Review: Ark

Ark by Veronica Roth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



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Review: Hoot

Hoot by Carl Hiaasen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've said elsewhere that I don't read YA books as a rule (I make exceptions for Terry Pratchett, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Roald Dahl, etc.). But dang, this was good. So I'll add Carl Hiaasen to that parenthetical list.

Make sure your Young Adult isn't easily shocked - there are some descriptions of violence against children and parental neglect and abuse.

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Review: In Bloom

In Bloom by Paul Tremblay
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



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The Purpose of Free Public Education: A little history

 This post originally appeared on Substack at https://pegatron.substack.com/p/the-purpose-of-free-public-education

Once upon a time, kids learned everything they need to know from their parents. Dad taught the boys a trade, or how to farm; or he shipped them off to learn blacksmithing, masonry, commerce - whatever they could find - as apprentices. Mom taught the girls cooking, sewing, mending, fine needlework; plants, flowers and a bit of herbal medicine if she had the knowledge. How to grind grain; find eggs; kill, pluck, clean and cook a chicken.

Everybody was pretty much a generalist. Mom made all the clothes they wore, all the food they ate, all the bedding, cushions, curtains … I’ve never made a man’s shirt, much less a pair of jeans! Dad made the roof over their heads, the chairs they sat on, harness, wooden buckets for the well he dug, all the “tackle and trim.” For a change of pace, he hunted and fished.

Passing this exhausting list of skills on to their children would have taken a high priority, and a significant slice of time. But it could be done, because the kids worked by their parents’ sides. Older kids taught the younger. Do I need to say that some parents were more successful than others? That they were better at the skill, or at sharing the process, or both?

When everybody moved to the cities, and dads went to work in the factories, the kids needed new skills, and new teachers. Jewish males had been literate - and urban, because they were often forbidden to own land - for a long time:

The Jewish religion made primary education mandatory for boys in the first century when the high priest Joshua ben Gamala (64 fh) issued an ordinance that “teachers had to be appointed in each district and every city and that boys of the age of six or seven should be sent.” From Farmers to Merchants: A Human Capital Interpretation of Jewish Economic History; Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein, January 2003

The Catholic Church started educating the general population; in the US, according to Wikipedia:

The earliest continually operating school for girls in the United States is Ursuline Academy in New Orleans. It was founded in 1727 …

… In 1875, Republican President Ulysses S. Grant called for a Constitutional amendment that would mandate free public schools and prohibit the use of public funds for "sectarian" schools. He said he feared a future with "patriotism and intelligence on one side and superstition, ambition and greed on the other" which he identified with the Catholic Church. Grant called for public schools that would be "unmixed with atheistic, pagan or sectarian teaching.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_school#Background)

The idea caught on, even if the Amendment didn’t - it was never passed. But 34 states incorporated the idea in their Constitutions. And public schools, funded by States, were distinctly different from religious, or otherwise private, schools which were not funded. (Some see this as a negative reaction to Catholics in general, since religion and religious practice were taught in Catholic schools.)

Congress created the Department of Education as we know it in 1979, but:

… its origins [go] back to 1867, when President Andrew Johnson signed legislation creating the first Department of Education. Its main purpose was to collect information and statistics about the nation's schools. However, due to concern that the Department would exercise too much control over local schools, the new Department was demoted to an Office of Education in 1868. (https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/focus/what.html)

The Wikipedia article on the Dept. of Educations says, in part:

Unlike the systems of many other countries, education in the United States is decentralized. Due to the courts and lawmakers' interpretation of the 10th Amendment, this means the federal government and Department of Education are not involved in determining curricula or educational standards or establishing schools or colleges.^[8] The Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) oversees schools located on American military bases^[9] and the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Indian Education supports tribally-controlled schools.^[10] The quality of higher education institutions and their degrees are maintained through an informal private process known as accreditation, over which the Department of Education has no direct public jurisdictional control. — Dept. of Ed Wiki

That’s pretty weak. All the Department of Education really does is collect and disseminate Federal funds and monitor how they are used, collect data, prohibit discrimination, assure equal access, and focus National attention on important issues.

Some Republicans are calling for it to be abolished altogether. They see it as Congressional overreach. I disagree. If we are truly “One nation … indivisible,” one people following one set of rules, then we need to educate our future leadership the same, whether they’re growing up (as mine did) in urban Oregon, or rural Georgia, or the wealthy exurbs of Connecticut.

We need a nation-wide population that shares a fundamental set of literacy skills, cultural understanding, math and science skills and basic tenets of ethical behavior. I wish the Department of Education would expand its operations in new ways, such as:

• establish standards for education;
• offer training for teachers;
• create pamphlets that outline “best practices in education” for parents and administrators, and
• make sure there are educational pathways forward for every child.

I’ll talk about this part later, and maybe detail why I hate the 10th Amendment and States’ Rights. But that’s in the future.

Education: Teachers

 This post originally appeared on Substack at https://open.substack.com/pub/pegatron/p/coming-soon?r=qmgpb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

I was in the 3rd grade when we had to move. The house had been foreclosed. My father had drifted away, leaving behind a wife recovering from polio, three children and a huge debt to the IRS (Daddy called it “The Infernal Revenue Service”). Tax agents had arrived on his heels, taking rugs from the floor, drapes from the windows and most of our furniture. Infernal, indeed.
But they hadn’t managed to package up my mother’s determination. She divorced my father, who moved to Alaska. She found us a new home and somehow, we moved also to a house across town. It was 1959. I was 8 years old.
There’s so much I don’t remember from that time, but this I do: School was my safe place. In school, no adults asked when my daddy was coming home, or were we getting enough to eat, or how my mom managed to dress so well in our “circumstances.” No adult razzed me for being “smart,” or “too smart for my own good.” No adult asked why I read so much.
I also remember some hard moments. I was called a “bastard” by kids who were innocent of divorce. Fists clenched, holding back tears, I explained divorce. Next was religion, and what an Episcopalian was. It seems endless to me, encounters from school to eternity, but I bet it was really only one 10-minute episode. I was saved by a teacher.
She had curly red hair, and she started by saying the she was also A Child From A Broken Home. What an apt phrase! How perfectly it described our shambolic lives! Her next revelation was that she was available any time I needed to talk. About anything.
I don’t remember her name, and I don’t know if I ever took the offered counsel. I had learned to reject most such gifts, like a fish deftly flashing past the hidden hook. But I knew I could take the risk and maybe find a friend. A door opened, a possibility arose.
It wasn’t the last time a teacher saved the day for me. I have many stories I could tell: Mrs. T, who taught the names of all the bones in our bodies; the awkward “Stick,” a high school teacher who “… Grew so exceedingly thin / That when she essayed / To drink lemonade / She slipped through the straw and fell in!”; her colleague Tom, an intern who was improper in ways great and small in 1967. The journalism teacher, Mr. O, who tried to lead us onward, empowered to serve Truth, Accuracy, and starving for our art or craft.
But each of us has such stories, nostalgia-fueled memories of a time of life when doors were opened - by teachers; and possibilities arose, magically wafted into life - by teachers; when we were strong and untarnished and seen clearly by our teachers.
So why the Hell won’t we pay them? Why do we obstruct them in doing their jobs? Why, oh why, do we applaud when they use their own money to buy lunch for a hungry kid, but recoil as though faced by drooling pedophiles when they offer kids food for their expanding minds?

Locks and literature

"Oh, give me a head with hair / long, beautiful hair ... Don't ever have to cut it 'cause it stops by itself!" (From the musical Hair)

"Oh, Jo! Your one beauty!" (From Little Women, after Jo sold her hair)

"Based on Google mobility data, every state had substantially fewer visits to transit stations, retail and recreation facilities, workplaces, grocery stores, and pharmacies by the end of March 2020 …" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/)

For the first 35 or so years of my life, I had long hair. I'd cut it, from time to time (The Beatles made me do it!), and occasionally I tried a perm - that was usually a disaster. Memorably, my Home Economics teacher, Mrs. Wilson, once said I looked like a "wild woman of Borneo." Ngl, it hurt; because the truth does.

As my life got more complicated - 2 kids, Mom living with us, trying to be a graphic designer and a writer and a computer maven and a wife and a dutiful daughter and a halfway-decent mother (Can you please watch the kids? I'm sleeping / grocery shopping / cleaning / going to the bar ...), my hair got shorter. It was just easier.

At one point, it was so short my kids called me "Sinéad O'Connor."

Then came Covid 19. I had planned to get my hair cut after the 1st of the year - yeah. That year.

"I'm gonna grow my hair down to my feet, so strange

"'Til I look like a walking mountain range …" (Bob Dylan, I Shall Be Free No. 10)

Remember how we thought things would go back to normal after 6 months or so? We made movie dates, or plans for dinner out ... then, we thought, maybe things will be normal next spring? Or after flu season? Well, all I wanted was to get my hair cut. I kept devising new ways to get it out of my way; clips, scrunchies, fancy (and plain) rubber bands. I was out of practice with having this much hair. But then … I got interested in seeing how long it would take to "stop by itself."

It turns out, it doesn't take that long, if you're older'n dirt. I used to be great at growing hair; now I'm sorta so-so. It used to be so thick I had to have the hair dresser thin it. Now it's thin and straggly.

That said, it is sort of long. My ponytail is about 14 inches long, but it's seriously thin after about 8 inches. I think I'll let it keep growing. Just to see what happens.

In a book I read, The Light on Farallon Island, the author wrote about a hair receiver - a small jar that thrifty Victorian ladies would put their hair in when they cleaned their brushes. They would then use the hair to stuff pincushions or small pillows for decoration. And, I assume, if they died, their sisters would make mementos, maybe jewelry or pictures made from braided and woven hair.

https://youtu.be/SNhh8c9s-tw?si=99WKKEYh2u-U8wTp has some hair receivers you can look at.

It makes me wish I had clipped some of my mother's hair to keep, although I don't know what I would have done with it. I certainly wouldn't have turned it into jewelry! And, to be honest? I probably would have mislaid it, or thought it was someone else's hair, or just generally gotten creeped out and thrown it away.

Anyway, I expect this will go the way it usually does: I'll get annoyed with dealing with it, and get it cut. Does anybody want some? There should be plenty to go around. We can sell  it on Etsy with our Spanish moss supplies!