Education Equality Project

The new "project" brought to you by Al Sharpton and Joel Klein.
I know this has been in the works and I have been on vacation.
There have been plenty of questions that have been posed by many over the past month about this project.
If it is indeed being funded by private monies, why are those private people not wanting the little people "us" knowing who they are?
Why name it Education Equality Project? Isn't education supposed to be equal for all anyway? Whether or not the children attend a public or charter school? I would say private but then again we are well aware that private schools are on a whole other playing field. At least the playing field is not on Randall's Island, but I digress.
So I received an email the other day with a media advisory from the Education Equality Project that in Denver the "project" as I will call it will call on the Democratic Party to endorse the Project’s Statement of Principles.
I find the statement of Principles to be ironic at best. With Joel Klein as a founder of the project and saying that the system is broke is that his way of admitting that even after everything he tried to do as Chancellor that they system still has not helped the neediest students?
He does spin scores to his advantage we all know that.
While we all still try to figure out just what the "Project" is really trying to achieve with all their fancy posturing, isn't it just amazing that the proud announcement of additional charter schools were revealed.
How about we just stop making up all these new "initiatives" already and just unmask yourselves as the great privatize of the public schools so we can all just go home already.
The new school year is just a mere few days away. Is a new rally in the plans yet?

Welcome

The phone rings, I pick it up to be greeted by Cardozo's automated phone call welcoming me back to the school year. Thank you very much for the welcome back but I hope in a few more weeks my phone number will be omitted from your computer.
Things never change.
Back in the stone age when I graduated from Martin Van Buren High and was already in college my lovely parents received a notice from the dean that I had stop attending school. It was already 6 months into the school year. I guess things never change even with the advent of computers.

Forgetful

I wish someone would have reminded me that just because you wore your new sneakers once, does not mean that you can do a two mile run in them the next day. They sure are not broken in and I have a big gigantic callus on my foot now. Not like it is going to stop me from my weekly Wednesday 10 mile walk. You can find me hobbling along somewhere in Queens.

By the way I am down 33 pounds. Yeah for me!

Summer Reading

I was wandering the local Private Schools for wee one, because I just won the lotto didn't you hear. Pissed Off Mom wins the lotto tells the Public School to kiss her ass. Just kidding I did not win lotto, but the system still can kiss my ass.
Did you know that this one nameless school teaches 3rd grade students how to build a house, and then landscape at the same time in their botany class. Where did we go wrong?

Another thing look at the list below for the mandatory summer reading list for High School students and tell me, please which of these books are our students asked to read? Just wondering ?


Freshmen
Read three selections: two from the following list and one individual selection.
A Separate Place by J. Knowles
Kon Tiki by T. Heyerdahl
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by B. Smith
Laughing Boy by O. LaFarge
Annie John by J. Kincaid
My Antonia by W. Cather
Back from Tomorrow by G. Ritchie
The #1 Ladies Detective Agency by A. McCall Smith
The Chosen by C. Potok
Of Mice and Men by J. Steinbeck
The Good Earth by P.S. Buck
Profiles in Courage by J. Kennedy
Growing Up by R. Baker
Story of My Life by H. Keller
The Human Comedy by W. Saroyan
Travels With Charlie by J. Steinbeck
I Heard the Owl Call My Name by M. Craven
Wurthering Heights by E. Bronte
Sophomores
Read three selections: two from the following list and one individual selection.
At Risk by A. Hoffman
House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Memaday
Black Boy by R. Wright
Into Thin Air by J. Krakauer
Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Ironweed by W. Kennedy
The Color Purple by A. Walker
Jane Eyre by C. Bronte
The Daughter of Fortune by I. Allenhoe
Kaffir Boy by M. Mathebane
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by A. Tyler
The Kitchen God's Wife by A. Tan
Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by R. L. Stevenson
The Kite Runner by K. Hosseini
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Stories by E. A. Poe
Lovely Bones by A. Sebold
Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
The Mists of Avalon by M. Bradley
Go Tell It On the Mountain by J. Baldwin
Scarlett Letter by N. Hawthorne

The Tao of Pooh by B. Huff
Juniors
Read three selections: two from the following list and one individual selection.
The Andromeda Strain by M. Crichton
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by V. Hugo
Angela’s Ashes by F. McCourt
The Joy Luck Club by A. Tan
Bean Trees by B. Kingsolver
Main Street by S. Lewis
Bell Jar by S. Plath
The Name of the Rose by U. Eco
Beloved by T. Morrison
Native Son by R. Wright
Cannery Row by J. Steinbeck
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by K. Kesey
Don Quixote by Cervante
Reviving Ophelia by M. Pipher
Ethan Frome by E. Wharton
Silent Spring by R. Carson
For Whom The Bell Tolls by E. Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Z.N. Hurston
Grendel by J. Gardner
Tracks by L. Erdrich
Henderson the Rain King by S. Bellow
Zen in the Art of Archery by E. Herrigel
Seniors
Seniors MUST read four (4) books – Either Anna Karenina, OR Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy, two (2) books from the following list and one (1) individual selection.
1984 by G. Orwell
The Fixer by B. Malamus
100 Years of Solitude by G. Marquez
Franny & Zooey by J.D. Salinger
And There Was Light by J. Lusseyran
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Autobiography of Malcolm X by M.X
Handmaid’s Tale by M. Atwood
Brave New World by A. Huxley
Heart of Darkness by J. Conrad
Brideshead Revisited by E. Waugh
Humboldt’s Gift by S. Bellow
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes by S. Hawking
Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog
The Brothers Karamazov by F. Dostoevsky
Love in the Time of Cholera by G. Marquez
The Cancer Ward by A. Solzhenitsyn
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by J. Joyce
Cat’s Cradle by K. Vonnegut
Prayer for Owen Meany by J. Irving
Cider House Rules by J. Irving
A Room of One’s Own by V. Woolf
A Confederacy of Dunces by J. Kennedy Toole
Song of Solomon by T. Morrison
A Doll’s House & Hedda Gabler by H. Ibsen
The Stand by S. King
A Farewell to Arms by E. Hemingway
Woman Warrior by M. H. Kingston

Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Madness by R. Pirsig

A conversation at enrichment

When I drop my wee one off at the local enrichment center, I usually hang around and wait for him to finish, or if highly motivated I do my power walk. Lately though I have been waiting for him.
The last two weeks I have had an ongoing conversation with two other parents about the state of education in NYC. It started with how long our children have been attending enrichment and do you think it has helped. Out of the 2 other parents wee one has been going the longest. I believe it has helped him understand the concept of math better and I am happy and will continue to send him under his continuous protests.
All of us agree that that the reason we are sending our children to the program is so they can have a leg up. We all agree that class size is to large and that teachers just don't have the time to give our child the individual attention that they deserve.
This past Saturday when I dropped off wee one, one of the two parents said that he has been looking into private schools since he felt that the curriculum in his local school is not well rounded and is only to teach his child how to pass a test. He wanted to know why a private school could have a well rounded and diverse education and not our public schools. The school he visited teaches languages to the children in early grades and also lets the child be an individual instead of some cookie cutter all children can learn at the same pace type of education. He also asked when were Bloomberg and Klein going to figure out that they are all wrong in their corporate way of trying to run the schools and that our children were not little worker bees but real people. I told him that they really don't care what we have to think, what our children need, or how our educators know how to teach them because no matter what happens they will always find a positive spin on it.
So while more and more parents become disenfranchised Bloomberg just shrugs, just one less student to educate. But I do understand that we need a new sports stadium.

Summer Time

I love summer. No school, no rushing, life is easy.
As easy as it could be with 3 children at home and you are at work and then what you come home to, if you do go home.
Wee one and I have been busy. Him going to his enrichment classes. Which he abhors, like I really care. He is learning multiplication and to me that is all that matters.
His reward for all his hard work. Hitting the museums with me. Okay well we just started the museum circuit. He gets to pick. His first choice was the American Museum of Natural History. I forgot my camera which I could just kick myself. He had a great time and since it poured over on Saturday it was a wonderful place to spend the day. He is still talking about his favorite parts of the museum.
Wee one made up his list of things we should visit if we were a tourist. His words. He picked the tourist route because as we were walking from Times Square to Rockefeller Center we could not get past the throngs of tourists. I just grabbed his hand and showed him how a true New Yorker gets around tourists. As we passed St. Patricks and a gigantic wedding party was letting out and the tourists were standing with mouths agape, I was muttering damn tourists and snaked in between them he has decided he wants to be a tourist in his own city.
Our next stop is the Empire State Building and then the Met. I will try to remember to bring the camera, so I can bore you, err I mean share some pictures with you
Enjoy the rest of your summer.