Politics: January 2009 Archives

A few days before my 45th birthday, I found myself doing it. Alone, in the bathroom, and not for the first time.

It's true: I was staring into the mirror, slowly smoothing my fingers across my forehead to see what I'd look like with Botox. I didn't really think I had that many wrinkles, until I'd pulled the skin taut and realized that, yep, should've been more vigilant with that sunscreen back in college, instead of slathering on baby oil and settling down on the tar-paper roof of my dorm with a tinfoil-covered record album under my chin to make sure that the sun hit every inch of skin.

From what I've read about Botox and other such "procedures," it seems that it's a bit like re-covering your couch: first you do just the couch, but then the couch looks so good that you notice the walls are dingy; so you do the walls and now the rug looks a mess...

I mean, if I were to shoot my forehead full of botulism, then what would I do with the hairline fractures appearing around my mouth? And if I fill those in with Restylane, what do I do with the delicate webbing around my neck? And below my neck? I shudder to think.  

It's one thing if my face were my fortune - if English professors could also earn lucrative spots shilling for Revlon. If that could happen, then maybe I'd contemplate needles in my face, a nip here and a tuck there, here a nip, there a nip, everywhere a nip-nip.

Thus you should understand that when I went to the dermatologist's office the other day, it was really and truly only to get some kind of cream for the little rash on my cheek that wouldn't go away. The office was, of course, filled with ads for various products that will erase the effects of aging, but what struck me most was a framed certificate of commendation hanging on the wall in the examination room. The certificate was from, like, the Institute of Botox or something, and certified his training in some advanced procedure. Here's the picture on the certificate:

Do you notice something about the woman's face? Right. She doesn't have one. She has features: nose, mouth, eyes, but there's nothing holding it all together. She's a blank, a cipher, airbrushed practically out of existence.

They say there's no truth in advertising, but I think this certificate unintentionally hits it right on the (perfectly coiffed) head: we can use "science" to "remedy" the aging process and, in the process, surgically strip our faces of what makes them ours: the record of our experiences, our failures, hopes, worries, dreams. I won't even mention the question of why we're so afraid of mortality that we're willing to inject poison into ourselves in order to defy the inevitable movement towards the grave; nor will I say anything about how our aging faces and bodies connect us to our parents (omigod! I have my mother's knees!)...nope, not gonna say any of that.

I am going to ask, however, if any of you have seen the posters for "He's just not that into you," which offers up an astonishing array of Hollywood faces:

So many chiclet-sized white teeth, so much shiny taut skin, such perfectly oval eyes set jewel-like under eyelids that don't droop... It's amazing - not their beauty, but the fact that, except for variations in hair color, all those people look the same: it's a big group of happy white people (apparently people of color do not experience romantic comedy the way white people do, with the exception, maybe, of Will Smith). All the individuality has been airbrushed out - but the airbrushing didn't happen just to the photograph itself. Now the airbrushing happens beforehand, in the doctor's office, where any flaw (real or perceived) can be magically whisked away. (On the movie poster Kevin Connelly has wrinkles in his forehead, but we all know that he's going to be the comic relief, so it's okay.)
 
Yes, I know, I can hear the protests: well-applied Botox just makes you look rested, revitalized; I don't feel my age so why should I look my age; if I feel better about myself with fewer wrinkles, why shouldn't I have some work done...

I don't have answers to those questions and I can't explain precisely why the Botox bonanza bothers me. Is it the overtones of Dorian Gray? Is it our relentless pursuit of physical perfection, regardless of the cost? Is it our symbolic rejection of previous generations?

Should I really be so afraid of getting wrinkles that I sleep only on my back, staring up at the ceiling, as a friend's dermatologist said to her, quite seriously. Are wrinkles really such an atrocity I shouldn't curl up around my husband or my favorite pillow and get comfy?

Or is this rant simply my own fear about being ignored by culture obsessed with youth? I get "ma'am" a lot these days - and it makes me feel like I should be in a wheelchair, or at very least bent over a walker.

Or maybe what bothers me is the hubris of thinking that we can airbrush away the passage of time, stop the wheels from turning; it's as if we're trying to reverse nature's progress, whitewash away the truth of our experiences.

And now - wait for it - a leap from beauty to the beast: the Bush years seem to me the embodiment of a plastic-surgery obsessed culture: eradicate the truth of experience, gloss over imperfection, erase any unpleasant fact, tug and twist and pull at anything even slightly out of alignment so that everything coheres into a happy-faced image.

Maybe now, in this new administration, we will become a country unafraid of the blemishes and age spots, brave enough to confront the truth about ourselves, and willing to look ourselves in the mirror without flinching - and without trying to smooth away the wrinkles. 

My mother sent me a birthday present. It's a photo of her two favorite Christmas presents: a life-sized cardboard figure of Barack, and the presence of her extended family. Our family is only rarely all together, but we all convened in Indiana this year: my French brother-in-law, my sister, their French-American daughter; my gay brother; my mother's African American second husband ; my husband, whose parents are Philippino and Parsi, and our children, who are pan-Asian by blood and New Yorkers by birth. And me, the midwestern New Yorker. And my mom, of course, the former Kenilworth debutante turned community organizer and ardent progressive political worker.

We're all standing on the deck of her house, surrounding Barack, who is wearing a Santa hat (we spent the entire Christmas week changing his headgear - Santa hat, scarf, visor, ball-cap). He looks right at home in the middle of our racially and ethnically mixed group.

That's the small snapshot of my family. Not in that picture are my dad in Florida (by his count, one of about twelve democrats in his small town) and, spread out over the country, my aunts and uncles and cousins, including a few cousins whose children have been adopted from Korea and Viet Nam. "Post-racial" becomes a much less abstract phrase when your children talk about their Filipina grandmother ("Lola") to the black man whom they call "Grandpa."

My family photograph sat on the coffee table looking at me while I watched Barack take the oath of office today, just after 12pm.  Did you notice that when he gave his inaugural address the sun gleamed off his flag pin, making it look like he was wearing some kind of sparkly sheriff badge? Yes indeedy, there's a new sheriff in town and he's gonna clean up Dodge City.

His speech, with its sober calls to responsibility and hard work, put elegant nails in the coffin of the Bush administration: he promised (among other things) that government will work in the light of day and that Constitutional principles will not be violated for the sake of expedience - ideas that, after the last eight years, suddenly sound brand-new.

The words that resonated most powerfully for me in that speech were little words: we, us, our. It wasn't a speech about Barack and all of HIS ideas and HIS accomplishments. His words cast a wide net, brought us all into the problem - and the solution.

My family, with its mix of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and family structure, embodies one aspect of the solution: it's hard to deny the rights of marriage to your brother; it's hard to see someone with brown skin as "less than" when that brown-skinned person is your husband, your stepfather, your child, your cousin - or your President.

Like I said in my last post - maybe it's all going to be okay. And that's not just the champagne talking.

Yesterday, Sunday, the day before MLK day, kids doing their best to harass one another into acts of violence (no pacifists growing up here, nosirree). We were listening to the broadcast of the "We Are One" concert on the radio, or at least I was listening to it until I started vacuuming. But when I turned the vacuum off and started winding up the cord to put the thing away, I heard Barack's voice addressing the thousands of people on the mall ... "no doubt that our road will be long, that our climb will be steep. But never forget that the true character of our nation is revealed not during times of comfort and ease, but by the right that we do when the moment is hard. I ask you to help me reveal that character once more, and together, we can carry forward as one nation..."

And damn if I didn't get all weepy, kneeling there on the floor winding up my vacuum cleaner cord. My kids stopped fighting long enough to stare at mommy - although when they saw that I wasn't injured, they went right back to their baiting and bopping.

Friends of mine are reporting a similar syndrome: a tendency, during this inaugural weekend, to get all vklempt utterly without warning. Some turn of phrase filters through the household noise; or a photo op catches the eye; or you suddenly remember - as a friend of mine said - that Voldemort is dead (and let's be clear here that by invoking he-who-must-not-be-named, we are referring to Cheney, not potus-the-doofus).

What is it? Why are we all suddenly, collectively, misty-eyed at the thought of the Obamas moving into the White House? Is the birth of the "Obama Presidency" the death of cynicism?

Remember when Jon Stewart, during the campaign, reminded his audience that it's okay to laugh at Barack?

Stewart is right, of course - I know we can laugh at Barack ... except so far he hasn't done anything particularly funny. Or jaw-droppingly illegal. Or breathtakingly ignorant. Or stunningly arrogant. Or wincingly embarrassing. Bush's eight years have been god's gift to cynics, comedians, and oil execs. The rest of us? mmm...not so much

What will we all do, those of us who have spent the last eight years being - variously - snarky, bitter, and terrified? What if our ability to believe can't extend beyond the ballot box? What if our feelings of patriotism, optimism, and civic pride have rusted from disuse? Are we really, really going to wake up and help this man do all that we've asked him to do? 

Yes. Yes, I think we will. Wake Up.  And for the first time in a long time, I'm not laughing at myself for feeling all do-goody and optimistic. My cynical self seems to be on holiday somewhere (Dallas, perhaps? Crawford?) and that too seems exciting: suddenly it doesn't seem hopelessly naive to think that maybe It's All Going To Be Okay.

The lines of the Whitman poem that head this blog seem oddly apropo for such a chaotic time of upheaval, renewal, and excitement: maybe in Barack we've found a leader "liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient" - a leader who yokes together disparate elements, who doesn't see the world in terms of either/or (with us or against us; good or evil) but in terms of both/and (black and white, national and global).

Tomorrow, as it happens, is my forty-fifth birthday (now Michelle and I are the same age. I know we could be BFF if she would just call me!) I plan to celebrate my arrival on the doorstep of middle-age by planting myself on the couch with the TV remote (going to watch the Obamas on every single possible channel); a really, really big box of kleenex; and perhaps just a dollop (or two) of champagne.

Birthdays 41 and 37 were significantly less exuberant occasions - but this one? What a gift. Would only that the symbolism had completely lined up and Barack were Prez 45, not 44. But I'll take it, regardless - and share this birthday gift with the rest of you. I will also share with you the birthday wish I'm going to make tomorrow night, when I blow out the candle on my cupcake: that Barack's second term ushers in my 49th year.

Next week is standardized test week in New York. 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders will spend two or three days taking the English Language Arts standardized test (the math test happens in March). Please circle which statements apply to these tests:

A.These tests measure student achievement
B.These tests measure teacher effectiveness.
C.These tests measure a school's overall performance.
D.These tests measure a principal's overall effectiveness.
E.School budgets may be influenced by how students perform on the test.
F.A principal may be awarded a bonus by how students in his school perform on the test.
G.Kaplan Test Prep has been awarded more than 73 million dollars in NYC school contracts in the last decade.
H.All of the above.

The correct answer is H - all of the above. Isn't it amazing that we've invented a measuring tool that can do so many things all at once?

Liam will take the third-grade ELA next week. Keep in mind, of course, that the third-grade scores don't impact the students other than as predictors of how third-graders might (might) fare on the fourth-grade test. The third-grade scores are used by the school to help measure "effectiveness." (But what does "effective" mean? If you're a teacher and your class scores well, does that mean you're a good teacher or that you've got a bunch of smarties in your class? Conversely, if your class does poorly does that mean you're a bad teacher? Isn't it more likely that the scores have to do with the alchemical combination of your teaching and the personalities of your students?)

Liam will spend two days next week answering multiple-choice reading comprehension questions. If the practice booklet is any guide, many of these questions are so badly written that even I can't quite figure out the right answer.  For instance, if you had to distinguish between "explaining" something and "describing" something, could you articulate precisely what the difference is between doing those two things? Would you expect a third-grader to know the difference?

These tests - and the industry that has grown up around test administration (including test prep) - are big business. If I were investing in anything right now, I'd be investing in testing companies. Millions and millions of dollars have been generated for companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review; millions and millions of dollars have been spent in NYC in order to gather the information generated by the tests and then to use that information to generate the incredibly unhelpful school report cards (there is a link on this page to the city-wide report card, in an excel spreadsheet). Let me know if you can deduce any useful information from these scores, other than that some schools scored higher and others scored lower. And while we're at it, let's look at this article, which suggests that higher-achieving kids are being short-changed in an effort to focus on increasing basic competencies.

Don't get me wrong - I'm all for basic competency. I'm just not sure that standardized tests are a way to get us there. I've taught too many college kids who have respectable SAT scores, but who cannot write a coherent sentence, read an entire novel, or even compute their own GPA. The test, in other words, doesn't measure competency: it measures the kid's ability to take the test. (Read this article for a grim account of a Kaplan test coach's stint in the NYC public high schools...)

Malcom Gladwell, in a recent New Yorker article, talked about the difficulty of assessing teacher effectiveness, which is ostensibly one of the things measured by these standardized tests. But one of the reasons why it is difficult to measure teacher effectiveness is precisely because learning doesn't happen on a standardized chart: people learn in hops and skips, circles and loops, moving backwards, stalling, and then bounding forwards. We've all watched kids learn to read (or remember ourselves that moment when the words unlocked on the page) - they mutter and mutter and hurl the book across the room and then one day, BAM!, they're laughing to themselves about green eggs and ham.

Nevertheless, Liam has to take the tests. Do I tell him it's no big deal, that it doesn't matter? I don't want to say that because next year, the test will matter. In a piece of DOE cleverness, the scores on the fourth-grade tests are the scores used on entrance applications for sixth-grade. Yes, that's true. A test your kid takes in January of fourth grade will be used one year later to determine where she should go to school the following year (which is to say, almost two years after taking the test).  

But even if I were to tell Liam that his parents don't think tests like this accurately measure what he's learning, the teachers and administrators send the message that the tests are important, while at the same time trying to reassure the kids about this standardized sword dangling over their heads. Practice tests became the bulk of the homework about a month ago; all the students made "stress balls" in order to alleviate anxiety (Liam asked me if he was supposed to be nervous); and even the third-graders are taught relaxation skills in order to alleviate the stress produced by tests that are essentially, practice. Fourth and fifth graders are given (free of charge other than to taxpayers) Kaplan test-practice workbooks, although no one is really sure why fifth-graders take the test, other than as further fodder for the school's overall profile: low test scores can result in schools being closed, and high-performing schools can get money if they take in kids from low-performing schools.

Liam's school does seem to be sending a mixed message, but what else can they do? The reality is that the tests matter, if only for budgetary reasons; but at the same time, the tests (taking them and preparing for them) take away from what all the teachers consider "real" teaching time. For that matter, what message are we, as a society, sending to our kids by promoting these tests: do we really want our kids to think that the only thing that matters is "what's going to be on the test"?

We live in a society in which the lack of accountability on Wall Street and in the real estate markets has driven us to the brink of financial collapse; a society that looked the other way while the Bush administration routinely tampered with public documents (and the public trust) in order to further its own agenda and line its own pockets. (See the most recent issue of Vanity Fair  for an infuriating explanation - description? - of how the Bush administration dodged accountability).

Does anyone else see the irony in our least accountable president insisting on accountability in the schools?

How can anyone think that these tests will somehow "account" for what happens in the classroom? Can a series of tests solve the problems caused by overcrowding, under-budgeting, and bad planning? Can we really quantify "learning" the way we can count widgets on an assembly line? Can we measure knowledge like flour: thanks, I only need a half-cup of math today?

If only it were that easy. If only our public education system could be fixed with a number two pencil and a scan-tron sheet.

Imaginations can't be standardized - and to fix the system, we're going to need precisely the kind of creative thinking that can't be measured by the ELA, SAT, ACT, or any other acronymed booklet.