The Burrow

Costco's aisles were filled with backpacks and lunch boxes this afternoon.   Monday was New Teachers First Day. School starts in one week - Wednesday, August 6th. My desk is covered in planning for the year.  A planting calendar, the school year calendar, Back to School Love Feast..... my brain is not prepared for this. It's July.  It's the middle of the summer.  I should be planning a trip to the ocean, not deciding which seeds to plant in Grandma's Garden.   I don't understand why the school year is structured the way it is.   Tucson Unified School District is floating the idea of year-round school, or 4 days/10 hour weeks.  (Parents have been asked to weigh in;  this woman's analysis is worth reading) .  The Cuters' school in Chicago was on trimesters; we loved it.  Having vacation time when everyone else was in school made ski slopes uncrowded and theme parks deserted.  We made good use of the time. I'm not just c...

Friends from The Happy Ladies Club have formed an Indivisible Team.  Prompted by the outlines and suggestions from the former Congressional staffers who created Indivisible  to mobilize citizen action against the Trump agenda, 20 or 30 of them meet and talk and plan. Action items seem to elude them, for the most part.  Some want to read philosophy or criticism or current events and spend the time discussing the ideas.  Some want to protest, with signs and chants and marching.  Some want to write letters and postcards, some want to visit the offices of our elected officials, some just enjoy the time spent with others. None of that was attractive to me; I'm happy spending my Fridays with JannyLou, harassing our legislators and registering our opinions without waiting for the agreement of a group.   Even now, with my partner in crime spending the summer in Colorado, I've been dropping in on Sen. Flake and Rep. McSally, sharing my views.  I'm still wri...

I'm going to vote Yes on Prop.  123. I am going against all my principles.  I don't give in to bullies.  I do not accept the basic premise of the Proposition.  They are not making any more land; once it's gone, it's gone.  The voters spoke and the Governor and his lackey Legislature refused to act on the electorate's mandate and instead gave us this awful Sophie's Choice.  This is not a long term solution; there is no promise for the future. But, then there are these real life people. The teacher who will get a bonus this summer.... and summer starts on Friday in our District. The principal who watches her teachers dig into their own pockets, pay more for their health insurance, look worn down by the lack of respect shown their profession by those who think that privatizing education is the perfect solution. The translator who knows that his relationship with the Somali and Sudanese 5 and 6 and 7 year old students can continue in the fall. And s...

I ranted and I raved and I was right.  Voting for this Proposition will be giving in to bullies.  The voters demanded funds for education; the governor denied those funds and presented this in its place. There are triggers and there are caveats and there's the whole thing about the State Land Trust and mortgaging the future for today. But..... I spent the morning at Prince Elementary School.  I watched the teacher struggle to maintain order with 27 wily 5 and 6 year olds doing their best to thwart her.  I saw her name on the books in her Library.... her name, not the classroom number or the school's identifier.  She paid for The Little White Duck  and The Sense of Smell  and several other well loved paperbacks in the bucket on our table.  The District didn't pay for those books.  She did, and she will take them with her when she moves out of Kindergarten and up to a 4th grade class next Fall.  They'll stay stored away, in case she de...

The Alumni Admissions Ambassadors Network recommended that Accepted Students be received. Therefore, the banner was hung on Saturday. I would show you a picture of the red and white balloons against the bluest of blue skies,  but the prickers on the palo verde trees destroyed them before I returned with my camera. One of the students thought they were the remnants of a party the night before, but they were part of the decor for her Reception. She Who Must Be Obeyed thought that something at home would be nicer than meeting in a restaurant.  Since the restaurant I wanted to use couldn't accommodate us on a Saturday, I agreed with her and turned to Breugger's and my pantry for bagels and lox.  Happily, I have a lot of red and white serving pieces and doilies and such. Leftovers have been keeping me happy ever since. It was a lovely party, with an edge just beneath the surface. These kids did not know what to do. They were the lucky ones, in th...

Miss Goldman, P.E. instructor extraordinaire, had the whole school out on the playground this morning......    including the principal.  It was the Annual Jump Rope for Heart Field Day. As Prince's Official Adopted Grandmother, I was an honored guest.   There were non-competitive games on the grass, but this year I stayed on the cement, watching, along with those astonished boys,  as a teacher showed her stuff.   She wasn't the only one having a good time. Some held one end of the rope for those in line   watching as amazing things happened The kid really had hops Yes, he's on his fingertips.   And this one is inches off the ground while flipping the rope and jumping. Other girls were jumping, too, even if their clothing was often less than hospitable to the activity She didn't let tradition get in the way of fun. She jump-walked all around the concrete.   ...

Big Cuter gave me a short course on the history of the world over lunch at a deli in San Francisco. David McCullough introduced me to the founding fathers and mothers and Jay Winik took me through April, 1865.   Anne Perry  brought me up to the brink and Dorothy Leigh Sayers  explained the period after the Great War, the war to end all wars, the war that brought globalization to a new extreme. I tried to read Gore Vidal's Burr on e summer when I was young; the adults were so brazen and their behavior so outlandish that I never got past the second chapter. I don't remember any of the history I was taught in high school. I never took a history course in college. It took me until my 30's before I read the ancients.  Herodotus invented history, they say, and it was presented to me as such - an invention.  Were the strange and wonderful animals he describes real or were they added to make the text more accessible?  Did the events he recounts happen ...

If he's in law school (and sees the humor in an asymptote joke), it sounds like all that smart parenting paid off. Any advice for a dad trying to raise knowledge-hungry little girls?  I admit that I basked in the glow for a moment or two.  An accomplished man paid me a compliment and then he asked me for advice.  He's in the knowledge business himself and he's curious about my child rearing techniques in his bailiwick.  It felt good. Flattery will get you everywhere, my friends.  It got him don't talk down to them, and read and expect them not to fear the big words or the long stories  but all that came after I asked him the most important question:  Do you have the World Book? Growing up, it saved my academic career.  Sixth grade meant writing 6 paragraph essays every night on one of 5 topics or choose your own.  Research was done in the library or in your own home if your family had an encyclopedia.  Lots of my friends...

It's mid-August and the kids have been in school for a week already. Summer vacation as we knew it is long gone, just like a phone that plugs into a wall socket and needs a cord in more places than most students today have ever seen before. School used to end around my brother's birthday, June 22, and it always started on the Wednesday after Labor Day. That gave families time to get home from the long weekend or the whole summer, do a load of laundry and lay out school clothes before the year began. Now, resorts can't find college-age staff to work after August 5th and it doesn't really matter because there aren't any school-age kids romping in the pool anyway. They are all dripping sweat as they walk from the bus to the classroom; air conditioning has a tough time competing with 250 little bodies opening and closing doors as rapidly as their schedules demand. . I brought treats to the staff at Prince Elementary for a 1st Day of School LoveFest; I had to sh...

I made a lot of new friends after January 8th, but few of them have touched my heart as much as the 5th and 6th graders at Stockton Elementary School.  They wrote to me in pencil on lined paper with perfectly readable penmanship.  Their addresses were in the upper right hand corner and the date was above Dear Mrs. Hileman  and I loved them even before they shared their hearts.  They read the newspaper every morning and Christina's story touched them.  They knew that she would want me to be happy and that she was glad to have me as her friend and that I shouldn't worry too much while I was healing as quickly as they wished I would.  They were sorry I got shot. Is it any wonder that I fell in love? Turns out that their teacher graduated from my high school a few years after the Class of 1969 and I went out into the world.  He sold real estate until he found the good life teaching small humans.  His emails are filled with warmth and adm...

The Cornell Alumni Magazine , after reporting that Gabby and I are recovering apace (seriously..... I'm a news article in my alumni magazine... this just keeps getting stranger and stranger....) went on to profile two other alumna, Michelle Rhee (former head of the DC public school system) and Randi Weingarten (president of the American Federation of Teachers).  Two smart women, two very different ideas about what's right and what's wrong.  ***** Arizona's legislature is on a rampage, reducing its contribution to public education and cost-shifting much of the rest to the counties.  My school district's latest budget update* includes these delightful tidbits: General Fund revenues have declined by one‐third in the last 3 years FY ’11 shortfall estimated at up to $(825) M followed by $(1.4) B in FY ’12 – excludes more than $1 B in suspended funding formulas Did you notice that last phrase?  That's more than $1,000,000,000,000 of unfunded mandates, $1 Billion...

I'm feeling put upon, so forgive me if I use you to whine about the world for a while.  Things are just out of sorts, it seems. I've been stewing about SB1070 since yesterday , and I'm no more comfortable with it today than I was then.  The lead photo in Monday's Arizona Daily Star has the requisite raised fist Michael Chow/The Arizona Republic but I don't see many raised fists here in Tucson.  I'm berating my legislators via email and phone, I'm spreading the word here in The Burrow, I'm feeling outraged.... and yet it all seems small and petty and meaningless. Why have the campuses not erupted?  Where is the fervor I remember?  Is it really that different 40 years later?  Have kids changed that much?  ***** I helped G'ma fill out her absentee ballot yesterday.  Arizona has a special election next month. There is only one question: Are you for or against the imposition of a 1% sales tax for the next three years?   Without it, ele...

Did you notice that the March 14th Alliance (formerly the March 16th Alliance but that's another story) was triumphant in Lebanon's elections this week? Their defeat of the Hezbollah/Iranian-funded-Shi'ia/(non-Maronite) Christian opposition party was a lovely coda to President Obama's Middle East visit. TBG and I read about it in the Wall Street Journal and followed it on CNN and MSNBC and bored the Amster to tears discussing it. Two weeks ago we might have noticed it, but wouldn't have given it a second thought. Now, though, I'm thinking that a Hezbollah defeat in Lebanon might have repercussions in the West Bank, from whence Hezbollah wages war* against Israel. And that's a consideration I couldn't have made before CAU . I did all the (excruciating) reading before we arrived on campus, and I read all the articles in the packet we received upon checking in. Every last word of every last page. Not all of it was fascinating but I read it and though...