Earlier I mentioned that some of the teams were being not-so-cooperative with my efforts, but I one of the media relations people from the Padres told me to contact this other guy who works for the overarching MLB. That conversation was rough because if I can't convince him to ask the teams to work with me, then I will have incomplete results.
I have begun outlining my site, and what kinds of representation I want graphs to show, but without those finalized results, it's really difficult to move forward. I also found out recently that I won't be using the MLB.com backdrop. Hopefully this doesn't set me back too far, but my work schedule is shifting to long hours to make up for that.
This next week will be tying loose ends on my reading, writing text to put on my site, and beginning to set up the format of the site now that I have Dreamweaver access. Good luck with putting the finishing touches on your stuff. It looks like I'm going to need a lot of good luck.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Friday, August 24, 2007
Epilogue From Takeo
One weekend in July, I took a guided tour in Harlem. Being a poet, I've had a sort of amateurish interest in the Harlem Renaissance, in Langston and Zora and the like. In the Schonberg Center for black culture, we stood over a large circular mosaic that depicted parts of Africa, America, and the broader African diaspora, and written all over was lines from Langston Hughes' "The Negro Speaks of Rivers":
My last day in New York was meeting Amiri Baraka in workshop and watching his performance. I told him how my dad in '67, then a Filipino farm boy at the age of 12, first picked up his book somewhere in the California Central Valley and got inspired to be political and passed that consciousness down to me. In a humble way I, as I am today, had descended from his words, and now here I was, full circle, shaking his hand.
After that performance, I knew that it would be the last time (for a while) that I would see the many great poets I had met out there. It was a series of very affectionate goodbyes. The many poets I had interviewed and spent time with had become my friends. I realized that quite honestly, I would miss them. I had become so adjusted to the environment here that I started to think myself as one of them, a young New York poet. And quite honestly, that's basically what I was.
Now that I'm back in the Bay, where the air is cleaner and a car makes more sense than the train, it all feels quite surreal. Like a big flurry of a dream. I've accomplished a lot of research and a lot of work, but the things I remember most are the infinite specificities of the people I had the privilege to meet and know a little about. And maybe a little like falling in love, those memories are something I keep close to my chest and feel a little giddy about because those images are my own little secret to myself.
- I've known rivers:
- I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow
- of human blood in human veins.
- My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
- I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
- I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
- I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
- I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went
- down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn
- all golden in the sunset.
- I've known rivers:
- Ancient, dusky rivers.
- My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
My last day in New York was meeting Amiri Baraka in workshop and watching his performance. I told him how my dad in '67, then a Filipino farm boy at the age of 12, first picked up his book somewhere in the California Central Valley and got inspired to be political and passed that consciousness down to me. In a humble way I, as I am today, had descended from his words, and now here I was, full circle, shaking his hand.
After that performance, I knew that it would be the last time (for a while) that I would see the many great poets I had met out there. It was a series of very affectionate goodbyes. The many poets I had interviewed and spent time with had become my friends. I realized that quite honestly, I would miss them. I had become so adjusted to the environment here that I started to think myself as one of them, a young New York poet. And quite honestly, that's basically what I was.
Now that I'm back in the Bay, where the air is cleaner and a car makes more sense than the train, it all feels quite surreal. Like a big flurry of a dream. I've accomplished a lot of research and a lot of work, but the things I remember most are the infinite specificities of the people I had the privilege to meet and know a little about. And maybe a little like falling in love, those memories are something I keep close to my chest and feel a little giddy about because those images are my own little secret to myself.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
PUME parents as an inspiration
As I have mentioned in my previous blog posts, one of the major projects I've been collaborating on has been a Literature Review on teacher equity and what seem successful strategies in reducing the high teacher attrition rates. Besides conducting this research, I have also been helping with a education equity campaign in the Central Valley. I was first introduced to this predominantly Mexican immigrant rural community during my first week at the internship. For the past seven months, one of my supervisors has made a weekly three-hour drive to meet with local parents who are concerned about the local schools their children are attending.
This group of parents came together in January to form a parent activist group called Padres Unidos, Mejores Escuelas (Parents United, Better Schools). The parents identified one of their main priorities the drinking fountains at the schools as their kids were complaining of drinking brown water with small particles. Since most of these parents, if not all, were Spanish monolinguals who worked long hours in the local fields, many of them had never stepped into their children's schools. After a few weeks, some of these parents (mostly women) were trained to conduct inspections at the school sites, and over 80 complaints were failed to the school district. Although money is available to remedy some of the problems at the schools (including the fact that the drinking water has been tested at a lab and has been found to be contaminated), the principal and school district administrators have failed to ask the state for some funds.
So after many months of learning the ropes of the American education system, the PUME parents continue to advocate on behalf of their young children. They may not speak English, but they sure have hopes for a better future for their kids. Last Thursday I attended a meeting at 6pm (which would guarantee a better turn out since parents are out of work by then) and was surprised to see over 25 faces (most of whom I had seen for the very first time). It was very inspiring to see all those parents, most of whom had just gotten of a 10 or 12 hours of working out in the hard conditions of the fields, and see them come together for a meeting on how they can help improve the educational opportunities available to their children.
This group of parents remind me of the NCLB parental involvement provisions I read about a few weeks ago. I would like to think that all parents are interested in the education of their children, however, some lack the tools necessary to advocate for their children. Teachers and administrators need to be more conscious of that and approach parents without allowing preconceived notions affect that school-parent interaction. I am hopeful that with the formation of more active parent groups like PUME, school personnel will be sympathetic in listening to their concerns.
This group of parents came together in January to form a parent activist group called Padres Unidos, Mejores Escuelas (Parents United, Better Schools). The parents identified one of their main priorities the drinking fountains at the schools as their kids were complaining of drinking brown water with small particles. Since most of these parents, if not all, were Spanish monolinguals who worked long hours in the local fields, many of them had never stepped into their children's schools. After a few weeks, some of these parents (mostly women) were trained to conduct inspections at the school sites, and over 80 complaints were failed to the school district. Although money is available to remedy some of the problems at the schools (including the fact that the drinking water has been tested at a lab and has been found to be contaminated), the principal and school district administrators have failed to ask the state for some funds.
So after many months of learning the ropes of the American education system, the PUME parents continue to advocate on behalf of their young children. They may not speak English, but they sure have hopes for a better future for their kids. Last Thursday I attended a meeting at 6pm (which would guarantee a better turn out since parents are out of work by then) and was surprised to see over 25 faces (most of whom I had seen for the very first time). It was very inspiring to see all those parents, most of whom had just gotten of a 10 or 12 hours of working out in the hard conditions of the fields, and see them come together for a meeting on how they can help improve the educational opportunities available to their children.
This group of parents remind me of the NCLB parental involvement provisions I read about a few weeks ago. I would like to think that all parents are interested in the education of their children, however, some lack the tools necessary to advocate for their children. Teachers and administrators need to be more conscious of that and approach parents without allowing preconceived notions affect that school-parent interaction. I am hopeful that with the formation of more active parent groups like PUME, school personnel will be sympathetic in listening to their concerns.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Last Full Day in New York City
Dang, well... Today is indeed my last day at Urban Word and my last full day in New York, seeing how my flight leaves tomorrow. I think when I get back to the Bay Area (if you wanna meet, Jennifer, it's an option), I'll be able to write more follow-up/reflection posts on this blog that are a little more interesting. I tend to find myself to be a better retrospective writer than a day-to-day reflective one, for better or worse.
But in either case, Urban Word finishes off its summer workshop series today as well with legend Amiri Baraka, who will teach a workshop and then perform at night afterward. We've been anticipating this with much... heh heh... anticipation. This Tuesday's Revoliterature revolved around studying Baraka and his work, and what was really interesting was that the majority of the young poets there weren't familiar with his work. Basically in order for the instructor to get them to understand how badass he is, he had to explain that he and Saul Williams once visited him, and that Baraka "schooled' Saul with poetry. That made most of 'em go "daaaaaannnnggg."
Last week's "celebrity poet" was a particular poet whose identity wanted to be protected, and who I confess I never heard of before the workshop series, but she was quite outstanding as a workshop leader. She used the anniversary of the Nagasaki bomb as an entry point to talk about points of view and the usage of rhetoric, and then really challenged the young poets with really intense writing exercises. Sometimes the students were so locked into what they conceived to be a "spoken word" voice that conceptually, about half of them did not come to understanding the kind of unconventional writing approaches that she was issuing (e.g. she wanted the students to write fake news articles from multiple political perspectives-- while about half of the students managed to write satirical propaganda pieces, the other half jumped into poetry-speech mode in which they just wrote a poem addressed to the government). Yet, the workshop facilitator was fully supportive of everyone's ideas even if they strayed dramatically from the prompt. It was quite impressive, and quite moving when she used atomic bomb poetry to move the momentum of the workshop forward.
The following several days were quite busy with an extensive series of interviews with youth poets of extremely divergent viewpoints. One poet insisted that "all poetry is rap," not the other way around. Another poet brought her boyfriend along for the interview, who fell asleep on the table next to us as we deconstructed ideas of writing. A third poet continued on about chakras, energy, Zen Buddhism, and inner and outer voices. The diversity of perspectives here is quite intense, but looming over all poets constantly is a sort of New York aesthetic that they either choose to embrace, to cater to, or to reject altogether. Mike Cirelli described how when YouthSpeaks expanded to New York and became Urban Word, there had to be an aesthetic adjustment. Hip hop in New York is indeed a way of life, far more so than I had ever seen before anywhere else, in which you can be starting up a cypher in the freaking garment district and folks will just start walking up and joining it. The intersection of hip hop with spoken word is intense here, and I tend to find that young poets are more likely to start making self-produced albums before chapbooks.
So many instructors know this and adapt accordingly. Gary Glazner, instructor of Applied Poetics (and the producer of the very first national poetry slam), was very detailed in describing how, in his poetry workshops, his primary emphasis was the delivery of poetry, and exploring the great ways in which that expands the public voice of young people. He was particularly interested in collaborative poems, choreopoems, and developing pre-written classics into big performance pieces. For example, several of us in his workshop met outside Lincoln Center on Saturday to perform Howl at a Summer of Love celebration, and that performance involved splitting up the lines between seven people, as well as an intensive set of choreography. For our last Applied Poetics, Glazner led us in what eventually became a poetry cypher that used "We Real Cool" as a repeated motif, but incorporated our own poetry and a ton of supporting beat boxing/chanting in an exciting improvisational technique.
What's also really interesting is the ways in which poetry seems to very, very indirectly approach social activism. While the Urban Word admins (my coworkers) I've talked to explain that they themselves have values that are very community-oriented, they have explained that with the exception of this summer, social justice has not been something that directly taught to them. Rather, it develops organically from what Cirelli said was "honoring their voices." The creation of a safe, student-centered space generates an incredible amount of agency and desire for changing the world, but it's usually pretty unconscious. When asked directly about social justice by Glazner, the poets there really had a hard time answering the question of "How can you apply poetry in original ways for the community?" The responses usually revolved around innovative ways of performing in general, but the idea of using poetry as a political weapon was not exactly something that came naturally. Yet, quite clearly, based on the kind of work these poets were creating, they were revolutionaries already in a sense, which is something they may or may not have been conscious off.
But anyhow, I'm gonna miss the city. My work is not really done here, however, I have to admit... I'm planning a return maybe in winter break to continue the research.
But in either case, Urban Word finishes off its summer workshop series today as well with legend Amiri Baraka, who will teach a workshop and then perform at night afterward. We've been anticipating this with much... heh heh... anticipation. This Tuesday's Revoliterature revolved around studying Baraka and his work, and what was really interesting was that the majority of the young poets there weren't familiar with his work. Basically in order for the instructor to get them to understand how badass he is, he had to explain that he and Saul Williams once visited him, and that Baraka "schooled' Saul with poetry. That made most of 'em go "daaaaaannnnggg."
Last week's "celebrity poet" was a particular poet whose identity wanted to be protected, and who I confess I never heard of before the workshop series, but she was quite outstanding as a workshop leader. She used the anniversary of the Nagasaki bomb as an entry point to talk about points of view and the usage of rhetoric, and then really challenged the young poets with really intense writing exercises. Sometimes the students were so locked into what they conceived to be a "spoken word" voice that conceptually, about half of them did not come to understanding the kind of unconventional writing approaches that she was issuing (e.g. she wanted the students to write fake news articles from multiple political perspectives-- while about half of the students managed to write satirical propaganda pieces, the other half jumped into poetry-speech mode in which they just wrote a poem addressed to the government). Yet, the workshop facilitator was fully supportive of everyone's ideas even if they strayed dramatically from the prompt. It was quite impressive, and quite moving when she used atomic bomb poetry to move the momentum of the workshop forward.
The following several days were quite busy with an extensive series of interviews with youth poets of extremely divergent viewpoints. One poet insisted that "all poetry is rap," not the other way around. Another poet brought her boyfriend along for the interview, who fell asleep on the table next to us as we deconstructed ideas of writing. A third poet continued on about chakras, energy, Zen Buddhism, and inner and outer voices. The diversity of perspectives here is quite intense, but looming over all poets constantly is a sort of New York aesthetic that they either choose to embrace, to cater to, or to reject altogether. Mike Cirelli described how when YouthSpeaks expanded to New York and became Urban Word, there had to be an aesthetic adjustment. Hip hop in New York is indeed a way of life, far more so than I had ever seen before anywhere else, in which you can be starting up a cypher in the freaking garment district and folks will just start walking up and joining it. The intersection of hip hop with spoken word is intense here, and I tend to find that young poets are more likely to start making self-produced albums before chapbooks.
So many instructors know this and adapt accordingly. Gary Glazner, instructor of Applied Poetics (and the producer of the very first national poetry slam), was very detailed in describing how, in his poetry workshops, his primary emphasis was the delivery of poetry, and exploring the great ways in which that expands the public voice of young people. He was particularly interested in collaborative poems, choreopoems, and developing pre-written classics into big performance pieces. For example, several of us in his workshop met outside Lincoln Center on Saturday to perform Howl at a Summer of Love celebration, and that performance involved splitting up the lines between seven people, as well as an intensive set of choreography. For our last Applied Poetics, Glazner led us in what eventually became a poetry cypher that used "We Real Cool" as a repeated motif, but incorporated our own poetry and a ton of supporting beat boxing/chanting in an exciting improvisational technique.
What's also really interesting is the ways in which poetry seems to very, very indirectly approach social activism. While the Urban Word admins (my coworkers) I've talked to explain that they themselves have values that are very community-oriented, they have explained that with the exception of this summer, social justice has not been something that directly taught to them. Rather, it develops organically from what Cirelli said was "honoring their voices." The creation of a safe, student-centered space generates an incredible amount of agency and desire for changing the world, but it's usually pretty unconscious. When asked directly about social justice by Glazner, the poets there really had a hard time answering the question of "How can you apply poetry in original ways for the community?" The responses usually revolved around innovative ways of performing in general, but the idea of using poetry as a political weapon was not exactly something that came naturally. Yet, quite clearly, based on the kind of work these poets were creating, they were revolutionaries already in a sense, which is something they may or may not have been conscious off.
But anyhow, I'm gonna miss the city. My work is not really done here, however, I have to admit... I'm planning a return maybe in winter break to continue the research.
lit review on teacher equity
Over the last six weeks, one of the major projects I have been helping with has been writing a literature review on teacher equity, more specifically on how to recruit and retain qualified teachers. I have read various studies and have concluded that most researches are in favor of better teacher development programs and more support from school administrators.
As I may have mentioned before, teacher attrition is one of the biggest problems in the state. Multiple studies have demonstrated that teacher quality is one of the principal factors affecting student’s performance. If we expect kids to make significant improvements on standardized exams, than we should begin by looking at who is teaching them and whether they have undergone the right preparation programs to learn how to be most effective in the classroom and what pedagogy has proven to be most successful.
Before I began working on this literature review, I always tended to focus on dilemmas in urban schools, such as classroom overcrowding, high drop out rates, teenage pregnancies, English Learners, etc. Although these problems are certainly present in smaller rural communities, my attention seemed to be captured by school districts in LA, Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, etc.
Now that I have read multiple studies on teacher quality and the huge problem with recruiting and retaining them, my focus has shifted. Yes, I still believe there are major issues that require a revamp of the whole education system; yes, I still believe more money should be invested in high-poverty and high-minority schools (which tend to be the lowest performing schools too). But there are also major problems with how qualified and prepared are teachers to teach.
As I may have mentioned before, teacher attrition is one of the biggest problems in the state. Multiple studies have demonstrated that teacher quality is one of the principal factors affecting student’s performance. If we expect kids to make significant improvements on standardized exams, than we should begin by looking at who is teaching them and whether they have undergone the right preparation programs to learn how to be most effective in the classroom and what pedagogy has proven to be most successful.
Before I began working on this literature review, I always tended to focus on dilemmas in urban schools, such as classroom overcrowding, high drop out rates, teenage pregnancies, English Learners, etc. Although these problems are certainly present in smaller rural communities, my attention seemed to be captured by school districts in LA, Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, etc.
Now that I have read multiple studies on teacher quality and the huge problem with recruiting and retaining them, my focus has shifted. Yes, I still believe there are major issues that require a revamp of the whole education system; yes, I still believe more money should be invested in high-poverty and high-minority schools (which tend to be the lowest performing schools too). But there are also major problems with how qualified and prepared are teachers to teach.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
FLY updates
It has been quite a while since my last post. As my deadline approached, my work seemed to grow exponentially for the four lessons I was assigned to show the Director. Simple reformatting seemed to take hours, not to mention packing in weeks of research into short, hour-long lessons. When the day finally came to present the completed lessons, the Director asked us to hand in printed versions so she could make edits. The meeting went well but both myself and the other person working on this project had our lessons handed back to us for revision before the meeting was even over. By just glancing over the lesson plans, the Director pointed out serious problems with how we presented the material. For example, one of my lessons covered basic banking services. I included a worksheet with examples of how to endorse a check along with information about how to sign over a check to someone else's account. It didn't even cross my mind that this could easily help an at-risk youth commit crimes of forgery and theft. I guess I'm not as cynical as one has to be to help these kids while keeping in mind their susceptibility to criminal behavior. Another problem arose with my immigration lesson. I didn't think that the lessons would need approval from donors and that the material had to be acceptable to conservative right-wing donors. I am struggling with how to include information helpful to immigrants who are in danger of deportation and separation from their families while avoiding being accused of helping "criminals". As for the other two lessons, they still need work because they have been re-worked by others before me and are still in need of being engaging for the youth. I've decided to change the Domestic Violence lesson into more of a guide to how to have healthy relationships because many of the youth have not been raised in healthy environments with models of positive relationships. They really do believe doing favors for their gang-banging partners like buying drugs or doing drive-bys are adequate ways to show love.
I've been gone for the last week and a half and without internet so I'm just getting back to work on these improvements. I'm excited for the next two weeks because we'll finally get to go into Juvenile Hall to pilot some lessons. Tomorrow we'll be going into a ranch unit(kids in juvenile on the waiting list to be sent to a less restrictive and more rehabilitative program on a ranch) to observe the Director teaching a lesson for which an actual lesson plan doesn't exist. She is an incredible instructor and has been teaching lessons on VOP(Violation of Parole) for years but has not created an actual lesson plan. So tomorrow we'll observe her teaching then write up a lesson plan for all the other instructors to begin using. We'll test out one of our new lessons next week without the Director. That should be exciting and I'm thrilled to finally get to work with the youth.
In other news, the Leadership Program at FLY is having their annual retreat for 40 new youth beginning the year-long program. It'll be three days in the wilderness. Well not really, more like in cabins with bunks and a fireplace. I'm sure it won't be any rougher than a one-room double in Wilbur. I just decided today to attend and it is this weekend. It should be a lot of fun with team building activities like a ropes course and beach olympics. I 'm really looking forward to spending quality time with the youth and FLY staff. It beats sitting in front of my computer working on lessons.
I'll post later this week with updates about our time in Juvenile Hall and how the preparations for the retreat are going. Hope everyone is doing well. Ciao!
I've been gone for the last week and a half and without internet so I'm just getting back to work on these improvements. I'm excited for the next two weeks because we'll finally get to go into Juvenile Hall to pilot some lessons. Tomorrow we'll be going into a ranch unit(kids in juvenile on the waiting list to be sent to a less restrictive and more rehabilitative program on a ranch) to observe the Director teaching a lesson for which an actual lesson plan doesn't exist. She is an incredible instructor and has been teaching lessons on VOP(Violation of Parole) for years but has not created an actual lesson plan. So tomorrow we'll observe her teaching then write up a lesson plan for all the other instructors to begin using. We'll test out one of our new lessons next week without the Director. That should be exciting and I'm thrilled to finally get to work with the youth.
In other news, the Leadership Program at FLY is having their annual retreat for 40 new youth beginning the year-long program. It'll be three days in the wilderness. Well not really, more like in cabins with bunks and a fireplace. I'm sure it won't be any rougher than a one-room double in Wilbur. I just decided today to attend and it is this weekend. It should be a lot of fun with team building activities like a ropes course and beach olympics. I 'm really looking forward to spending quality time with the youth and FLY staff. It beats sitting in front of my computer working on lessons.
I'll post later this week with updates about our time in Juvenile Hall and how the preparations for the retreat are going. Hope everyone is doing well. Ciao!
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Beau Sia, Life-Saving Poetry, and a Tornado
Sorry for the late post... last week meant intermittent internet access. My family flew into the city and I kind of had to show them around in addition to working, so I wasn't on for very long throughout the week. But anyway, it's actually been a pretty eventful week last week, as well as this one.
Last week saw a workshop and performance by Beau Sia, arguably the most successful Asian American spoken word artist in the business (you may remember him as a bodega clerk in "Hitch"). He's famous (or infamous) for his very direct, comedic poetry, and is frequently referenced as the quintessence of funny spoken word. But despite his rather comedically eccentric workshop-leading style, he came to us with a fiercely intellectual workshop set-up in which we really interrogated the problematics of activism for the sake of satisfying one's conscience. At the performance, he performed an extremely intense piece referencing Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech shooter. Folks familiar only with his funny work were surprised and astounded by his poignancy, and it was quite a lucky experience for us, seeing how he had just written the poem a day before. He took a creative risk and tried performing songs, as well, which he very metatheatrically kept referencing as being pretty bad (he's not much of a singer, though a great poet and stage presence). In either case, I snagged him for a possible spoken word performance at Stanford, so I'm kind of excited about that.
Many interviews conducted as well... One poet I interviewed was quite literally homeless, and described how poetry, again, literally saved his life from addiction. This same poet was about to head off to compete in the adult National Poetry Slam and was extremely critical of other poets, acknowledging but not agreeing with a non-judgmental egalitarian "everyone can write poetry" sort of ethos. Later that same day I interviewed one of Urban Word's first students,
who avoided the adult poetry slam scene for that community's rejection of that ethos; this poet was more interested in using spoken word as a means for helping teens. I'm trying to figure out to what extent emphases on aesthetic clash with and harmonize with emphases of community... it's interesting. Though I do find that aesthetic-emphasized poets tend to value the archive, while community-emphasized poets tend to value the repertoire, though this of course means no 1:1 relation, nor are these categories I just named off at all definitive.
Applied Poetics has been fascinating; I haven't really discussed that workshop at all yet, have I? It's the only workshop with a consistent instructor (rather than rotating ones), and he's extraordinarily charismatic and clearly has experience working with both very young and very old poets. Interestingly, against the tendency I've seen with most older poets, he emphasizes performance over writing; we've been doing collaborative poem delivery, reciting "Howl" and "We Real Cool" in large Greek-chorus style. But he's really, really interested in the pragmatics of poetry. Today we visited an Alzheimer's center in Brooklyn to read classic poems to the outpatients who came. Contrary to expectation, it was not completely smooth: one of them heckled us, and another who enjoyed our performance got angry at said heckling and ended up almost assaulting the other. Fascinating. But the vast majority of the folks who were there were starry-eyed at the performance, and were very sweet in their thank-yous.
Unfortunately, only one other student, me, and the instructor made it to perform, due to rather interesting events this morning. Crazy enough, much of the public transportation was defunct for the first half of the day due to a tornado-- yeah, that's right, a tornado-- blasting its way through Brooklyn last night. And last night, I had my window open. That was interesting. And comedic. And wet. The very metal door of my housing facility was torn from its base. I was impressed.
So yeah, tornadoes in Brooklyn. Bizarre. Oh, one other thing: as I've announced on Facebook, I've sold out to the Man. And by "the Man," I mean Rupert Murdoch, and by Rupert Murdoch, I mean MySpace. I set up an account. But the reason why I mention that is because everyone else does it here. I mean, everyone. There's an entire community of poets that is trying to make it more or less professionally, and MySpace is how they get gigs. It's insane how, no matter where I perform, five or six people will just walk up to me and ask me if I have a myspace... everyone expects every poet to have one. Talking to other poets, I've discovered that poets have managed to rack up tens of thousands of dollars and national tours... all through myspace. "If you want to network, you'd be insane not to have a myspace," says one poet. "I've gone across the country free of charge because of myspace. I never even met these people in person before I got hired!" So I thought, oh, hell, why not, for kicks, I'll start one up. Sure enough, three hours after I had set it up, a poet who remembered me from another venue I had performed at walked up to me and told me he really loved my work and asked me for my myspace. Insanity. Curse you, Rupert Murdoch.
Last week saw a workshop and performance by Beau Sia, arguably the most successful Asian American spoken word artist in the business (you may remember him as a bodega clerk in "Hitch"). He's famous (or infamous) for his very direct, comedic poetry, and is frequently referenced as the quintessence of funny spoken word. But despite his rather comedically eccentric workshop-leading style, he came to us with a fiercely intellectual workshop set-up in which we really interrogated the problematics of activism for the sake of satisfying one's conscience. At the performance, he performed an extremely intense piece referencing Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech shooter. Folks familiar only with his funny work were surprised and astounded by his poignancy, and it was quite a lucky experience for us, seeing how he had just written the poem a day before. He took a creative risk and tried performing songs, as well, which he very metatheatrically kept referencing as being pretty bad (he's not much of a singer, though a great poet and stage presence). In either case, I snagged him for a possible spoken word performance at Stanford, so I'm kind of excited about that.
Many interviews conducted as well... One poet I interviewed was quite literally homeless, and described how poetry, again, literally saved his life from addiction. This same poet was about to head off to compete in the adult National Poetry Slam and was extremely critical of other poets, acknowledging but not agreeing with a non-judgmental egalitarian "everyone can write poetry" sort of ethos. Later that same day I interviewed one of Urban Word's first students,
who avoided the adult poetry slam scene for that community's rejection of that ethos; this poet was more interested in using spoken word as a means for helping teens. I'm trying to figure out to what extent emphases on aesthetic clash with and harmonize with emphases of community... it's interesting. Though I do find that aesthetic-emphasized poets tend to value the archive, while community-emphasized poets tend to value the repertoire, though this of course means no 1:1 relation, nor are these categories I just named off at all definitive.
Applied Poetics has been fascinating; I haven't really discussed that workshop at all yet, have I? It's the only workshop with a consistent instructor (rather than rotating ones), and he's extraordinarily charismatic and clearly has experience working with both very young and very old poets. Interestingly, against the tendency I've seen with most older poets, he emphasizes performance over writing; we've been doing collaborative poem delivery, reciting "Howl" and "We Real Cool" in large Greek-chorus style. But he's really, really interested in the pragmatics of poetry. Today we visited an Alzheimer's center in Brooklyn to read classic poems to the outpatients who came. Contrary to expectation, it was not completely smooth: one of them heckled us, and another who enjoyed our performance got angry at said heckling and ended up almost assaulting the other. Fascinating. But the vast majority of the folks who were there were starry-eyed at the performance, and were very sweet in their thank-yous.
Unfortunately, only one other student, me, and the instructor made it to perform, due to rather interesting events this morning. Crazy enough, much of the public transportation was defunct for the first half of the day due to a tornado-- yeah, that's right, a tornado-- blasting its way through Brooklyn last night. And last night, I had my window open. That was interesting. And comedic. And wet. The very metal door of my housing facility was torn from its base. I was impressed.
So yeah, tornadoes in Brooklyn. Bizarre. Oh, one other thing: as I've announced on Facebook, I've sold out to the Man. And by "the Man," I mean Rupert Murdoch, and by Rupert Murdoch, I mean MySpace. I set up an account. But the reason why I mention that is because everyone else does it here. I mean, everyone. There's an entire community of poets that is trying to make it more or less professionally, and MySpace is how they get gigs. It's insane how, no matter where I perform, five or six people will just walk up to me and ask me if I have a myspace... everyone expects every poet to have one. Talking to other poets, I've discovered that poets have managed to rack up tens of thousands of dollars and national tours... all through myspace. "If you want to network, you'd be insane not to have a myspace," says one poet. "I've gone across the country free of charge because of myspace. I never even met these people in person before I got hired!" So I thought, oh, hell, why not, for kicks, I'll start one up. Sure enough, three hours after I had set it up, a poet who remembered me from another venue I had performed at walked up to me and told me he really loved my work and asked me for my myspace. Insanity. Curse you, Rupert Murdoch.
checking in
Hi, All.
Hope everyone is doing well!
While some of you are ending your internship terms others of you still have some time to go. I do hope you have found the experiences valuable. I know I have really enjoyed reading your posts every week. Makes me feel like I am elsewhere than working on my dissertation in San Francisco.
Please continue to post, and for those you who have not posted very much, please post more.
I am just checking in to let you know that I have sent an e-mail to each of your project supervisors asking them how things are going. I thought I would tell you in case your supervisor asks. It's just a CSRE formality to make sure you have been working.
Remember if you want to chat at all to please drop me a line or give me a call.
Take good care!
Saludos,
Jennifer
Hope everyone is doing well!
While some of you are ending your internship terms others of you still have some time to go. I do hope you have found the experiences valuable. I know I have really enjoyed reading your posts every week. Makes me feel like I am elsewhere than working on my dissertation in San Francisco.
Please continue to post, and for those you who have not posted very much, please post more.
I am just checking in to let you know that I have sent an e-mail to each of your project supervisors asking them how things are going. I thought I would tell you in case your supervisor asks. It's just a CSRE formality to make sure you have been working.
Remember if you want to chat at all to please drop me a line or give me a call.
Take good care!
Saludos,
Jennifer
Sunday, August 5, 2007
farewell D.C.
Friday was hectic because I was racing to finish my last couple projects before I left. I managed to go through a lot of census data and other research and finished my memo for our Emerging Communities Initiative. In the memo, I made recommendations for where we should direct our efforts in the South for Latino communities. If I had more time, I would have looked at other minority communities in the Midwest (e.g. the Hmong) and elsewhere (e.g. Somalis in Maine). In the end, however, I'm really proud of the work I put into my report, and I really hope that this helps them coordinate their work in the South.
In between finishing the ECI memo and compiling data for next year's Election Protection program, I had an exit interview with the Director of the Voting Rights Project. I hadn't ever really heard of an exit interview, so I found it kind of weird, but it actually was really helpful. The Director and I had a frank discussion about my experience at the Lawyers' Committee, and he gave me really good criticism and advice. I really appreciated everything he had to say, and I hope that it will make me a better employee in the future.
As I'm packing to leave D.C., I still can't really believe that my experience with the Lawyers' Committee is really over. On the one hand, I am really looking forward to going home and am anxious because there are a lot of things to take care of when I get home. However, I think that I will miss working at the Lawyers' Committee. Although it has been a frustrating experience at times, I still believe that I learned a lot about how to work in an organization. I've definitely learned how to better communicate my frustrations and my ambitions to superiors. Overall, I think that I benefited from having had this experience, and I can only hope that my work at the Lawyers' Committee has helped them out too.
In between finishing the ECI memo and compiling data for next year's Election Protection program, I had an exit interview with the Director of the Voting Rights Project. I hadn't ever really heard of an exit interview, so I found it kind of weird, but it actually was really helpful. The Director and I had a frank discussion about my experience at the Lawyers' Committee, and he gave me really good criticism and advice. I really appreciated everything he had to say, and I hope that it will make me a better employee in the future.
As I'm packing to leave D.C., I still can't really believe that my experience with the Lawyers' Committee is really over. On the one hand, I am really looking forward to going home and am anxious because there are a lot of things to take care of when I get home. However, I think that I will miss working at the Lawyers' Committee. Although it has been a frustrating experience at times, I still believe that I learned a lot about how to work in an organization. I've definitely learned how to better communicate my frustrations and my ambitions to superiors. Overall, I think that I benefited from having had this experience, and I can only hope that my work at the Lawyers' Committee has helped them out too.
Friday, August 3, 2007
The past couple weeks has been a trying time in my work. I had accounted for all the teams but was still uncertain of the ethnic heritage of many of the players. In each player’s biographical information, their birthplace is provided, but in most cases, nothing can be found as to how the players categorize themselves. Because nothing can be found on the lineage of their parents, or how they identify themselves, my statistics can only be based on pictures, names, articles that I can find and asking the player themselves.
For the most part, my work has not been difficult, only tedious. As you may remember, I decided to use the 40 man roster of each team, because even though 25 can dress for a game, with injuries the larger roster is necessary. This provided quite a challenge for me, because some of the players are held in the minor leagues, or are on their way up, but do not have any major league experience yet. I can find articles and articles on Derek Jeter or Johnny Damon, players that have been in the spotlight, and for racial purposes, are upheld as examples of the diversity that MLB has. But for players you’ve never heard of, it’s a little more difficult to find out if they come from mixed marriages, immigrant families or if they might have hispanic heritage passed on their mother’s side (without a Spanish surname).
So I took it as far as I could. Of course it has been difficult keeping up with the changing rosters through the trade deadline, but I’m planning to use that date as the point of reference. I began asking teams for their help in identifying players, not for the individual person, but so that I could have more accurate numbers. Most have been cooperative with me. And I’ve now contacted each team.
But for privacy and other reasons, I’ve hit another wall, and some of the teams refuse to provide me with any support or contact the players for me. Frustrating also is when they do not return my calls or respond to my emails. I hope to continue pressure on them and continue to research the background of certain players until I have my complete results.
In the meantime, I have been calculating some results and getting things ready to begin posting statistics, graphs and such. Cataloguing articles and other resources, as well as writing some of my procedures and opinions up is the next step. Still I feel like I’m about a week behind.
I’m sorry it has been so long since I’ve written. I got caught in a routine, but because there weren’t any significant changes, I didn’t have anything all that new to write about. More of my books have come in and I’ve done a pretty good job getting through them, and I’ve learned a lot and been pushed in a lot of positive directions concerning what is really important and what has been all but forgotten on the road to integration in MLB.
Take care as some of us begin the final strokes of our internships. Wishing you all luck and focus.
matt
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
a high need for [qualified] teachers
Last week was a little slow at the office as I spent most of my time reading and summarizing studies on teacher quality and what can be done to motivate teachers to stay in the profession. There is a huge teacher turnover. I recall reading in one Philadelphia study that more that one third of new teachers leave the profession within their first 3-5 years of teaching. The high attrition rates is costing the government a lot of time since they are spending millions of dollars in each year trying to recruit, train, and retain them. However, it also has a cost that can't really be summed up in figures, as the children keep getting teachers who are inexperienced and who will most likely leave within a few years. Not having some consistency in the classroom has effects on student learning and how they are performing on high stakes exams.
There have been some studies on what teachers need in order to stay in the profession. Many suggest that more staff development embedded in their daily schedule would allow for greater collaboration among experience and novice teachers. Thus, teachers could share with each other what teaching practices seem to work and what don't. Other novice teachers say that having supportive administrators who are willing to provide mentoring and assistance would greatly enrich their first few years in the profession. Instead of leaving new teachers to deal with discipline problems in the classroom, administrators should make a bigger effort to reach out to those who don't have experience and might feel overwhelmed with all their responsibilities in and outside of the classroom.
Lately I've been thinking about the Teach for America program and how it sends novice and unexperienced "teachers" into the classroom. Although I applaud those individuals who are trying to impact the education those students in impoverished communities are receiving, the fact is that these 'teachers' only have a 5 week training before they enter the classroom. Instead of sending young college graduates who haven't taken a teacher preparation program (most are one or two years long) to inner-city, poverty-stricken communities, the more experienced and successful teachers should be trying to bridge the gap. How can we expect students to improve their performance level if we aren't equipping them with the best teachers they could possibly get?
Reading up on teacher equity and what we should be doing to keep more qualified teachers in the classroom has really opened my eyes on student performance and how closely linked it is to teacher quality.
There have been some studies on what teachers need in order to stay in the profession. Many suggest that more staff development embedded in their daily schedule would allow for greater collaboration among experience and novice teachers. Thus, teachers could share with each other what teaching practices seem to work and what don't. Other novice teachers say that having supportive administrators who are willing to provide mentoring and assistance would greatly enrich their first few years in the profession. Instead of leaving new teachers to deal with discipline problems in the classroom, administrators should make a bigger effort to reach out to those who don't have experience and might feel overwhelmed with all their responsibilities in and outside of the classroom.
Lately I've been thinking about the Teach for America program and how it sends novice and unexperienced "teachers" into the classroom. Although I applaud those individuals who are trying to impact the education those students in impoverished communities are receiving, the fact is that these 'teachers' only have a 5 week training before they enter the classroom. Instead of sending young college graduates who haven't taken a teacher preparation program (most are one or two years long) to inner-city, poverty-stricken communities, the more experienced and successful teachers should be trying to bridge the gap. How can we expect students to improve their performance level if we aren't equipping them with the best teachers they could possibly get?
Reading up on teacher equity and what we should be doing to keep more qualified teachers in the classroom has really opened my eyes on student performance and how closely linked it is to teacher quality.
7/20/07 - Meetings
Research is going well for me. I had a meeting with my project coordinator and I think it really helped me to figure out where I was in my research process and where I had to go in the next couple of weeks. We’ve scheduled a follow-up meeting on the 7th of August and a date later in August to send out the completed publication for review by community members.
The one thing that has been slightly discouraging is how little information there is out there on Cambodian health. I’ve been having trouble putting together a sizable literature review with the sparse amount of data available. I will probably bring this up with my project coordinator at our next meeting, if the situation does not change.
We are going to meet for photovoice evaluations soon. I am excited.
7/16/07 - Broadway
Today, when I arrived at the office, I found out that the internet was not working. Since most of the work that I had been doing at the office required the internet, I, along with some of the other interns, decided to do one of the other neighborhoods that we had been assigned for the photovoice project. I headed home on the subway and picked up a camera from my house. I took a bus with Jenn, one of the other interns, to Queens Blvd Elmhurst Elmhurst is known for many things, like being the site where Eddie Murphy’s “Coming to America Queens Blvd Roosevelt Avenue Elmhurst Elmhurst Avenue 
Some Grafitti in Woodside
Really Salty Filipino Seasoning Flavored with an indigenous citrus called Calamansi
The Subway Stop Sign
Money Remittances to the Philippines are a part of everyday life for most First Generation Filipinos
Elmhurst
Bus Stop on Broadway in Elmhurst
Skateboarding at the Park
Some Men Playing Xiang Qi (象棋)
PC ë°© meaning PC Room is a popular hang out for Korean youth
While we came hoping to grab some picks of these two populations which we had not seen much on our last photovoice trip, we were unlucky because neither of these groups were there at the time that we went. We did manage to get a couple of pictures of a Filipino youth skateboarding and some older Chinese men playing chess and xiang qi. I’ve been told that the park is not too safe at night and that it is the site of a lot of drug deals. Our organization is trying to establish a Filipino youth organization in the area to prevent the youth from getting mixed up in the drugs and violence which they are so often exposed to while growing up here.
Here are some of the pictures I took over the two photovoice trips:
WOODSIDE
Some Grafitti in Woodside
Really Salty Filipino Seasoning Flavored with an indigenous citrus called Calamansi
The Subway Stop Sign
Money Remittances to the Philippines are a part of everyday life for most First Generation FilipinosElmhurst
Bus Stop on Broadway in Elmhurst
Skateboarding at the Park
Some Men Playing Xiang Qi (象棋)
PC ë°© meaning PC Room is a popular hang out for Korean youthSunday, July 29, 2007
wrapping things up
Since my last post, I have been busily working on completing a couple of projects as my time at the Lawyers' Committee comes to a close. The last assignment I completed was charting the testimony of witnesses called before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees in relation to the firing of the U.S. Attorneys. Working with another intern from the Brennan Center, we charted the witnesses' evasive responses and who each witness deferred to as having the answer. I am confident that our chart was put to good use during Attorney General Gonzales' latest hearing.
Since then, I've been working a lot with our Campaign Manager to set up our operations for Election Protection 2008. Election Protection is a program that seeks to provide on the ground support for voters during elections. This involves coordinating a large amount of volunteers, both legal and non-legal, to help answer any questions or resolve any problems voters may encounter before or on election day. The main project I've been working on is compiling data on our target states for 2008. Though the general election is a little more than a year from now, the primaries are rapidly approaching. The Lawyers' Committee expects to run limited Election Protection programs in key states for the primaries. For the general election, we expect to have a program far larger than our 2004 and 2006 efforts.
Lastly, I am working on a project for our Emerging Communities Initiative (ECI). As I've mentioned before, ECI seeks to empower immigrant communities by educating them of their legal and political rights and options. My current task is to track anti-immigrant ordinances that have been cropping up all across the nation following Congress' inability to move forward with immigration reform. In doing so, I will be trying to pinpoint where our efforts with ECI should be directed. In particular, I am trying to identify the best areas in the South that could be test sites for ECI.
As my last week begins, I find myself frantically scrambling to finish these projects. I really hope to be able to finish the work for the Lawyers' Committee before I leave; though, I won't be too surprised if I lend a helping hand to the Committee when I have time in the coming year.
Since then, I've been working a lot with our Campaign Manager to set up our operations for Election Protection 2008. Election Protection is a program that seeks to provide on the ground support for voters during elections. This involves coordinating a large amount of volunteers, both legal and non-legal, to help answer any questions or resolve any problems voters may encounter before or on election day. The main project I've been working on is compiling data on our target states for 2008. Though the general election is a little more than a year from now, the primaries are rapidly approaching. The Lawyers' Committee expects to run limited Election Protection programs in key states for the primaries. For the general election, we expect to have a program far larger than our 2004 and 2006 efforts.
Lastly, I am working on a project for our Emerging Communities Initiative (ECI). As I've mentioned before, ECI seeks to empower immigrant communities by educating them of their legal and political rights and options. My current task is to track anti-immigrant ordinances that have been cropping up all across the nation following Congress' inability to move forward with immigration reform. In doing so, I will be trying to pinpoint where our efforts with ECI should be directed. In particular, I am trying to identify the best areas in the South that could be test sites for ECI.
As my last week begins, I find myself frantically scrambling to finish these projects. I really hope to be able to finish the work for the Lawyers' Committee before I leave; though, I won't be too surprised if I lend a helping hand to the Committee when I have time in the coming year.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Incredible...
Definitely an amazing, amazing week for me in so many ways. Because it's fresh in my memory, I'm going to start off with how I spent this afternoon.
You may or may have not heard of the great Black Arts Movement poet Sekou Sundiata. He was at Stanford in the winter of '05 through IDA, and I took his class as a freshman. He also produced two shows at Stanford: "Blessing the Boats" and "51st Dream State," and for his premier of the latter I got to reunite with him. I could probably say that he was the first teacher to really have me approach poetry analytically, from both the writing and performance standpoints. Because of Sekou, I take poetry seriously. I was very, very sad to hear a couple of days ago-- to my shock-- that Sekou passed away last week.
At the Bowery, a legendary NYC poetry club, there was an amazing tribute for him this afternoon. It was a truly moving experience with the most incredible cast of characters appearing to honor the great poet. Suheir Hammad and Beau Sia, two of the greatest spoken word artists in the business, graced the stage. Sitting (literally) right next to me, however, was the incomparable and legendary Amiri Baraka, one of the fathers of the the Black Arts Movement and the founder of the Black Repertory Theatre. I was a little too shy to talk to him, but he performed a beautifully eloquent eulogy. I had the unbelievable honor of gracing the same stage as Baraka and Hammad and performing my piece "Model Minority," which was written for Sekou's class, in Sekou's honor. All in all it was a beautiful event, and I rode the subway back with Luis Rivera, Sekou's old friend and contemporary, who invited me onto his radio show if I ever return next year to New York.
So that was this afternoon.... Before that was my competition in the Harlem youth poetry slam, which finally concluded this Friday. Originally I had intended only to attend for research purposes (much of which detailed on my last entry), but I ended up performing and advancing to the semifinals, and then even the final round. I didn't win, but I really developed some great relationships with my fellow poets; I think I'm no longer just some newcomer dweeb, too-- like, the poet community now knows that I can hold my own. It was really an honor to be a part of that, and also to interview a poet from the competition for the research.
Then there are the Urban Word workshops... really great stuff. In our thursday workshop, a major activist/performance artist talked to the students about globalization, and eventually he led us through a writing exercise in which we were supposed to describe our consumer habits. Then, the punch line: he had us walk out of Urban Word and perform these pieces in front of McDonald's, both to disrupt the social norms via performance and to protest the grander mechanics of capitalism. A very interesting sight to behold in many ways: on the one hand, talk about an incredibly liberating experience for the teen poets. But on the other hand, I did notice that the male poets dominated the scene, with the women poets rather reluctant to share their work, and when they did, they did so quietly. The issue would appear in an interview I would conduct later with a different woman poet, in that she said that as a woman, she feels like she is being compared to the other woman poets, whereas "guys can just spit."
Currently reading my Victor Turner. Real good stuff.
Anyway, here's Takeo signing off. Take care, y'all.
You may or may have not heard of the great Black Arts Movement poet Sekou Sundiata. He was at Stanford in the winter of '05 through IDA, and I took his class as a freshman. He also produced two shows at Stanford: "Blessing the Boats" and "51st Dream State," and for his premier of the latter I got to reunite with him. I could probably say that he was the first teacher to really have me approach poetry analytically, from both the writing and performance standpoints. Because of Sekou, I take poetry seriously. I was very, very sad to hear a couple of days ago-- to my shock-- that Sekou passed away last week.
At the Bowery, a legendary NYC poetry club, there was an amazing tribute for him this afternoon. It was a truly moving experience with the most incredible cast of characters appearing to honor the great poet. Suheir Hammad and Beau Sia, two of the greatest spoken word artists in the business, graced the stage. Sitting (literally) right next to me, however, was the incomparable and legendary Amiri Baraka, one of the fathers of the the Black Arts Movement and the founder of the Black Repertory Theatre. I was a little too shy to talk to him, but he performed a beautifully eloquent eulogy. I had the unbelievable honor of gracing the same stage as Baraka and Hammad and performing my piece "Model Minority," which was written for Sekou's class, in Sekou's honor. All in all it was a beautiful event, and I rode the subway back with Luis Rivera, Sekou's old friend and contemporary, who invited me onto his radio show if I ever return next year to New York.
So that was this afternoon.... Before that was my competition in the Harlem youth poetry slam, which finally concluded this Friday. Originally I had intended only to attend for research purposes (much of which detailed on my last entry), but I ended up performing and advancing to the semifinals, and then even the final round. I didn't win, but I really developed some great relationships with my fellow poets; I think I'm no longer just some newcomer dweeb, too-- like, the poet community now knows that I can hold my own. It was really an honor to be a part of that, and also to interview a poet from the competition for the research.
Then there are the Urban Word workshops... really great stuff. In our thursday workshop, a major activist/performance artist talked to the students about globalization, and eventually he led us through a writing exercise in which we were supposed to describe our consumer habits. Then, the punch line: he had us walk out of Urban Word and perform these pieces in front of McDonald's, both to disrupt the social norms via performance and to protest the grander mechanics of capitalism. A very interesting sight to behold in many ways: on the one hand, talk about an incredibly liberating experience for the teen poets. But on the other hand, I did notice that the male poets dominated the scene, with the women poets rather reluctant to share their work, and when they did, they did so quietly. The issue would appear in an interview I would conduct later with a different woman poet, in that she said that as a woman, she feels like she is being compared to the other woman poets, whereas "guys can just spit."
Currently reading my Victor Turner. Real good stuff.
Anyway, here's Takeo signing off. Take care, y'all.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Latino School Board of Education Association Conference
Last Friday I attended a conference in Visalia for members of the California Latino School Board of Education Association. When one of my supervisors first mentioned she had been invited to present at this forum, I was surprised to learn that there was a statewide association for Latino School Board members. In my experience, the majority of school administrators, teachers, school district staff, etc. have not been representative of the current demographics. Since there were no Latino administrators at my school or school district that I knew of (until my senior year in high school when our newly hired principal was Latino), attending this conference where educators and community advocacy members were of my ethnicity was very empowering for me. Although I did not know any of them, and had barely met them that day, I saw them as leaders in my community and only hope that they are truly advocating for fair educational opportunities for students of color.
There was one presentation that focused on high school drop out rates and college opportunities made available to low-income students of color. What was said during this presentation did not surprise me, as I have read articles and have been at forums where the low performance and low college attendance rates of minority students is discussed. Over and over again I have read and heard (and have personally experienced it as well) that more affluent suburban schools are able to provide its students with all the resources, state-of-the-art facilities and qualified and experience teachers, while low-income minority and English Learners who most often attend poverty-stricken inner-city or urban schools experience the opposite of that. Again, I ask myself how will we ever expect the latter students to be able to perform well on standardized exams if we are not providing them the resources they need to succeed?
Another part of the conference that was inspirational for me was a short video on a student run campaign in the LA Unified School District that demanded the School Board members to adopt a policy that would require all high school students to take A-G courses as part of graduation requirements. Many students appeared in the video, chanting and holding signs that said “education for all” and “we want to go to college.” The LAUSD School Board recently voted on a policy that will make it a requirement for all high school students to take these college preparatory courses. Although students can opt out of the requirement, at least all students will supposedly have the opportunity to take those classes that would make them eligible for college.
There was one presentation that focused on high school drop out rates and college opportunities made available to low-income students of color. What was said during this presentation did not surprise me, as I have read articles and have been at forums where the low performance and low college attendance rates of minority students is discussed. Over and over again I have read and heard (and have personally experienced it as well) that more affluent suburban schools are able to provide its students with all the resources, state-of-the-art facilities and qualified and experience teachers, while low-income minority and English Learners who most often attend poverty-stricken inner-city or urban schools experience the opposite of that. Again, I ask myself how will we ever expect the latter students to be able to perform well on standardized exams if we are not providing them the resources they need to succeed?
Another part of the conference that was inspirational for me was a short video on a student run campaign in the LA Unified School District that demanded the School Board members to adopt a policy that would require all high school students to take A-G courses as part of graduation requirements. Many students appeared in the video, chanting and holding signs that said “education for all” and “we want to go to college.” The LAUSD School Board recently voted on a policy that will make it a requirement for all high school students to take these college preparatory courses. Although students can opt out of the requirement, at least all students will supposedly have the opportunity to take those classes that would make them eligible for college.
Audre Lorde, Political Consciousness, and a Poetry Slam
So the first day of "Revoliterature" went off without a hitch, more or less. Our workshop leader was an accomplished poet from the organization Louder Arts, and to my surprise, he didn't pull any punches in terms of intellectual challenge. The man whipped out a series of Audre Lorde and June Jordan poems that the students had to deconstruct and analyze. We were covering complex topics, particularly around discourses of power, and the idea of the erotic as a liberating force. Pretty heavy topic for high schoolers, I was thinking; while I was a participant of this workshop I took a step back and only contributed to the discussion when I felt it might open up interesting directions for poets to analyze. I did find that many of my suspicions were correct: the workshop leader made perfect sense to me because I had gone through three years of CSRE classes, but many (though not all) of the high school students were oftentimes lost. Fortunately, those students who did get a grasp of what she was saying were extremely patient and helped along those who were completely missing the point of Lorde's work; I was impressed with that steadiness, that patience, and how it remained a very nurturing environment.
What was fascinating about this particular workshop was that there was actually no writing-- it might as well have been one of David Palumbo-Liu's discussion sections (the conversation, in fact, really steered toward a lot of the same questions of his class Ethnicity and Literature-- you know what I'm talking about, Matt). The goal of the workshop leader, it seemed, was really to expand consciousness, rather than to examine the mechanics of the poetry. This makes a lot of sense to me; the ideal aesthetic in spoken word could be characterized by its "truth," its "authenticity." In becoming an astute sociologist, you become a better poet-- find the truth, and the poetry will follow. This reflects much of what an Urban Word admin told me in interview; he really wanted to see poets become more than just writers for their own sake, but also successful students and activists.
Later that night, I decided to compete in a poetry slam. Originally I had gone merely to observe and find interview subjects, but it turned out I would save two dollars if I competed, so I did. The poetry slam is a slightly different phenomenon from the open mic, and dramatically different from the workshop, and after three years of experience slamming in the college circuit, I could go on about it, but I won't. Suffice to say that it was really interesting (though not at all unpredictable) seeing how the poems were scored. As always, poems in the second half of the event got big score inflations (because the audience becomes conditioned to listen to the poems more closely by that time), and poets who had memorized their pieces, even if they were by and large cliché, always scored better than poets who brought up paper, even if the page-poets produced more poignant writing. Lots of verbal affirmation from the audience when they heard lines that they liked, but on most of these affirmative head-nods, I had heard lines I had heard a million times before (making plays on Dick Cheney's or Bush's names, or lecturing-- without using imagery-- how blacks are still oppressed). It seemed to me that the phenomenon was that there were affirmations for those things that folks already knew or agreed with, but then again, I didn't see much poetry that strayed outside of the general opinion anyway (mine didn't either). I may have also been imagining it, but I also perceived a bias toward male poets, and the woman poet who did the strongest projected and hit her points much like the men in the room. I don't think it would be accurate to say that she had a "masculine" method of performance to cater to a "masculine" aesthetic, but it seems to me that for whatever reason (perhaps institutional confidence in the public arena), the men did have a general advantage in the scoring.
By the way, I had the major disadvantage of performing first in the slam (the first poet almost always gets scored lower than usual, and I was no exception, scoring lower than later poets who would forget their poems midway through). Yet by some miracle, I've advanced to the semifinal round, which happens in a couple of days, so I'll let you all know how that goes....
What was fascinating about this particular workshop was that there was actually no writing-- it might as well have been one of David Palumbo-Liu's discussion sections (the conversation, in fact, really steered toward a lot of the same questions of his class Ethnicity and Literature-- you know what I'm talking about, Matt). The goal of the workshop leader, it seemed, was really to expand consciousness, rather than to examine the mechanics of the poetry. This makes a lot of sense to me; the ideal aesthetic in spoken word could be characterized by its "truth," its "authenticity." In becoming an astute sociologist, you become a better poet-- find the truth, and the poetry will follow. This reflects much of what an Urban Word admin told me in interview; he really wanted to see poets become more than just writers for their own sake, but also successful students and activists.
Later that night, I decided to compete in a poetry slam. Originally I had gone merely to observe and find interview subjects, but it turned out I would save two dollars if I competed, so I did. The poetry slam is a slightly different phenomenon from the open mic, and dramatically different from the workshop, and after three years of experience slamming in the college circuit, I could go on about it, but I won't. Suffice to say that it was really interesting (though not at all unpredictable) seeing how the poems were scored. As always, poems in the second half of the event got big score inflations (because the audience becomes conditioned to listen to the poems more closely by that time), and poets who had memorized their pieces, even if they were by and large cliché, always scored better than poets who brought up paper, even if the page-poets produced more poignant writing. Lots of verbal affirmation from the audience when they heard lines that they liked, but on most of these affirmative head-nods, I had heard lines I had heard a million times before (making plays on Dick Cheney's or Bush's names, or lecturing-- without using imagery-- how blacks are still oppressed). It seemed to me that the phenomenon was that there were affirmations for those things that folks already knew or agreed with, but then again, I didn't see much poetry that strayed outside of the general opinion anyway (mine didn't either). I may have also been imagining it, but I also perceived a bias toward male poets, and the woman poet who did the strongest projected and hit her points much like the men in the room. I don't think it would be accurate to say that she had a "masculine" method of performance to cater to a "masculine" aesthetic, but it seems to me that for whatever reason (perhaps institutional confidence in the public arena), the men did have a general advantage in the scoring.
By the way, I had the major disadvantage of performing first in the slam (the first poet almost always gets scored lower than usual, and I was no exception, scoring lower than later poets who would forget their poems midway through). Yet by some miracle, I've advanced to the semifinal round, which happens in a couple of days, so I'll let you all know how that goes....
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Another Post from Takeo
Sorry I'm doing a poor job being up-to-date with updates and such... again... but here goes...
It's kind of exciting in that this week, the intensive summer poetry workshops actually begin at Urban Word. The last several weeks I've been pitching in with preparation type stuff... mostly recruitment, logistics, that sort of thing. But this week, they're actually going down, and they look absolutely exciting.
One workshop, entitled "Revoliterature," revolves around social justice poetry; looking at a lot of politically conscious poets and how they use poetry to produce social change in the world around them. Very pertinent to my project, and I'm going to try to audio-record the process so as to study the sort of techniques that are employed. Another workshop is entitled "Applied Poetics," primarily about the practical application of poetry to one's everyday life; again very exciting in the sense of spoken word poetry as a liminal process. And then there's the "Write the Power" masters class, which brings in famous poets to work directly with the young students, and at Urban Word, they're not kidding: Amiri Baraka is teaching the final workshop (literally the last day of my internship).
Definitely been out and about interviewing different folks and their perspectives on poetry. Reading Victor Turner's "Anthropology of Performance" while simultaneously talking to folks about their work is extremely eye-opening. The sort of primordial performance studies-type writing that Turner elaborates upon (especially when he compares/contrasts his views with Erving Goffman) is giving me a great theoretical base with which to examine things. Naturally, not everything fits sociological/anthropological theory, and it's really exciting to see how ideas of structure, process, and performance get affirmed but sometimes stretched by my findings. I'm really intrigued by Turner's idea of the "social drama," and how that manifests itself in the context of spoken word poets. Prof. Elam in "Taking it to the Streets" explains how El Teatro Campesino utilized the very real social drama of the UFW strike, such that a Luis Valdez acto produced a ritualized, liminal space where the possibilities of change were boundless. In the case of the spoken word artist, there does not necessarily need to be a single "event" (or "crisis," by Turner's terminology) for the poet to be engaged in directly in the moment: i.e., there does not need to be a rally for the poet to recite in. Rather, the open mic session becomes a sort of rotation of three-minute crises that the work both responds to and invokes simultaneously. Definitely something I've been thinking about as I go from performance to performance, open mic to open mic...
I'm also really trying to get a handle on the more aesthetic analysis of the experience... i.e. how does a community regulate the aesthetic of spoken word. Going from Spanish Harlem to Bed-Stuy to midtown Manhattan, I'm noticing certain patterns in-group, but my ability to analyze is based off of my own experience writing and teaching spoken word in a kind of self-trained, "naïve" sense rather than in any formal grounding in English classes. Furthermore, I've remained intrigued by the ubiquity of "poet names"-- in what sense is a different identity being performed once the poet enters a stage space. And to bring it back to Turner, in what ways is that space liminal-- that is, an in-between ritualized space-- or liminoid, which imitates the liminal but with a universal understanding of its fiction?
But yeah.... More to come...
It's kind of exciting in that this week, the intensive summer poetry workshops actually begin at Urban Word. The last several weeks I've been pitching in with preparation type stuff... mostly recruitment, logistics, that sort of thing. But this week, they're actually going down, and they look absolutely exciting.
One workshop, entitled "Revoliterature," revolves around social justice poetry; looking at a lot of politically conscious poets and how they use poetry to produce social change in the world around them. Very pertinent to my project, and I'm going to try to audio-record the process so as to study the sort of techniques that are employed. Another workshop is entitled "Applied Poetics," primarily about the practical application of poetry to one's everyday life; again very exciting in the sense of spoken word poetry as a liminal process. And then there's the "Write the Power" masters class, which brings in famous poets to work directly with the young students, and at Urban Word, they're not kidding: Amiri Baraka is teaching the final workshop (literally the last day of my internship).
Definitely been out and about interviewing different folks and their perspectives on poetry. Reading Victor Turner's "Anthropology of Performance" while simultaneously talking to folks about their work is extremely eye-opening. The sort of primordial performance studies-type writing that Turner elaborates upon (especially when he compares/contrasts his views with Erving Goffman) is giving me a great theoretical base with which to examine things. Naturally, not everything fits sociological/anthropological theory, and it's really exciting to see how ideas of structure, process, and performance get affirmed but sometimes stretched by my findings. I'm really intrigued by Turner's idea of the "social drama," and how that manifests itself in the context of spoken word poets. Prof. Elam in "Taking it to the Streets" explains how El Teatro Campesino utilized the very real social drama of the UFW strike, such that a Luis Valdez acto produced a ritualized, liminal space where the possibilities of change were boundless. In the case of the spoken word artist, there does not necessarily need to be a single "event" (or "crisis," by Turner's terminology) for the poet to be engaged in directly in the moment: i.e., there does not need to be a rally for the poet to recite in. Rather, the open mic session becomes a sort of rotation of three-minute crises that the work both responds to and invokes simultaneously. Definitely something I've been thinking about as I go from performance to performance, open mic to open mic...
I'm also really trying to get a handle on the more aesthetic analysis of the experience... i.e. how does a community regulate the aesthetic of spoken word. Going from Spanish Harlem to Bed-Stuy to midtown Manhattan, I'm noticing certain patterns in-group, but my ability to analyze is based off of my own experience writing and teaching spoken word in a kind of self-trained, "naïve" sense rather than in any formal grounding in English classes. Furthermore, I've remained intrigued by the ubiquity of "poet names"-- in what sense is a different identity being performed once the poet enters a stage space. And to bring it back to Turner, in what ways is that space liminal-- that is, an in-between ritualized space-- or liminoid, which imitates the liminal but with a universal understanding of its fiction?
But yeah.... More to come...
Sunday, July 22, 2007
NCLB & its many issues
This last week was extremely busy for me as I attended two separate forums on Monday and Friday and the other three days I was in the office reading and summarizing some articles for my supervisor. Monday's event was held at Boalt Law School and the topic of discussion was on the No Child Left Behind Act (NLCB) and the parental involvement provisions. As some of you may or may not know, this 1,100 page document is up for reauthorization in Congress in the next few months. It's interesting to note that parental involvement is mentioned more than 100 times and is one of the main focus of the law. President Bush's philosophy was that if parents are directly involved at their children's school site, the parents will hold the schools and school districts accountable. Although schools and school districts are required/mandated by NCLB to create and implement policies that will involve parents, these policies are not really reinforced by the state or federal government.
It was really interesting to attend the roundtable at Berkeley since many researchers, community organizations, and educators were present to give their take of the law. Most people seemed to be in disfavor of how it has turned out and what its rhetoric has been. Supposedly, by the year 2014 all students across the US will be 100% proficient in both reading and math. How will this be possible if many students are no where close to making that much progress (lack of resources and qualified teachers, just to name two main issues)? John Rogers, a professor from UCLA, predicts that by 2008-2009 75% of schools in California that serve predominantly minority students will be labeled as "failing" based on the NCLB standards.
Others argue that since students are being tested on reading and math, teachers are being forced to narrow the curriculum and what is being taught. The instructional minutes for other core subjects like social studies and science are being reduced in order to concentrate on reading and math proficiency. Instead of being taught how to analyze texts, how to write lab reports, or how to critically think, students in the US are being taught how to take multiple choice exams. How can this type of assessment really test what students are learning, of if in fact they are learning anything? How will students from the US be able to compete with children from other countries who are learning two foreign languages and are being taught to conceptualize and apply what they are learning?
If we truly expect ALL students to be proficient by 2014, we ought to re-evaluate the way we teach, what we are teaching, who is teaching, how we are testing, and how much money we are willing to invest in the future generations (who more than ever will need to compete in a highly-advanced economy).
It was really interesting to attend the roundtable at Berkeley since many researchers, community organizations, and educators were present to give their take of the law. Most people seemed to be in disfavor of how it has turned out and what its rhetoric has been. Supposedly, by the year 2014 all students across the US will be 100% proficient in both reading and math. How will this be possible if many students are no where close to making that much progress (lack of resources and qualified teachers, just to name two main issues)? John Rogers, a professor from UCLA, predicts that by 2008-2009 75% of schools in California that serve predominantly minority students will be labeled as "failing" based on the NCLB standards.
Others argue that since students are being tested on reading and math, teachers are being forced to narrow the curriculum and what is being taught. The instructional minutes for other core subjects like social studies and science are being reduced in order to concentrate on reading and math proficiency. Instead of being taught how to analyze texts, how to write lab reports, or how to critically think, students in the US are being taught how to take multiple choice exams. How can this type of assessment really test what students are learning, of if in fact they are learning anything? How will students from the US be able to compete with children from other countries who are learning two foreign languages and are being taught to conceptualize and apply what they are learning?
If we truly expect ALL students to be proficient by 2014, we ought to re-evaluate the way we teach, what we are teaching, who is teaching, how we are testing, and how much money we are willing to invest in the future generations (who more than ever will need to compete in a highly-advanced economy).
Friday, July 20, 2007
Photovoice 7/7/07
Today, the interns did some work in the field. I went along with one of the other interns, to Woodside,
Since, I actually live in Woodside, where there is a large concentration of Filipino Americans, I was assigned to document the community there. We visited a catholic church, a few doctors’ offices, a Filipino bakery, several banks and remittance companies, a couple of cargo companies, and a number of Filipino restaurants. Overall, most of the places did not have any problems with our taking pictures. However, we met some resistance at the church and at some of the banks and restaurants. I was glad to be able to get some use out of my Tagalog language skills, limited though they are. Along the way, we had some food from one of my favorite Filipino restaurants named Ihawan. The food was amazing but, as usual, rich, salty, and oily. The other intern is a nutrition science specialist and she commented on this. I’ll grab some of the best photos from the trip and post some of them in my next post.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Takeo's Third (late) Post
Yeah, sorry I didn't post last week... I'll make up for it by posting twice this week. Now for a long-overdue update...
Work at Urban Word has been pretty chill. I had three primary tasks in the last several weeks: data entry of thousands of names into a database, calling hundreds of poets to participate in next week's poetry workshops, and arranging things with a publisher to produce Urban Word's next poetry anthology. But in the process I've managed to attend a slew of events, open mics, and gather exposure for Urban Word's other projects. I've also performed several times throughout the city, including in Manhattan, Bed-Sty, and Spanish Harlem, each location rich with its own dynamic and feel.
The research end has been two-fold; the interviews are progressing, and I'm beginning to really discover some interesting things. The more I talk to poets connected to Urban Word, the more I hear that what is thought of as "a poem" becomes increasingly distant from the text itself. When I ask aesthetic questions, the tendency I'm finding is that "good poems" are described in terms of how they're spoken, rather than how their writing is constructed. It's really getting me thinking to Diana Taylor's distinction between two forms of cultural memory: archive and repertoire, with the archive representing physical objects that can be cited, and the repertoire being sort of embodied performances and knowledge (i.e. oral tradition). Spoken word poems surrounding Urban Word, it seems, become more and more distanced from archival knowledge and closer and closer to repertoire. And the community that Urban Word facilitates appears to perpetuate this aesthetic. It's really really interesting...
It always is kind of awkward for me to post on this blog, by the way, mainly because I'm trying to figure out both what's relevant and what's interesting in my experience here; sometimes they don't align. Like, in my preceding paragraph, I said it's interesting, but that's not to say you actually found it interesting... haha, well... I hope to be more detailed/intriguing in my next post later this week.
Work at Urban Word has been pretty chill. I had three primary tasks in the last several weeks: data entry of thousands of names into a database, calling hundreds of poets to participate in next week's poetry workshops, and arranging things with a publisher to produce Urban Word's next poetry anthology. But in the process I've managed to attend a slew of events, open mics, and gather exposure for Urban Word's other projects. I've also performed several times throughout the city, including in Manhattan, Bed-Sty, and Spanish Harlem, each location rich with its own dynamic and feel.
The research end has been two-fold; the interviews are progressing, and I'm beginning to really discover some interesting things. The more I talk to poets connected to Urban Word, the more I hear that what is thought of as "a poem" becomes increasingly distant from the text itself. When I ask aesthetic questions, the tendency I'm finding is that "good poems" are described in terms of how they're spoken, rather than how their writing is constructed. It's really getting me thinking to Diana Taylor's distinction between two forms of cultural memory: archive and repertoire, with the archive representing physical objects that can be cited, and the repertoire being sort of embodied performances and knowledge (i.e. oral tradition). Spoken word poems surrounding Urban Word, it seems, become more and more distanced from archival knowledge and closer and closer to repertoire. And the community that Urban Word facilitates appears to perpetuate this aesthetic. It's really really interesting...
It always is kind of awkward for me to post on this blog, by the way, mainly because I'm trying to figure out both what's relevant and what's interesting in my experience here; sometimes they don't align. Like, in my preceding paragraph, I said it's interesting, but that's not to say you actually found it interesting... haha, well... I hope to be more detailed/intriguing in my next post later this week.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Bobst....7/3/2007
So, just to update you all on how my internship is going, I recently received my assignment for the community health needs assessment to be written. I am working on needs assessments for the Vietnamese and Cambodian communities. These publications will go to community members, organizations, health care providers, and policy makers and will act as a portrait depicting the status of these two communities in New York City. I’m really excited to be putting out something that will be of tangible benefit to the community. For each of the needs assessments, I will be working on the background and health status sections. This will mostly involve reading scholarly articles and writing a review of the literature that is accessible to lay people.
The needs assessment also includes a section detailing the history of these communities in America as well as immigration trends that are pertinent to their settlement in New York and America. The other intern, who is working on a needs assessment for the Korean and Chinese communities, and I decided that journal articles did not give us enough information on immigration patterns so we decided to do a book search at the NYU libraries and acquire lending privileges.
Our first stop on the search for lending privileges was the NYU SoM libraries two blocks north from where we work. After explaining our situation and filling out a form, we were given bar codes for our IDs and directed to the main NYU library on the Washington Square campus. We hopped on one of the NYU buses which are free for those with NYU IDs and headed towards the Bobst library.
When we arrived, the only thing I could think was “Bobst is an architectural feast for the eyes.” Although from the outside, it appears to be just like any administrative building, red brick façade looming over Washington Square, the architecture inside is amazing. Once you step through the doors, your gaze immediately jumps to the modernist silver staircase that spans the 11 floors of the library (only those above ground, there are two more below ground.) After procuring the books I needed, I spent a little time just admiring the library. The architecture of Bobst reminds me how much I’ve missed the city but also reminds me of Stanford and how I miss my bike and sitting in the quad chatting.
The needs assessment also includes a section detailing the history of these communities in America as well as immigration trends that are pertinent to their settlement in New York and America. The other intern, who is working on a needs assessment for the Korean and Chinese communities, and I decided that journal articles did not give us enough information on immigration patterns so we decided to do a book search at the NYU libraries and acquire lending privileges.
Our first stop on the search for lending privileges was the NYU SoM libraries two blocks north from where we work. After explaining our situation and filling out a form, we were given bar codes for our IDs and directed to the main NYU library on the Washington Square campus. We hopped on one of the NYU buses which are free for those with NYU IDs and headed towards the Bobst library.
When we arrived, the only thing I could think was “Bobst is an architectural feast for the eyes.” Although from the outside, it appears to be just like any administrative building, red brick façade looming over Washington Square, the architecture inside is amazing. Once you step through the doors, your gaze immediately jumps to the modernist silver staircase that spans the 11 floors of the library (only those above ground, there are two more below ground.) After procuring the books I needed, I spent a little time just admiring the library. The architecture of Bobst reminds me how much I’ve missed the city but also reminds me of Stanford and how I miss my bike and sitting in the quad chatting.
collaborative efforts
This week has been super busy! So I've been working on the Prairie View, Texas case; however, this week I was given a new assignment. Working with some other interns over at the Brennan Center for Justice (at NYU Law School), I've been poring over hundreds of pages of Congressional testimony. I can't really give any specifics as to what I'm doing with the testimony, but the end result should be very exciting. The last joint project the Lawyers' Committee did with the Brennan Center resulted in a press conference at the National Press Club. It was very exhilarating to watch the last press conference. Hopefully, all this work will go towards another press conference or a Congressional briefing. I should be finishing up this work by the end of the week and should be back on track with the Prairie View case.
I've also been trying to get more involved in our Emerging Communities Initiative. This newly started program seeks to empower recent and generally overlooked immigrant communities, such as the Hmong or Somalis, by educating them about their legal and political rights. In particular, we are trying to stress the importance of political participation and the benefits that can be reaped through civic action. We'll see how this goes in the weeks to come.
I've also been trying to get more involved in our Emerging Communities Initiative. This newly started program seeks to empower recent and generally overlooked immigrant communities, such as the Hmong or Somalis, by educating them about their legal and political rights. In particular, we are trying to stress the importance of political participation and the benefits that can be reaped through civic action. We'll see how this goes in the weeks to come.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
A flavor of everything
"A flavor of everything," as I have decided to title this post, resembles what my experience in the California Capitol has been so far. Since the last time I posted on the blog, I have been doing a little bit of everything: I have conducted online research on some key provisions of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (focusing on parental involvement and teacher quality); I have visited a community in the Central Valley to witness some of inequalities prevalent in poor, rural communities; I have been present at a private meeting with a key Senator in California; and last but not least, I had the very interesting experience of seating at a Senate Education Committee hearing. Indeed, I have been fortunate enough to get a wide variety of experiences in my first week at work. Since I could go on and on talking about each of them, I will focus on the most rewarding ones.
On Wednesday both the Senate and Assembly Committees on Education had separate hearings on proposed bills by members of both Houses. Since my supervisors thought the Senate would be more interesting for me to attend, I sat through their meeting for nearly four hours. It was a really good experience as 40-45 different bills were briefly discussed during that time. I had never witnessed something like that in person (I had seen it on television, but always changed the channel as I usually lost my interest after a few minutes of watching). While the author of the bills were going up to the podium to testify on their proposed bill, mention recent amendments and clarify any questions for the Senate committee members, I was busy glancing through a +100 page printed catalog that had included detailed information about each bill. Each included background information, the pros and cons based on research the staff's committee had done, and which organizations (i.e CA Teacher Association, CA Board of Education, etc.) or which individuals (i.e. State Superintendent) were in support or against the bill. I was fascinated by the action that was going on because although all the issues were relevant to education, they all varied.
For example, there was one that stands out in my mind by the Senator (or maybe Assemblyman) of Oakland. His bill asked that the Oakland Unified School District receive full local control of its schools. According to some of the comments the legislator made, the State had taken over the district's sovereignty four or five years ago after having gone bankrupt. Since the district had improved both financially and academically, parents, educators, and administrators felt that it was time for the OUSD to have local control again. Many community organizations, teachers, parents, and students went up to testify (say their name and affiliation to the district) to show their support for the bill. It was great to see so many people come to the Capitol to express their concerns and show support for something that they are deeply in favor or. Of course, I won't know which of the 40-45 bills that were discussed while I was there have a chance of becoming laws. However, I do know that that experience opened my eyes and allowed me to realize there are many other issues in the education system that need to be resolved (more than the usual concerns with teacher quality, academic achievement, high school dropout rates... issues such as harassment, safe and clean facilities, etc.).
Finally, one of my other experiences from last week that stood out in my mind was a visit to a rural community in the Central Valley. I attended a meeting organized by parents who have expressed concerns with the water at the local elementary school. The water has been tested by a lab and it has been confirmed that it is contaminated and unsafe for the children to be drinking out of the drinking fountains. The school district has failed to make any improvements and keep ignoring the legitimate concerns brought up by the parents. Since most of these parents are working class (mainly farm workers), have less than a high school education and are Spanish monolinguals, the school district is disregarding their request to do something about the contaminated water. It was empowering for me to see a group of parents coming together to address this issue that is negatively affecting their children. As I mentioned in one of the last paragraphs, I often think (and many others do too) on the big issues: achievement gap, dropout rates, inner-city violence, English learners, etc. However, I (as well as many, many others) forget about the needs and struggles of poor, rural areas. I even forgot (didn't even think it was an issue) that contaminated water would be an issue in a public school in California, United States. I would imagine problems like those are present in third-world developing countries, but not in ours in the 21st century!!
In sum, my eyes are beginning to realize there are many, many, many other issues in our education system that need major help. It's really frustrating, disheartening, upsetting (fill in the blank) to know there is one problem after another, but how many solutions can we find for each of them? I'm trying to remain optimistic, but my mind immediately turns to other problems this great state of ours (and in fact, our nation too) is currently facing in the prison and healthcare systems, as probably in other areas too.
For anyone who might have read down to here, please forgive me if I seemed pessimistic or frustrated at times, but I'm faced with a reality that I'm not very satisfied with and hope many others who want to create change aren't satisfied either.
On Wednesday both the Senate and Assembly Committees on Education had separate hearings on proposed bills by members of both Houses. Since my supervisors thought the Senate would be more interesting for me to attend, I sat through their meeting for nearly four hours. It was a really good experience as 40-45 different bills were briefly discussed during that time. I had never witnessed something like that in person (I had seen it on television, but always changed the channel as I usually lost my interest after a few minutes of watching). While the author of the bills were going up to the podium to testify on their proposed bill, mention recent amendments and clarify any questions for the Senate committee members, I was busy glancing through a +100 page printed catalog that had included detailed information about each bill. Each included background information, the pros and cons based on research the staff's committee had done, and which organizations (i.e CA Teacher Association, CA Board of Education, etc.) or which individuals (i.e. State Superintendent) were in support or against the bill. I was fascinated by the action that was going on because although all the issues were relevant to education, they all varied.
For example, there was one that stands out in my mind by the Senator (or maybe Assemblyman) of Oakland. His bill asked that the Oakland Unified School District receive full local control of its schools. According to some of the comments the legislator made, the State had taken over the district's sovereignty four or five years ago after having gone bankrupt. Since the district had improved both financially and academically, parents, educators, and administrators felt that it was time for the OUSD to have local control again. Many community organizations, teachers, parents, and students went up to testify (say their name and affiliation to the district) to show their support for the bill. It was great to see so many people come to the Capitol to express their concerns and show support for something that they are deeply in favor or. Of course, I won't know which of the 40-45 bills that were discussed while I was there have a chance of becoming laws. However, I do know that that experience opened my eyes and allowed me to realize there are many other issues in the education system that need to be resolved (more than the usual concerns with teacher quality, academic achievement, high school dropout rates... issues such as harassment, safe and clean facilities, etc.).
Finally, one of my other experiences from last week that stood out in my mind was a visit to a rural community in the Central Valley. I attended a meeting organized by parents who have expressed concerns with the water at the local elementary school. The water has been tested by a lab and it has been confirmed that it is contaminated and unsafe for the children to be drinking out of the drinking fountains. The school district has failed to make any improvements and keep ignoring the legitimate concerns brought up by the parents. Since most of these parents are working class (mainly farm workers), have less than a high school education and are Spanish monolinguals, the school district is disregarding their request to do something about the contaminated water. It was empowering for me to see a group of parents coming together to address this issue that is negatively affecting their children. As I mentioned in one of the last paragraphs, I often think (and many others do too) on the big issues: achievement gap, dropout rates, inner-city violence, English learners, etc. However, I (as well as many, many others) forget about the needs and struggles of poor, rural areas. I even forgot (didn't even think it was an issue) that contaminated water would be an issue in a public school in California, United States. I would imagine problems like those are present in third-world developing countries, but not in ours in the 21st century!!
In sum, my eyes are beginning to realize there are many, many, many other issues in our education system that need major help. It's really frustrating, disheartening, upsetting (fill in the blank) to know there is one problem after another, but how many solutions can we find for each of them? I'm trying to remain optimistic, but my mind immediately turns to other problems this great state of ours (and in fact, our nation too) is currently facing in the prison and healthcare systems, as probably in other areas too.
For anyone who might have read down to here, please forgive me if I seemed pessimistic or frustrated at times, but I'm faced with a reality that I'm not very satisfied with and hope many others who want to create change aren't satisfied either.
Week 2 and 3
There hasn't been anything too exciting to report from the past two weeks. My days pretty much consist of a normal 9-5 workday in a cubicle. Granted, the work I'm doing is interesting, I still pretty much sit in front of my computer researching the content for the four lesson plans I have to complete before the 30th. My second week I revised an already existing lesson on record sealing. Considering I have no knowledge of the process or requirements for a youth to have their criminal record sealed this was quite a challenge. Thankfully there are experts in the office whose sole job is to help youths through the process. I still haven't completed this lesson because the requirements and process explanation are pretty complicated and I have to simplify them and include some sort of activity so that the youth can understand the basics and not get too bored. I moved on at the end of my second week to begin work on a lesson on immigration. The holiday in the middle of the week was a nice break but the immigration lesson has been a challenge since. Even though I 'm supposed to complete a lesson a week I am still working on immigration and have narrowed it down to two separate lessons, one on the process to get U.S. citizenship, its benefits and the types of crimes that can prevent one from gaining their citizenship and a second lesson on the recent issue of raids and how the youth can protect themselves from arrest and deportation. Hopefully this coming week I will have these two completed and can move on to the last two, banking and domestic violence. Hope everyone is doing well.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Tuesday 10th
Today was the All Star game. I’m not all the way through my lists yet, but I’m halfway through the National League, and completed the American League. I still need to confirm with all the clubs, but I think I’m sitting pretty strong right now. If you watched the game, it was really an exciting one, as the big tension every year is when the National League will break through and end the
It’s funny that I am reading Clemente at the moment, because Mays is certainly involved. Mays was a Giant, as was Monte Irvin, the Negro League slugger, and Clemente was recruited by the Giant. But because of the restrictions and by laws of the league, Clemente signed with the Dodgers instead. And the reason the Dodgers nabbed Clemente? To keep him away from that outfield, what would have been the most dangerous, and most black, in history.
This is also a great example of what baseball was like in the winter, when all the stars went south and played in
I’m learning a lot, and not reading fast enough. My books I ordered came in today, so I’m collecting quite a stack, on top of my actual project. But these will help me write pieces and respond to new developments once my site is off the ground.
Saturday 7th
Thursday, the 5th, was a very important day in Major League history. There were all kinds of articles on Larry Doby, which made him a lot more visible, I think than anyone really thought he’d be. No, all the teams didn’t decide to switch over and wear the number 14 to honor him, and it is my understanding that the Tigers still did very little to make it known. But the broadcast media, ESPN, and the announcers seemed to at least recognize him. And the flurry of articles about his life and legacy reached beyond the staple “he was the second (so does he really count?).”
I spent most of the day reading through articles, then switched back to trying to make progress with trips, my books, and my cataloguing. Friday was much of the same, and the work is slow because I seem to second guess myself, or rethink a lot of my ideas.
But today was the big day, because I got an email from Professor Lapchick pushing me in a direction. I had outlined my project and asked for his help, and though he said he’ll be traveling for a couple weeks, I’m looking forward to talking at more length with him about some of the work he’s done. I think I mentioned that I had read his book, but he seemed excited about my work and what it might do, especially this year, to get some more tangibles on the table for people to examine.
He also sent me a lot more reading material and offices to contact, some of which I’ve read, and used as inspiration or models for how I should handle the statistics that I’ve been given. Receiving a response from someone like him, in my opinion, would be like asking Jesse Jackson to look over your civil rights paper before turning it in.
I’m really excited.
Wednesday 4th
After the fourth of July, I determined to try and complete my team listings by the All Star Break. A major part of my work has to be done before I can post anything, so I have to continue with that. This question of where and how I should categorize multiracial players, or players that are perceived as black in the
Going to the root of this is the key to understanding the difficulties and pressures of how players are even marginalized in such ways in today’s game. This is also a roundabout way to respond to Gary Sheffield’s comments about the farming and exploitation of Latin players as an explanation for the dwindling numbers of blacks in the game.
Those are the two major things that I’ve been doing, I’m about halfway through my teams.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
the halfway point
So this past week has been very busy at the Lawyers' Committee. I've been working with the new Campaign Manager to refine our outreach strategies and to update our website. In addition to my usual web updating and press clips duties, I've also been working with another staff attorney on a new investigation. The Lawyers' Committee has been extensively involved in a small town called prairie view in Waller County, Texas. In the town, there is a predominantly African-American student body at the university whose population dwarfs that of the town's inhabitants. there have been many occasions in the past where local officials have obstructed the African-American students' right to vote, including intimidating students with threats of felony prosecutions (in fact, two students were indicted by a grand jury for trying to vote; the charges were later dropped), reducing the amount of time for early voting (from two days with 16 hours total to one day with only 8 hours), and moving the polling place far off campus. On each of those occasions, the Lawyers' Committee has intervened and successfully defended the rights of the African-American students (most recently during last year's midterm elections). For the upcoming 2008 elections, we are trying to move the polling place for the town onto the university campus' new student activities center. i am currently researching the long history of discrimination the students have endured and compiling a document that will help with our efforts of maintaining the students' access to the polls during elections.
Greetings from Sacramento!
Hello fellow CSRE interns, Jennifer, and anyone else who might be reading this. I arrived to Sacramento on Sunday night and I have a lot of adjusting to do! I'm from a smaller city (55,000 or so) and being in the state Capitol at the age of 21 and working on educational policy is something I didn't think I would be able to do until I graduated from Stanford. First of all, I'll have to get used to public transportation (I'll be taking the bus to the office, which is about 8 miles from the apartment), the heat (it's been around 90 degrees Fahrenheit and supposedly it will be in the high 90s by the end of the week), living in a big city, and many other things. Monday was my first day of work and it went really well, although I can sense I'll be working non-stop. I get in at 9am and get out at around 6pm. Last night we didn't get out until 7pm.
My summer internship is with a public interest Law Firm called Public Advocates. I'll be working on a couple of different projects, but mainly on the implementations of a 2005 Settlement called Williams v. California. It will provide $1 billion for underrepresented schools that are in need of textbooks and instructional materials, qualified teachers, and safe and clean facilities. I will talk more in details in my upcoming posts.
Even though it is my first few days at the office, I can already sense this will be a very rewarding experience for me in many levels. Being around policymakers and people who genuinely want to improve the decay of California public schools makes me more interested in searching a career in the public or non profit sector, although I'm not sure under what role.
Today I had to go into the public library to conduct some online research. As I was waiting outside for the library to open, a high school class arrived for what looked like a tour of their facilities. Once we went inside and they came around to where I was seating (which happened to be the Sociology, Race Relations, College Information, etc. Floor), I silently observed from where I was seating. It made me so sad to see how disengaged these students were while the librarian provided them with information of the many free resources that are available to them. She even went on to tell them there is a college counselor for consultations a few times a week, yet none of them seemed to realize how invaluable this resource is. Indeed, I was doing research on how to improve the educational opportunities of these underrepresented students. However, before any of us can truly make an impact, we have to get the students to care themselves.
My summer internship is with a public interest Law Firm called Public Advocates. I'll be working on a couple of different projects, but mainly on the implementations of a 2005 Settlement called Williams v. California. It will provide $1 billion for underrepresented schools that are in need of textbooks and instructional materials, qualified teachers, and safe and clean facilities. I will talk more in details in my upcoming posts.
Even though it is my first few days at the office, I can already sense this will be a very rewarding experience for me in many levels. Being around policymakers and people who genuinely want to improve the decay of California public schools makes me more interested in searching a career in the public or non profit sector, although I'm not sure under what role.
Today I had to go into the public library to conduct some online research. As I was waiting outside for the library to open, a high school class arrived for what looked like a tour of their facilities. Once we went inside and they came around to where I was seating (which happened to be the Sociology, Race Relations, College Information, etc. Floor), I silently observed from where I was seating. It made me so sad to see how disengaged these students were while the librarian provided them with information of the many free resources that are available to them. She even went on to tell them there is a college counselor for consultations a few times a week, yet none of them seemed to realize how invaluable this resource is. Indeed, I was doing research on how to improve the educational opportunities of these underrepresented students. However, before any of us can truly make an impact, we have to get the students to care themselves.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Lorenzo de Zavala Youth Legislative Session
I have never had a more rewarding experience in my life before working with the National Hispanic Institute's Lorenzo de Zavala Youth Legislative Session. There were over 230 amzingly brilliant high school kids from across the nation, and I was fortunate enough to work with them. The Lorenzo de Zavala Youth Legislative Session, or LDZ, is a program developed to spark intellectual creativity while showing these kids the infrastructure of their government by allowing them to elect their own members of congress and re-enact the law making process. Before all of this begins, there is an interesting dynamic created to break down the kids mentally. WIthin the first two days of the program, they are put in legislative sessions in front of an incredibly intimidating authority figure, the Secretary of State (SOS). The SOS begins the session according to Robert's Rules of Order and it is the kids' job to find out how to entertain motions and so on. No one could help the kids figure out the proper procedure for the rules so it took them a very long time to accept the roll call. From there, the SOS would ask questions and quickly turn down the kids' responses. The kids would immediately get frustrated because it would take them forever to answer his questions or how to properly entertain a motion. Since these kids are accostomed to being the best in their class, the smartest, and leaders, it was difficult for them to be put down and have their credibility questioned by this authority figure. The first day was very painful for the kids, but at night, it was the staff's duty to question their feelings about the SOS, being wrong, and question their acceptance of power and domination so quickly. The point was to get the kids thinking about how they are used to follow and not take matters into their own hands and lead.
From then on, the kids had to run for offices and they had to give speeches, vote, and innaugurate all of its new members. It was very realistic. Then, they had to create bills and pass them or kill them. This was a very time consuming process. Each night, we would then have meetings again with the kids and question their actions throughout the day. There were kids in the senate, house of representatives, supreme court, executive branch, and in the presidential cabinet. The kids were argue over bills, but they were essentially learning their government's processes.
After those ten days, it was time for departure and everyone was so sad. I would have never thought that someone can make an impact within a span of ten days, but I was wrong. My kids told me I was the reason they began to think about themselves and about how they see their future and they thanked me. It was so rewarding for me to see how these kids went from being clueless to being strong, articulate leaders.
From then on, the kids had to run for offices and they had to give speeches, vote, and innaugurate all of its new members. It was very realistic. Then, they had to create bills and pass them or kill them. This was a very time consuming process. Each night, we would then have meetings again with the kids and question their actions throughout the day. There were kids in the senate, house of representatives, supreme court, executive branch, and in the presidential cabinet. The kids were argue over bills, but they were essentially learning their government's processes.
After those ten days, it was time for departure and everyone was so sad. I would have never thought that someone can make an impact within a span of ten days, but I was wrong. My kids told me I was the reason they began to think about themselves and about how they see their future and they thanked me. It was so rewarding for me to see how these kids went from being clueless to being strong, articulate leaders.
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Week 2 in NYC (Takeo)
My second week, work-wise, is not enormously interesting to transcribe... it was mostly data entry, calling people to come to workshops, and researching ways to publish Urban Word's new book. Oh yeah, I performed a couple of times, but that's pretty self-explanatory. It's going well. But I think far more interesting is a more personal reflection on New York in general. The following is from my personal blog...
Carmen Alicia Rivera
Isais Rivera
Juan William Rivera
Linda Ivelisse Rivera
There were four Riveras who died in the World Trade Center. I do not know them. But seeing their names at the World Trade Center site this morning made me break down. There was everyone's names up there. White names, black names, Arab, Chinese, Latino, Japanese... It has been six years and I have made it to New York to find that when those planes hit, we all died in that explosion. I visited today, this hot summer day, and that gaping hole in the sky was the most mournful blue sky I had ever seen in my life.
Two months have passed since I last posted. A lot has happened; things I've decided not to mention on the blog because they've been mentioned in the New York Times. Suffice to say that I've found myself in New York City over the summer in between my two terms of being an RA, essentially living out on my own and taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of the greatest city of the world every day. It is quite the respite after the horrendous media debacle. Well, maybe not a respite-- but regenerative nonetheless. Being an RA-- and a nationally humiliated one at that-- comes with certain things that can wear down on you over an extended period: being anchored to one spot, lack of privacy, an omnipresent panopticism everywhere down the hall. Here, in New York City, it is impossible to stop exploring, and I can blend comfortably into the bustling anonymity.
I love this city. I love Brooklyn. I love the statues and the piss stains, the summer trees and urban sprawls, the simultaneous heat waves and thunderstorms, the kindly paraplegic panhandlers and the brutal NYPD cops, the homeless poets and millionaire Hampton-home-owning executives, the blonde-dyed-hair rich white girls with Forever 21 bags and the low-jeans-sagging puertoriqueño grimacing as he bobs his head to his iPod, Chinese taco shop owners and pizzeria guys who hate you the first time and love you the second, pastrami and pizza and the thousand places to get "New York's Best" of each, the train (not "subway") and talking like you know how to use it. On the F train I've seen Mayan flutists and evangelical preachers. Between the tracks today I saw rats, Red Bull cans, and an old man's cane. And I saw Manhattan shroud herself from full splendor during sunset adjacent to the Brooklyn Bridge. This city has the best, the worst. A utopian dystopia, New York contains the world.
New York's fourth of July fireworks are the greatest in the country. It was a symphony of light in four movements. I went, awestruck at the thousands of Brooklynites who made it through the rain to gather, gaze upward, and join everyone else in applause. I thought about the metaphor of fireworks. Gunfire. Bombs. The revolutionary primordial America. Gunfire. Bombs. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq. I began to wonder if I was awestruck by the symbolic destruction, or by the eight-year-old Haitian girl standing next to me who asked her mother: "Where do fireworks come from? Meteors?"
Which brings me back to this morning, sobbing at ground zero. The debris. The ash. The patriotic graffiti. There was patriotic graffiti. On the back of a sign there was: "R.I.P. World Trade Center," "God Bless America," "United We Stand, Divided We Fall!" and two twin rectangles. My God, I thought. This is where it all started. This was the moment my generation was born. This was the starting point that led to the daily mutual destruction of American soldiers and Iraqi soldiers. I thought back to all the old footage, the screaming, the people jumping from thousands of feet up, the ash, the smoke. We didn't learn. We just fought back. Continued to do what we were best at.
But as I walk the streets of New York I begin to understand America. The millions of faces, every combination of human being possible, individuals flashing by as if to some tense Philip Glass soundtrack, you see a big bang of sorts just walking down the street. The marvels of creation. This city is large enough to be the quintessence of imperfection, through the worst dehumanization one can find the most resilient humanity, and thus boundlessly authentic, boundlessly human. In comparison, the Bay Area struggles through an identity crisis of too many Starbuckses and the ubiquity of places that accept credit cards. You use cash in New York, and you can get mugged. But c'est la vie.
The tragedy of 9/11 is now more real to me than ever. Nationalism aside, when New York was struck, we were all struck. Maybe four of me died in there.
But in any case, I'll continue to roam the streets, catching glimpses of what it means to breathe.
Carmen Alicia Rivera
Isais Rivera
Juan William Rivera
Linda Ivelisse Rivera
There were four Riveras who died in the World Trade Center. I do not know them. But seeing their names at the World Trade Center site this morning made me break down. There was everyone's names up there. White names, black names, Arab, Chinese, Latino, Japanese... It has been six years and I have made it to New York to find that when those planes hit, we all died in that explosion. I visited today, this hot summer day, and that gaping hole in the sky was the most mournful blue sky I had ever seen in my life.
Two months have passed since I last posted. A lot has happened; things I've decided not to mention on the blog because they've been mentioned in the New York Times. Suffice to say that I've found myself in New York City over the summer in between my two terms of being an RA, essentially living out on my own and taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of the greatest city of the world every day. It is quite the respite after the horrendous media debacle. Well, maybe not a respite-- but regenerative nonetheless. Being an RA-- and a nationally humiliated one at that-- comes with certain things that can wear down on you over an extended period: being anchored to one spot, lack of privacy, an omnipresent panopticism everywhere down the hall. Here, in New York City, it is impossible to stop exploring, and I can blend comfortably into the bustling anonymity.
I love this city. I love Brooklyn. I love the statues and the piss stains, the summer trees and urban sprawls, the simultaneous heat waves and thunderstorms, the kindly paraplegic panhandlers and the brutal NYPD cops, the homeless poets and millionaire Hampton-home-owning executives, the blonde-dyed-hair rich white girls with Forever 21 bags and the low-jeans-sagging puertoriqueño grimacing as he bobs his head to his iPod, Chinese taco shop owners and pizzeria guys who hate you the first time and love you the second, pastrami and pizza and the thousand places to get "New York's Best" of each, the train (not "subway") and talking like you know how to use it. On the F train I've seen Mayan flutists and evangelical preachers. Between the tracks today I saw rats, Red Bull cans, and an old man's cane. And I saw Manhattan shroud herself from full splendor during sunset adjacent to the Brooklyn Bridge. This city has the best, the worst. A utopian dystopia, New York contains the world.
New York's fourth of July fireworks are the greatest in the country. It was a symphony of light in four movements. I went, awestruck at the thousands of Brooklynites who made it through the rain to gather, gaze upward, and join everyone else in applause. I thought about the metaphor of fireworks. Gunfire. Bombs. The revolutionary primordial America. Gunfire. Bombs. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq. I began to wonder if I was awestruck by the symbolic destruction, or by the eight-year-old Haitian girl standing next to me who asked her mother: "Where do fireworks come from? Meteors?"
Which brings me back to this morning, sobbing at ground zero. The debris. The ash. The patriotic graffiti. There was patriotic graffiti. On the back of a sign there was: "R.I.P. World Trade Center," "God Bless America," "United We Stand, Divided We Fall!" and two twin rectangles. My God, I thought. This is where it all started. This was the moment my generation was born. This was the starting point that led to the daily mutual destruction of American soldiers and Iraqi soldiers. I thought back to all the old footage, the screaming, the people jumping from thousands of feet up, the ash, the smoke. We didn't learn. We just fought back. Continued to do what we were best at.
But as I walk the streets of New York I begin to understand America. The millions of faces, every combination of human being possible, individuals flashing by as if to some tense Philip Glass soundtrack, you see a big bang of sorts just walking down the street. The marvels of creation. This city is large enough to be the quintessence of imperfection, through the worst dehumanization one can find the most resilient humanity, and thus boundlessly authentic, boundlessly human. In comparison, the Bay Area struggles through an identity crisis of too many Starbuckses and the ubiquity of places that accept credit cards. You use cash in New York, and you can get mugged. But c'est la vie.
The tragedy of 9/11 is now more real to me than ever. Nationalism aside, when New York was struck, we were all struck. Maybe four of me died in there.
But in any case, I'll continue to roam the streets, catching glimpses of what it means to breathe.
Monday, July 2, 2007
new faces, different challenges
So as I had mentioned earlier, the Lawyers' Committee had recently hired a new Campaign Manager for our National Campaign for Fair Elections about two weeks ago. At first, it was a little frustrating for me simply because the Campaign Manager needed to be caught up to speed. However, now that he's more adjusted, I've been working very closely with him to streamline our communications and outreach processes. For example, we've worked out systems to quickly reach all Congressional offices when needed for disseminating our publications and testimony. We recently used this system to show our support for the Deceptive Practices bill in the House I had mentioned previously (H.R. 1281). The bill was put on suspension calendar, and it was a relief that House voted in favor of it.
We've also sent out a couple of mass mailings regarding the nomination of Hans von Spakovsky to the FEC. Mr. von Spakovsky has a disturbing record of undermining voting rights (especially of minority voters) and of politicizing the Department of Justice (where he served for about two years). Although it is unlikely that the Senate will reject his nomination (there are three other nominees to the FEC, and they are all supposed to be voted on with an up-down vote), we're working very hard to make sure that his actions during his tenure at the Department are made widely known. Specifically, we want to emphasize his role in the larger scheme of the politicization of federal agencies under the Bush Administration.
I've also been working to collect press clips everyday of the Lawyers' Committee's activities across the country. In sum, I've been doing a lot of communications-related tasks. I'm going to try to get different tasks, but it's going to be tough given the upcoming Congressional recess.
I hope everybody else is enjoying their internships and summers too. (It's surprisingly not humid today!! Very rare for D.C. in July.)
We've also sent out a couple of mass mailings regarding the nomination of Hans von Spakovsky to the FEC. Mr. von Spakovsky has a disturbing record of undermining voting rights (especially of minority voters) and of politicizing the Department of Justice (where he served for about two years). Although it is unlikely that the Senate will reject his nomination (there are three other nominees to the FEC, and they are all supposed to be voted on with an up-down vote), we're working very hard to make sure that his actions during his tenure at the Department are made widely known. Specifically, we want to emphasize his role in the larger scheme of the politicization of federal agencies under the Bush Administration.
I've also been working to collect press clips everyday of the Lawyers' Committee's activities across the country. In sum, I've been doing a lot of communications-related tasks. I'm going to try to get different tasks, but it's going to be tough given the upcoming Congressional recess.
I hope everybody else is enjoying their internships and summers too. (It's surprisingly not humid today!! Very rare for D.C. in July.)
Sunday, July 1, 2007
Sunday's entry
Scheduling trips and how I want to approach my project is more difficult than I initially thought. I know that I’ll be in
What puts me on a tangent with this is that one of my original trips planned was to an away game for the Indians in
While the time that would have been spent traveling can be used to solidify my direction with the project, it feels kind of bad that my summer is starting without me. I am missing this game, which still offers no guarantee, only the possibility of recognition, and the All-Star game in
matt
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