Show us a picture that's worth a thousand words.
Submitted by sami711.
The teacher explains this highly improved writing sample:
1) To see what a teacher's blog can be like, see hers. Much of what she writes has to do with day-to-day realities, which she relates in a candid style, and which are important for seeing inside the school, particularly for those who have no children currently in the schools, or whose educational milieu is vastly different within a large district. This helps the community at large develop some understanding of the complexities, and see where things have changed since they last formed an impression. The camera-photos are a huge help in literally bringing people inside the classroom. A great example of her range was last May http://bronwynann.blogspot.com/2006_05_01_archive.html
And I've got to include this one as being one of the more culture-shocky (yet not heartwrenching, like this one is).
(2)
Her Feb 6 post ends with a plea to contact legislators about No Child
Left Behind and a request to forward to everyone EXCEPT journalists.
She's concerned about the district being retaliatory and is only slowly
able to feel comfortable reaching out beyond those she knows for
certain won't abuse her trust.
She's a 3rd grade teacher in East Oakland. She is going on sabbatical next year as, at 30, she's completely exhausted....after 8 years in the school, no two with the same Principal, and she's been the seniormost teacher I believe for the past two years.
Personally, I can't imagine they'd *allow* her to go under any circumstances, let alone force her out, but the fact that she's terrified they'd do so just shows how much she loves her job and her kids.
(3) Her most recent DonorsChoose request
was for Kleenex and mopping supplies since janitorial doesn't regularly
do floors evidently, and the kids were sick and germ-swapping.
I really try not to just be "The Blog that Re-Posts Ted Rall Columns." But then I succumb again.
As a single head of household with a school age child, every few weeks I panic over healthcare (my most recent hyperventilation was over Thanksgiving when I fell and dropped so hard on my lower spine that I ripped through my clothes, tore my skin, and gave myself a very nasty bruise just from the force of impact... nothing broken, but the first thing I did was wiggle my toes. The second thing I did was think about my perpetual state of underinsurance.). I have Blue Cross / Blue Shield, and I have a decent policy through an alumni group. They used to be one of the best providers in the country. Now, they deny every claim; that's their opening gambit.
I should add that of my male relatives going back two generations, 4/6 were (one still is) an MD. (MD's are also bearing crazy insurance costs in the form of their malpractice premium, which rise and fall with insurance companies' investment returns (and not, actually, runaway jury awards).)
250,000,000, INSURED BUT STILL IN TROUBLE
It's obviously outrageous that tens of millions of citizens of the wealthiest country to have ever existed in human history are one cluster of metastasizing cells away from bankruptcy. Did you know that 25 percent of mortgage foreclosures result from high medical bills?
But you really should read it for Ted Rall's wart story, at the end of the article.
We know you never slack off at work, but if you did, what would you do?
I'd co-opt QotD to post a youtube challenge on Vox!
So I'm challenging all men (and some particularly domain-knowledgeable women):
Banana Health.
Background
I'm a single mom of a teenage son. It has come to my attention that the Kaiser Permanent play on AIDS prevention that's presented to high school students has a modular instructional component involving unrolling a condom onto a banana. Astoundingly, many locations' parent groups require them to drop this component out of the play. (Although what can you really learn from 100 feet away, anyway?)
This is one of those things I just don't dare teach my child because, although I think of condom use as a factual health issue, good god, who wants their mother to teach them that?! So I'm left hoping he runs across this important information on the interweb! So, here I am, doing my best to improve the likelihood of that happening. On behalf of single mothers everywhere, I pose this challenge:
Challenge
Make a clinical video on how to select and use a condom, and post it to youtube.
Details
It can use any number and types of fruits or other non-sexual props, but no actual manufactured dildos or other sex toys no matter how abstract. You may use any number of condoms of any color, size, etc., from any manufacturer. I hope it will convey things like how to choose a condom that fits you, and it can certainly include any other kind of health related information such as where to buy condoms anonymously and/or cheaply, info on condom quality, etc.
Then post it on Youtube with the search terms "banana health"
Thanks!
Highly recommended: Brotherhood, a increasingly fab show which evidently recently signed for its second season on Showtime in 2007, does a dance on this riddle: what's the different between organized government and organized crime?
It ties in strongly to issues about social capital as well
(particularly the subset of political or social capital, and how those
lines cross). Another relevant issue: how does "military might," a type
of capital rarely mentioned get convoluted into social capital?
to keep in touch. In order to curtail my vox presence on google, I am no longer creating public posts.
f you've ever been around eight year olds, you know that although they are wonderful, they are covered in germs!!!
I'm asking for some tissues, Purell hand sanitizing gel, Lysol spray and disinfectant wipes to clean surfaces to try to stop this epidemic! I am also asking for basic cleaning supplies - broom and mop - because the janitors have had their hours and staff cut and don't have time to clean the floors. Thank you!!
The cost of this soaps and sanitizers is $322, including shipping and fulfillment.
My son's class just did Odysseus and, with it, the heroic journey.
Porting a diatribe from elsewhere here -- where it's obviously private because no one EVER comments on anything I write, I realized that my issue is of society's perception of Generation X as being full of anti-heros.
However, there's a different way of looking at it, which is how I actually do look at it: that they've (we've? Full disclosure: 1962, interpret as you will) had a Hero's Journey but their Return to Society has been aborted. From my child's handout:
After Transformation and Atonement, we face the final stage of our journey: our Return to everyday life. Upon our return, we discover our gift, which has been bestowed upon us based on our new level of skill and awareness. We may become richer or stronger, we may become a great leader, or we may become enlightened spiritually.
The essence of the return is to begin contributing to our society. In mythology, some heroes return to save or renew their community in some way. Other mythological heroes return to create a city, nation, or religion.
Sometimes, however, things don't go smoothly. For example, we may return with a great spiritual message, but find that our message is rejected. We are ostracized or even killed our for our ideal. We also run the risk of losing our new understanding, having it corrupted by putting ourselves back in the same situation or environment we left earlier.
In some cases, the hero discover that her new level of awareness and understanding is far greater than than the people around her. She may then become disillusioned or frustrated and leave society to be on her own. On the other hand, many great heroes such as Buddha and Jesus have sacrificed the bliss of enlightenment or heaven to remain in the world and teach others.
Doing other research, I ran across Zygmunt Bauman (b. 1925 in Poland), author of Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts among other things (see the Wikipedia site), who is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds and the University of Warsaw. Having lived through rather a bit himself, he had this to say:
The so-called 'Generation X' of young men and women born in the 1970s, in Britain or other 'developed' countries, knows ailments of which older generations were unaware; not necessarily more ailments, or ailments that are more acute, distressing, and mortifying, but ones that are distinctly different, novel -- one could say 'specifically liquid modern' maladies and afflictions. And it has novel reasons (some replacing, some added to the traditional ones) to feel ruffled, disturbed and often aggrieved ....
One of the diagnoses most commonly on offer is unemployment, and particularly the poor job prospects for the school-leavers who enger fresh on a market concerned with raising profits through cutting labour costs and asset-stripping rather than creating new jobs and building new assets. ... One of the most commonly offered recommendations to the young meanwhile is to be flexible and not particularly choosy, not to expect too much from jobs, to take the jobs as they come without asking too many questions, and to treat them as an opportunity to be enjoyed on the spot as long as it lasts rather than as an introductory chapter of a 'life project', a matter of self-esteem and self-definition, or a warrant of long-term security.
Comfortingly, therefore, the package-idea of 'unemployment' entails the diagnosis of the trouble complete with the best available cure and a list of straightforward and reassuringly obvious routines to be followed on the way to convalescence. The prefix 'un' suggests anomaly; 'unemployment' is a name for a manifestly temporary and abnormal condition and so the nature of the complaint is patently transient and curable. ...
How different is the idea of 'redundancy' that has shot into prominence during the lifetime of Generation X! Where the prefix 'un' in 'unemployment' used to suggest a departure from the norm - as in 'unhealthy' or 'unwell' - there is no such suggestion in the notion of 'redundancy'. No inkling of abnormality, anomaly, spell of ill-health or a momentary slip. 'Redundancy' whispers permanence and hints at the ordinariness of the condition. ....
To be 'redundant' to be ... unneeded, of no use - whatever the needs and uses are... There is no self-evident reason for your being around and no obvious justification for your claim to the right to stay around....
A feeling that redundancy may signal such 'social homelessness', with all the attendant loss of self-esteem and life purpose, or a suspicion that it may at any moment become their lot even if it has not yet, is part of the life experience of Generation X that it does not share with the preceding generations, however acute and resented the misery of those generations might have been. ... Unwelcome, tolerated at best... treated in the best of cases as an object of benevolence, charity and pity (challenged, to rub salt into the wound, as undeserved) but not of brotherly help, charged with indolence and suspected of iniquitous intentions and criminal inclinations, it has few reasons to treat 'society' as a home to which one owes loyalty and concern.
So my point is this:
As people bemoan the lack of leadership now that Boomers are entering retirement (cf. SSRI article), how does one convince those older people who would be seeking to mentor others to cease the negative stereotyping and rationally examine the lessons that a group of people have managed their way through? Is a poor urban child's journey heroic only if the end result is that they identify as suburbanites? Is an African-American's journey heroic only if they identify with being a part of the European-derived racial majority? Why should a group of people, whose time-location gave them a unique informal education, be considered on an heroic (not anti-heroic!) journey ONLY if the end result is that they identify with being of a different time-location? Why are some influential Baby-boomers looking for mini-me's, and how can those who are doing so be persuaded to cut that out?
In other words: how does Generation X "Return"?
What gameshow or reality show would you kick butt on?
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