Children: November 2008 Archives

At dinner last night, Husband and I talked about the menu for Thanksgiving Dinner.

The peanut gallery felt compelled to weigh in.

Loudly.

Caleb: I WILL NOT EAT THAT TURKEY. TURKEY'S YUCKY. AND I DO NOT LIKE PIE. I WANT CAKE.

Liam, infinitely more reasonable now that he's eight: I will eat some turkey. With salt only. No gravy. No stuffing. I hate mashed potatoes. And I only want ice cream for dessert, not pie. I hate pie. It has fruit in it.

He thought for a moment, then added: Can we have soda with Thanksgiving because it's a holiday?

Caleb, not to be outdone: I want tanksgivn HOT DOG. On a BUN. With KETCHUP.

Next year, Caleb will start kindergarten.

This simple sentence keeps me awake at night, not just because I worry that he will be the only boy in his class with a nookie in his pocket (looks a bit like a rocket, true, but neither is appropriate at morning story-time).
 
Nope, the nookie is only a fraction of my worry. My main worry is our address. We live outside the "catchment," as it's known, for the public school that Liam attends - a school we like and where Liam is pretty happy. Yes, I know that in some worlds, Caleb would attend the same school his brother does, no questions asked. But - cue maniacal laughter - we live in Manhattan. Which means that just because we got a variance for Liam to go to this school, we shouldn't for a minute expect that Caleb will get one, too.

Maybe the next time I can't sleep, I should call Joel Klein, our so-not-beloved Chancellor of Schools. I'm pretty sure he stays up nights too, plotting ways to make the lives of middle-class New York families ever more difficult. One of last year's tricks, for example, was the "centralizing" of pre-K and Kindergarten choices: families filled out a gazillion forms, made copies of their lease, their mortgage, their birth certificates, and just about any other piece of paper they could find, and sent their packets of information to...

Pennsylvania. Which is, apparently, "central" to folks at the DOE.

You will be stunned to know that there were glitches with this centralization process: families with twins were told that each twin would be sent to a different school. Families "in district" were sent to far-away schools, and some families weren't told where they were going until early September.

In short - a mess. And an expensive one - those people in Pennsylvania didn't work cheap. But we'll come back to money in a minute.

To get Liam into his school, we had to get a variance - or, in DOE parlance, "placement exception request." Acquiring this form took about fifteen phone calls, several emails, and three trips to an office building in Herald Square. I had to fill it out and return it to the office on the first day of business in January of the year Liam entered kindergarten. So on January 2, I hauled ass out of bed and hustled over to 333 7th Avenue - and my form was far from the first in the pile. We didn't hear from the school until mid-August, after we'd already started forking over money we didn't have to a private school that had given us huge amounts of financial aid. Mostly we don't regret our decision to shift from private to public, particularly when it comes time for birthdays, holidays, new winter coats, the occasional vacation... all of which would be a stretch if we'd had to continue to pay that tuition bill.

Now it's Caleb's turn and, given the DOE's proclivities to change its procedures whenever Joel Klein can't sleep, there's a new PER policy (love those acronyms, dontcha?) But no one knows what the policy will be. No one can tell me when variance forms will be available, when the forms will be due, or when we'll find out. The "centralizing" process that was put in place last year has been yanked, according to a recent article in the Times, but it's not clear what (if anything) will take its place. The article made it sound like children in Caleb's category are not precisely high priority: first to enroll are kids who live in the school's zone, and next are kids who live in the district but outside the zone. Then we get to Caleb's situation: kids outside the district who have a sibling in the school.

This map, from the DOE website, is supposed to help clarify things. But nowhere on the site does it explain those red lines. Are those "catchments?" Maybe they are "regions?" Or "zones?"

What are our options? We could try again for private school and simply close our eyes to the financial strain and to the potential inequity of sending one kid public and the other private. But without financial aid...? Well, tuition at Friends Seminary, for example, a wonderful private Quaker school nearby, is upwards of thirty grand (not including mandatory fees and "donations").  Unfortunately, I have not a spare pile of cash on hand.

Other options: Hunter College Elementary School, the holy grail of public elementary schools in NYC because it's the hardest to get into: you need to hit some mark (upwards of the 96th percentile) on an IQ test even to be allowed to the second round of the admission process. Hunter takes 48 kids in kindergarten (and another batch later, in seventh grade) - 24 girls and 24 boys. Hunter gets more than a thousand applications a year and I'll bet that this year, as the economic bad news penetrates further and further into formerly affluent households, even more applications will come flooding in.

What else? We could aim for the so-called G&T programs (and no, unfortunately, these are not schools that serve gin and tonics at their PTA meetings, but what a good idea). These are the "gifted and talented" programs, some of which draw from a city-wide population and others that are local (in terms of district, zone, catchment...who knows). The DOE instituted a new policy last year for TAG programs that was supposed to increase diversity among TAG programs (and did precisely the opposite) by standardizing admissions. 

Here's how that standardizing works: kids take a test and depending on their score, they are admitted or not. Period, end of discussion.

Right. Depending on how your four-year old fares during a particular hour on a particular day (and on whether you can wring the correct information from the DOE website about how to apply), your child may or may not be eligible for an advanced curriculum, smaller classes, and (probably) more engaged classmates.

Basically, despite all this standardization, it's a crapshoot: did Caleb play nicely with the doctor who administered the IQ test for Hunter admissions? Will Caleb tell the examiner that the TAG tests are stupid? Where does recalcitrance fall on the "talented and gifted" grid? Will my variance request, when I ever get it, be mis-filed because I don't have the same last name as my son?

If it weren't the educational fate of my children at stake here, this whole scenario would make me laugh. All these efforts to standardize and streamline, so much energy put into plotting points on a grid, arranging data in a graph - but does anyone know a four-year old who plots tidily into a chart?  And what does this data really tell us?

Let's look at a different data set for a minute, shall we? Let's look at some costs: the city spent 130 million dollars designing and implementing "school report cards" that are supposed to increase "transparency" in the schools - if you can figure out how to read the report card (click here to see the spreadsheet). Another eighty million bucks got spent on a computer record-keeping program that doesn't work and then there was the paltry six million they spent on surveys for parents, teachers, and students. Let's see...that's about TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN MILLION DOLLARS for...paperwork?  Wonder how these numbers factor into the recently announced 1.5% school budget cuts - Liam's school just lost fifty thousand dollars from its budget, with warnings of more cuts to come next year.

What happens when a city - oh hell, let's extrapolate, shall we? - when a country can't properly educate its children?

That's why the question of Caleb's kindergarten keeps me up at night.

After dinner the other night, we turned on the soundtrack from "The Commitments," that great movie about Motown in Ireland. It's a great family dance record - "Mustang Sally" has been one of Liam's favorite songs from his first staggering steps, and Caleb will dance to just about anything. 

Our favorite dancing tune, though, is "Treat Her Right," with its "hey hey hey" chorus and heavy bass line. Caleb's got a great hip swaggle when he dances, but the other night he was wiggling around with one hand clasped firmly on his crotch, like a tiny Michael Jackson.

Typical mother that I am, I didn't realize that this was perhaps a stylistic choice on his part, so I told him we could pause the music while he went to the bathroom and peed.

He stared at me witheringly. "Mommy. I'm just holding my penis. It's what you do when you dance to this music."

Oh.

Guess we can pretty much rule out auditions for "Billy Elliott."

Another day walking home from school with Liam. His birthday is next week, so I asked him what Grandma should get him for his birthday, expecting "lego set, pokemon cards, bionicles," - you know, standard-issue 8 year old stuff.

He paused, turned, threw his arms in the air. "She should spend EIGHTY DOLLARS and get me a TUXEDO!" he proclaimed. "Like real vampires wear. Or a spy."

Fall is Harvest Time: apples, squash, pumpkins, the last of the lettuces. The Greenmarket in Union Square is a mecca for cooks, both serious and amateur; for photographers, who exclaim over the brilliant colors (causing the farmers to snicker); and for urban wanderers, who wander among the stands and pretend they're in bucolic-ville.

I go to the Greenmarket several times a week, hoping somehow to instill in Liam and Caleb the awareness that food doesn't come from Fresh Direct boxes.I'm not sure it's working (the list of what my children won't eat is a daily testament to my failure as a mother), but I persist.

This summer, I even went so far as to plant my own vegetables. Three vegetables, to be precise. No, not three types of vegetables, just three vegetables: one pot of carrots (didn't grow); many pumpkin seeds, which turned into one thriving pumpkin vine for June and July, spawning great thoughts of Halloween carving, until mid-August, when the vines wizened and died, looking much like the legs and feet of the Wicked Witch of the West, post-house collision. And sweet potatoes, which I plant mostly because I like the bright green vines - I  twine them around the fence of our terrace in an effort to make things look a little less institutional.

(Yes, we have that most precious of New York commodities: outside space. Across the hall from our apartment is a concrete fenced-in terrace that runs the length of the building; it gets sun until about noon at the peak of summer, as well as a steady stream of noise and bus exhaust.)

The vines grew and grew and I kind of forgot about the potatoes down there in the dirt, until I was cleaning up the flower pots this weekend, doing an urban version of readying the farm for winter. On the 15th floor, winter preparation involves throwing away the dead plants, saving the potting soil in plastic bags to be reused for next year, and taping black garbage bags over the two rose bushes, in hopes that they might bloom again next year (I've got my doubts).

But as I cleared out the long window box with the vines in it, I discovered that voila! I had grown two potatoes! The boys were amazed - and a little horrified by the coiled length of reddish vine I pulled from the soil. 

I had some vague doubts about actually eating these things - god only knows what kind of New York city toxins filtered into the soil - but I figured whatever it was wouldn't kill us in such relatively small doses. Besides, whatever was going into the dirt was going into our lungs every day anyway, and we're not dead yet, as they say in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (a comment that comes verbatim from Daniel Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year. Swear to god).

So we peeled the potatoes, sliced 'em up, and made french fries! They look pretty good, right? Nicely crispy, a little sprinkling of Maldon sea salt...

Delish.

The boys each ate about two and then Caleb asked if we had any tater tots.

What's the growing season on a tater tot, I wonder?

6:32AM, the day after election day.

"Mommy, Obama won, he won!" The same four little hands as yesterday, but this time chilly from already having gone downstairs for the paper before I was even awake.

The boys want to know the score, because of course if someone won, then there's a score. Once I'd gotten some coffee into me (don't I realize that I'm too old to start drinking champagne at 11PM? I guess one must suffer for history), I realized that there were, in fact, a whole lot of ways to answer that question:

• The electoral college score: 349 to 173 as of mid-morning, with North Carolina still uncalled.
• The voter rolls: more than 3 million first-time voters
• The international opinion meter: way higher than on November 3rd
• The national optimism meter: WAY higher than on November 3rd
• The correcting-history score: off the chart

Because I live in Manhattan, I could be pretty sure of encountering equally elated citizens this morning as I went around doing my errands after dropping the boys at their respective schools. (Okay, so Caleb has maybe just a little glimmer of a fever, but Mommy has Got Stuff To Do and it doesn't involve pushing a four-year-old around in a stroller all day.) At the grocery store, the farmer's market, Staples ... everyone had a little smile, and the "have a good day" exchanges seemed particularly meaningful.

For someone like me, who has a pretty cynical worldview (and okay, I'm often bitter, too, but without the guns and religion), what seems perhaps the most unreal about today is the emotion bubbling inside me. I think - dear god could it be? - I think I feel ... patriotism. Actual patriotism: pride about what my country represents, about what it did for itself last night, about the amazingly peaceful transition that just took place and that continues to unfold. Think about it: an entire regime has just been deposed without a single shot.

It's true: this liberal cynic feels patriotic, dammit, like maybe I should be wearing red-white-and-blue, or a flag pin or something. I am, frankly, amazed that my country, which so often takes pride in its xenophobia and ignorance, and which has for so long clung to narrow and parochial views of difference, managed to shake off its blinders and move forward towards something - dare we say it - that has the potential for magnificence?

Last night, in his amazing speech in Grant Park, Obama said "that's the true genius of America, that America can change." We needn't be trapped by tradition, or convention, or the bleaker parts of our own history. Let's revel in this particular change, shall we? Here's an image that will bring a smile: imagine Dubya trying to make that speech - no, not write that speech, we all know that's impossible - just trying to get his mouth around all those elegant, powerful words - those elegant, powerful ideas.

Before we left for school this morning, Liam and Caleb were working together (see? Barack does work miracles) on a lego fortress/castle/poison destroyer. Liam was sing-songing to himself as he worked: "we have a president and his color is black, we have a president and his color is black." Every now and then, Caleb would chime in "and blue!" because he's very excited about the Empire State building being lit up in Democratic blue tonight.

I guess you could say, then, that today, for a change, black-and-blue are the color of victory.