The Life and Death of a Girl in Chicago

"She loved Fig Newtons and lip gloss."

I have been feeling guilty for not writing anything on this blog about the gun death of Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year-old girl who attended Martin Luther King College Preparatory High School, the selective enrollment high school where my next-door neighbor teaches drama. For the climax of his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Obama began to describe Hadiya, whose parents were seated next to the First Lady, using the above sentence. He went on to embellish his portrait, but it is an interesting starter to me, because, delivered in Obama's signature matter-of-fact style, it portrays her as just, or merely, a girl.

A girl who, instead of going straight home after school got out early, decided to go hang out in the park with some friends. It is not a big leap of the imagination, when put this way, to believe that Hadiya could have been a student at the school where I taught. We sometimes hold our breath on the days that students get out early, fearing that just these sorts of feuds will have just enough more daylight for the worst to happen.

When the Newtown shooting happened in December, I was certain that it would prove to be the catalyst for real anti-violence reform at the federal level. I was wrong. The real catalyst was not the death of two dozen innocent children; rather, it was the death of a single, defenseless girl.

It matters, too, that Pendleton was just a girl. And she, like so many young women, was such a wonderful girl: she was beloved by everyone around her. Had she been male, the outpouring of grief over her death might have been more easily tempered by questions about what she was doing in that park that afternoon. Equally significant, then, is that the first reform program announced in the wake of Hadiya's death is one from which she would not benefit at all: a $3m investment in the mentoring program known as "Becoming a Man." It does not necessarily need pointing out that Hadiya Pendleton probably had no desire to become a man. This mentoring program, which, like many mentoring and tutoring and after-school programs, has had some success in keeping young men and boys occupied so that they will not be "sucked in" to other, more violent pursuits. It begs the question, then, that "Becoming a Man" might have saved Hadiya, if indirectly, by preventing her killers from becoming involved in a gang. But, as I have written before, programs for teens tend to be very heterosexist in the ways that they insist on strict boundaries between two genders and the behaviors (stereo)typically practiced by those two genders. It deserves pointing out that there are plenty of young women and girls who get up to no good after school, too, and they need things to do after school, too.

Last year, one of my students told me about an argument she had with her father when she wanted to become involved in such afterschool programs as the newspaper and sports teams. Her father didn't want her walking home after dark, which, in these Chicago winters, comes all too quickly. She argued, in response, that he would not make the same interdiction against a male child. And that's almost definitely true. But, considering Hadiya Pendleton or the countless unnamed innocent victims of poorly-targeted gun violence, who can blame him? 

A school that offers every possible sport, that keeps its gym and weight room open, that has a newspaper and a ballroom dance club--that school is preventing violence every day, and, at least at my school, our principal knows it.

Unfortunately, most of these things happen because teachers are willing to donate their time and sponsor these extracurricular activities for no pay. Coaches get paid a small sum, but club sponsors do not. There can be a lot of pressure on teachers to offer activities, because we, too, know what goes on out there if we are not making life interesting enough inside the building.

So you know what? I'll take Becoming a Man. It took the prominent death of an ordinary girl and some journalists pointing out that the park in which Hadiya was shot and killed is just a mile from the President's own Hyde Park-Kenwood mansion. But what a mile! As friends and readers who live in Chicago know, Hyde Park and Bronzeville often appear much farther apart than that, as do Austin and Oak Park, also only a mile apart. It bears pointing out that Harlem and the Upper East Side of New York City are also about a mile apart. A mile is a long way in the big city.

The President's address began to swell into oratory on the note of Pendleton's death. In the style of the man whose name graces Hadiya's school, Obama listed the locales that give a name to other American gun massacres. Newtown. Aurora. Gabby Giffords. There were more, but I sort of lost track, except to notice the places he didn't name, because they are too old, too long gone, to name: Virginia Tech. Northern Illinois University. Fort Hood. The oratory culminated on the refrain, "They deserve a vote." I lost count of how many times the President said it.

But what kind of vote? A vote on what? It will take more than $3 million to memorialize Hadiya Pendleton, the children of Newtown, and the other untold hundreds killed every year in Chicago, and elsewhere.

Yesterday I was listening, as I always do, to Chicago Public Radio, and I heard two pieces that, to me, say more than I can ever try to about the life and death of a girl, or any child, in the city of Chicago. So here they are. 

The first is the story of the violence interrupter Ameena Matthews. Matthews grew up in Chicago and is the daughter of Black P Stones founder Jeff Fort. Matthews is so poised and full of grace about her past life as a gang member that she leaves me speechless.

The second is the story of the recent gun death of another Chicago teen, this time on the west side. Unlike the case of Hadiya Pendleton (whose tragic proportions I by no means want to diminish), this murder will probably go unsolved.

Guilt, love, and genre fiction: What Asian Mothers, Christianity, and Academia have in common

My favorite teacher of all time was my high school senior year Calculus teacher, Alice Snodgrass.

Today one of my Facebook friends reminded me of one of her sayings, which I use in a paraphrased form all the time: "Don't be sorry, just be better."

So here's a question: When you are complicit (in the system), how do you live with the guilt? When you want to be part of the solution, but you find out that you are still part of the problem, what can you do about it, besides moving to a commune and quitting the game?

You start by recognizing that everyone is already complicit. Even if you are an atheist whose favorite founding father is Marx, you know that we are born that way.

This is what I got for my mom for Christmas:

I think I realized with some final finality this summer--at age 32--that my mom isn't perfect. It happened when she asked me to read (after I finished my dissertation) Fifty Shades of Grey, so that we could talk about it. She was on her cell phone, and she was on her way to buy the second and third volumes at Sam's Club. Holy moly. Though I have uh pee-ach(e)-dee, I am not one to judge people's taste in reading, as my friends and family members know. But this news, to put it mildly, shocked my fucking--um, socks--off. MY MOM READ FIFTY SHADES OF GREY. My mom, who taught me how to be a feminist, who encouraged me to pretend I didn't have a body until....always....read a novel that is glorified soft-core pornography! I am rarely stunned into silence, but...holy crap.

Now, trust when I say that this discovery didn't make me lose any respect for my mother whatsoever. She is still my first heroine. But when she told me that she not only loved this novel, but also could not put it down and needed to read the sequels as soon as possible, I was like, "wait, who are you and what did you do with my modest Thai mom who wants to talk about sex like she wants a hot poker in her ear?" She told me that she didn't like the sex parts. My mom is probably the only person who read Fifty Shades of Grey for the story. That's why she wanted me to read it. She wanted to hear what I thought. She was having my dad read it too, but she didn't trust his opinion as much on matters of....what?

In my humble opinion, my mom wanted us to talk to each other about this book as feminists. She wanted to know if I thought that the heroine was really a hero or not. Well, it may surprise you to learn that I do think she's a hero at the end of the first novel, because she leaves the fucker. I know she's going to go back, but that's why I stopped after the first one. I wasn't crazy about the book (even though I couldn't put it down). What I didn't like was how unrealistic it was. I mean, really. A girl from Portland saying things like "chap" and "have a chat"? Helicopter rides from Portland to Seattle in half an hour? Didn't P.L. James do her homework?

She did, of a sort. The novel kind of makes the argument that Tess of the d'Urbervilles has a happy ending.

Now, I don't know how the Fifty Shades trilogy ends, because, as I have already said, I didn't make it past the first one. I found one blogger who was writing chapter-by-chapter summaries-with-feminist-criticism of the second book, but she stopped because she got a job. The Sparknotes aren't out yet.

Aside: oh yeah, I am totally an advocate of using Sparknotes. I especially give them to English Language Learners to read alongside the actual book. I also try to discourage my honors students from using them. I tell them that many Sparknotes were written by good friends of mine, and that their interpretations are biased. (If you are reading, author, please tell me that a non-Yale student would have even noticed, let alone waxed poetical, about the allusions to Chaucer and T.S. Eliot at the beginning of Grendel, and I will give you $5 the next time I see you. Smile.) If my students copy the Sparknotes, I always catch them. I can't catch every kind of cheating--no teacher can--but it's usually pretty obvious, when an AP Literature student starts using words like "subjectivity," that they didn't come up with that themselves. My students used to accuse me of being prejudiced when I caught them plagiarizing, but then I did the somewhat cruel thing of reading one of the more egregious plagiarizers out loud, just to demonstrate how obvious it was. Fortunately, the guilty student was not in class that day, because everyone else died laughing.

My first year in grad school, I learned about a legendary game played by English PhDs called "Humiliation." Here's how it works: you take turns naming a canonical book that you have never read, trying to up the ante until someone "wins." So, if I were playing this game, I would first say that I've never read Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Then I would say another one that I find too embarrassing at the moment to confess. My ace in the hole used to be Native Son (I finally read it in order to write a seminar paper, which is often how we get those embarrassments out of the way). Now, my winner is that I haven't read all ten of August Wilson's cycle plays. I won't tell you which one(s?) I haven't read. You can try to guess.

But wait! What's so humiliating about this game anyway? There is no canon anymore, so I thought that there was no required reading. Whenever I tell high school English teachers that there is no required reading, they don't believe me. They're partly right--I mean, there is one author listed by name in the Common Core State Standards. I bet you can guess which one. But what were the canon wars for, if not to end this game of humiliation? What's fascinating is how the canons have changed--in private and affluent public high schools everyone reads Their Eyes Were Watching God. In urban and rural public high schools, everyone still reads The Scarlet Letter.* When these kids get to college, will they be able to humiliate each other by playing the dozens about what they have and haven't read?

If you ask me, my mom was both embarrassed and proud to have read this trilogy. I know because, at our family reunion in August, when I was reading it, we found out that my sister-in-law's reading group, all female professionals, also read this book, and many of them loved it. And my mom told all of my aunts to read it and told them how much she had enjoyed it, even though she knew better than to enjoy it. My mom, like me, likes to flaunt her guilty pleasures, because we are the first hipsters (kidding). My mom and I are both crazy about Tetris. She is unabashed in her love of Rachel Maddow. She owns about as many shoes as Imelda Marcos, whom she does not admire, unlike Michelle Rhee.** (Mom thinks Imelda is a Bad Woman, but she told me when I was a kid that she didn't have any shoes as a child, so she's making up for it now.) The worst part about becoming your mother is when you start buying shoes like crazy.

Many well-educated people hate hypocrisy and take umbrage as if it was their job, and as if they are not themselves hypocrites. But, as any teen will point out to you, all adults are hypocrites. Walt Whitman wasn't the first to say it, but he said it well: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes." If he wasn't so famous, I would call him an egotistical jerk. But poets have a better chance than politicians of contradicting themselves without getting in trouble. Better, but not great, especially since their reputations are forever.

Second aside: When I taught Whitman at the Quaker school, one of my students refused to read any more after he found out that Whitman was queer. "I can't identify with this," he said. He, like many homophobic boys, just wanted to make sure we all knew that he wasn't gay, in case we were wondering... Anyway, I did win over many of the other students with the poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," which is my favorite Whitman poem. Quite a few students at the school (about 10%) were there on scholarships that send "urban" students to boarding schools. So I taught many kids from Philadelphia proper, New Jersey, and New York, including Brooklyn and Queens. The ones from Brooklyn and Queens eventually taught me how to take the train to New York to visit my friends. But Whitman was early days in my time at Westtown. One of the Brooklyn students, a very talented baseball player who aspired to the MLB, helped me draw a picture of New York Harbor so that the students could see what Whitman was talking about. This was Back in the Day, 2002, so it wasn't as if I could just pull up a photo on my trusty computer and project it on the smartboard. Even at the prep school, we had only one smartboard. It was brand spankin' new, and it didn't work half the time. I learned very early on what many teachers know: always have a backup plan in case your technology craps out on you.

Anyway, it is now pretty well understood that Walt Whitman was not an egotistical jerk. He was, however, misunderstood in his time, and then a later poet tried to appropriate him to his "side" of things. (This is, by the way, my favorite Ginsburg poem. I'm just not such a big fan of long poems if they aren't by Homer or Milton--and since I didn't mention the Ramayana, that makes me a race traitor, I guess.) What Whitman knew is that everyone, not just every man, not just every American, contradicts herself. As I said in a previous post, I am guilty: I love to eat beef and bacon. I love coffee, wine, and beer. I buy most of my clothes at Target. Do I know I'm a guilty consumer, complicit in capitalism? Yes. Do I try to pretend I'm not guilty? Of course! I drive a Prius!

Further confessions: I don't only eat grass-fed organic beef, either. It doesn't taste as good as the fatty agri-business stuff. I loved, with an ironic eye for the sexist bits, all of the pomp at my graduation. And I enjoyed my wedding, which, though conducted by an Ethical Humanist, still bore some of the scars of patriarchy. And I wear a wedding band, even though I know I am not a slave to my husband, and I also have many gay friends who cannot legally marry in the United States, and I hate that. And I have had family members and students work at Target, but I certainly wouldn't want to work in a sweatshop in China. My grandparents left China for a reason. As my mom always says, life is better in the U.S. than anywhere else she has lived.

We all have to pick our battles. As I have written before, for a long time, feminism was a battle I decided to retreat from for awhile, whilst I fought others. When I was growing up, I was a pretty patriotic little girl for someone who experienced prejudice (the positive kind, model minority and all that) and hated injustice. It was because my grandfather loved presidential history, and because I was born and raised in the city that launched Lewis and Clark and has not one, but two museums named after Jefferson, and I believed, at the time, like the President always says, that my story wasn't possible anywhere else. But, of course, it was. We've all seen Miss Saigon, right? (Kidding! But my mom does like to tell people that my dad is a G.I. He's a (retired) gastroenterologist.) It wasn't until I grew up a little more and got a little wiser that I learned to hate America. Boy, did I feel stupid when I found out that Jefferson had owned slaves. I hated America, but I still got in a fight with my entire U.S. History class about how important it was to vote. (I'm still working on knowing when to keep my mouth shut.)

I didn't get to be a better activist until I got to the Quaker school. And then, in grad school, I became everybody's favorite armchair activist. That's a joke: I am in fact acquainted with many an activist and teachers "on the ground" who think themselves superior to us academics, we who sip coffee in the ivory tower and fritter away our days on our laptops, Tweeting about the world's problems instead of actually doing something. I like to point out that there were three men invited to speak to the psychologist Kenneth Clarke on the subject of "The Negro and the American Promise" on television in 1963, just after several of them had met with Robert Kennedy to discuss his response to the violence in Alabama and Mississippi. The three men were all in their late thirties, two of them had been born in the North and one in the South, and they represented three different "perspectives" on the contemporary debate. Have you guessed yet who they were? They were all known nationally by their first names: Martin, Malcolm, and...Jimmy. Did you guess? It's unfortunate that my hero James Baldwin, in an otherwise engrossing, powerful, signature performance, was so insistent that the treatment of African Americans was a form of castration. I lost a little bit of respect for him when I first saw that clip. (But, in his defense, he was aware that he only hated women subconsciously...) By the end of my first year in grad school, I knew how to say all the most politically correct things. But I still felt more like part of the problem than part of the solution. I also felt bad for not being a vegetarian. There's always something to feel bad about, isn't there?

People often ask me how I ended up marrying a Cubs fan. I felt bad for getting married, but I was in love, even though I know that's a social construction. And I was able to easily overlook the Cubs fandom because the Cubs are so pathetic. I've always had a thing for underdogs, you see. But I usually come back at these people by saying, "You think that's crazy? My mother-in-law is a pastor, and her mother loves the Tea Party!"

But do we all love each other? We sure do. And we respect each other's differences, too. And we are even  able to talk about politics civilly at the holiday dinner table. I get frustrated sometimes, and so do they. But they have taught me a lot, and I admire both my mother-in-law and my grandmother-in-law for their feminism, even though they're not both pro-choice. We're all guilty in one way or another. On Christmas afternoon I teased my grandma-in-law (I just call her Grandma, since she's the only one I've got) that Cornel West is always arguing that Jesus was the first Marxist. She doesn't like that. And I don't like some of her politics, either. And neither of us believes in saints and sinners (at least, not to my knowledge): she's a Methodist, and I'm an atheist. But let she who is without sin cast the first stone.


*"Everyone" is written here with some irony. Not everyone reads anything, and no one can read everything. I had to suffer my own version of humiliation when I discovered that, for literature written in English, the most important thing for me to read, besides Shakespeare, was the book, the one that I had never before felt any need to read at all. I had, in fact, been taught in my raisin' to find the Good Book highly suspect. But you can't help what influences people, and you can only partly help what influences you yourself: you can't choose your family, not even when you choose your partner. I think I would read James Baldwin very differently if I hadn't married into a Christian family and taught quite a few Pentecostals over the years.

**It should be understood that my mom loves Michelle Rhee, not that Rhee loves Imelda Marcos. I don't know Rhee well enough to know how she feels about Imelda Marcos, but I can guess....that she LOVES her. Marcos is, after all, both a shameless opportunist and a very well-dressed Asian. My mom loves Michelle Rhee because she is a successful Asian American woman who appears to care about children. I am always trying to correct my mom's misperception, but that is another post altogether.

"So What Are You Going to Do With That?" An open fan letter to my brother-by-another-mother(-in-law), Tim Kreider

Here's a little dorky academic joke:
Q: How do secular humanists explain cosmic coincidences?
A: They tell the story. (Art imitates life, you know.)

The writer/cartoonist Tim Kreider is my sister-in-law's brother. My brother's (Todd, who I have written about on this blog) brother-in-law. And Todd is my half-brother (different moms), and Tim and my sister-in-law are adopted* (different moms), so by my calculations, we're just one shy of six degrees of mother between us (my niece and nephew live in an episode of Modern Family trying to keep all their aunts, uncles, and grandparents straight). But when I was younger, I looked up to Tim a lot. (And I'm not sure he ever knew that, hence the "fan mail" title.) I've been thinking about him a lot lately, as I ponder, yet again, the question at the top of this post. I have a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. in English, and an M.A.T. in Secondary Education. What am I going to do with all that?

*So, by way of a story, here's the coincidence: Tim wrote beautifully about his experience meeting his birth mother and birth sisters in his book We Learn Nothing. It was really weird for me to read that essay, because it's about his sisters, one of whom is my sister, my sister-in-law, my first real sister in a lot of ways (4 boys, one girl, one girl-cousin-sister-cum-au-pair), and I also know his adoptive mom, their mom. And I was literally just thinking about his book and that essay this morning, because I was worrying about writing about my family in this public way--Thai-American midwesterners are not dirty-laundry-airing people, and the essays in Tim's book are quite personal. And so I was thinking about how to write more like Tim, to sound detached and personal at the same time. And then boom! This article lands in my inbox, sent to me by a good friend who has been helping me with all this soul-searching (see previous 10 posts or so). My friend (I have taken to calling him "advice man") thought that Tim's article might model the kind of writing and research that I might want to do, now that I am oh-so-credentialed.

I feel like I got whacked in the head and woke up in August 2000, at my nephew's first birthday party. I was just recounting this memory to my brother this past August, now that my nephew is an honest-to-god YOUNG MAN. In honor of my nephew's first birthday, I had pooled the resources of my other three brothers and purchased, for our nephew, the first 4 Harry Potter books in hardcover (those were the four that were out). I had spent spring break of my sophomore year in college reading the first three Harry Potters, and the fourth one had just come out. I found out about Harry Potter before all of my friends because I had brothers that were still in high school. It's so odd for me to think back on those days and how, even then, I was baffled by the way that reading cultures differ in high school and college. My friends were all into Rushdie and Pynchon and Kundera, and here I was reading kids books. (Not coincidentally, that's what Tim's article is about, too.)

So, birthday party. I can't remember the theme--my sister-in-law throws a killer themed kids' birthday party--maybe either Bob the Builder or Blues Clues. (My niece's love of Dora the Explorer has come in super handy teaching in a mostly Mexican American school. When we look at the world map, I often sing the map song, which is, by the by, the cruelest, most repetitive ear worm in the history of man. Take that hyperlink at your own risk.)

In college I always felt shy and awkward around my brother and sister-in-law's friends at these things because of the age difference. Todd is 9 years older than I am, and I met most of their good friends for the first time at their wedding, when I was an awkward 13-year-old in a floral pantsuit, watching my ladies-men-cousins and my older brother, who got to be a groomsman, hit on the bridesmaids. I'm not kidding. A floral pantsuit. It's no small wonder that I spent most of the wedding hiding behind a video camera and/or stuffing my face with desserts. My brother still teases me about how I ate all the desserts. I have no recollection of this, so I can neither confirm nor deny its factuality. There is supposedly photographic evidence, but I have never seen said evidence.

So they had already unwrapped the 4 Harry Potters, which, on four college-/high-school-student incomes, had felt expensive, and I was pleased, because all of these actual adults seemed to think it was a cool present. And then Tim walks in with this crusty banker's box FULL of used children's books--a lot of them first editions--and all the really great ones. I was so chagrined. It felt like some episode of Sex in the City where one of the girls gives the other an antique baby rattle from Tiffany's, and the other one gives a six-pack of Gerber onesies. Or like a birthday party in Logan Square now, where one person gives the birthday girl a set of saucers from Crate and Barrel, and another gives her a hand-knitted apron with an ironic animal screen-printed on the front. You get the idea. Tim had out-hipstered me avant la lettre.

But let me be clear, there's no resentment here. I think at the time I expressed my embarrassment to their mother, my brother's mother-in-law, and she, always knowing the right thing to say, announced to everyone that, between Uncle Tim and Aunt Lit (my name in my family), our nephew would grow up a reader. And it's true--both my nephew and my niece are terrific readers. It's been fun, as a high school teacher of "struggling readers," to share books with them, and have them share some of theirs with me. Not to brag, but I have gained a lot of cred with them as the aunt who introduced them to both Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. I've been trying, now, to get our nephew to read Lord of the Rings, or A Wrinkle in Time, or Ender's Game. But I also know that it's pretty tough to get my own students to read these children's classics. I actually asked my nephew when I last saw him what had happened to all those books that his Uncle Tim had given him, and he said that he still had them, and I told him he should start reading them now, because they're all so, so good. I haven't heard from him lately about what he's been reading, but I hope he's given one of those a shot--he told me he'd tried Lord of the Rings a few times but had found it kinda boring.

At that birthday party, I so wished I was as cool as Tim. I was entering my junior year in college, and I had been thinking a lot about what I was going to do with my degree in English. In my extended family on both sides, there are a lot of professionals, but not very many humanists. In fact, there are just four English majors: my cousin Alisa Tang (also a writer), my brother Todd (double English and Chemistry, now an MD), Tim, and me. We all grew up with that immigrant ethos--my dad's parents were both first-generation Italian-American, so the question that is the title of this post was asked of us. A whole effing lot. (My cousin Alisa once complained to me that everyone expected her to "just" become a teacher, which, at the time, was what I wanted to do, so I was pretty chagrined, again. Abashedness, mine, comes up a lot in this story.) My parents did not want me to major in English. When I told them as a freshman that I had decided to be an English major, they told me that they thought it was impractical. My father actually said he thought it was a waste of my analytical, scientific mind. (He'll probably deny this now.) At the time, my brother and my sister-in-law and my cousin Alisa, all older, all tried to be encouraging. And my brother and sister-in-law pointed to Tim, who was, at the time, working as a professional writer and cartoonist, but he hadn't "made it" yet. Now, with his book out and a blog on the New York Times website, I think he has, and I'm super proud to know him. I hope the book is a Times Notable Book. I think it deserves it. If he does win it, you heard it here first!

When I was a freshman in college in 1998, I wanted to be Tim when I grew up. By the time my nephew turned 1, I didn't want to be Tim anymore, because I didn't think I could be him. I got to college wanting to become a writer, but I got really discouraged, really fast. First, I quickly discovered that no one wanted to hear me write about myself (shout-out to Abigail), second, that I couldn't be Joan Didion in my wildest dreams because I just wasn't stick-to-itive enough about my writing habits (this is, Abigail, my personal anecdote of how high school and college kill the love of writing), and third, that I was actually much better at writing literary criticism anyway. So, by the time my nephew turned 1 in 2000, I had made a different plan, one that would fit my parents' ambitions and fears for me: I would teach high school for a couple of years, and then I would go get my doctorate in English. This, I thought, would impress my parents. I would still be a doctor, just a different kind! (Aside, because I love to digress like gothic novelists love to digress: My senior year, when I took the GRE, I mentioned casually to my dad that I might take the LSAT just for the heck of it. I sort of tanked the verbal section of my GRE (which shocked everyone), but I did really well on the analytical part, so I thought it might be a good idea to have a high LSAT score in my back pocket, just in case I couldn't get in to any English PhD programs. My dad brought this up with me again about a month after I mentioned it and asked me if I'd thought any more about law school. He's the most tiger mommest dad ever, and he's not even Asian.)

My aunt, who is a retired teacher (one of only two other educators in my family besides my husband), asked me this summer if I was going to make my students call me Dr. Barton. I told her no, but I was going to make everyone in my family--all six of them are MDs--call me that. I graduate next week. My husband and I have already joked about the Instagram photo of me, in my cap and gown, surrounded by the MDs. The caption will read "black sheep."

And I'm still not quite sure what I want to be when I grow up. But I've started to think that I might still, after all these years, want to be Tim, especially now that he's a bona fide public intellectual/renaissance man. He really is an outstanding writer. I was just telling my sister-in-law on the phone the other day how much his writing  reminds me of all the great mid-century essayists I love.

Back then, I wanted to become a renaissance woman, but we all know there's no such thing. I was scared of not getting a "real job." Tim was the only adult I knew well who didn't have a "real job." And I had already decided not to do many things I thought I might like--writer, lighting designer, stage manager--because I thought I wasn't going to be good enough to make it, and I was scared to go into the world without a steady income, without health insurance, without a degree that would impress my parents. Ten or fifteen years scratching out a living on an uncertain path seemed like a long time and a big risk to try to become successful for them. And it has only been in the last three or four years that I realized that I'm supposed to become successful for me. So I'm working on that now. Stay tuned.

Why I love My Hood

I had always hated Halloween for stealing my birthday (which was yesterday). Then I moved to Logan Square. Two kids tonight:

Me: Who are you? Quienes son?
Older brother: We're robots!
Me: wait a second. Are you Optimus Prime? [Nods] And are you--

Older bro: We're not really robots.
Me: Are you Bumble Bee? [Nods. Takes mask off.] Whoa! You're a little boy! I really thought you were robots!
Older bro: We're not robots! We're kids! [Takes mask off]
Younger bro: We're kids!
Me: You sure had me fooled.
Parents (whisper): Say Happy Halloween.
Kids: Happy Halloween!
Me: thank you!
Older bro: You're welcome!

Drive: I post this all the time, but it bears repeating.

drinking the kool-aid: thoughts on this blog's title and my opening days

I've decided to start a blog to keep a record of my experiences and reactions to my time in this program. I really feel like I've been thrown in the deep end with course work--just tons and tons of reading and assignments--so I haven't had much time to sit down and reflect, but I did have some reactions to our orientation days that I wanted to get down.

During the two days of our orientation, we had a lot of different members of the organization's leadership speak to us. Several of them repeatedly made remarks that made my ears prick up, and one especially stood out: "there are those that would wish to see us fail." I will have more to say at a later date on school turnarounds, I'm sure, but my initial impression was to feel depressed at how embattled they seem to feel.

After all, even though many people think that turnarounds are not a good model for school reform, can there possibly be people who care about education who WANT those school turnarounds to "fail," that is, to fail to serve their students? I doubt that this is the case. But the feeling of embattledness, the position that educators are not united in wanting students to succeed, permeates and poisons the education reform debate. This was evident in Steve Brill's caustic New York Times article about Race to the Top, and in many comment threads you read on the education blogs. Anyway, when the US Education Secretary, the President, the city government, and the heads of the district are all on your side (not to mention lots of private $$), then you probably don't have to worry too much about your naysayers.

We had an amazing panel of parents from a network school speak to us about their experiences. I think it was hard for a lot of us to be uncynical about how these parents were selected--they all had very positive things to say and they seemed to be some of the most active parents in the school. To be sure, some of them professed initial skepticism about the turnaround. But even though they weren't given any input before the school's "turnaround" (closure) was announced, they all agreed that now there is a lot of community input about goings on at the school. What they had to say about the changes that they've seen in their students and in the school community was truly moving and inspiring.

Over the next months and year I want to enter into this process with a pragmatic and open mind. I have some (informed) prejudices, but I want to be prepared to see what works and what doesn't, to feel like we all want students who have been underserved to succeed. If that is our mission, then no one will want us to fail.