on the brain

Education-related subjects have been the substance of recent posts, which is an obvious sign that I'm not spending enough time in the realm of poetry. I can't help it. I am fascinated by Joe Williams's book Cheating Our Kids: How Politics and Greed Ruin Education. It feels so subversive to read it during the "prep periods" while substitute teaching. I love that. It's like I'm reading under the antagonist's nose. Well, not really. Williams's main focus is about the corruption and problems of America's largest urban school districts. His case examples have been with New York City, LA, San Diego, St. Louis, and Milwaukee mainly. As an education reportor, he lived/worked in Milwaukee, and now is in NY (and his sons attend its public schools). He asserts that parents who exercise choice for their children's education will choose either a private school, charter school (if that option exists), or--depending on the financial means of the family--move to the suburbs.

What Williams assumes is that the suburbs, simply because they are not so big and urban, are better school district systems. I believe that there is still excessive and unnecessary administrative systems and expenditures that have little or no direct impact on children--neither the instruction and learning process, or the overall classroom/school experience. For example, how many assistants are really needed in each department at the District office? Go to a district's home page and search the district personnel listings and you may find for one administrative department all of the following: Project Manager, Coordinator, Project Supervisor, and Project Assistants.

There's a lot I agree with in his book. In fact, most of it. I just makes sense, and he has convincing proof and citations. I wonder if the NEA has commented on this book yet?

Enough serious reading.

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Back to Poetry . . .
On the literary bookshelf now: Appalachia by Charles Wright - a recommended/loaned book of poems from a member of my monthly poetry workshop group.

Indulgent Reading
Just borrowed from a friend, but haven't started: Harry Potter book 6 - Will this be 600+ pages of entertaining distraction when I could be reading and writing poetry?

From the library, but haven't started yet: Angela's Ashes - I started it years ago, when it was still the hot book to read; however, I just couldn't sustain interest for whatever reasons at that time. But since reading McCourt's Teacher Man, I now have a greater intrinsic desire to read his first memoir (and not just read because it's literary and everyone else has read it).

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Advice for job seeking (esp. for college teaching) - when not to have a blog, or admit to it..or in other words, how blogging could hurt your career.

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favorite food of the week: steamed white rice with cilantro
how to eat it: wrapped in a wheat tortilla with mozzarella cheese, lettuce, salsa, and guacamole ...easy to eat while reading online articles.

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State of the Laptop: faded letters - d (gone, totally); c (mostly); v, n, s (partially extinct); m (endangered). Wazzup wit dat, Dell?