fantasy sensibility so that even now as reach back to recall it, I have this image of the place being covered with rolling waves of astroturf (which couldn't be the case because it would surely violate the ethos of the store). Anyway, it was really appealing.
And the toys were all safe, non-toxic, made locally, nothing much to disapprove of (though they wouldn't fit in with the Montessori curriculum). I have friends who often reject toys because of aesthetics and/or materials and this place would be a safe gift spot for anyone...
Except that it is one of those toy stores where every two or three feet there is a "DON'T TOUCH" sign and the person behind the counter seems a little put out that you came in and really wishes that the young octopus wiggling around in the stroller you had the misfortune to have to drag in is threatening to grab something off the floor or from a low-hanging shelf or play with one of the really cool looking music makers.
This I don't understand. I DO understand and appreciate this store's contents (even if it all is a tiny bit twee, it is really really lovely). I also understand (to a lesser extent) the extremely high prices, but even though they make me less likely to buy things there, I respect the craftsmanship and the fact that one pays a premium for locally made, indubitably safe products.
But what I don't get is why, especially in this economy, it seems like a good idea to open a toy store that is completely hostile to children and their tendencies to want to touch things. I can go further and wonder why the person working in the place seemed to find kids so distasteful.
I wasn't offended really, and my visit was super short because I was afraid that the Sebastian would stop being patient and want to pick up something attractive to see what it could do.
But what is the point, really? I won't name the place because I do hope it survives . I just also hope it loosens up a little. I'm guilty of dodging it, though. When I walked in I was hoping to find something for the daughter of a close friend who had a birthday recently, and this seemed the spot to get something truly novel. In the end I bolted with Sebastian and we found something more plebeian, but still absolutely fun a few blocks away, where our presence didn't inspire so much anxiety.
posted by Elise at 11:37 AM
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Pulling Back
These days I find I'm particularly tugged around by everyone's favorite set of duties: work and family and even though I know I'm so not alone in this as to be a cliche, it is still very tricky. (And arranging things results in the weird waking hours I've been keeping and peculiar sense of guilt and the occasional spasm of rage, usually inspired by pedestrians I don't know and will never see again.)
So it was with interest and sadness that I saw this comment from Jane Campion, a filmmaker whose work is not my all time favorite but whose work is usually intriguing and somehow remarkable. She hasn't produced much for quite a while and was asked about her low output at the Cannes film festival this year (where she was showing a movie, Bright Star, about the romance between John Keats and Fanny Brawne-- coming out in September they say).
What she said (reported by IndieWIRE): "The real reason is that I have a daughter [and] I was beginning to wonder if she knew she had a mother... I was determined to have some time with her while she was young... Alice is my reason, she’s my best film yet."
How annoying that it isn't people like me who get stuck and find themselves frantic and semi brain dead. And here's hoping Campion can do more and more now that her daughter is a teenager.
This particular issue doesn't explain why Kathryn Bigelow, another interesting filmmaker, who happens to be a woman can't seem to make more than three movies a decade. Here's hoping her latest, The Hurt Locker, will change that.
posted by Elise at 9:39 AM
1 Comments
Loyalty
My pre-Mother's Day treat was getting to skip out to the local cinema where my husband and I put our $12 (each) towards the gonzo opening weekend earnings of Star Trek.
My father and I watched the original series together (the reruns seemed to be on all the time when I was growing up, much in the way that Law & Order reruns are ubiquitous now), so the show and the stories have a fair amount of nostalgia for me, plus there are the endlessly fascinating problems... with animals (Tribbles, for instance or that Salt Monster or the Horta), with other people, with existential questions that probably seemed much more agonizing when I was not yet nine.
At the moment I don't share these narrative interests with my own kids because their television series interests sort of terminate with the Wonder Pets (that music wedges itself in one's head so easily) and a couple of other offerings on Noggin (Jack's Big Music Show, Blue's Clues, that sort of thing), but a friend of mine took her significantly older children to the Star Trek movie the day after I saw it. (I had told her I didn't think the violence was any more extreme than what you can find in the Star Wars series.)
Anyway, these kids came out of the theatre saying that the movie was pretty good but not as good as Star Wars. I do not object to Star Wars (well, I don't object to ALL of it, at any rate, there are a bunch of things I could have done without in the series) but I am interested in the loyalty it demands of its fans. Emily Bazelon actually wrote for Slate a while ago about Star Wars obsessiveness in her own children, so I'm not talking about an isolated case.
Star Trek also commands obsessive fans and determined watching, but why would these franchies have to be so competitive with each other? These kids can afford to spread some of their narrative interests around a little bit. Why is there this sense of betrayal for embracing, even briefly, another science fiction franchise?
For my part, I'm into all of it (to a point- there are no action figure collections around here). But I am the kind of person who happily will parse seemingly inconsequential details of favorite stories (not, I must say, Wonder Pets, though Felix will eagerly point out when some sort of statement or impication is being made when one character puts on another character's hat or takes up an unuual prop), so I figure in that, if our tastes ever dovetail as my father's and mine did and do even now, my children could consider themselves lucky. We'll see how this plays, though.
posted by Elise at 3:26 AM
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Intrigued
Is it simply circumstance, or is Mother's Day getting that extra push this year? I can't tell if I'm getting so many more junk emails asking me to purchase "gifts for mom" because of the crummy economy or if something about this year is making everyone cling to the holiday.
For my part, as I think I've probably mentioned before, I don't come from a family of ardent Mother's Day celebrators, so the pressure is off a bit. I am a little eager to see what is in the carefully tissue-wrapped, cellophane-bagged package that was handed to me at Felix's school with the admonition not to open it before Sunday. (I am also sincerely hoping I got it home in one piece... whatever it may be.) And I think that part of my reluctance to be highly celebratory is that with all of the praise and coddling comes (for me, but I am weird this way and I know it) some reckoning where I keep wondering, Ed Koch like, how I'm doing.
And I worry that in recent days, my scores on the domestic front are kind of low. I figure I've done all right by the kids but in the inevitable effort not to repeat past mistakes, my husband and I have decided to get a little electrical work done on the apartment before we are too scared to do it. (Also, there wasn't much in the way of lights hooked up so it was pretty necessary.) We are currently in that ugly in-between stage where everything is wrapped up in "protection" and my neighbors hate me for the noise and the dog is so upset that to ease his angst and reduce my neighbors' ire and my blood pressure, I have had to ask my own parents to take care of him. These are not my finest hours.
So it is with this eye that I wonder at all the books coming out, like Ayelet Waldman's essay collection Bad Mother (no, I haven't read it) and Elizabeth Edwards's book and confessional tour (which I also have only read about-- didn't catch her Oprah appearance). I take it that I'm not alone in feeling like a bit of a fraud on Mother's Day, while not quite being a "bad mother."
In other news or "news" I did see a curious baby naming article this week, and I must say that I have not seen this new trend of babies named Cohen (but I live in New York City where so many people have the last name Cohen that it would seem unimaginative and possibly redundant). It is apparently a very controvertial choice (a bit surprising to me). Also surprising is the fact that the initial inspiration for the trend came from a character called Seth Cohen on the television series The O.C., which ran until 2007 (never watched that either). I missed it, but was this show amazing? Was this Seth guy something else? I ask because I wasn't really that aware of much naming kids after characters beyond the flood of Laras inspired by Doctor Zhivago. Is this a thing? I understand being somewhat susceptible to actor's names but characters last names? The mind reels. Of course one could go with something relatively normal like Clayton (from Michael Clayton) but what if you really loved The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (as I do)? Kockenlocker. The name doesn't exactly trip off the tongue.
Happy Mother's Day.
posted by Elise at 3:58 AM
3 Comments
Quick Study
In the last month I have had to start thinking about kindergarten, which in New York is not always an obvious choice. It would take a considerable amount of annoying explanation to say why this is, and frankly I don't understand all of it either, but it doesn't matter if you want to send your child to private school, or think your kid is smart (or "gifted and talented" in Department of Education lingo) but want to send him or her to public school, or if you'd be happy with a local public school. Often there is no automatic choice and finding a school for your child requires a fair amount of hustle, wheeling, dealing and knowing that you have to show up at a few places with current electric bills and applications in hand (zoned public schools want to know you live in the district even though they might be too full to accept your child in which case you have to go elsewhere).
So I've actually seen a couple of kindergartens recently so I'm not entirely unfamiliar with the kinds of things kids get up to, and I admit to being bit surprised by Peggy Orenstein's article in the New York Times Magazine about the academic rigors of kindergarten. Across the country, apparently, the need for measurable achievement and the interest in standardized tests (and other standardizations).
The places I saw (and this may be coincidence based on my own interests, my own relative ability to get organized, and the fact that I didn't do anything like a survey) were quite firm about not assigning homework to five year-olds, but I have heard quite a lot about preschool testing and while all educators have cautioned extensively about not signing kids up for test preparation classes and drilling them endlessly, these programs are still flourishing in the city. I never did any research, so I don't know what any of these pre-k test prep courses are called or what they claim to do to prepare the kids, but I do know that there are at least four possible semi-standardized tests preschoolers could possibly take. I also know that for the most part these tests are not presented as tests but as opportunities for the children to demonstrate knowledge and abilities so they don't tend to be traumatic experiences, just one-off encounters. Parents, on the other hand, seem to be quite freaked out by these tests. I can't say I won't be, but I have yet to have to deal with them.
Anyway, this is all an awkward jumble, but until this morning, I confess I hadn't thought Felix could possibly be in a homework situation beyond having to remember (read: having me or his father remember) to bring in a show and tell toy.
posted by Elise at 3:42 AM
1 Comments
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