Democracy Lessons in the Carpool Lane

I get to work via the casual carpool. For those who are unfamiliar with this Bay Area institution, it’s a way of traveling to work cheaply and usually fast. Riders line up near transbay bus stops, and drivers come by and pick up one or two passengers so they can go through the carpool lane – a carpool is defined as three or more, unless you have a two-seater. If there are more riders than cars, most drivers will gladly take a third passenger. Carpools used to go over the bridge toll-free, but now they pay $2.50 (the normal rush-hour toll is $6), so each rider pays $1. If the driver picks up three people, they make 50 cents on the deal. At my stop, it’s very changeable; some days there’s a long line of cars waiting for riders, others a long line of riders waiting for rides. Two or three times in the last year, I’ve ended up taking the bus. I’ve never heard of anyone being assaulted or harassed while riding the carpools.

The other day, I rode with a woman and a man, and as we made our way to the Bridge, they started talking about their kids. The guy’s kids were late elementary schoolers, and the woman’s were in middle and high school. The guy said he was lucky, that his kids liked school and didn’t mind doing their homework. The woman said two of hers were good students, but her oldest son – “Well, thank God there are garbage men jobs for people like him.”

Though of course there is nothing wrong with being a garbage man, and anyway it’s probably not nearly as easy to get those jobs as she thinks, I was upset that she was so dismissive of her son. It hit on something I’ve been thinking about a lot, how school so often seems to kill kids’ enthusiasm and curiosity instead of fostering it.

“There must be something,” I started to say and she cut me off.

“There’s nothing wrong with him. I thought he had ADHD, but I had him tested and he’s fine. He’s just lazy.”

Undeterred, I said, “What is he interested in?”

“You mean his hobbies?”

“Yes.”

“Skateboarding,” she said. “He and his friends spend hours out in the street, practicing their tricks. He goes snowboarding every weekend in the winter. His father says he can’t get enough of it.”

“Well maybe he’ll be a snowboarding instructor,” I suggested.

“Could be,” she said. Her voice had softened.

The driver jumped in. “There’s a skate park near where I live,” he said. “The kids were always out there, cutting school. So this guy got an idea, and he started them making videos. He set up an editing studio and taught them how to edit. They ended up learning about story writing, computer skills. Hopefully, it made them realize that there were things they could learn in school that would help them.”

I had actually been thinking of that, because back when I lived in the City and skated to work, I would always pass skateboarders filming each other. They said they made a fair amount of money that way, and that was in the days before YouTube. But his mentioning the skate park gave me another idea.

“Is there a skate park near where you live?” I asked the woman. Since she had said the kids practiced on the street, I figured the answer was no, and it was. “Well why not suggest they try to make one,” I said.

“They could design a park,” the guy said. “They would have to learn math…”

“Math and design,” I said. “And teamwork, figuring out what they want as a group. But then they could really try to get it built. They’d need to do fundraising, find out about the permitting process and how to get approval from the city. They might need to do some lobbying, and probably community organizing to counter the inevitable opposition from the neighbors. They’d have to figure out how it was going to be run, would they need a nonprofit or some other kind of organization to run it. How would decisions be made about it, how would disputes over who could use it when be mediated, and how would it be maintained?”

I didn’t say but thought that they could run into things like gang injunctions and curfews, and need to make coalitions with the people fighting those.

“They’d probably want to read about how kids in other cities got parks built,” said the driver.
The woman seemed to like the idea, and said she would talk to her son about it. As we got out of the car, it occurred to me that this was probably the first time she ever thought of her son’s talents and interests as anything other than a waste of time. If the idea catches on, it could also be the first time her son thinks of school as anything other than a waste of time.

Confessions of a Bookaholic

On July 4 weekend, I decided to stroll up to Walden Pond, my local (about a mile away) progressive independent bookstore. One of my goals was to find interesting authors to interview on Women’s Magazine, and I did – a couple weeks ago, I interviewed the highly entertaining and knowledgeable Leonard Sax, whose book Girls on the Edge: The Four Factors Driving the New Crisis for Girls seemed really on point to me. I especially liked the sections on sexuality and the “cyberbubble.” Dr Sax agrees that “crisis” is kind of melodramatic – he explained that noncelebrity authors don’t get to pick their titles. But the problems he identified correspond to the ones that most of the teenage girls I know (and their parents) are dealing with.
I picked up the Sax book and headed to the counter, but on the way, of course I had to stop by the Staff Picks table. Oh my Goddess. There was a Maisie Dobbs I hadn’t read. Okay, that was a no-brainer. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. Someone in a writing class I had just taken was naming Jennifer Egan among her favorite writers. Plus anything that has goon squad in the title is sure to be up my alley. As it turns out, it was and wasn’t. But I wouldn’t know that if I hadn’t bought it.

Thanks to zimpenfish, whose room looks
even worse than mine

I stuffed my new books in my version of Hermione Granger’s infinitely expandable purse and headed home, one shoulder drooping with the weight. Wait, what’s that? A box of free books, lurking by the side of a ramshackle apartment building. I tried to make myself walk by, but then a little voice said, “You just spent $40 on books, and you’re going to turn down free ones? What kind of American are you?” There were some mysteries by writers I like – a Nevada Barr, a Linda Barnes, and a historical mystery about Tudor England with a blurb by P.D. James – couldn’t resist. I added four or five to my bag and stumbled home in danger of becoming a hunchback (the protagonist of the Tudor England book, which I’m reading now, is a hunchback).

Fortunately, a few years ago, someone left a disassembled Ikea bookcase in my storage space. She was going to come get it in a few days, but she never did. When I moved, I took it with me, even though I wasn’t sure I would be able to figure out how to put it together or that I would have a place for it if I did. I decided the time had come to break it out. I figured out what little parts I needed that I didn’t have and went to Ikea and picked them up and came home and managed to assemble it without too much difficulty – you’ve met one Ikea cabinet, you pretty much know them all. Cool. Now I had six new shelves to fill. I unpacked the last box of books that had been waiting in my new house for a home and then stacked all my new books on the remaining shelves and STILL had a couple empty shelves. I cannot tell you what joy filled my heart.

A couple month later, the shelves are nearly full. I got books for my birthday: Sherman Alexie, Patty Smith, The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea, a great book about Pluto and two about witchcraft. I special ordered The New Jim Crow from Book Passages. I was sent review copies of several new feminist books.

The other night I went to visit a friend who just returned from China and Africa. She has a new roommate moving in so she needs to clear out bookshelves. She had put aside about ten mysteries she thought I would like. Then she started throwing other books at me: do you want this? How about this? She handed me Joel Beinin’s Was The Red Flag Flying There? a history of Marxism in Palestine. I tried to resist. It’s the kind of book I would look at and think I should read, not really the kind I will read. But if I didn’t take it, she was going to give it away. Couldn’t let that happen. I might want it sometime. She tried to give me The Tragedy of Zionism by Bernard Avishai but fortunately, I remembered I already have it. As I heaved the overflowing bag of books into my car, I said, “I will not buy another book until I have read all these.”

That was five days ago and I haven’t bought a book. So maybe I’m kicking the habit?

On his way to lunch, my coworker said he had just heard on the radio that the U.S. Census Bureau is reporting what he has known for years: that this is the first generation of kids who will not outlive their parents. He implied that this finding was based on the increase in environmental toxins, nuclear accidents, oil spills and depleted uranium. I was surprised and a little skeptical, because that sounded awfully political for the Census Bureau. I also wondered which generation they were actually talking about – mine (I think we’re officially the Me Generation)? Gen X? Gen Y? The kids being born now, whose gen doesn’t have a name yet? While he was at lunch, I went looking for it on the net. Didn’t find it. What I did find were about a thousand articles projecting that today’s children will not outlive their parents because of – you guessed it, childhood obesity. And among the many prognostications of gloom and fat – none of which, as far as I could tell, contained any actual statistical evidence that kids are going to die sooner than their parents - was a diamond in the rough called “What Michelle Obama's childhood obesity project gets wrong,” by Kate Harding. I clicked on the link taking me to Harding’s blog, and there I found out that she is a coeditor of a book called Feed Me!: Writers Dish about Food, Eating, Weight, and Body Image.  I really think I might have to have that book. I didn’t buy it, but I recalled that I actually have some money on a Powell’s gift card yet to be spent.

My coworker came back from lunch and I asked him if he remembered where he heard about that census data. He said it was on Randi Rhoads’ show and allowed as how it might not have actually been from the Census Bureau. He said Randi usually has her sources on her website, so I went to it. Didn’t find anything about that segment, but I did find an op-ed about the social base of Tea Party, authored by two professors named David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam who, I learned, are the authors of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us.  Oh no. That sounds so interesting.

The op-ed was in the New York Times, and while I was there, my eye fell on another opinion piece, this one about the educational value of various types of homework. Some of you know that this is an obsession of mine. Don’t ask me why, either bad memories of time spent making castles out of sugar cubes as a kid or maybe it’s that several nights a week when I get home from work and a meeting or social gathering, I have to spend a few hours working on a blog or a radio show. Anyway, this article, which I found fascinating, cited various studies on how people learn, including “spaced repetition” (you retain material better if you see it a number of different times for shorter periods, rather than for a longer period all at once) and “retrieval practice” (drills and tests) was written by Annie Murphy Paul, and of course she has a book too, called Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives. Really exciting to me, especially since I just read something else that seemed to dispute the premise that prenatal experience is crucial in our development. And hey, this book is about pregnancy so that would be a natural for Women’s Magazine, which means … I might have to get it.

Now you might ask, why don’t I get these books at the library? I’ll tell you: because I don’t read fast. Plus with all this blogging and keeping a weekly radio show on the air, I don’t have as much time for reading as I wish I did. So when I go to the library, I see four things I want and get them all, but then I don’t always get through them in three weeks, and I end up owing fines. I know you can renew stuff online nowadays, but the fact is, I’m just not that organized. I like having a choice of what to read, being able to start something, put it down, start something else, come back to the first one, have several half-read choices on my nightstand. Call me old-fashioned.

Okay, so I’m obviously a bookaholic. But my question is, is that a problem? I mean, it’s a harmless addiction, right? It might even be called healthy – after all, reading is better for me than watching TV, isn’t it? Less likely to make me obese, anyway, from what I’ve read on the net. In fact, book-buying might be called paying it forward, since I am hoping people are some day going to buy my book(s). (Okay, for those of you who have been bugging me about when Murder Under the Bridge is going to be available to buy - don’t start. Soon, I promise.) But consider this: what if, some day, the weight of all my books causes my apartment to slide into the mud? And since I’m on the first floor, the apartment upstairs from me could collapse.

Maybe I’d better check out Books Anonymous. No doubt some of the other people there will be trying to cleanse by giving away their books.

The Case for Cheating

Last night I saw “Race to Nowhere,” the antidote to “Waiting for Superman,” the new film which blames the failure of our educational system on teachers’ unions and other proponents of publicly run public schools. “Race to Nowhere” is a powerful indictment of the pressure-packed environment today’s kids have to navigate. It’s one of the most intense movies I ever saw, partly because a lot of kids I have known and loved bear the same scars as those in the movie. At the panel afterwards, some of the protagonists and other experts on educational policy drilled the central message: the obsession with “achievement” is getting in the way of much actual learning.

The kids talked about coming home from a full day of school followed by sports, music lessons, Hebrew school or work to do six or eight hours of homework. One of the talking heads was the author of the book “The Case Against Homework,” which I picked up a few years ago, concerned about the unwieldy obligations of my niece and some of the other kids I know. The book presented a lot of evidence that kids derive no benefit from most of the homework they do, that the rewards of homework diminish rapidly after about 20 minutes per class for high school students, and that unstructured time is important for developing creativity and discovering one’s passions. In the film, one Advanced Placement teacher said he cut the homework in half and the AP scores of his students went up.

Sunday night I had dinner with a friend and the Chinese student who is living with her. Yi Sha told us that high school students in China start their day at 7:00 a.m. and don’t go home until 10:00 p.m., six days a week. Middle school is 7:00 to 6:00 and little kids get to go home at 5:00. We were all horrified, but my friend said, “That’s why we’re failing.” I disagreed, and tonight’s movie reinforced my disagreement. In fact, our kids are working as hard as the Chinese kids, and I don’t think it’s good for either of them.

By contrast, most Palestinian kids go to school from 7:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. and don’t do more than a couple hours of homework, and Palestine has the highest percentage of Ph.D.s in the world.

One thing that annoyed me in the movie was a romanticism about what childhood was like in the “good old days” – that is, the sixties and seventies when I was growing up. The parents in the film, who are my age or a little younger, rhapsodize about how much fun we had. All I can say is, they weren’t growing up where I was. I remember feeling suicidal every day for three years – and in my family, I was the happy well-adjusted kid. Several of my classmates actually attempted suicide,. Nearly all of us were anorexic, some were bulimic, many of us were molested, we were bullied, we cut ourselves, we were pressured, we were shamed and ridiculed by teachers. My classes were smaller than today’s, but only because I was born during a period of declining birth rates and the budget cuts hadn’t quite caught up with the lower enrollment. It didn’t matter how large or small they were, though, because you didn't get individual attention if there were five kids in your class; it wasn’t part of the methodology back then.

I remember some years ago figuring out that the reason I never learned anything in gym class was because no one really tried to teach me anything. The teachers thought yelling stuff like, “Watch the ball!” or “Try harder!” would turn you from a klutz into a gazelle. The more interesting realization was that the frustration I experienced during the one period of Phys. Ed. was what kids who weren’t good at academics experienced the rest of the day. No one tried to figure out why they weren’t learning. They just got bad grades, and if the grades were bad enough they failed.

By far the most useful thing I learned in school was how to get along with people whom I didn’t necessarily have that much in common with. The second most useful was that not everything was going to be about me. I might be bored, the culture of the school might not be what I was comfortable with, but that was just life, and I had to adjust. That is something I was pleased to hear mentioned in the film: that the main purpose of education is socialization.

So that begs the question, what are we socializing kids for? The given in every discussion about education is that the goal is to get a good job. One theme that was continually raised in “Race to Nowhere” was that the skills taught in school need to be relevant to the jobs people are trying to get.

Apparently a major response to the pressure that kids are under to achieve has been a meteoric rise in cheating. In one very high achieving school, 80% of the students said they had cheated. The assumption was that this is a problem, and I’m not saying it’s not, but we can also look at cheating as cooperation. What’s the difference between helping a friend pass a test and being a “team player”?

Recently, I got to take a private class in database development. I had been trying to write a macro to do something and it wasn’t working. I asked the teacher and he said, “Google it.” So we did and found some code that I copied into my macro and it ran.

I said, “That’s what I usually do, but I always thought it was cheating.”

He looked at me like I was nuts. “Does it work?”

“Usually.”

“Then why is it cheating?”

I said, “Well, I don’t exactly know why it works.”

“Does it matter?” he asked.

I am a little ambivalent. You could say that it’s ridiculous to make challah when I can buy perfectly good ones from Semi Freddie’s. I would say that it’s both useful to know how to make bread and fun to do it. But I know that the secretaries at my job who spend time retyping documents because they don’t know how to scan and OCR them (or even better, that they can send them to me to do for them) are not using their time wisely. So I would add to the list of most important things I learned: distinguishing between activities that have intrinsic value and those which are unnecessary busy work.

Some years ago at a workshop, the facilitator asked us to write down a negative characteristic of ourselves that we are kind of proud of. Without hesitation, I wrote, “I’m lazy.” When I tell people that, they always argue with me. How can I be lazy when I’m involved in so many projects and take on so much work? But I’m not being humble. My laziness is what makes it possible for me to accomplish a lot. The fact that I’m the laziest person on earth makes me good at my job, because I’m always looking for the fastest way to get the work done with the least amount of effort.

I get frustrated that most of my coworkers are not adventurous. They’re smart and experienced, they know a lot, but they’re afraid to try new things. They prefer to plod than to figure out how to learn what they don't know. I learned to word process by lying. I said I knew WordPerfect when I had never used it. I went to a bookstore and read up on how to turn on the computer, change the margin, set a tab. When I got to my first job, fortunately there was no one sitting near me to see me frantically looking at the help menus. By the time anyone came to see how I was doing, I seemed like an expert.

So if my experience is any indication, laziness and lying are more useful qualities to teach kids than honesty and industry.