Why do I hate Justin Bieber?

I was thinking about my knee-jerk reaction to the proliferation of all things Bieber. Why, exactly, do I love to hate him? He's just a kid, singing innocuous love songs to a bunch of screaming teenaged girls, right??

Nope. I'd argue that he is symptomatic of a larger change in the music industry that I find disheartening. He's not an artist. He's a product.

1. I will just say straight out that I MUCH prefer singer songwriters to people who have great talent, but who sing the songs of others. Bob Dylan and Neil Young are not gifted vocally, but they WRITE THEIR OWN SONGS and I think that is awesome. The music is coming from their hearts and souls, not from some paid songwriter. Somehow I don't feel that Bieber is writing many of his own songs at this point, and even if he did, the things he would write about would probably not speak to me. They might speak to your average teenager, but I doubt they are songs that will live in pop consciousness for too long.

2. This kind of goes back to reason one, but you can be gifted vocally and maybe even be a great dancer, but if your singing doesn't tell me something about your experience, or connect to a greater humanity, then I'm just not as enthusiastic about you. Take, for example, Christina Aguilera. She has a tremendous voice. However, I don't think that any of her albums have given me a glimpse into her soul. She's a songbird. I don't get any sense of who she is. With each music release, she changes style with whatever producer she has chosen. Adele, or Amy Winehouse, or Neko Case, however, are singers AND songwriters who, though they work with producers, put out music that is embedded with their souls, their stories, their heartache and their triumph. When they sing, you feel it. The downside with this, is of course sometimes those demons overcome the artist (hello Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse), but not always. The best music, is universal because it speaks to the human experience. Of course, not all music need to save the world. We can't all be Midnight Oil. There is room in life for silly pop songs that make you want to dance (hello Katy Perry!). But can't there be great pop music that is catchy, well-written AND musically relevant?

3. Pop music has always been susceptible to it (as has most dance music), but I rue the rise of the super producer over the last few years. This tends to go in cycles, of course, as producer-dominated disco once ruled the charts for a time. The new Katy Perry is an example of a hugely catchy CD (and yes, she co-writes her songs), but it's also put together by some of the best producers/songwriters in the business. The fact that I know the names of Dr. Luke, the Smeezingtons and RedOne, is disappointing because really, the names of the artist should be more predominant! There for awhile, when the Neptunes duo were hot, you could hear their songs on the radio in an instant. They all had a similar style, and the vocalists were essentially interchangeable. That bothers me. The vocalists, the artists should not be interchangeable!! Shouldn't they be singing their songs, shaping their stories? Perhaps with an assist with a producer or songwriter (Adele wrote her song Turning Tables with a great songwriter who is also an evangelical Christian, but that's another story), but their own vision should be first and foremost! Otherwise they are not really artists, they are product. They are Christina Aguilera. Or Demi Lovato.

4. Finally, Bieber is symptomatic of a music industry that needs to permeate all corners of pop culture with their product. It's not enough to have a song on the radio. You have to have your own iPhone app, movie, soda, clothing line, perfume etc. Now that people aren't buying music anymore, it's understandable that the music industry would move in this direction. However, when a gigantic multinational corporation is putting together these lines (look! It's the new Selena Gomez perfume!), it just strikes me as so artificial. When the Disney juggernaut decides to put its corporate weight behind a music group (The Jonas Brothers), all of a sudden they become ubiquitous. All of a sudden it's not so much about the music as it is about the product and product diversification. Ironically, the Jonas Brothers are actually pretty good musicians and I don't hate them. Have you noticed, however, how little we've been hearing about them lately? Has the Disney Corporate juggernaut passed them by??

Maybe, ultimately, that's what bothers me about Bieber and his ilk; music as product rather than expression. In today's quickly changing landscape, I realize that musicians can't rely on music sales to make their living. They need to diversify, license their songs to be played in Carl's Jr.s and Mc Donald's and sell lots of t-shirts. I guess I just prefer it when an artist's expression is their own, and not that of a corporate board that is trying to extract maximum profit from a product (Bieber) that has a limited shelf life.

yes, I know. I think way too much about music. This is what happens when you have WAY too much post-graduate education and suffer from a life-long obsession with music.

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I worry about my girl

because I read an article today about a spread in French Vogue featuring a 10 year old girl. A very beautiful little girl, but she is TEN YEARS OLD! WHAT in the world were her parents thinking? What was the editor thinking?

I realize that there are a lot of moms out there that love to take their daughters for mani/pedis, make up lessons and fashion shows. God bless those moms and the jobs that they support, but

I AM NOT ONE OF THOSE MOMS!

The window of girl hood is getting ever smaller and smaller. I love the fact that my girl still loves to go outside and hunt for insects. She doesn't care that her nails get dirty. I love that she still plays "pretend that...." with her little brother. I love that when she dances, she's not trying to imitate any TV star, but just runs around moving to her own muse. I love that she is completely at ease with her body. I know that I can't keep her in my protective bubble forever, but I am clinging desperately to these last few years of little girlhood because I know what's coming. We ALL know what's coming.

Can we please try and keep our kids from growing up so fast? Can we keep them still enjoying the simple pleasures in life, like playing with water hoses and hunting for roly-polys? Can they stay girls for just a bit longer? Really, folks, they have the rest of their lives to put on make-up, worry about their nail polish and strut around in low-rise pants. She doesn't need Vogue to rush her along that path.

music, music, music

a few years ago, at a staff in-service, the teachers had to take one of those tests that purported to show our favored learning style. The PE folks were obviously bodily-kinesthetic (learn by doing, moving around), the arts people were visual, the language arts folks were verbal etc. Interestingly, I scored high in music, second only to the choir teacher. Which is interesting and all, but why would I feel compelled to share this really trivial and uninteresting factoid?

It all goes back to the U2 concert last night.

Last night, to be honest, I wasn't so excited about going to the concert. You know when you see couples at a concert and you can tell which person is REALLY the fan and which one is there as the date? Well, I expected to be "the date."

And then we got to the show.

I had forgotten the feeling, the literal feeling of the bass line as it courses through your body.

I had forgotten the emotions that a song can evoke; the feeling of where you were when you heard it first, who you were dating, how it made you feel.

I had forgotten how much U2 was a part of my youth. The baby boomers had the Stones. We had U2. The Joshua Tree. Achtung Baby. and so many more.

I had forgotten how much music can make you move, make you dance in a way that sometimes feels completely out of your control.

I had forgotten the powerful feeling of singing a song together with tens of thousands of other people, sounding like the most awesome choir in the world. You are singing in unison, a song that-at the risk of sounding horribly corny-makes you feel like you can change the world and that you are....one.

Really, I think I had forgotten how important music is to me, and how much I miss it. Singing along to Lady Gaga while I cook dinner is not enough. I'm going to join the choir at church. That should help. I think I'm going to have to start working on some scales and playing some more piano. My music theory is really rusty. And maybe, just maybe, I will indulge my secret dream to play drums. There might not be money for that right away, but that's a goal. I think last night's concert just reminded me that there is an important part of my soul that I have been neglecting. Feeding my musical soul is just as important as the food I make every night. At my age, I know I'm not going to change the world with my song. Hopefully, however, I'll make my world a little happier and hopefully spread some joy around.

Summer! It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

Since Memorial Day marks the unofficial beginning of summer, I thought I'd jot down some of my thoughts about summer. Feel free to add your own bests and worsts:

1. best thing about summer-not having to work!

1. worst thing about summer-having my kids around me ALL DAY is really tiring!

2. best-swimming! It's free and it's fun! as a bonus, it totally wears the kids out.

2. worst-always having to search for the shady spot whenever we go out, realizing they've already been taken by giant SUVs and then resigning myself to cracking the windows and putting up the sunshade.

3. best-fun and FREE programs at the library.

3. worst-TOTALLY inadequate parking at the Main library downtown. Now that we have the newer, bigger Marcy Branch, I doubt I'll be going to downtown very often.

4. best-no more packing lunches! hooray!

4. worst-now I have to cook lunch AND dinner! Sometimes I feel like my entire day is prepping/cooking/cleaning, wait a few hours, then repeat. ad infinitum.

5. best-excursions to fun, slightly faraway kid attractions like Kidspace in Pasadena or the Discovery Cube in Santa Ana.

5. worst-having to brave traffic and gas prices, or paying hefty metrolink fares and doubled travel times. hmmmmmm.

6. best-being able to take late-night walks around the neighborhood and not worrying about getting home because we have to get up early the next day for school.

6. worst-any semblance of a schedule goes completely out the window. I love my schedules.

7. best-the abundance of fresh fruit means that we have the time and fresh produce to make delicious popsicles and ice cream.

7. worst-the constant whining for snacks and aforementioned popsicles and ice cream!

8. best-more chances to go to LEGOLAND!

8. worst-other people are also on vacation, clogging up our beloved park. Though it hasn't reached Disneyland levels of crowdedness, it has come close.

9. best-really juicy and delicious summer tomatoes.

9. worst-really horrific heat and don't get me started in the air quality.

10. best-not worrying about the roof on my 81 year-old house leaking! Even if you don't see it, you know it's leaking somewhere.

10. worst-worrying about the air conditioning bill!

NCLB: the good, the bad and the UGLY

We have all been living with NCLB (No Child Left Behind) for so long, that it's beginning to get hard to remember that there was ever a time before the current obsession with standardized testing. My first day at Arlington High School, I was given a set of keys, a teacher textbook and was thereafter pretty much left on my own. I set my own pacing, made my own lesson plans and tests. Ha! Those were the days!

A bunch of teachers all working in relative isolation, however, is not necessarily the best environment for students at the high school level. Although I very much resent a lot of the requirements and implications of NCLB, I think some of it really has been good for me and for the general profession of teaching. However, a great deal of it is misguided at best, and downright damaging at worst. First, let's turn to the good stuff.

Riverside Unified School District (RUSD) many years ago bought into the whole Professional Learning Communities (PLC) idea of education. Originated by some guy in the midwest (where schools have a lot more money, smaller class sizes and more homogenous student population, but never mind that!) whose bright idea was that ideas for change needed to be generated by teacher-led groups, with teachers determining what needed to be done and how. My PLC has four US history teachers, with everyone represented, from AP students to English Learners and Special Ed. I really, really enjoy working with colleagues, sharing ideas, devising common assessments and coming up with ideas to help our students. It's such a big change from what I encountered when I first began teaching. Getting out of our classrooms and together with other teachers has been, on the whole, a great change. PLC would not have happened with NCLB, so in this respect, NCLB rocks.

NCLB and it's close cousin the CST/API (state tests and state test ranking), reward schools more for bringing the lowest performing groups (English Learners, Special Ed, low socio-economic status) up and reward less for bringing up the scores of the highest kids, like GATE or AP. Given that AP parents tend to be the most involved in the school (squeaky wheel gets the grease!), historically their kids would often receive a disproportionate share of school resources. Those whose parents were too busy working, or unaware of what their kids could receive in school, often got ignored. You hardly heard a word about English Learners when I first began at Arlington in 1998. Now you know who they are, their level of English proficiency and are constantly showered with ideas on how to raise their test scores. Although I know I wouldn't be happy about this new allocation of time and resources if I had an AP kid at the high school level (or GATE kid at the elementary school level), I think it is a positive thing to help those kids who need our help the most. I do not believe our focus would've shifted to these sub-groups were it not for the pressure to raise test scores fostered by the rise of NCLB.

Ok, so how bad is NCLB? Where to begin? the list is so long, and the complaints so numerous, they could easily be (and have been) the subject of book-length treatises. I will focus my enmity on perhaps the most significant aspect of it; i.e. the never-ending obsession with test scores.

CST (California Standards test), at least at the high school level, are administered over the course of two weeks, just after spring break. In practical terms, this means that while we once had an entire YEAR to teach our curriculum, we now have to cram it all into three quarters. Once testing is over, we pretty much have the rest of the school year (6-8 weeks) to do whatever we want. CSTs are over, so no one really cares.

Besides the obvious time crunch this pacing chart (racing chart?) imposes, it directly impacts classroom instruction in that it discourages more in-depth, project-based assessments (i.e. what we used to call "authentic assessments") in favor of more direct instruction and multiple-choice common assessments. In the past, I would often have students complete projects (e.g. skits, metaphor posters), as a way to show me what they knew. Kids who might never score well on a multiple choice exam (creative kids, special ed. kids, english learners) would then get a chance to show me what they DID know, versus an exam which only pointed out what they didn't know. Unfortunately, these projects are not a comfortable fit with the new educational paradigm because they are (a) very time intensive and (b) not as easily quantifiable as a multiple choice exam. I used to do projects at the end of every unit, but unfortunately this year I've had a chance to only do one. This is the bad of NCLB. So what is the ugly?

Now that standardized common assessments are the primary vehicle for measuring student achievement, the pressure has come down on teachers to raise the percentage of our final grade that comes from testing. Only a few years ago, if a kid tried on their classwork, homework and projects, they could do poorly on tests, but still be able to pass my class. Unfortunately this is no longer the case. We have all been pressured to raise test scores to at least 40% (in my case) or up to 80% of the final grade. As one administrator pointed out, how can a kid pass your class, even while doing poorly on his tests? He obviously isn't mastering the material. If he isn't passing our assessments, then he certainly won't do well on the CSTs. Heck, last year they even had us plot our grade distribution on a chart with our CST scores to see if they aligned. So really, instruction and grading are all driven by CSTs.

This is especially unfortunate for the special ed student, the creative student, the student who just doesn't do well on tests. I have had special ed kids that could tell me (or draw for me) everything I wanted to know about the age of imperialism, but who will never, ever be able to ace a test. It's not a question of intelligence or "high incidence academic vocabulary." This makes me so, so very sad for my special ed kids who work their rear ends off trying to get at least a "C" for me, and every test they take is dismal. They do know their stuff, but the system is working against them. It's so frustrating for them and for me. Given the pressure coming from all levels to tighten down on teaching, teachers and test-taking, I don't see this changing any time soon. I predict that within the next ten years, at least part of my raise and/or evaluations will be tied to CST scores. And a lot of the joy of teaching is being slowly leached away.

It's pretty much mostly in the 4th quarter, when the pressure is off, that I get to experiment with different types of lessons, different types of "authentic assessment" projects that I don't have the time to do during the rest of the year. Other than the pro forma district common assessment that I have to administer at the end of the year, I can pretty much structure the pacing, depth and scope of my instruction for those blessed six weeks. it's utterly exhilarating and simultaneously really tragic, because it's the kind of teaching I'd like to do all year long! They say that educational philosophy goes in cycles, but I don't see this cycle of test-obsession and NCLB driven mania changing or fading away any time soon. That makes me really sad. I wish I was wrong about it, but I think I'm right.

public v. private school, first in a series

For a few weeks now, since a bunch of my friends seemingly simultaneously moved their kids from public school to Chiara and Mario's private school, I have been dealing with a nagging fear that I am at least partly responsible for white flight from our public schools. I think the issues are more than I can address in one blog post. So I am going to confront the various issues one-by-one and hopefully a common theme will emerge.

Topic #1 Class size matters. A lot!

At a kid birthday party this last weekend, I got to talking to another mom and it turns out that she's a kindergarten teacher at a school in the area. Her school is 99% free and reduced-lunch (which is another story entirely, but we'll get to race, class and SES/Socio-economic status later), and she has personally dealt with not only being repeatedly pink-slipped, but also class sizes that have grown from 20 to nearly 30 just within the last few years. She told me that her original plan was to send her son to public schools, but then class sized increased. As she put it, "once they went to 29? No way! I know how my kids are!" So now her son is in kindergarten at Carden, benefiting from a class size of....12?

"But wait!" some would argue. What about teacher training and quality? That is another tough topic and one that I will leave for another post.

Ask ANY teacher in any school and they will tell you that absolutely class size is critical, but I cannot even begin to convey with words how significant the effect is in those critical first few years of education. Most people in education can tell you that K-2 are the most important grades because that is when a kid really needs to learn how to read. Many kids face HUGE drops in their grades after that time, because it is in the 3rd grade where you stop learning how to read and start reading for comprehension. This is a critical change. Studies show that if a student is not reading at grade level by grade 3, they will never read at grade level. They just fall further and further behind. Grades K-2 lay the foundation for ALL the learning that follows. In a class of 20, a single teacher can be fairly sure that she (and it's almost always a she) has worked with each student. This is especially important when you have many different levels in the same classroom, i.e. kids who are already reading mixed in with kids who don't speak English and/or have never had a book read to them. The varying ability levels is another topic for yet another day, but suffice to say that when class sizes increase even by 5, the teacher just has that much less time to get to all the kids. A friend of mine told me that she feels like she has to work with the lowest kids, that the top kids will take care of themselves, but that it's the kids in the middle who get lost. Do we want any kids to get lost in this shuffle??

I have 36 kids in almost every one of my classes right now, and of course I would LOVE to have smaller classes, but really, at the secondary level, we are dealing with the survivors. By the time they get to me, a great many kids have dropped out and/or gone to alternative schools. Half of the kids who start school as Freshmen are not there by their Senior year. This is yet another subject for another post, but my point is that our resources really need to be focused on elementary education and especially on class size. Now that kids are being pressed to do so much at earlier ages (hey! yet another topic!), and are coming to school with such wildly varying levels of preparation, the dismantling of class size reduction is such a tragedy.

This is one topic where my public school advocate friends are going to lose; smaller class sizes matter. and please don't tell me that parent volunteers can make up all the difference! They make a difference in neighborhoods where you have middle-class or affluent parents (not to mention literate parents!) who can afford to take the time out of their day to go into the classroom to read or otherwise work with kids. This type of community involvement is of course what we need to help fill the gap, but it cannot completely make up for an elementary school classroom teacher who is stretched to her limits. I'm sure it is significant in some schools where that type of participation is strong, but it is definitely not apparently in all schools. The kindergarten teacher friend tells me that at her school, they essentially have to bribe parents to show up to school events by offering free food. Otherwise they won't show up. I have a feeling that parental involvement at this school is not going to help close the gap that was opened when class sizes went from 20 to 30.

I know that Governor Brown's budget proposals are tough and I know that community redevelopment personally helped me financially (the city of Riverside guaranteed our loan to move downtown), but in an economy that demands tough choices, I really think that elementary school education should get the highest priority. Increasing class sizes make sense economically in the short-term, but I am afraid that the long-term implications will be disastrous.

Okay, now that I've thrown this bomb down, think about where and why you send your kids to school. why class size matters. and why, as a society, we don't seem willing to pay for it.

have these children never seen real food?

I've noticed over the last few weeks, since I've been making an effort to pack more of my own snacks and lunches, that my students are inordinately fascinated with what I am eating. When I bust out my ak-mak crackers and laughing cow cheese, they ALL want to try them. I guess anything that isn't a Dorito or Goldfish must seem strange and exotic. And my yogurt? They have never heard of Greek Yogurt and are highly skeptical of my statement that I make my own. They seem confused that it's not brightly colored and doesn't extrude from a tube. And when I break out my actual lunch (chili, soup, lasagne), they ALL have to take a gander at it and wonder aloud how it tastes.

I am no culinary genius. It's not like my lunches have been torn from the pages of some fancy cooking magazine. I'm not doing anything special. What I am doing, however, is actually cooking.

I know I'm beginning to sound like a broken record here, folks, but I sometimes feel like some of my students are deprived of good food. I don't think they suffer from hunger (we do have a HUGE line of kids waiting for free breakfast and lunch), but I do think they suffer from very limited horizons. I wish there was something I could do to expand those horizons.