Tag: school

Tomato

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Forgive me

but I have gotten out of the habit of writing daily. I’m very proud of the groove that I was in at the beginning of the year, but like anything else, skip too many days and the habit changes. Writing wasn’t the only thing that changed: I got out of piano practice while Jesus Christ was traveling, and I totally got away from my desire to find one Instagram-worthy shot each day. I was worried about being cut off from others while not having a computer, but because I use it to work on things for myself, I felt more cut off from myself. I feel more normal now.

Wednesday

After sleeping way early on Monday night, and being up for 21 hours straight on Tuesday, I finally evened out on Wednesday morning and woke up rested and ready to face the day. Nobody was home when I was getting ready to leave. Sometimes I want to be the kind of person that wakes up and blasts Katrina and the Waves the second I get up, but on quiet, still mornings I usually quietly eat and read before leaving the house.

I had to start hustling as soon as I got to work. There was going to be a meeting at noon, and I spent the morning rushing around so that there was good news to report to the others there. I had to drop off some posters at a couple of the middle schools that are in the district I work in.

Skyridge-Middle-School-Medium

I was so struck yesterday by the strange architecture of schools here in the Northwest. Some things, like the perpetual smell of old fried food near the cafeteria or the bizarre colors that no sane adult would choose (a murky forest green that is somehow too dark, a rusty red-brown that looks like old shitstains), were familiar from my time in school. Others, like the new bank lobby approach to visitor security or the fact that the fronts of schools are engineered with autos and busses as first priority, probably have more to do with the schools being built in a post-Fortress America era than anything else. I found myself very nostalgic for the 1970’s open, outdoor campuses that I went to school in. The buildings were falling apart, but I loved the large eaves that formed giant wraparound porches, or that each teacher could prop a door open to let a cool breeze come through. I remember that my local school, Barbara Webster, (built with New Deal money to segregate away immigrant children in “Spanishtown;” to this day it serves mostly ESL and immigrant children) was a curiosity because it was an elementary school with an interior corridor. The schools here, or at least the ones that look like they were built quickly, look like bunkers, and the only thing that makes it not a sad environment to me is that the kids don’t know any different yet.

I came back for the planning meeting for an art show fundraiser coming up  in a month. It was an unusually sane meeting for that working group, and my spirits were lifted by the doyenne of the local art gallery. She’s a woman in her late 60’s that runs the local gallery, and has such a generous and enthusiastic and fun spirit, and so incredibly filled with don’t-give-a-fuck. We were talking about ways to attract teen entrants into the art show, and she made a crack about gift certificates to a local dispensary. It’s the kind of harmless, not cruel joke I might have made if I wasn’t… well, I’m not sure why exactly. She’s fascinating to me, and I wish that I could have met her at 25, because I imagine that she’s always been like this, or perhaps was once a much more buttoned up person.

After the meeting, I had a self-loathing fast food meal, then came back to find kids filling up the building. Nothing too crazy happened all day. When we were headed out to recess on the playground, I had one of those out-of-body, “is this my life?” moments where all I could see was the kids hanging off me, the cheap plastic whistle around my neck, my polo shirt and ill-fitting black pants. The moment passed, and it’s incredible that it doesn’t happen more.

By the end of the day, however, I was BURNT OUT. Toast. Nothing more to give. I came home, made myself dinner, and tried to watch a few episodes of Cowboy Bebop.

I’ve got a mixed reaction to Cowboy Bebop. But first, a digression through music:

One of the things I’ve been thinking about in the last year is learning to trust my instinctual likes and dislikes of things a little more. There are two things in balance with each other: everybody has an initial primary response to something, whether they like it or dislike it. The other side of that is the things that take time to appreciate, because you don’t understand context, or because you don’t understand the style, or because it’s unfamiliar. About every four months, I get irritated with myself for having an iPhone full of music that I’m not excited about that I feel like I have some obligation to try and like. And each time that happens, I try and remind myself to listen to myself, that I will like the extra time to bond with music I really love and won’t feel left out of the music that I’m trying to like.

Now, back to Bebop. Usually I have a much better nose for TV than for music. For whatever reason, I’m willing to try harder with an album that I think is boring than sit through a TV show that doesn’t interest me. And while I’ve liked some episodes of Cowboy Bebop, I think it’s past the point where it’s going to grip me as one of “my shows.” I think a lot of the show hinges on whether you like the character of Spike and find him charming. Now it’s probably unfortunate timing, but I’m not that interested in him. Through no fault of the show, I’ve been bombarded by snarky, dark, smoking anti-heroes on my TV for the last decade. The show’s jazz-saturated aesthetic and animation are still strong, as well as the presence of the totally winning Radical Edward (Edward is the sexist, annoyingly-voiced kawaii character that I usually hate, but something in the genderfluid self-invention of her names and identity, as well as her sunny disdain for the dark clouds that hover over her other shipmates keeps my interest).

After dinner, I headed out to my coffee shop to Nighthawks it and fill out a job application, which I completed and submitted with many knots in my stomach. After this, I go to bed and wake without remembering my dreams.

Losing Touch With The Young Folk

Matthew Eilar2 Comments

I was pretty gobsmacked by this story out of Portland, Maine*:

Over the next two weeks, Portland’s school district will install filtering software on laptops issued to high school students, in order to block access to pornography, social networking sites and video streaming sites when the laptops are at home.

Access to those sites is blocked now only at school, through the school network. The current filter doesn’t work when laptops are off school property.

The district will install filtering software made by Sophos, an Internet security company based in Boston. The software will be downloaded automatically when the students boot up their computers at school. Only when students get home will they discover that their lives have changed in a big way.

No longer will they have access to social networking sites like Facebook and video-streaming sites like Hulu and YouTube. Also blocked will be forums and news groups, games, dating sites, gambling sites and chat rooms.

Fortunately, the Kennebec Journal didn’t shy from the implications of this decision:

[School board Chairwoman Kate] Snyder said the school district shouldn’t give students equipment that makes it harder for parents to do their job, which is to help children stay focused on academics. She said the district has the right to filter the Internet.

“It’s a school-issued laptop,” she said. “If that’s something that the student wants to do on their own time and on a family computer, that’s OK.”

The change’s impact on students will depend on whether they have access to other computers at home. For many poor families, the school-issued laptop is the only computer in the house.

In interviews with Portland High students last week, those from middle-class families expressed various degrees of annoyance when told of the new filtering measures. A group of immigrant students reacted with anger.

“When we are at home, we need to have something else to look at besides homework,” said Fatush Jama, a senior.

“Where can we go to share if we don’t have Facebook?” asked Nateho Ahmen, a 17-year-old junior. “Who came up with this idea? We are going to have a long talk.”

This is not a legal question. Of course the school district has every right to install whatever software it wants on the computers it owns. But it’s hard for me to see this decision as anything but smallminded and passive aggressive.

First of all, I think it’s pretty uncontroversial to state that internet filters are nothing but odious joy killing vectors of hate. We’ve all had that experience of being interrupted at school, or at work in our quest for the answer to a question by an overzealous filter. Using the internet behind a filter is like browsing with a doddering uncle on your shoulder. He’s not entirely sure what’s going on, but he’s pretty sure that he disapproves. Not being able to leave him behind at the end of the school day sounds hellish.

Second, I think it’s pretty galling that a small group of parents pushed this through and made parenting decisions for the entire school district (that’s conjecture–there’s nothing mentioned about it in the article–but given that the school board member was the one dishing out the quote about giving control to parents, I think it’s pretty solid). I’m pretty sure the low income parents that use the computer as part time family computer are not the ones complaining. Sure, it’s primarily intended as a tool for school, but giving computer access to these families is a pretty valuable secondary social function. There’s something frankly ugly about denying access to families that don’t have other options.

But third, and most important, this decision shows a real failure of empathy on the part of the parent groups for the students they are responsible. Becoming out of touch with the culture is somthing I’ve been thinking about a lot, as I’ve reconsidered my relationship to pop culture and what’s popular. As I grow older, and my tastes more specialized, I’ve had to think about what responsibility I have to keep up with the culture at large. Another mental milestone passed by when I was reading a review for the new YA novel Fear, by Michael Grant, which posits a world in which everyone over the age of 15 mysteriously vanishes, and I realized that I had joined the masses of the dead. They told me to never trust anybody over the age of 25, and now that doesn’t seem very far away at all.  

But being out of touch with the chatter of the world happens, and I don’t really worry about it. There’s so much much in the world, and I don’t think anybody cares that much when a sheep drops out of the herd. What I really worry about is this exact kind of losing touch, where new technologies, new ideas, new social dynamics cut you off from your own experiences and your own former selves. Empathy is a plastic thing; I’ve met people in high school that will never be able to see themselves in people that did not grow up like them, and I’ve met older people that have stayed young, despite growing up in a world that may not exist anymore. Facebook is a new thing. But wanting to talk to your friends, gossiping about your enemies, developing a personality apart from your parents, even avoiding homework, these are very old things. And the smallmindedness of banning Facebook from school computers is the same smallmindedness of banning conversation during lunch, or restricting recess.

And we’ll all become old things too, whether that means over 15, or over 25, or over 55; age is a moving target. The boundaries of us and them will change whether we listen to top 40 or read the news or go to the movies. But we can resist forgetting what it means to be young.

*Which is, as regional allegiances require me to point out, the worst Portland.