Entry 391: Old School vs. New School

Big news this week at the G & G household: Lil' S1 was accepted to a DC public charter school.  Applicants are selected by lottery, so it's mostly luck, but also S was extremely persistent in checking his status (i.e., bothering the school on a daily basis), and I think that might have helped (it certainly didn't hurt).  She's really happy about this.  I'm more "meh."  Actually "meh" is the wrong exclamation, because it connotes a lack of interested.  It's not that I don't care; I'm ambivalent.  I have strong feelings on both sides.  I haven't totally reconciled them, but I'm going to try to lay them out in this entry.

The first, most important thing is that I wanted this to happen because S wanted it to happen.  She's obsessed with getting our kids into the "best" school possible.  Rankings and tiers and reputation and things of that nature mean a lot to her, and I don't think she would ever be content sending our kids to the "normal" neighborhood school, when these "better" charter schools exist as an option.  She's got a bit of Tiger Mom in her that way.

I'm totally fine with her viewpoint on this -- I think it will probably serve our kids well in the long run -- but as you can probably guess from my use of quotation marks above, I feel differently about things.  I'm a socialist when it comes to schooling.  I'm not about my kids being as advantaged as possible, but rather about them being part of a system that works for everybody and one in which everybody works for it.  Is that too idealistic?  Maybe.  But it's how I feel.

I also question whether or not "better" schools are actually better.  I'm of the mindset that education is much more about what you, as a parent and a student, put into it, than it is about where you go to school.  But it could be I'm too biased by my own personal experience on this.  I never went to an elite school -- it was public high school and state universities for me -- but I feel I attained the same level of academic success and amassed the same skills I would have if I went to a posh private high school and an Ivy League university.  (I don't have the same connections as I would have in that case, but that's another story.)  My feeling is that the best schools don't make the best students, but rather the best students make the best schools.  Harvard is great because all the smartest kids choose to go to Harvard.  If suddenly they chose to go to Middle Tennessee State, then Middle Tennessee State would be great (and Harvard less so), even if nothing else about the two universities changed.  That's my broad opinion on the matter.  It could be total wrong, but it's worth noting that in his book Everybody Lies, Seth Stephen-Davidowitz highlights a big-data study that lends some support to this theory.

So, I'm not particularly worried about my sons lagging behind academically no matter where they go to school.  I want them to go somewhere that's safe and clean and comfortable (and of course it has to have some baseline of academic standards), but also I want them to go somewhere they (and we, as parents) can contribute to the local community.  And therein lies my ambivalence with sending him to a charter school.

I haven't totally wrapped my head around charter schools yet.  On the one hand, they really can be a savoir for low-income families who are "trapped" in districts with failing schools.  On the other hand, they can further disadvantage those students who don't have parents willing work to the system -- that is to say, exactly those students who need it most.

Because here's what happens, or at least here's what happened to us at our school, which I assume is what happens a lot of places.  Lil' S1 started going to our neighborhood school two years ago for PK3.  It's a decent school, overall.  The teachers are mostly good, and I like the principal, but it does have some shortcomings.  It's old and needs to be renovated; the thermostats don't work correctly, so students complain about it being hot or cold in their classrooms; the kindergarten classrooms are glorified storage areas, which don't even have windows; and also sometimes it can seem disorganized when dropping off or picking up students.  It supposedly is in line for a major overhaul, but DC keeps delaying the funding.  Now it's set for 2020 or something like that.

The school is a mix of students I will call "advantaged" and "disadvantaged," for lack of betters terms.  The parents of some advantaged students see these shortcomings and want to upgrade (which is totally understandable), so they apply to charter schools or pay for private schools or move to the Maryland or Virginia suburbs.  The parents of the disadvantaged students can't or won't do this -- they might be poor or overworked or absent or have substance abuse issues or they just didn't win the charter school lottery (and even applying for charter schools has a cost associated with it in terms of time and incidental expenses).  So now the ratio of advantaged to disadvantaged kids is much lower than it was before, and this of course makes the school worse (and cruelly the school has less money to fix things, because funding is dependent on enrollment numbers).  Probably the best thing for a struggling student is to be immersed in a school of mostly non-struggling students.  And that's how schools should work in my opinion.  The privileged students should buoy the underprivileged.

But that's not how it works.  Instead all the other parents of advantaged students look around and see everybody else leaving and decided it's in their best interests to leave as well.  Everybody could just stay and work together to make their school better, but they don't, and it makes the remaining students worse off.  (A friend of mine framed it in terms of the prisoner's dilemma.)  And by the way, this doesn't necessarily break down racially the way you might expect.  It's true that the vast majority of the disadvantaged children are black and brown, but so are many of the advantaged children.  It's not "white flight"; it's "engaged parent" flight.  And that's the worst part, because it is precisely those students who don't have engaged parents who need good schools the most.

So here were are.  We are sending our kid to charter school, and I'm feeling very conflicted about it.

Until next time...

Entry 390: To U.P. and Beyond! (But Not That Far Beyond)

The G & G clan spent the past few weeks in University Place, Washington visiting my family.  First things first, U.P. really needs to change its name.  I know many people are hesitant to change things because change is scary and things from the past always seem better than they were.  But University Place is the stupidest name ever for a city containing exactly zero universities.  College Station, Texas and State College, Pennsylvania make sense because they are home to two of the largest colleges in the U.S.; University Place, Washington makes no sense.  It got its named because the University of Puget Sound once purchased land in the city (then an unincorporated region of Pierce County) and was going to build a campus there, but never did.  (The private high school Charles Wright Academy was built on the land instead, but Private High School Place is an even worse name.)  So somehow during the period of time after the land was purchased by UPS and before it was sold back to the county, people started calling it University Place, and it stuck.  My question: How long was the construction pending?  Months?  Years?  Whatever the case, we are now apparently stuck with an absurd name for an otherwise lovely city.

I've heard rumblings that somebody somewhere tried/is trying/is going to try to change the name to Chambers Bay, but I don't know much about it.  Other than Chambers Bay, which would be a fine name, here are a few other suggestions:

• Whiter Tacoma
• Roundabout Station
• Younger Fircrest
• Gary Larsonland
• Dead Crab City

The last one is a reference to Titlow Beach, where we spent an afternoon, and Lil' S1 used the occasion to wade into the water and "collect" dead crabs.  He got a massive handful and wanted to bring them home with him.  It was pretty gross.

[A very hazy view from Chambers Bay.  This is before the smoke from the Canadian wild fires had completely dissipated.]

In addition to learning my oldest son has a penchant for deceased crustaceans, I also learned that he is good at swimming and bad at rollerskating.  We used the pool of some family friends and Lil' S1 was swimming by himself for relatively long stretches.  I really want him to get to the point where if he fell into the deep end of a pool, he could swim to the wall unassisted, without incident.  I think he could do it now, but I'm not completely sure.

Rollerskating is a completely different story.  I thought he might be good at it, because he has good balance, when it comes to climbing and jumping and stuff like that, but he was a disaster on skates.  (My nephew G had a birthday party at the skating rink the night before we flew back to DC.)  It was like that scene in Bambi, where he's learning to walk -- legs flailing in every direction at once -- only there was no success at the end.  After a few minutes, he started crying and demanding his skates be removed, and that was the end of that.  It's fine.  I do wish he would have tried a bit longer though.  I don't really care if my son is good at rollerskating or not, but I do want him to have some perseverance.  He kept saying, "I don't want to rollerskate.  I'm not good at it," which makes me a bit nervous, as I don't want him to get in the habit of just giving up on things he isn't instantly good at it.  But he's not even five years old yet, so... yeah.

The past few times I've been back to U.P., the weather has been immaculate and this trip was no exception.  I don't know if it's global warming or luck or some combination thereof, but almost everyday it was clear skies and temps in the 70s and 80s.  That makes it SO much better.  The worst part about living in the Pacific Northwest (west of the Cascades) is the constant rain and overcast skies.  (I heard it was a particularly bad fall and winter.  I think my dad said it rained everyday in October.)  Absent that, there is no place I would rather be.

[My dad watering the shrubs with Lil' S1]

But it wasn't all sunshine and moonbeams.  My uncle B died a few days before we left.  This doesn't evoke a particularly strong response in me, as I barely knew him.  My dad's side of the family has always been a bit, let's say, odd, especially so my uncle B.  His is a sad story.  He came back from the Vietnam War with obvious mental and emotional problems, and it seems as if his life never really got on track because of it.  He always seemed to be "searching" for something, and he tried to fill it with things like astrology and Kabbalah and whatever other mystical hocus-pocus was popular at the time.   He was a hard guy to like, as he was constantly holding grudges against other family members -- my dad included -- over trivial matters.  To me, he was always a harmless weird old guy, whom we would see sometimes when we came to visit and sometimes not, depending on his current mental state.  I'm certainly not happy that he died, but I'm not sad either.  I didn't know him.  I feel about the same way you probably do reading this right now.  Maybe it's sad, at a macro level, that I didn't have a stronger relationship with him, but since there was never a relationship there to begin with, it doesn't feel sad that one doesn't exist.  It's like getting sad because an imaginary friend is no longer speaking to you.

I actually was more sad when I found out that the my friend JW's uncle M had also died recently.  He committed suicide a few months ago.  Unlike with my own uncle, I actually hung out with M from time to time.  I used to go to their family lake house quite a bit, and it was like a second home for M.  He was a good guy.  He definitely didn't seem like somebody who would take his own life, but a lot of suicidal people keep that side hidden from even their closest confidants, let alone their nephew's friend whom they see once a quadrennial.  M wasn't married and didn't have any kids.  And apparently he was in chronic pain because of a bad back injury.  I'm certainly not in favor of suicide, especially at a relatively young age (I think M was in his 50s), but if you are in constant pain, and you don't see any relief on the horizon, and you don't have any kids to raise or a spouse to support, then okay, I guess.  I mean, not okay.  It's still sad.  It's still something I would try to talk somebody out of.  But it's more okay than it could be, I suppose.

Alright, happier news: I saw my old friend and college roommate TB for the first time in a few years.  Since I last saw him, he got divorced, took time off from his job, had something approaching a breakdown, got help, and turned things back around.  He seems to be doing genuinely well now.  And it was great to see him.  He's one of those guys that just makes you feel good to be around.  I really wish we lived in the same area.  I'm bad at corresponding, and he's worse than me.  So it's rare when we get together.  (The only reason our meeting happened this time is because I saw he was in the area on Facebook.)  But when we do, it's like old times again.  That's how you know who your true friends are.  When you get together after years apart, how long does it take for the initial air of formality to dissipate?  If the answer is instantaneously, then that's a true friend.

I have tons of stories about TB from back in the day, but here's one of my favorites.  He was constantly struggling to make ends meet throughout college, and there were times when he literally had no money to his name.  Once, he came home with a $10 bill and said that he was getting paid tomorrow, but that this bill was all he had for a meal that night.  Back then, $10 in our smallish college city was more than enough to get a decent amount food, so we went to the grocery store, and here's what he bought: a giant bag of tortilla chips, a tub of french onion dip, two Rainier tallboys, and the movie Soap Dish.

I got to see some of my other friends while I was there as well.  My aforementioned friend JW just had a baby with his wife Y, so I got see their new little guy.  They've had really bad luck with pregnancies, so seeing them with a baby is really something special.  I also saw my friend JY and his family.  His only child is about to turn 14 (!), so he's a legit teenager.  It's such a different parenting world.  We went to a Mariners game, and he and his buddy could just go off on their own while the adults hung out among themselves.  Everybody says to enjoy your kids being young while you can, but, man, it would be nice to not have to constantly worry about entertaining them at every turn.

[We saw Edgar Martinez's number 11 retired by the Mariners.  If you look carefully, you can see the image of Edgar in his batting stance cut into the outfield grass.]

Seeing my family was great also, as always.  My brother and sister in-law also have a new little baby girl, Lil' A, and she's just as cute as you would imagine.  They recently moved from Seattle to U.P., so now my entire immediate family lives there (except us).  It makes it easier to see everybody when you come visit.  Lil' Q, my bro's oldest, is a few months younger than Lil' S1, and they get along pretty well.  Sure occasionally they have incidents -- like when Lil' S1 hit Lil' Q with a map at the zoo or when Lil' Q poked Lil' S1 in the eye during their sleep over ("I forgot I wasn't supposed to do that" was Lil' Q's defense) -- but for the most part they play together pretty well.

Alright, I wanted to write a bit more, but as usual I'm out of time.  S is away at the moment with the kids, and if I don't unpack my half of the suitcase before she gets home, it's not going to be pretty.  She has been asking me to do it for the last two days after all.

Until next time...

Entry 389: On Crossword Constructor Pay

I'm about to go on vacation, again -- a "real" vacation this time, not one of those long-weekend, fake vacations.  The whole G & G clan is going to the southern shores of glorious Puget Sound to visit family and friends for ten days or so.  I'm sure I will have much to write about when I get back.  Until then, please enjoy this entry at my other blog on crossword constructor pay.