Half Changed World

kill a catalog, save a tree

The holidays are still 2+ months away, and we're already drowning in catalogs.  It's clutter that we don't need, and it's bad for the environment.

I went to the Direct Marketing Association website and asked to be taken off their lists.  (They charge you $1 for the privilege, which ticks me off.)  That helps with the random catalogs from companies I've never heard of, but doesn't stop catalogs that you've bought from in the past.  The problem is that I do like ordering from companies like LL Bean and Oriental Trading Company, but I do so from their website, and I don't need (or want) to get a monthly catalog from them.  So I've been calling one or two companies a day and asking them to take me off their lists.

In general, the process has been pretty painless.  But Lilian Vernon was sufficiently annoying that it makes me far less likely to order from them in the future.  You call, and get an electronic voice that asks you what you want to do.  Then it asks you to read it your customer number off the catalog.  Then it asks you to confirm that your address is... (whatever they have in the system.)  Only then does it connect you to a live operator... who proceeds to ask for your customer number again, and for you to repeat your address to her.

Update: Via Aggregating the Fascinating, I found Catalog Choice, a free online site to submit requests to be removed from a catalog.

my reader

The other morning I asked D to get dressed, and when I went into his room 10 minutes later to check on him, I found him sitting in his underwear reading.  I just had to laugh, because I can't tell you the number of times my mom found me with one sock on, reading or just staring into space.  While it can be annoying to have to repeat myself 3 times before it registers on him that I've even said anything, I'm just pleased as punch that he's becoming a real reader.

On the other hand, I'm sort of selfishly bummed by his choice of reading material, which is almost exclusively manga.  He's read all the Naruto that the library carries, and is now working his way through the Yu-Gi-Oh books.  It's not that I think that comics aren't "real" reading --but it's not the stories that I dreamed about sharing with my children.  D still wants to be read to, but he's less and less willing to let me pick the stories, and has almost no patience for chapter books of any sort.

Added to clarify: I'm thrilled that he's reading, regardless of the content.  But there are so many books that I was personally looking forward to reading with him that he's not interested in....  He won't watch baseball with me either.

Good news, bad news on SCHIP

The good news is that the House passed the SCHIP reauthorization bill.  The bad news is that the 265-159 vote margin is not going to be enough to override a veto.  Congress will presumably include SCHIP in the continuing resolution that it will need to pass by September 1, and it will continue at current levels until at least sometime next year, probably until 2009.  That's going to mean real cuts in some states.

Here's the roll call.  What immediately jumped out at me is that my representative, Tom Davis, is one of the Republicans who voted against the original House bill but for the compromise bill.  I had been wondering about that after getting his response to my email plea for SCHIP last week, which said, in part:

"H.R. 3162 was not SCHIP.  It was an excessive expansion of a good program, an expansion that could undermine the program's effectiveness and a backdoor effort to move toward government run health care....   

Given the wide range of problems with this legislation I voted against it when it came before me in the House. It passed, however, by a vote of 225-204.  The Senate passed a narrower expansion of the SCHIP program. I am hopeful that as we proceed to a conference we will return to the core principles established in the original SCHIP."

I assume that Davis is going to run for the Senate seat that John Warner is vacating.  I think this vote will hurt him in the Republican primary, but help him in the general election if he gets nominated.  Or maybe I'm being too cynical -- many Republican voters support health care for kids too.

Added: I heard this afternoon that there's been another recall of Thomas trains for lead-based paint.  Unlike the first go-around, we do have some of the affected pieces, and will send them in for an exchange.  But I still wish that the American public was half as outraged about SCHIP as it is about lead in toys.  Nick Anderson got it right a month ago.

TBR: A Class Apart

This week's book is A Class Apart: Prodigies, Pressure, and Passion Inside One of America's Best High Schools, by Alec Klein.  Klein, a Washington Post journalist, spent a year at Stuyvesant High School, one of New York's competitive math and science high schools.  He tells the stories of a handful of students and teachers as the school year progresses, occasionally cutting back for a bigger-picture look at the questions such as the value of gifted and talented education and the huge under-representation of black and Hispanic students.

In topic and approach, A Class Apart bears a striking resemblance to another recent book, The Overachievers, in which Alexandra Robbins reports on three semesters she spent with students at Walt Whitman High School in Montgomery County.  (Both authors attended the schools they wrote about.)  But I whipped through A Class Apart in a couple of days, while I gave up on The Overachievers after finishing less than 100 pages in the three weeks the library allowed me.  So what's the difference?

• I also went to Stuy, so I had more of a personal interest in the book.  It was interesting to see what things had changed (more racial divisions in the student body, far more organized prepping for the entrance exams) and what hadn't (Sing!, Ms. Lorenzo, the existence of an assistant principal who would approve schedule changes for the desperate).
• Klein included teachers' experiences which made for a greater variety of stories.
• Klein clearly felt a great deal of affection for the students, the teachers, and for the school as an institution.  I didn't get that from Robbins.
• I think Klein is just a better writer than Robbins.

Klein's book doesn't really have a thesis -- it's just descriptive.  To the extent that it has an argument, it's a plea that there ought to be more schools like Stuyvesant.  By that he means schools that push bright kids to excel, but he also means schools where parents are involved (sometimes to a fault) and schools where students feel a sense of ownership (again, sometimes to a fault) and teachers and administrators are willing to bend the rules in the interest of learning.

Home repairs

Posts like this one, at Corporate Mommy, intimidate the heck out of me.   Geez, they did that all themselves?  I can paint a room and replace the flappy part of a toilet, and that's about the limit of my home improvement skills.  Come on, I grew up in an NYC apartment -- when something broke, you called the super.  So I liked the article in this Sunday's Washington Post magazine about a woman who bit the bullet and learned to do some electrical work around her house.

T's a bit more skilled than I am, but not as much as I sometimes think he should be.  Not because he has a Y chromosome, but because his father is pretty handy.  But he had bad experiences "helping" his father as a teenager.  That said, he's become a fair hand with a solder iron since we bought the house.  His father showed him how to do one and the first one he did took him about 3 hours, but since the house had essentially no grounded plugs or GFCIs when we got it, there were lots of opportunities to practice.

Fundamentally, those are the two elements that you need to learn most hands-on skills -- someone to show you how to do it, and the opportunity to practice.   In general, we don't have either for home improvements, which is why we've spent the last two months sending emails back and forth with the guy we're trying to get to do our bathroom.  (One of the lighting fixtures fell out of the ceiling tonight, so I'm hoping that we can expedite this process a bit.)  I didn't learn how to do crafts as a child, either, and have mostly self-taught those, but the difference is that I don't really mind having a sloppy quilt where none of the corners quite line up stuffed into a closet.  I don't want to live with a kitchen where the cabinets don't line up for the next 20 years.

See also: The Simple Dollar on The Do It Yourself Dilemna

Support health care for kids

I don't have a lot of energy to post tonight, but I wanted to be sure to share Families USA's website on how to contact your representatives to urge them to support the bipartisan SCHIP reauthorization against Bush's veto threat.

Or call tollfree: 1-866-544-7573 -- thanks to SEIU.

Some quick points:

• In a country as rich as this one, no one should have to choose between taking their kid to the doctor and having enough to eat, or having the heat turned off.
• Kids with insurance are more likely to get preventative care, more likely to be seen when sick before something minor becomes something big.
• Families with insurance are more likely to get to make doctor's appointments, rather than have to wait to be seen in a clinic or ER.  That means their parents don't lose as much pay.
• Covering children is actually remarkably cheap as good public policies go, on the order of $2,000 per child per year.
• In the states that are covering higher income families, they're requiring families to put up copays and premiums.  It's not a free ride.
• As far as I can tell, the Bush Adminstration's main complaint about SCHIP is that it works, and that other people might start asking why they can't buy into public health insurance pools.
• On the radio this evening, Dennis Smith was claiming that the problem with expanding SCHIP is that it would create adverse selection against private insurance programs, by making the insured pool older and sicker.   Funny, the Administration doesn't seem to worry about adverse selection when it comes to their proposed tax subsidy solution to uninsurance.
• When the Administration starts talking about crowd-out, they never talk about the quality of the private health insurance plans that people are abandoning.  In many cases, they're insurance in name only, with overly high deductibles -- or worse, ridiculously low annual limits.  In some cases that's because the employers are being stingy, but just as often, it's because they're desperately trying to find a way to keep offering health insurance in the face of constantly rising prices.
• In a country as rich as this one, no one should have to choose between taking their kid to the doctor and having enough to eat, or having the heat turned off.  Yeah, I know I said it before, but it's worth repeating.

Update: go read Cecily's post on health insurance

WBR: Spook Country

This week's book is William Gibson's new book, Spook Country.  I requested it from the library mostly on the basis of the rave review in the Washington Post, which called it "a devastatingly precise reflection of the American zeitgeist" and compared it to Don DeLillo's books.

I read it in about a day and a half, which puts it way ahead of most of DeLillo's recent books.  (I've owned Underworld for several years and don't think I've made it past page 50.)  But other than being quite readable, I didn't think that Spook Country had a lot going for it.  (Well, it did offer the pleasure of hearing a Gibson character say "remember where we were all going to do virtual reality?")

I had two major complaints about it:

1)  The book has three main characters, whose stories wind up intersecting as the book proceeds.  But all three of them are fundamentally pawns, being moved around by other people.  None of them ever considers doing something independently.

2)  One of the major conceits of the books is about locational art, where virtual reality headsets are mashed-up with GPS receivers, so they send images that are specific to the exact spot where you stand.  But none of the locational art described in the book sounded in the least bit interesting.  I've experienced real directional art -- Janet Cardiff's audio piece, Words Drawn on Water -- and it still lingers with me two years later.  Nothing in the book had that sort of resonance.

Tashlich

Tashlich is a ceremony where you symbolically cast your sins (in the form of bread crumbs) into the water so that they can be washed away. 

In looking for something to read at our informal tashlich this evening (the fish thought our sins were very tasty), I found this poem:

Tashlich, poem by Rafael Jesús González

   

These are the days of awe —

time of inventory

         and a new beginning

when harvest of what we sowed

         comes in.

(What have we sown

         of discord &
terror?

six years

I wanted to schedule this audioconference for work as soon after Labor Day as possible, and after some back and forth, it became clear that September 11th was going to be the only day that fit everyone's schedule.  One of our guests was a state senator from NY, so I asked her scheduler was she sure that the 11th was ok, and she said yes.  So we held it today.  And I'm not going to any memorial services or doing anything out of the ordinary today.

But I was glad that it was gray and overcast today, and not another impossibly perfect blue sky.

If you feel a call to gather and talk about your memories and feelings, we've opened up Wednesday Whining a little early this week.

Last year's post

2005 remembrances

2004

(Yes, I did hit my 3rd blogaversary last month.)

Review: BOB Books

[This is a MotherTalk sponsored review.]

I signed up to review BOB Books: Set 1 mostly because I was curious to see how my kids would react to them.  D is 6 1/2 and a strong reader; N is almost 4, and knows his letters, but hasn't really started putting them together into words. 

The set is a collection of 12 small paperback books, each about a dozen pages long, and with maybe 50 or so words.  N loves the size, and the way the set comes with its own storage box.  They're designed so that the first book only uses a handful of letters, and then each book adds a few more.  As you can imagine, that doesn't leave room for a particularly wide vocabulary -- there are a lot of sentences like "Sam sat."

What redeems the books, and makes them not totally painful for the parent to read (and re-read, and re-read) is the illustrations, which are whimsical line drawings, with easy to read expressions.  N and D both think it's absolutely hysterical that Sam sits on Mat and Mat sits on Sam.

Are these books helpful for teaching a child to read?  I don't know.  Last night, N selected these books for his bedtime story.  (We've had the books for about 3 weeks now, and he's still interested in them, although he's no longer asking for them every night.)  I tried to get him to read some of the words in the first book, and he did, but when I asked him if he was reading them or remembering what the book said, he said "remembering."  I personally think my head will explode from the repetition of the books before N is ready to make the transition from identifying letters to putting them together.  But for a kid who is right on the verge of decoding, and who would enjoy the triumph of being able to read a whole book "all by myself," these books might be a real hit.

Plum Torte

One of the tastes that has always meant fall for me is Marian Burros' plum torte.  You can make it with regular plums, but it's really meant to be made with the little Italian prune-plums, which are one of the few fruits that still seems to be seasonal -- they're only available in late August and September.  (And they seem to be much harder to find in the DC area than in New York -- maybe because there's not much of an Italian population here?)

The recipe appeared almost every year in the NY Times when I was growing up, until one year Burros finally wrote that this was the last time, and if you wanted it, you should cut it out for cripessake.  (The Times reprinted it again a year or two ago.)  It's one of the few cakes I can remember my mother baking (she's an excellent cook, but has never been particularly into baking) and one that I've made dozens of times.  It's delicious, incredibly easy to make, and travels well, so it's perfect for a potluck.

This summer, Cook's Illustrated ran a recipe for a Rustic Plum Cake that is based on Burros' recipe.  But they didn't like the cake base, so added ground almonds (and reduced the butter slightly) and they poached the plums in a bit of jam.  Sounded interesting.  So when I saw a 5 pound box of Italian prune-plums at Costco last week, I knew what I was baking.

The Cook's Illustrated version is good.  But I like the old version too.  I found the almond taste a bit overpowering -- I think I might use the ground almonds, but pass on the almond extract.  And I don't think the extra flavor of the cooked plums was enough to justify the extra effort, and additional dirty pot.

Either way, I don't think you can go wrong.

PTA

I went to the first PTA meeting of the year this evening.  I'll admit it was nice to attend a PTA meeting where all the participants couldn't fit at a single table.

I did find it a bit ironic that the evening's presentation was on handling stress, with one of the main suggestions being to do less.  Now where would the PTA be if everyone listened to that message?

Get Women Elected Now!

I spent this evening at a meeting for GWEN -- Get Women Elected Now.  It's a local group with the goal of supporting progressive female candidates in Northern Virginia.  It's obviously somewhat inspired by EMILY's List, but aiming to build personal connections as well as raise money.  One of the founders is Libby Garvey, and she's very clearly thinking about the gendered paths to political involvement that I wrote about two years ago when she wrote for delegate.

It was quite an interesting group of people, including several current and former elected officials.  Two men, the rest women.  I'd guess that most of the people there were in their 50s or older, although there were a few younger members.  Garvey mentioned that someone had emailed her asking about child care at the meeting (which was not provided).  There was clearly a hunger for ways to be involved that didn't involve writing checks, and that were more substantive than stuffing envelopes or making calls.

I volunteered to update their website for them.  As T said when I told him, "of course you did."

Teacher autonomy

I'm still on the email list for D's old school, because I still care a lot about the students and the school.  Like many other Northern Virginia schools, it failed to make "adequate yearly progress" (AYP).  But because it's failed in the past, it is now in the fourth year of "Title I Improvement Status."  What does that mean?  Here's the official Alexandria public schools explanation:

"The sanctions dictate that ACPS must take one of six corrective actions.  The Superintendent chose the first option and as a result, has made significant staffing adjustments in several key areas. In addition, this year a school oversight committee will (1) monitor the implementation of JHAA's three-year school improvement plan, and as necessary, modify it to better address the needs of students;  (2) verify weekly that teachers are effectively teaching the division's curriculum and following the pacing guides; (3) analyze a variety of data to inform instructional practices and remedial programs; (4) provide staff development opportunities that focus on bolstering student achievement;  and (5) ensure JHAA staff and parents are aware of the committee's decisions."

I have to say, number 2 on that list made me shudder in horror.  The best teachers I know all modify the curriculum to respond to children's interests, or take advantage of a special event in the community.  This kind of pressure makes it harder for them to do things like this. 

And I just found out from another parent that D's kindergarten teacher from the start of last year (before D was switched into a different classroom), who started every day with children gathered around him listening to a story, was not invited to return this year.  Because he paid more attention to the children than to the curriculum.  Sigh.

I've spent a lot of time over the last 6 months reading about what makes jobs good or bad, for a paper on job quality.*  One of the things that struck me is how much the ability to control how you do your job, what I call "worker voice" in the paper, matters to people's evaluation of whether they're happy at work.  I'm afraid that we're systematically making teaching a worse and worse job in that respect.

*Executive summary here.  If you're curious as to what I sound like, here's a podcast interview with me talking about the report.