A Few Things

Developing a Sense of Community in a Dystopia

First:  An Apologia

It has been five weeks since I've written anything in here, but I have a good excuse.  After some forty years of trying to write a novel in fits and starts and mostly abject failures, I have finally produced one.  It is 72,000 words long give or take a few hundred, as I am still polishing.  If you want to talk genres, it is a combination of magical realism, coming of age, and comedy of manners.    

Let me tell you about it.  A few years ago, I noticed that knitters always have these little slips of paper with grids of numbers and letters to help them keep track of where they are on their project.  They're called lace patterns, Katherine tells me.  I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if a gung-ho newspaper type--a sophomore because sophomores are always either gung-ho or comatose--came across a series of these mysterious notes.  He would probably concoct some kind of conspiracy, or some kind of visitors from outer space narrative around the little papers.  I had been brooding about that idea for a number of years and even had some failed first attempts at the story.  Finally, almost exactly one year ago, I hit upon the point of view and the voice I wanted to use in this narrative.  Against my better instincts, I decided on third person omniscient because I was uncomfortable with it and I figured it would force me to work harder and concentrate.  I don't want to sound too egomaniacal, but writing in first person comes too easily for me.  My concentration lapses, and I end up being way too breezy.  I also wanted to let dialogue dominate because I want to grow up to write like Richard Price.  That was another decision that forced me to concentrate.  I suck at dialogue, so to make it work I had to figure out how to make it work.  I'm pleased with the results.

It is called MONDAY NIGHT AT THE BLUE GUITAR.  It focuses on a sophomore boy reporter named Nate Merced and his journalism teacher, Charley Sanger.  Nate spends the book investigating a long time legend about runaways and blues music down at an old acoustic music purveyor based roughly on the Denver Folklore Center, one of my haunts when I was a college kid.  Meanwhile, Mr. Sanger watches Nate's progress fondly while also contending with parents who are complaining about his insistence on teaching CATCHER IN THE RYE, and his idiot principal, Dr. Trish.  Sound familiar?  They both undergo mild initiations.  Not earth shattering, but definitely noticeable.  I've noticed over the past 60 years that life lessons are rarely accompanied by lightning strokes.

Now comes the hard part.  I'm looking for an agent and working on a query letter that will hook some unwitting publisher into buying the thing.  I'll let you know what happens.  Whether it gets published or not, I loved the act of writing it.  It did an admirable job of keeping me off the streets.  In fact, I liked the experience so much that I am already 4000 words into my next book.


What's All This About Community?

We were in Arizona with Bud and Janet Simmons for Rockies' spring training.  We had just finished watching a game and stopped off at a new ultra-modern mall close by for pizza at Grimaldi's, an awesome pizza transplant from Brooklyn.  The pizza was great.  I was walking with Janet on our way back to the car when we noticed looming in front of us the biggest Apple store either one of us had ever seen.  It was all tinted glass like the windows on a stretch limo and four stories high.  Through the gray windows on each floor we could see the shadows of hundreds of shoppers queueing up to check out the newest IPads.  Janet and I both looked at each other with the same thing on our minds:  The scene reminded us both of disquieting moments in movie versions of dystopian novels like BRAVE NEW WORLD  or 1984 where the citizenry has been reduced to emotionless automatons mindlessly buying and selling their way through a long, dreary life.

This feeling was, of course, exacerbated by the fact that I was in Arizona with its tough immigration laws and sand blasted neighborhoods with golf carts in every driveway and gates in front of every community.

Important people are always extolling the virtue of patriotism, community, shared responsibility.  But the only time that feeling of community ever happens is when some lunatic or lunatics strike out with automatic weapons, groin guards, and tear gas.  Everybody in Aurora is focused on the theater shooting, just like everybody in Littleton was focused on Columbine.  This is the first day the newspapers have not been exclusively about the crime and the victims and the shooter, busily looking for reasons and explanations that will never adequately explain anything.  Tomorrow, there will be even less coverage and pretty soon we will all forget and that sense of community that comes with  communal sorrow will be history.

You see, I don't think there is any sense of community or country anymore.  We aren't about the good old USA, or our fellow citizens.  We're about Apple, Exxon-Mobile, Microsoft, GM, Dell, investment bankers, and dividends.  Where is patriotism when our first allegiance is to the bottom line?

I know what some of you might be saying.  "He doesn't understand business."  "What's good for GM is good for the country."

Bullshit.  I understand business perfectly.  That's the source of my malaise.  What's good for GM is good for GM.  It has nothing to do with country.

Beach Reads @ Puerto Vallarta

We just got back from two weeks in Puerto Vallarta with the Simmons.  To the right is the stack of books read between the two of us.

I'll talk about mine and then K. can tackle the rest.

The Breaks - Richard Price

I started this on the plane and finished it the first day at the pool at Villa del PalMar, just a short bus ride from the Malecon and downtown PV.  Price is one of my favorite authors, the best writer of dialogue I have ever seen.  This, I think, was his first book and you can tell.  Clockers, Freedomland, Lush Life, The Samaritan (to name a few) are worlds better, but this is still a fun read and you can see the beginnings of his mastery of telling a story primarily through dialogue.  It is a coming of age novel told in first person.  It doesn't have the gritty focus of Price's later works and very little of the tragic potential, but the speaker is a more street-wise Holden Caulfield who is MUCH more willing to talk about and engage in semi-graphic sex.

11/22/63 - Stephen King

I'm not a huge horror fan, but I certainly appreciate King's sentence crafting and mind boggling imagination, even though it ends up being a little too violent for my tastes.  This is his most recent novel and only the third one I've read by him.  To make a long story short, the main character is led to a portal that will transport him back from 2011 to 1958.  No matter how long one stays in the past, he discovers, only two minutes elapse upon returning to the present.  He decides to go back in order to stop Oswald from killing Kennedy and in the five years he spends waiting to intercede, we are given a nostalgic view of the late fifties/early sixties.  Some of the views have us longing for the past; others are too horrible to contemplate.  It is one of the most compelling books I've read in a long time.  It is nearly 900 pages long and I finished it in three long sessions under the scorching PV sun.

They Eat Puppies Don't They - Christopher Buckley

A hilarious satire of life in Washington.  Buckley is an equal-opportunity excoriator and no one escapes his scorn.  I don't think this is as funny as Supreme Courtship, another one well worth reading, but it does leave you with the conclusion that there is nothing in our nation's capital worth saving.

Founding Brothers - Joseph Ellis

This book was written twelve years ago, but has lost none of its immediacy.  Ellis, who wrote The American Sphynx (a great Jefferson bio) takes a look at the eight most prominent figures at the nation's founding (Washington, John and Abigail Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Burr, Madison, Franklin) and by focusing on six seminal moments (e.g. Hamilton and Burr's duel, Washington's farewell letter, the changing relationship of Adams and Jefferson) shows how these remarkable people managed to start a country founded on two paradoxical beliefs:  Federalism and Republicanism.  This is a great essay.

Unholy Night - Seth Grahame-Smith

I started this on the plane trip back and am currently three fourths into it; therefore, I'll let K. take over from here.

Katherine here.

I'm struggling a bit.  I stepped on what I believe were sea urchin spines, heroically cleaned out by my right thumb nail.  The scrubbing in a subsequent shower shoved those spines under my thumbnail.  I've been soaking it in salt water and watching spines crawl up towards the end of my nail from the holes they've dug lower down.  My once lovely (truly) right thumb nail is bruised and throbbing and swollen.  I won't discuss the three toes in similar situations (bottom of toes rather than top though and surprisingly far less painful).  The toes do not interfere with typing.  I'm letting you'll know I'll be pretty brief with my book stuff when I have so much more to say.  I'm not sure if this is good luck or bad luck.  You never know close up.

Here's what I read in PV.  It was great.  No tech.  Only books.

Back of Beyond and Force of Nature -   C. J. Box

C.J. Box is what I read instead of the Twilight Series.  He writes western semi-mysteries, semi-nature, books set in Wyoming.  Wyoming (specifically the Tetons and Yellowstone to a certain degree) are bliss, health, love, romance, friendship, nature, Zen and the godness of everything, and an island that is just J. and I and other special friends who understand this--they know who they are).  C. J. Box writes stuff that talks about Wyoming and sometimes the very places I've been in Wyoming (Tetons or otherwise) and it fills me with love and anticipation.  I have a stupid video about Grand Teton National Park where they show the cabins we stay at.  It's about time to get that puppy out.  Anyway, I read C.J Box with an open heart.  Here's a bit on each:

Back of Beyond was kind of a remake of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians only this time the elimination of the characters (or campers) takes place in the wilds of Yellowstone.  Cody Hoyt is a borderline alcoholic who solves the mystery and works to save his very cool son from death's door.  Not C. J.'s best stuff.  You have to love Wyoming for this one.

Force of Nature is a Joe Pickett book.  Pickett is a game warden who always figures out the crime while at the same time championing a wide range of outdoor values, showing that living in Wyoming means living a life of contradictions.  Joe usually destroys a government vehicle, pisses off authority figures, figures out the crime while seeking and getting help from a wonderful cast of characters made up of family and honest friends.  This book details the background of long-time friend Nate Romanowki, a former military killer, now semi-native drop-out from society who happens to be one of the best falconers in the world.  Good looking too.   I love Nate.  The book is about him and all our imperfections and perfections and finding the bad guy.  9/11 too.  I loved the term "yarak"-- a falconry term meaning ready for a kill, for sex, for something primeval and natural.  Great escape book.

Sacre Blue - Christopher Moore

Magical Realism.  Ahhhhh.  A blue muse (a slave to man who makes the color blue in a way I shouldn't reveal here, but is quite erotic) inspires Impressionist artists as she inhabits and loves the models they paint.  She teaches them to see, to learn, to focus and oddly cannot create herself.  There's lots on the the history of the color blue, many Impressionist artists and the Paris of their time, and baking bread (always test the appropriate crunchiness of a loaf of French bread by whacking across the side of a young man's face).  Smart and funny.  Loved it.

Unholy Night - Seth Grahame-Smith

This is what might happen if the three Magi  in the new Testament were thieves and liars instead of kings.  Balthasar is our head thief  and we follow his history as the infamous outlaw--The Ghost of Antioch.  Balthasar is fixated on revenge and the search for a pendant, a pendant that defined him.  His encounter with his brother theives/kings Mary and Joseph, Herod, and Pontius Pilate are wonderful.  The book oddly made me believe in all sorts of things.  Don't want to say more.  Jim's in the middle.

The Sisters Brothers - Patrick deWitt

This is a grisly "picaresque" novel detailing the wanderings of two hired killers who finally go home to Mom.  They kill somebody about every five or six pages.  Wore me out.  The cover says it would be by Cormac McCarthy if Cormac McCarthy had a sense of humor.  Not quite.  There is no poetrty here.  No myth of space and quest against the gods.  No gathering of powers or friends or equipment (unless you count the toothbrush and minty tooth powder the narrator picks up early on).   I appreciate this book.  Not my current cup of tea.

The Prague Cemetery - Umberto Eco

I mean to write a whole post about this.  Not today.  This is an allegory lining up what an evil forger, Simonini, in the late 1800's in Paris did to history with his lies.  He created documents (from personal wills to documents that undermined governments and led men to deaths) and the documents were total lies.  The most important, the story about rabbis gathering in the Prague Cemetery and creating a plan to take over the world was based on bad storylines Simonini had read in books by Alexander Dumas and someone named Sue (lost his first name--sorry).  Conservative politicians buy the lies and start wars and spread the myth.  Liberal freedom fighters who championed Jewish rights ignored the myth of the Prague Cemetery because there were no facts.  The whole story lines up beautifully with how the lies on the internet become myth and no facts can deter some folks.  Consider how Congressman Mike Coffman questioned President Obama's citizenship and heart just last week.

It's important to note Eco is a history teacher and the stories he tells are real.  Only his narrator was fictional.  The timelines and sources are included in the appendix.  Hitler used the real Prague Cemetery documents to spur his Final Solution for the Jewish Population.  The parallels were frightening.

The book had two lines that I've thought about a lot.  The first came after a discussion of Descartes where the narrator changed the philosopher's famous lines to this: "I hate, therefore I am."  I've thought about that a lot.  I see it in a lot of people.  It is an interesting way to look at things for a bit.  The other echoing line is: "Hatred warms the heart."

Gods without Men - Hari Kunsru

Halfway done--I'll let you know.

On Vacations

Everywhere Katherine goes she makes new friends. She just can't help herself.  Here she is making the sand coated chessmen on the Malecon in Puerto Vallarta break character.  We walked into restaurants we hadn't been in for over a year and the waiters remembered her and were happy to see her.  We walked into Cassandra Shaw's jewelry store on Basilia Badilla (sp?) and Ms. Shaw remembered her from the one and only other time we had set foot in the store.  I'm not exaggerating.  It's true.

We stopped at a street vendor's stand to check out a hand beaded dress and as we were walking away a local artist came up behind us, placed both palms on either side of his face and looked at Katherine and exclaimed, "My God, do you know how beautiful you are?"  She was nonplussed.  I have been saying that to her for years, but I never added the hands to both sides of my face touch.  I'll bet next time we go back that same artist will spy her walking down the street and run up and give her a hug.

What I'm saying is that our two weeks in PV with the Simmons was a lovely time.  The weather could not have been more perfect, although now that I'm back in Colorado I do have to worry constantly that I'm losing my tan.  The restaurants ranged from deplorable to spectacular (Las Palapas).  We spent one day on a food tour of the best street food in old town and I encourage anyone traveling to PV to do the same (check out Vallarta Eats).  Mostly, we got into a daily pattern and followed it.  Up at seven and to the gym by 7:30.  Workout till 8:45.  Walk the beach till 9:45.  Have coffee and scrounge a little breakfast and then out to the pool by 11.  Read until 3.  Shower, cool down, and hang out until time to grab a bus downtown or to some local village (Ixapa, Punta de Mita) for dinner.  Back home and in bed by ten.

Here's the rub.  I have mixed feelings about the whole vacation thing.  Usually the first thing I think when the plane touches down for a two week stay is that "In just thirteen more days I get to go home!"  I know that sounds grouchy, but I can't help it.  Jenny Lake is the only place where I don't end up counting the days, hours, and minutes until I get to leave.  It just seems a little silly to spend all that money to basically do the same things I do at home:  read, eat, workout.  All the things I love most in the world (Katherine, hiking, kayaking, reading, writing, going to great restaurants, cooking) are within a half hour of my front door.  Why do I need anything more.

But then I feel the sun turning my body brown, hear the waves (being careful to watch out for the undertow) lapping against the beach, smell the carnitas wafting over old town, and see my wife loving it all and I end up having the time of my life.

Recent Lost Virginities: A P-M-I

Katherine here.  


Somewhere in my early married life there was a group of teachers at Green Mountain High School who lived and breathed school and we hung out together.  A lot.   We synergistically learned that teaching kids to think had nothing to do with content, but it had much to do with teaching kids jargon and systems of thought.  C. Fite taught science students a language beyond nouns--it wasn't about memorizing types and kinds of plants and critters.  C. Fite was a guide helping young thinkers find the right places to cut the biological world into parts.

In English classes, Jim and I were cutting things into parts of our own.  Sophomores learned to cut with  initiation knives for a year of their lives.  Juniors dealt with the knives of philosophy, sociology, and Zen Buddhism.  Seniors cut through tragedy after tragedy after tragedy.  Somehow, by teaching kids how to think, rather than actually teaching individual books, students learned both process and content. That was the plan anyway.

C. Fite also gave her blooming scientists a jargon to hang onto and to connect with the rest of the subject area world.  Students learned about hypotheses and theories and facts and inferences.  Though nouns, these are process words.  They describe types of scientific thinking.  All it took was a Friday afternoon at a local bar to figure out how these words lined up with our English jargon.  In English we taught subjective labels and objective details and subjects, assertions, and key terms in thesis statements. This jargon is a writer's and reader's language.  It is a set of nouns for describing a way to think about reading and writing.  All the science words and the Language Arts words were explaining different contents in very similar ways.  It was cool.

I meant for this introduction to be shorter (go figure).  I just wanted to say that I have no idea how successful I was, but Jim and I and Cindy and lots of others at that time tried to teach kids to think. And we all began with baby steps.

The first thinking strategy Jim and I taught kids was to P-M-I almost whatever content we were attacking.  To P-M-I something, you simply use your analytical knife and cut things into what you see as Positive (P), Minus (M), and Interesting (I).  I'll forever be grateful to Edward DeBono and his books about Lateral Thinking which led me to the concept.  I discovered that almost any freshman could master this thinking system and that should tell you worlds.

With all this in mind and with all the Salinger-esque interruptions and delays so far, I'm ready to roll.   I've managed to try a number of new things in the last year and I want to think about them and a P-M-I list seemed like the perfect filter.  Here's to a year of lost virginities of all kinds.  Thanks for listening.

 RECENT LOST VIRGINITIES: PLUS

1.  I cooked my first pork belly.  I did it Asian style (Mizuna cookbook).  When it was all fried and crispy, I served it like lettuce wraps.  Yum.
2.  I went to The Santa Fe Opera.  I finally get it.
3.  I loved Sayulita, Mexico.
4.  I ate my first sweet potato pancake at Snooze.  I eat them a lot now.
5.  I ate grilled scallions sprinkled with cheese in tortillas at La Lancha in Guatemala.  We made them at home last summer.  Time to do that again.
6. I went to Boulder and was fit for shoes at Newton Running (named for Sir Isaac and featured in the Denver Post not too long ago).  My feet are very happy.  This is a very cool place if you're looking to be a barefoot runner, but the actual practice of going barefoot or wearing the finger shoes hasn't worked out for you.  My shoes (one pair for running and one pair for hiking) are turquoise.   Somehow that just seems appropriate.
7.  I learned to lean pieces of art up against mantles and walls and corners and things.  Our friend David taught me this when he was buying a small landscape oil in Jackson Wyoming to lean against some books in his library.  I'm leaning things all over the place now--mostly because I don't have a library.
8.  I now love Tory Burch flip flops.  That's really all I want to say about that.

RECENT LOST VIRGINITIES: MINUS

1.  I crossed the borders between Belize and Guatemala twice.  The rates changed constantly.  The people in front of us were charged half of what we were.  People with large guns and uniforms reminiscent of Woody Allen's Bananas were standing close by.  We did not argue.  It's interesting that is always costs more to get out of a country than it does to get into a country.
2.  I hated the bus ride to Sayulita, Mexico.
3.  A bird pooped all over my dress while I walked down the Malecon in Puerto Vallarta.

RECENT LOST VIRGINITIES: INTERESTING

1.  I read my first Jane Austen book--Pride and Prejudice.  I struggled through the first half.  It's much ado with not much going on besides who likes who and it just reminded me far too much of love stories filtering through sophomore Big Chiefs (lots of words without much substance).  I really enjoyed the second half even though it kind of pissed me off.  I mean--the huge problem of a aristocratic-type person loving/marrying a mercantile-person is not the stuff Hardy was after with Tess.  I have Emma.  We'll see.
2.  I ate waffles and fried chicken for the first time.  I really liked it--salty and sweet together.  I couldn't do this regularly though--need to keep my girlish figure.  This might hit the PLUS category except for location.  Chris recommended Lo-Lo's in Scottsdale.  Turned out it was in a strip mall and filled with people who look like Scottsdale and it just didn't seem to feel very Southern.  The Kool-Aid (House Speciality) came in all sorts of bright colors and flavors.  Didn't have any.  I had plenty growing up.
3.  I walked up Granite Canyon in the Tetons instead of down.  We ran into an avalanche and lost the trail and then we ran into a giant bull moose and we had to bushwhack around him and find the trail yet again and we saw waterfalls and all sorts of nature stuff from a totally new viewpoint.  It was also a lot harder going up.  There's a lot to be said for taking the lift up Rendezvous Mountain and walking down the canyon.  We once saw a naked girl lounging in the river on that route.  Jim gave himself 20 points for that wildlife spotting that day too.  I didn't think she was worth more than 17 at best.
4.  I walked ALL the way around Emma Matilda and Two Ocean Lakes starting on the south side (Tetons again).  I loved this part--views of Ox-box Bend from high above and a new range of wild flowers.  The back side sucked.  Dark and woody ("Lions, and tigers, and bears--oh my!) and I've never had to wade through so many mosquitoes in my life.
5.  I'm learning to care for an orchid.  A gift from David who has them in his store.  It's gorgeous, but I fret over it.  I don't know what I'm doing and it's the thirstiest darn plant and David says they should be able to go 10 days or more without water.  This is not Alabama and my orchid nearly died last summer when a neighbor cared for it while we went to Wyoming.   It just lost all its blooms and Im hoping this is natural.  It's still green and pleasant looking otherwise.  My son-in-law will be relieved the blooms are gone now though.  He's shackled with taking care of it while we are out of town and I'm sure it'll be less pressure now that it's just a lot of greens and roots.

Enough.  It was good to think through some new experiences of late.  I'm tired though.  I don't want to think anymore.  It's time to settle down in front of ESPN and let pundits carve the world into NFL draft choices.

Teacher Evaluations Gone Amok

Katherine here.

Today is my first day off after coaching my flock of teachers this year.  That's what I do.  I help interesting folks finish the requirements for Colorado teaching licenses.  These aren't teachers fresh out of college who've been through a traditional program.  These are people with degrees who are shifting careers.  They have amazing experience and often make remarkable teachers.

I've done this seven years now.  I've worked with a National League Baseball Umpire who is now a calculus teacher and baseball coach at Gateway in Aurora.  One teacher fought forest fires in New Mexico and became a superb science teacher for students expelled from Denver Public Schools (DPS).  I've worked with Broadway dancers, one comedian,  two real live rocket scientists and several remarkable artists.   This year's group included a Flamenco dancer from Mexico City, a mountain and ice climber from Venezuela. and a PROUD Latino Zumba instructor.  I love learning how each of them found a way to a classroom.

I see these folks twice a month and I get to know them.  When they worry, I worry.  I'm excited that two will get married this summer and one will travel to England.  I hope those having to take DPS ELA units can manage to find open classes that fit with their lives.  I want good things for them.

The job has been harder this year and not because of the 17 teachers I've been working with since last August.  Mostly it's the atmosphere of teacher oppression that wore me down.  There seems to be a universal attack on teachers that has lived a long time on editorial pages and blogs.  Teachers are scoundrels who do nothing and reap great retirement benefits--that sort of thing.

This year teacher hatred, however, has become very real for classroom teachers, especially DPS teachers living through their LEAP evaluations.  LEAP has created a culture of fear in lots of DPS schools--especially where there isn't a strong principal who really knows his staff thoroughly and accurately.

Here's as brief a synopsis of this situation as I can muster--listed in steps to keep me under control.

1.  The Colorado Legislature passed a law basically attaching problems in education (low test scores, etc) to "bad" teachers.  This is a new data-driven concept derived from a Harvard study showing that the biggest impact on student success was the teacher.  The legislature reversed the logic (along with many other state legislatures) and decided lack of success should be attributed to "bad" teachers.  In the Colorado Legislature's effort to get Federal Race To the Top dollars, they made districts responsible for large and sweeping changes in teacher evaluations with the goal of improving things by the elimination of all those "bad' teachers.

2.  DPS saw the huge cost factor and wrote grants leading to the creation of The New Teacher Project.  It was designed to create a massive and eventually high-risk evaluation system.

3.  The New Teacher Project, led by former Teach For America and DC Education Bureaucrat  Richard Greene, shared the program's goal at meetings with Metro State staff where I work.  Greene indicated that since data showed that 20% of teachers are "bad," the goal would be to eliminate 20% of teachers each year.  High expectations.

4.  The evaluation program, LEAP, that Greene designed and led, was staffed with a small army of Teach for America folks who all seem to be 28 years old, female, never wear coats even in cold weather, and behave as though their two years of Teach For America experience and a summer workshop with Greene and his statistics can cure all things educational.

5.  The LEAP army is supposed to see teachers 4 times a year.  Teachers are given notice of a two week window when an evaluation could take place. (often missed because the evaluators seem to always be running behind).  I think there are eight pages of teaching components the teacher is to demonstrate in any forty minute time the LEAP observer arrives.  It doesn't matter if it's a fire drill or the last day before a big vacation or if you happen to be giving a district assessment.  That forty minutes is your fate.

6.  There are 8 LEAP categories with sub-components that define master teaching.  If a teacher was part of "the pilot," he/she needed to score a 5 in 5 of the 8 categories in order to have the teaching contract renewed.   Student test scores can help the teacher if the teacher has enough students for the scores to count.  Greene changed the rules late this year and eliminated the bottom score--mostly because all pilot teachers would have to be non-renewed I think.   The non-pilot teachers have three years to get their numbers up to par and then their jobs are on the line too.

7.  The LEAP program sends fliers to all teachers with photographs of happy instructors smiling and saying, "I've been Leaped."  The fliers did not make my group of DPS teachers embrace the system.

This kind of high-stakes evaluation system isn't about helping teachers.  This LEAP system has turned an awful finger-pointing public symptom into something real and concrete for teachers in DPS.  These folks are doing well in their classrooms for beginners.   They might do even better without the threatening numerical system and the army of LEAPers who seem to know it all and have expectations I don't believe they could pull off themselves.

The Colorado Legislature blew it by making teachers the scapegoat for everything wrong in education and assuming a great evaluation program could be a panacea.  Denver Public Schools blew it because the district took the law so seriously.  They have made their own work force paranoid.  Paranoid people rarely grow and improve.  They are too busy being worried.  Really good teachers need to worry about kids, not their own LEAP scores.

So far there is nothing like the LEAP evaluation program in other Metro area districts.  Maybe they don't have skilled grant writers.  Maybe they felt the evaluation systems they had in place would do the trick if they just did a better job of following through with them.  Maybe there is some common sense in other districts.  Time will tell.

My job was harder this year.  My 16 DPS teachers worried more than they ever had.  There was a whole new level to their worry this year beyond meeting standards and helping their students grow.  It made me worry more too.  I'm ready for a break.

How does your kid measure up?

Baby Apps

Here is another in an increasingly long list of reactions that prove I'm getting old. I read in THE ATLANTIC just this morning about the new wave of apps designed to keep track and chart EVERYTHING about your new infant's behavior. On Baby Connect, for example, you can log the exact amount of your child's intake, describe, weigh and measure your child's output (a rather disgusting thought), record every sleep session, describe the differences in your child's crying and fussiness, etc. You can even ask the app to tell you, based on the data you have entered, how your kid stacks up. What percentile is he? How does his poop "measure" up to other two month olds'? And the biggest question of all: Is my baby normal? I find the whole thing horrifying. It's right up there with play dates and toddler visits to the beauty parlor.

There's one line that really concerns me. The article says the best thing about the new baby apps is that they offer "tech-savvy parents a substitute for hand written diaper-change and feeding logs." DIAPER-CHANGE AND FEEDING LOGS! Were we supposed to do that? No one told me. No mention of it by Dr. Spock. Penelope Leach ignores the whole thing. I'm kind of ashamed to admit that we have no diaper-change log for Franny. It makes me a little angry that our pediatricians never mentioned the possibility. I think we've missed out on a valuable source of nostalgia. Sure, we have plenty of photographs that we can go through and remember. But when it comes to diaper-change logs, nada!

And what if the app goes down, or someone swipes your iPhone? At the Y if the FitLinxx computer that keeps track of everyone's progress--the total weight lifted, total miles run--is off line, many members wander around aimlessly, not knowing what to do. You know, they really wanted to lift weights and run today, but the computer broke. By the same token, do your baby's full diapers count if they can't be recorded? That's why if I was a new parent I wouldn't want one of those apps. Just too much to worry about.