Sunday’s Must Reads

2. MAUREEN DOWD, BARACK OBAMA…AND THE HERO OF CHIC LIT

Okay this is a sorta Must Read: If you only do it for the sake of eye-rolling, it’s worth reading Maureen Dowd’s Sunday NY Times column comparing Barack Obama to Mr. Darcy in Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice.

“The odd thing,” writes Dowd, “ is that Obama bears a distinct resemblance to the most cherished hero in chick-lit history. The senator is a modern incarnation of the clever, haughty, reserved and fastidious Mr. Darcy.”

Hey, Some might take umbrage, not just at Dowd’s comparison of Obama to the initially haughty Darcy, but to dismissing Jane Austin as “chic-lit. Not me, actually. I frankly think Dowd—who usually gets on my nerves—is on to something else.

If Obama is Mr. Darcy, with “his pride, his abominable pride,” then America is Elizabeth Bennet, spirited, playful, democratic, financially strained, and caught up in certain prejudices. (McCain must be cast as Wickham, the rival for Elizabeth’s affections, the engaging military scamp who casts false aspersions on Darcy’s character.)

Okay, well that’s just silly.

But just to remind us that she isn’t always all bitchiness and light, and that, when she wants to, she can see more deeply than she often pretends, Dowd has this ‘graph near the bottom of the column.

Can America overcome its prejudice to elect the first black president? And can it move past its biases to figure out if Obama’s supposed conceit is really just the protective shield and defense mechanism of someone who grew up half white and half black, a perpetual outsider whose father deserted him and whose mother, while loving, sometimes did so as well?

Glad somebody finally said it. Thank you Maureen.

Anyway, read it.

**************************************************************************************************************

2. ABSURDITY AND THE ART OF BECOMING AN LA PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHER

Both the cluster of opinion pieces and the cluster of book reviews were depressingly small on Sunday’s LA Times. But Opinion featured this nice, little jewel about a TV writer who decided to follow her heart and make a career change in order to make a difference in the lives of kids in LA’s public schools—or so she had hoped.

Here are a couple of snips:

After nearly 20 years of working as a television writer, I made a radical life decision: to teach English at an L.A. public high school. I felt it was time for me to make a difference, to share my passion for language and literature with the next generation. Sure, I knew that the pay would be abysmal and that the teaching conditions in gang-infested, impoverished communities might be tough. But I really wanted to try, so I braced myself to keep going even if there were times of struggle, of heartbreak, of feeling inadequate and humiliated, even if there were times when I wanted to weep from frustration, even if I sweated through dark nights of the soul overwhelmed by the futility of it all.

And indeed, I have experienced all that. But what’s crazy is that I haven’t even set foot in a classroom yet.
By state law, I cannot teach in a California public school without a credential from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. On the face of it, this requirement makes sense. Schools can’t go around hiring any slob who professes a love of children and a burning desire to make $39,788 a year (the LAUSD starting pay scale for interns).

[SNIP]

As mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act and interpreted by the Legislature, all teachers in public schools must be deemed “highly qualified.” Again, fair enough. One of the notorious disgraces of our public school system is the way the best teachers are funneled into schools serving high-income students, while children from low-income families are often stuck with far less-qualified teachers.

I have a bachelor of arts degree in English from Bryn Mawr and have spent my entire adult life as a working writer — and all I want is to sign up to take the education classes I need before I walk into a classroom. Won’t my degree and my life’s work qualify me at least to sign up for those classes? Not even close. First, I had to take the CBEST, a four-hour exam on reading, writing and math.

[SNIP]

After taking the CBEST, I still had not proved “subject matter competence.” For that, I would have to fill the apparent gaps in my transcript with five courses in linguistics, expository writing, adolescent literature and American literature — or pass something called the CSET, an Orwellian, five-hour sequence of four exams with some questions so obscure I would defy most PhDs to answer them. What is a modal verb? What’s an embedded appositional phrase? A grapheme? Can you pick the meaning of a poem from a list of answers a, b, c and d, none of which in any way capture the ineffable beauty of the poem itself?

[SNIP]

And I had to pass an 80-question, unbelievably arcane and ambiguously worded test on the U.S. Constitution. I have wracked my highly qualified brain, and I cannot imagine any possible rationale for this test. Because if I hadn’t memorized the Bill of Rights I might march into the classroom and try my students twice for the same crime? Or force them to quarter soldiers in their homes? What is being tested here? My patriotism? My sanity? My level of desperation? What’s next … eating centipedes?

Remember: This is not to finish my teacher education. This is to be allowed to enroll in it.

Meanwhile, a new study shows that 33% of California high school students drop out before graduating; Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has speculated that in particularly underserved Los Angeles communities, the dropout rate might be as high as 70%.

Anyway, read on. It’s funny, but it ain’t pretty.