School Skirmishes

As a parent, you find yourself having to advocate on behalf of your child at all times, particularly in the public schools. And we are no different than any other parent, who work over time as parents. My son's recent school project has raised many concerns for us as a family, all of which has ended in a letter being written to his teacher. My son, who is a mere 5 years old, brings home endless notes from his teacher, it seems every day. I knew his class was working on a family project, the culmination of which would be an international luncheon. The international luncheon part is hilarious since his class is, for whatever reason, predominantly Irish-American. I know this has to do with the fact that the previous owners of this mammoth real estate didn't allow blacks to rent in their apartment buildings. And as my son noted, there are no Korean students in his class, unlike his preschool in LA, which was situated smack dab in the middle of the largest Korea community outside of Seoul, Korea.

A sheet was sent for us fill out with prosaic questions like: Where are you mother's family and father's family from? I, of course, filled in Korea for me and North Carolina for my husband since that is where his family is from. The teacher took me aside to ask what country my husband's family origins trace back to. Hmmm. It took me but a minute to respond his family were slaves. Of course she was flustered by my direct response. The urgency to know the origin of country for the kids' maternal and paternal family was a result of the flags the kids would make to correspond with whatever country their ancestors traced back to. She said she understood the sensitivity of slavery, a topic we have yet to discuss with our child. But she pressed the point in us identifying a region or, more specifically, a country in Africa where my husband's family could be traced. This is the point where I wanted to deck her, not only for her doggedness, but for her absolute dimwittedness about all of this. The worst part of this discussion was her revelation she'd run into this same problem before with other African-American students. Hmmm...Yes, this is an educated person in charge of teaching young kids.

You can imagine the discussions that ensued in our house. My husband, rightly, declared we should tell her to use the American flag since slaves were largely responsible for building most of the institutions of this country. And if she had a problem with this logic, she should call him at the office so he could make his point. Obviously, this was not an ideal solution for the situation since I'm the one having to deal with her daily. After some research, really just typing in Pan African flag into a search engine, I discovered there is such a flag. Again, why she couldn't do this is beyond me since she's the one who created this particular curriculum. I printed out the information sheet on this flag and attached a letter we wrote to address our concerns this project raised for us, but would certainly raise for others,most notably and ironically, the only true Americans--Native Americans.

My husband always points out that the majority of the country is run by C- students, a most sobering thought if you give thought to this. We know the top job in this country, namely the Presidency, could be attained by those with far less on their academic records. A certain idealism on my part would have hoped teachers would be more worldly and rigorous in their own classrooms. But that's expecting more than is the reality.

The Economist recently had an article about the academic rankings of countries. Finland, it seems, is the most ideal place for one to be uber-educated. The United States didn't even rank in the reading scores--a grim statistic indeed since Bush's "No Child Left Behind," touts its successes. The article pointed out the one stark differences between countries with high scores and those with scores that don't register is how the top scoring countries take only top students as teachers--hardly the reality in this country. We all know this stems from the devaluation of teachers in our culture, a trend that has reached an all-time low. What does this mean for our children? Well, it seems they will be behind many of their international peers in reading, math, and science. What does that translate into for our country's future? It means innovation, those ideas that can spawn entire industries, will occur more often on soil other than the US. It means the dumbing down of our cultural institutions will occur without the citizenry, smart enough, or engaged enough, to take note or to argue for more. It will mean the constant polarization where religious fundamentalism will take place of intellectual curiosity. People, finding their world confusing (and too dumb to understand why) will turn to the "opiate for the masses"--mega churches to answer all the ills of a world where children's futures are just a bit more hopeless than the previous generations'.

It is a grim picture indeed. It's enough to make us want to immigrate to Finland, the only biracial family to ever arrive on their shores.

Rockefeller Center

My son and I trekked to Rockefeller to meet our friends, who were visiting from Los Angeles. We took in the tree and the throngs of people, all there for the quintessential New York experience. Families posed in front the mammoth tree and gawked at the skaters on the rink below. Fifth Avenue is congested, making the stroll down the glittery street an impossibility. It is enough to make you turn into Grinch. I now understand why most New Yorkers avoid mid town this time of the year.

Every restaurant was full with tourists catching their breath from the strolling down 5th Avenue. This weekend, another whirlwind of seeing friends from Los Angeles, passed in a blur. Again, it seems every other week brings another friend from the West Coast out for a visit. This thread of our past getting woven into our present is making for an interesting tapestry to our days here.

Perhaps the visits will curtail once the harshness of January settles all around us.

Lincoln Center Jazz at Lincoln Center

Last night we went to hear Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz at Lincoln Center. After all these years to finally hear this jazz ensemble in their natural habitat was beyond cool. No other word can describe the experience. The irony of all this is we were invited by friends from LA, who are in town visiting this weekend. We'd been here all these weeks, but so busy getting our lives set up that such an outing seemed like an extravagance.

The evening ended with drinks at the nearby bar, something we would never have done in LA. Late nights here are as normal as our early morning routines had been in LA. As we were driven home, the city seemed dressed up for a formal occasion. Each lamppost bedecked in garland and lights, store windows gleaming in its holiday get up. Even the cold didn't dampen the entire experience of this evening. What I remember from the night was the encore the group played. The audience, a well-heeled group, clapped and swayed as the band loosened up and really began to swing. It's moments like this when a little pinch is required for me to appreciate how different our life has become in this beautiful, crazy city--now our home.

Foodtv

I admit it. I'm a Food Network watcher. And have been for a long, long time. As one who watches, not avidly as in every day, but enough to distinguish shows, I've amassed some observations about the 'chefs', or rather, personalities on the shows.

First let me start by stating I'm not a Rachel Ray devotee. I find her cutesy, 'Rachelisms": EVOO, YumO, Sammy, Delish--annoying rather than endearing. I understand why the network found her appealing, and why more than half the nation finds her appealing. She is the average, girl next door, simpleton, who can whip up half hour meals, apparently all the time we have in our days to put a meal on the table from start to finish. My dislike of her stems not only from these annoying personality ticks now part of her schtick, but rather from the fact that none of her dishes look all that delicious. It's like she's incorporated all the ideas of good food for the fast food life. You can see the complete juxtaposition of such a good idea. There are some things that shouldn't be rushed because in the rushing you miss the true elements and beauty of the process of what you create.

Another chef, who is no longer on the network as they move away from chefs to personalities, is Mario Batali, the antithesis of Rachel Ray. For this man, no time is too long to create a delicacy that will be as memorable as that first kiss. His recipes were as complex as the most complex algorithm. And the beauty of it was his absolute ardor for all things culinary. His rotund figure speaks to a life spent satiating those very basic needs to the maximum. One can imagine how much fun he'd be late night with plates of delicacies and bottles of wine.

One of those sad replacements for Batali is a woman named, Sandra Lee. Where does one start with this Barbie doll looking woman? She is part trailer trash, part Stepford wife, and obviously some powerful executive's wife since it's hard to fathom how she got this show. Her only redeeming quality and the only thing I find endlessly amusing about her show is how every show ends with her "Tablescape," and potent cocktails. I wouldn't eat anything coming out of her kitchen even if it was the only food left, but I would certainly drink her hefty cocktails.

Then there's folksy Paula Deen, whose personal story is compelling. Her folksyness is, much like Ray's, bordering on the kitsch since it is such a schtick of what the network has told her they want from her. She seems to become more Southern, more bellicose, bigger in personality with more air time. Even her sons now have a show of their own where they drive around the country looking for food, of course.

The one chef, whose personality is nearly nonexistent, is the Jewish Housewife with Good Taste, The Barefoot Contessa. This one woman has done more to demolish the stereotype that Jewish women can't cook but make excellent reservations. This woman cooks. And with lots of butter. It is as if she never really got over Julia Child's eponymous: The Art of French Cooking. But everything she makes looks delicious, and a recipe I would be happy to attempt in my own kitchen. Unlike the other chefs, whose outsize personalities, seem to distract from the fact that they are cooking crap, she is as scintillating as a librarian discussing the Dewey Decimal System.

It is her personal life, those bits of her life revealed once camera lights are turned off, I find fascinating. First, there is the nebbish husband, whose job is far enough away to warrant he stays away Monday through Friday, so that she has endless shows devoted to meals for his return. Hmmm. Then there is the fact she is childless. Again, very interesting. Yes, the reasons why she may not have had children may be something that saddens them both. But it does give me endless speculation about, not only the why, but how come. However, the thing about her life that trumps all these others is the fact she seems to only have gay male friends. Every party for which she is preparing, including a Bridge party, ends with her surrounded by three or four gay men, all of them raising their glasses in a toast. Most straight women have a handful of gay male friends, particularly those women with personalities that border on the drag queen mode--I am one of them. Does this mean, off camera, she's a hard-swigging, foul mouthed, hilarious woman, who keep all of those gay men in stitches? It is a fascinating thought.

It is now the time of year when each chef devotes a show to the holiday meal. Again, all great stuff. I don't know why I find watching these shows endlessly entertaining. I just do. If I need a quiet moment in the day, a time to retreat, I turn on the Food Network to, hoping to catch any one of these new celebrities turning the preparation of food into entertainment. No one, other than the Two Fat Ladies, was, or is as entertaining as the originator--Julia Child. But that's a rather high bar for one to surpass.

We are Japanese

I don't know how or why this has happened. It seems our country is now Japan. Let me explain for those who are confused by such a ridiculous question. We, my husband, son and I are on the private school interview circuit. Despite the number of private schools when compared to the 8 million population in this city, well, the hustle to get into one of the top schools is as competive as anything I've seen. And this is what I mean about our country is now Japan, a country known for excessive parental pushing of their little tots to get them into the 'right' school. The school can, even at the tender age of five, determine whether the young one will determine his or her socio-economic standing for their entire life in the country of Japan.

For our meritocratic nation, the notion of a school determining one's entire destiny is laughable, but is it so laughable after all? A bachelor's degree, now much more ubiquitous than 20 years ago, takes on significance if attained from a small number of prestigious universities. Therefore, the need to insure your child will get their BA from, not a state university, but one of the elite schools that is known in far flung places as Sudan.

Each time we enter one of these private schools, I am struck by the parents attending to their little one. It is as if we had all be cut from the same cookie cutter--father in suit, mother dressed appropriately, and both attentive over their little one, nudging enough to make sure their child is not relegated to a second tier elementary school, a fate that could determine the outcome of their child's entire academic future. It is all too pressure filled to be believed. And yet, here we are, schlepping our little guy, coaxing him to go off with another Admissions person as we sit and are grilled by another school admissions director.

This vying for the so few spots at the top tier schools is intense, much more than anything we experienced in LA, where the vying felt less about the importance of the education your child would receive than about the social milieu your child would be exposed. Let's face it, most parents in LA, particularly those in the Entertainment business, were more concerned their kids attended the same school as Celebrity X's kid than about the actual curriculum of the school. Here there is a bit of the social jostling, but the emphasis is really about the education your child will receive--the ultimate goal being your child's entrance into Harvard, Yale, or Brown.

Our son, despite his kvetching about these interviews in the beginning, is now an old pro. He goes off happily with the new person, coming back with pictures drawn. I wish I could say we only have a few more left. Sadly, this driven couple, otherwise known as us, had applied to a dozen schools in the city. We are now halfway through with the list. And each time we head off to another school with our son in tow, we mutter to each other about how we had taken on the absurd social practices of a country half way around the world.

Obama--The President?

Polls, those measuring sticks for people's popularity, say Obama may win Iowa. OK. I'm politically in tune, watch the news--mostly Jim Leher--read The New York Times, sometimes the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New York Magazine, and now the Economist. Despite my excessive reading, I'm still at a loss how Iowa, that little state, can determine who will win, not only the party's candidacy, but the Presidential election. It's all a mystery to me. But this recent poll of Obama having gained on Clinton, but now possibly surpassing her, raises some interesting questions about whether this country is more ready for a Black president or a woman.

If someone would have posed that question to me a few years ago, I would have said a woman without question. But that was before a Presidency that has done more damage than thought possible after the devastation of September 11th. People, those that have been polled, although who these people are remains unclear, have said they would pick Obama before Clinton in the Presidential election. And these are the undecideds. It does give us pause to reflect on the President being a black man, even if he is only half.

I'm not sure whether this is signals a country really having made strides where race is concerned or we're just a country beaten down by this administration. I tend to think the latter, but that's my cynicism.

So, we will watch as Iowa gets its moment in the spotlight. And see how this outcome may determine more about the future of this country than any other election. There is no doubt whoever takes the helm has his or her hands full of dismantling the decisions that have done more to damage this country than any another known Presidency. The plethora of problems that plague this country from the economy, foreign policy, the mounting deficit, the devaluation of our currency, domestic woes brought on by the ever widening breach between the classes, and the laughable job we've all done to dismantle our public education, is enough for any smart person to decide to sit out on this election. But since we seem to breed more candidates, even if most are not qualified to run this country, we will surely be in for some nail biting moments during this primary.

Snow Days

Snow days, when you were a child, meant days spent at home, venturing out to play looking like an overstuffed turkey. Yesterday was our first snow day as a family. My son, who had never seen snow, was happy to stay indoors, not wanting to go out and play in the white dusting. I am afraid he is very much a California child, whose neophyte endurance for the cold makes him lament this move since the weather seems to dictate your life in ways that is blithely inconsequential in Los Angeles.

The snow fell on the ground below. As it fluttered down, past our large living room window, the cotton-like flake, quiet in its descent, settled around us like insulation. The noticeable thing about snow is the quiet. It seems to mute sounds of every day life, sounds that are normally piercing. It is the quiet I missed, and the first thing I noticed. Life slows when your every day surroundings looks dressed as if for a special occasion. Cocooned indoors, you retreat to a coziness that is impossible in our normal-paced world. This white makes the world take stock, giving each of us a reflective moment. It is also the kind of day where a large pot of something simmering on the stove makes the isolation feel less so.

We spent the day decorating our little tree of home made ornaments, each of us missing aspects of our previous life. My heart ached just a bit for my son's Tia, who had been my cohort during the days when our house was adorned for this festive season. Soon enough, our tree was decorated, ready to receive the many wrapped packages that will surely arrive in the days to come. My son, who has miraculously adjusted to life here, played various games, drawing pictures, and finally happy to see a friend, who stopped by for a play date. I know he is at an age where these memories will be the touchstones of his childhood. At day's end, we were satisfied that our first snow storm had come, preparing us for the many months of quiet ahead.